Chris, a similarity between those students who made a bad choice and got punished, and Pinjira Begum, 25, who is one of the 18 million Bangladeshis being poisoned due to no crime of her own by arsenic wells, is not one I feel, to put it mildly, convinced of. What, exactly, was Pinjira's infraction that makes her 'punishment' not monstrous?
My fear is that you are going to declare that Pinjira herself is not, personally, the miscreant; and that this arrangement is okay with you-- you will nevertheless choose to worship a deity who you believe responsible for instituting such an arrangement.
I have come to think of religious belief as a sort of institutionalization of the Stockholm Syndrome, wherein horribly abused and threatened captors, hostages to a criminal power against which they are helpless, suddenly discover how much better it makes them feel when they love their captors.
I'd say that the beginning of wisdom is to get phenomena in the right categories. It seems to me that religious belief as described on this thread by the believers in a God who, they assume, 'did' these things to Pinjira Begum and may tomorrow do them to their own loved ones, lies somewhere in the same series with the beliefs of the terrified children of the 19th century German Educational theorist, Moritz Schreber, who were taught to, and forced, to praise and thank their tormentors for the beatings and punishments they received and those of the women in the Stockholm bank vault who came out so enamored of the villain who had held them hostage and mistreated them. |
