I actually have a blog post titled “this blog is an ivory tower”, which I eventually decided not to publish.

With regards to Santa or the tooth fairy, they are already examples of telling your children lies, having the children eventually disillusioned about it a bit. Personally, we were never told about Santa. We had no “lies”, at least not the intentional kind, except for for one: a “tooth mouse”. The tooth mouse (/fairy) belief adds some hope and positivity to the tooth loosing experience, with an added safety clause, a back door: you only loose teeth to a certain age, so there isn’t any big disillusionment event at which point you need to let go and realise “there isn’t actually a tooth mouse. This time there won’t be anything…”

Of course thinking back, you can’t remember if you suspected or kinda knew that it was your parents. Maybe your subconscious wondered, but there’s a kind of contract, you don’t ask questions, and you get the money. It’s worth it to accept the belief, no questions asked, for the benefits it bestows upon you. (Ditto with going with your majority culture’s beliefs — being the oddball is never easy. That’s why I read St. Paul’s advice to his early Christian communities, and think the advice often applies to atheist communities in some Bible-belt culture, more than it does to the majority-rule Christians.)

In terms of fear of hell, for example, if a parent truly believes in hell, that it exists, that it is a terrible place, that the most important thing is to avoid it, then in their love, they will convey this fear to their children, to protect them from it. Indoctrination, sure, whatever, like any angle on socialising your children, teaching them the way of society. If that is considered “evil”, then things get really messy: everything we teach our kids, that later turns out to be not correct, could classify as “evil”. OK, granted, there’s a strong psychological impact on priming a mind for a life driven by a fear, but the point I’m making is that I believe intention is important. If a cat is not to be considered evil (for playing with it’s food, because it is instinctual), I don’t think indoctrination with a fear of hell could be considered evil, if it is done “out of love”.

By all means, if some parent doesn’t believe it themselves, and are indoctrinating their children in order to achieve a particular effect (like keep them under control more easily), I’d be happy calling that evil. It’s like child-experimentation. “Let’s see what happens when I teach my children this.” (Is Calvin’s Dad evil in the lies he’s telling Calvin? He sees it as humour, I guess… I don’t think that’s evil either, though it is rather mean…)

http://dieburgerblogs.mweb.co.za/ViewComments.aspx?mid=2651&blogid=41

I have yet to read God is not Great, so I can’t comment on this. Do you have a copy?

I suspect I might have combined this talk with some of Hitchens’ vitriol. (I read about three pages of Hitchens’ book, and decided not to waste my time at that time.) I’m most curious whether Hitchens’ book refers to celibate cultures in the first few pages? Hmm, whatever. I’ll stand by this bit in my post:

This is how I remember that particular case, but I don’t have a link to it. Whether I remember the details correctly or incorrectly, the point I’m trying to make still stands.

*time passes as I watch the TED talk*

Nope, the TED talk isn’t loading right now… I’ll double check what that tag is doing there later.

It might have been Dennett, but I think Dennett is better than that… To talk about a different talk: There is one Dennett talk that I remember quite well, where I was very disappointed in the ending: he started sounding like creationists to me, in terms of ridicule or logical fallacies. I think his audience played a part in that. AAI. He knows what they want to hear, he gave it to them. (Subconsciously, maybe.) At that point I didn’t have much respect for the guy, but I’ve listened to other talks by him, which I did think were very good. (Or should I be talking singular here? It was his TED talk, it kicked ass.) So now I’m of the opinion “c’mon Dennett, you’re better than that…”

As an example from memory, I’ve come across a famous atheist seemingly ridiculing celibacy on the grounds of its impact on the (non-)propagation of the practitioner’s genes. Such arguments are effectively encouraging us to live as slaves to our genes, nothing more. I’m sorry, that is not what humanity is.

Who was this? If it was Dawkins, he was definitely not ridiculing celibacy. In point of fact, he was showing that people are not slaves to their genes.

If it was someone else, I’d like to read their arguments.

There was a sentence or two I seem to have ended up cutting, where I mentioned that some of the point of this post is looking at, or thinking about, alternatives, for those that are not able to believe in God, for those that don’t have that as an option, stating something like “much of the benefits are available to the non-theist”. But also that it might be rather challenging — though not less challenging than believing in God, for some.