Essay for Feb 13
Most of us were subjected to political, religious, and
social indoctrination before we became teenagers. While we have been learning
of a few individuals who have de-converted from a particular religious belief, most
people believe as their parents do or have been instructed by them to believe. That is
easily understood when you think of the early interactions that you had with
your immediate family or relatives.
If your family supported Republican candidates, then you
generally only heard good things about Republicans. Any negative news about
Republican behavior would be filtered by your parents to exclude it from you.
The same is true of Democrats and today more than in the past, hypocrisy is
revealed by replaying passed video clips as they twist themselves into pretzels trying
to justify their current stance on an issue compared to their stance five years
ago on the same issue. For example, both Senate Majority Leader McConnell and Speaker
Ryan were predicting apocalyptic consequences as a result of expenditures that
added to the deficit five years ago and this week when it was convenient for
them, they added to the deficit saying that a growing economy would resolve it.
The Democrats made the same counter argument five years ago.
If you are born in the United States, most of you had
parents who belong to either the Catholic church or one of 200 major Protestant
denominations, so you would have heard or read stories from the Old and New
Testaments and nothing about other religions or their writings. You would have
been taught the “Founding Fathers,” supposed beliefs while ignoring what individuals
like, Franklin and Jefferson said about religions. These untruths about them would
be handed down from generation to generation. Today, if you attend a public
university and you do a little research you discover that what you’ve been told
is sadly not true or only half-true at best; however, if you show the proof to
someone who has bought into the myth or misrepresentation, your proof, even if acknowledged, will generally be
dismissed quickly.
If you were born in China, you might know very little about
Judaism or Christianity, so how much of what you believe is determined by your
place of birth? So many different cultures have belief and non-belief systems
that are so different from those in the west. Some people in the U.S. were
already disconnected from other cultures because they viewed them as inferior.
Now as it is starting to dawn on a few of them that they are not inferior,
there seems to be an effort to retrench and erect barriers to prevent
reasonable cultural exchanges. We may soon find ourselves walled in to our
detriment.
Will there be a time in
the far distant future when children are not indoctrinated, but instead taught
to think critically about political, religious, and social issues? I have my doubts.
