Friday, January 23, 2009

Parenting and the Relation Between Faith and Dictatoroship

The simple relationship is that submission is the means by which both dictatorship and faith use to reach their objectives.
However, there is also the more subtle relationship in which I will discuss below.

Faith effectively tells its subjects what to do, thereby devaluing any attempt for reason and discussion. In contrast, not only do science and philosophy not tell you what to do - as we are the ones burdened with solving the problems - they also value any system which helps in the never-ending endeavor to find truth.

Human beings can either be taught to be told what to do or they can be taught to find out for themselves. This differentiates what I call 'dictatorial parenting' (A) from 'responsible parenting' (B) where the dictatorial parent is one who tells the child what to do without explanation and the responsible parent is one who lays out the choices for the child and helps when differentiating between the reasonable choices from the non-reasonable ones.

Children who grow up within household A are much more likely to give into ideologies involving slave mentalities such as religion or fascism. These are ideologies which tell the subject what to do through a method such as faith or something very much like faith, such as nationalism. Philosophers and scientists may have grown in these types of households but there is no doubt that they have received some responsible parenting, whether or not the actions had been produced by the actual parent. Much the same, non-philosophers may be produced from household B as well. Also, for example, scientific fascists and religious anarchists are created in such mixed environments.

The solution is then not a positive obligation on humanity to educate. It is not a positive obligation on responsible parenting. It is not resorting to violence (public school). Really, there is no obligation! Human beings are creatures that have adapted so that they could advance and evolve their minds, so this change will happen naturally. In fact, it is education itself that teaches submission. Public schools tell there students to submit to the state while religious ones tell them to submit to god - and this is exactly why there should be no positive obligation on humanity to teach because that would just mean public education, producing exactly what we had set out to destroy.

Its great to be optimistic but the chances of us evolving out of this stage before we kill ourselves, or rather when those within household A destroy themselves and those of household B, are diminishing. The struggle for the survival of humanity has always been the struggle between these two households, the household of faith and the household of reason.

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