naughty said:
THank You, Stronzo.
I was fully prepared for a full out assault. I can however see the merits in your argument. While I was reading your response i was invisioning a similar indoctrination of children in a country across the waters and the subsequent out come. Children do often take things literally to tragic consequences. As for a "Gay School" LOL! What would they teach? How to appreciate the finer things in life. over achieve, and put the rest of us poor slobs to shame? LOL!
:biggrin1:
That's very complimentary but I know some gay boys with truly dreadful taste!!:tongue:
But more seriously - I was once taken to task by Dr. Rock for being a product of my upbringing and readily dismissable somehow since I (acc. to him) appeared to be unable to unchain myself from my religious historical past. In the genealogy thread I mention this same phenomenon and it applies here too.
I don't
want to dismiss out of hand all the familial ties to my historical past ... including the religious one. They're my "knowns" (at least the legitimate ones...)
I find great comfort and fellowship among the Christian community of my upbringing. Do I find all of what's taught applicable to me or my situation? No, decidedly not. But I do see proportion in my own denomination and that seems harmless (if not indeed helpful) to all age groups. Growing up in the Episcopal Church and having Sunday school regularly .. then being an acolyte during my teens I was never "forced" to believe anything. It was all put before me as premise.
In truth I was never really very aware of the extremist business among Christians until I was an adult. I thought it was fairly rare and just an odd off shoot of the very few based in regional fears and superstition. But increasingly (perhaps because of the media) I see much more of the sort of thing shown in that video exposed as gaining strength and influence.
I've never been sorry I have no children. I never plan to have any. But I do enjoy the one on one company of a child whose curiosity and sense of wonder remains intact and uncorrupted. It's a really significant thing to me and when I connect with a child of seven or eight and can give that child a sense of my own experience in what makes the world valuable and beautiful it can be an immensely rewarding experience. In these rare connections there's no "training" on my part. There's simply exposure to what's beautiful in this experience. There's no fonder family memory than the one time I took my own youngest nephew to the seashore. It was low tide and he was maybe seven. He immediately crushed a hermit crab under his bare foot.
Rather than chastize him I asked him why he did it. He said "why not?"
For the next two hours we wandered the sand bars and I picked up each mollusk and explained why it all "worked" in the larger sense of the balance of nature and man (as best I could). I saw a sense of wonder and amazement slowly take him. Later that evening I got a call from my sister (ten years my senior) who said "who did you send home to me? David's done nothing but speak of his great time with his uncle and everything he learned today".
For me - it seems there's precious little time to instruct without bias. That's why that video is profoundly disturbing to me.
And again - there's a time for them to be simply children. I think it crucial in their development. And I see in that video that those poor kids have been robbed of it. That's not Christ at work - it's man in his aberrant form.
Re "gay school" :tongue: I meant it more in the sense of instructing children as they grow in sexual practices per se .. be they hetero or homosexual since I believe both ought to be available. However that instruction (were it to profiled in a similar fashion but in a sexual education sense at that age) would be deemed "abuse" of the first order. The cries of abuse would be loud and clear.
In my opinion one of two things will happen to those children:
1) They'll mature with those beliefs becoming ever-more vehement.
2) They'll utterly reject anything spiritual and despise any sort of belief system like the children of many clerics I know.
(think Marjoe Gortner here)
Either way I see no sense of real proportion coming from that sort of "ministry" (and I use the term
very loosely).
