M, <During that visit the five year old asked him where her mommy was. Even though he wasn't comfortable with the question, he couldn't find it within himself to tell the child that her mommy was a stone cold mass of dead rotting flesh lying six feet under that would eventually end up feeding the worms.
He told her that her mommy was in heaven with the angles > [sic]
I think it is always wrong to lie to children. Okay, maybe I could come up with some circumstance such as lying to prevent some Nazi locating a Jew I'm hiding in the attic and having to lie to children to ensure non-disclosure.
But lying to distort their understanding of how the world works is in my opinion intrinsically wrong. So there is no Santa Claus. Children still enjoy fantasy so we can pretend with them that there is a Santa and that's fun. We still have Easter-egg hunts and the offspring demand it. When the cry goes up that Easter Bunny was spotted in the garden, it's very competitive. Santa comes at Christmas.
"Let's pretend" is great fun in all sorts of ways. Imagination is a "Let's pretend" process. To imagine what might be able to be done involves pretending that the idea is real then seeing how it does or doesn't fit with reality. If anything, it's me who the offspring think needs to be a bit more realistic.
People with no or suffocated imaginations are like people who haven't learned to talk. They are severely limited.
Lying to children involves destroying trust. When they figure out they've been lied to, it means they can't trust the person who lied. I would NOT want my offspring mistrusting me. Thinking I'm an idiot is okay. They've learned to deal with that. They need to understand I'm not totally perfect. Almost, but not quite. I just need to give my modesty and humility a tune up, then I'll have reached Nirvana. But I don't want them to mistrust my intentions. Being seen as a stupid liar would be a real downer. They might disown me and not look after me in my dotage.
Our children [when young] have been to funerals and seen caskets go into the ground and seen the grief of people and experienced it themselves. I don't think those things need to be hidden or lied about. But neither do I think things should be inflicted on children.
I don't subscribe to the idea that the world's an ugly, vicious, lying, stealing, horrible place and the sooner children get their face rubbed in it in sickening detail the better. On the contrary, the world is a wonderful place, full of opportunity, possibility, fun, love and hope.
Our job as people is to extend the good and do away with the bad. Which means understand nature and bend it to our will. We are in the heat of battle and knowing how the world works is crucial to winning that battle. We need to reverse entropy and gravity, redesign our DNA, build It and turn ourselves into the supernatural being. A kind of religion in reverse.
Children need to learn how the world works too. Making them think they can fly off to the Hale-Bopp space-ship in their Nike sneakers and live happily ever after in heaven is a cruel lie. Telling people that our supernatural spook is good and their's is bad is criminally evil, not to mention insane.
That's my theory anyway. So far, so good.
Mqurice
PS: I don't think heaven is full of angles, Pythagoras, Euclid and trigonometry. For a lot of the mathematically impaired, that would be hell. It's angels in heaven [nubile young naked women without a Pythagorean, Euclid or slide rule in sight - Waitakere Golf Course is probably there too]. |
