US ambassador killed over a film

[kandrathe]

No this is my concept of bad parenting. Making your child religious before he has grown up is bad parenting to me. (although I understand the cultural implications so I am not saying that such parents need to go to jail or so).

You are out on the fringe here, beyond the consensus of even secular main stream professionals in child and adolescent psychology. As described by Ken Pargament in "The Psychology of Religion and Coping: Theory, Research, Practice", his description of the "rejectionist" position in psychology is 1) alienating to the patient, 2) against research findings, and 3) unethical. Page 363.

My own view is that children enter this world devoid of our societal structural framework, it would be abusive to leave that blank. They would fill it in with whatever influences they absorbed -- from other children, from their baby sitter, from the television, or from Big Bird videos. The parental responsibility is to 1) be responsible for them until that time they can be responsible for themselves, and 2) set them on a course to successfully integrate into our society capable of using their unique gifts for the betterment of themselves and society. Where I live, this society includes many things, including main stream Christianity. If I were in the depths of the Amazon, I would alter my guidance to better help my children survive/thrive in that society.

Thanks for not advocating tossing us Christian parents in in jail. You are a paragon of tolerance.

And... to set the record straight, Ayn Rand is not my hero. Her works are in my library along with many other notable authors. Perhaps I'll sandwich her between Marx and Engles just to hear the bindings scream.

If I had to pick the top 10 people who've influenced my thinking in no particular order;

Society
1) John Locke
2) Jean-Jacques Rousseau
3) Søren Kierkegaard

Economics
4) Milton Friedman
5) Frédéric Bastiat
6) Friedrich Hayek

Machines, Minds and Aesthetics
7) Marvin Minsky
8) Roger Penrose
9) Wystan Hugh Auden
10) Paul Cezanne

Ms. Rand might be in the top 100 -- I haven't thought about a list that big... I enjoyed Atlas Shrugged -- as a story, I like Dagny as an empowered heroine. Objectivism as a philosophy, suffers like others when slavishly imposed ( much like Marxism). When I have access to a knife, fork and spoon, why should I eat peas with only a knife? There are pearls of insight in studying many many viewpoints. I'm not so narrow minded to become the Fan Boi of one.