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Pastimes : Understanding Islam -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: trouthead who wrote (396)	11/5/2001 7:15:33 PM
From: HG	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2926

Thanks for the kind words JB. Regarding your questions... I guess most of us long for the safety of parental authority. When the choices and responsibilities get too much, we long to have someone tell us what to do, to give us direction. Making up our own minds, choosing between right and wrong constantly, every minute of the day - is very tough. Its easier when someone takes care of us, tells us what to do, however wrong that may be. It takes the burden of thinking away... All of us I believe have pieces of personality that would respond favorably to authority. But most of us become mature enough to realise that as adults of the society, we do not have the luxury anymore. The challenge then is to develop the adult part of our personality. The part which recognises the responsibilities and obligations we have as adult human beings. I believe that mental development comes from freedom in societies. The sooner you're free, the sooner your mind learns to think for itself. In most of Asia, the younger generation finds freedom pretty late in life. And even then, the social conditions prevent complete freedom of thinking. Children as old as 25 and 35 are expected to tow their parents line, concede to their authority. This nurtures total dependence with all its advntages and disadvantages. Take away the parental support from a 15 year old in US, and he or she will survive, even come out stronger maybe. Take away the parental support from a 15 year old in Asia...and adolescent will end up dead, either thru suicide or thru murder. You can see that a 15, or even 18 year old is relatively underdeveloped in Asian societies. They have not been given the opportunties to think for themselves. The same psychological mechanism is at work when an entire nation passes from under a dictatorship to a democracy, the pendulum swings to the other extreme. Thus, an autocratic society like Russia broke into anarchy as soon as the communist rule ended. For generations people were used to being told what to do and how to live and now suddenly there was this freedom....it got too difficult for people. It was too much work. Suicides rates shot thru the roof. The public just didn't KNOW how to live anymore....? Pakistan is another country which has never been able to learn to be free. Dictatorships have always alleviated the pain of democratic leaderships. Coming back to the individuals, I believe when the teenage phase is over, the child finds itself at crossroads. He can choose to create and nurture his own values and beliefs belief system, or he can adopt that of the society. Most of the time the youth doesn't even realise he has a choice. In his mind, freedom of choice is not an option. And he prefers takes the less cumbersome path of his ancestors. Its easier to follow in the footsteps than create your own footprints. The only way to break this self fulfilling prophecy is when parents realise the spiral exists, and willingly encourage the child to break thru the bonds. Not many parents even want to think about doing that. A personal example. For the last 15 years or so we, me and my husband have been struggling with our identity as we travel thru different continents. Who are we ? Where do we belong ? Which is our country ? Which is our language ? Where do our allegiances lie ? What is our religion ? We have lived in different lands and absorbed most of their customs and festivals, so these have been tough questions for us, they still are. We could have passed these dilemmas onto our kids, or we could have made them loyal to our country of birth. Both of these isolated them from realities and made them prisoners of their 'race'. So we delibrately taught them to love 'this' country, follow its culture and customs and forget about religion till they are old enough to decide which one they want to adopt, if at all. I hope that the freedom to choose at an eary stage will perhaps make them eager to take on responsibilities and not remained confined to my own mental cages. Parenting is a very personal thing, but when I look at some of these Arab kids who have been deliberately taught to be disloyal and ungrateful to the land where they were born and will live, <with reference to the interviews with kids in London where kids cheered Bin Ladin and said words to the effect "Death To America" and said given a choice, they'd go and fight for Bin Ladin> I wonder what kind of values it will breed in them and how these choices will affect their overall personality. Is it surprising to expect them to grow up into self serving, selfish, disloyal, ungrateful adults ? After all, personalities, values and beliefs are shaped in childhood... Most families pass their mental cages onto their successive generations, but it is taken to an extreme in the Arab society. Successive generations lose the ability to decide and choose between right and wrong. Their parents doom them to a life of mental servitude. They rely on the religion, on the book, on the clerics, on someone or the other for most of their life, and eventually become incapable of distinguishing between right and wrong..... HG are the initials of my old moniker JB, we used to hang out on the YHOO thread a few years ago...does it ring a bell ? And I am an compulsive gardener too <smile>