Public Criticism
Posted by Doug Tue, 08 Mar 2005 17:20:00 GMT
I posted two blog entries I knew would be controversial last week. The first was my review and editorial on George Barna’s book Turning Children into Spiritual Champions and my comments on stiffer fines for FCC indecency violations. I had discussions on IRC about both topics both before and after I posted. Since I don’t allow comments on my blog (due to too much BlogSpam and lack of time to deal with it), I thought I’d go ahead and link to a couple blog posts by individuals from IRC who disagree with me. I’m not really going to counter either of these posts here. I’ve already discussed the two issues. All I’m doing is providing a link and as neutral summary as I can to dissenting views. First, there’s a post by Fufie on Resigning to censorship. He equates the FCC indecency rules to censorship and those who support or enforce them as waging a “War on Reality”. Since I’m interested in photography, he thinks I should be more likely to want a clear picture of reality including things labeled by the FCC as indecent. He also has a side-bar condemning me for brainwashing children and says I’m “having a garage-sale with your soul.” Second was what I found a more thoughtful post by varjag/blog/archives/000192.html” target=”_top”>Spirituality. I think he objects not so much to parents training children in religion, but to “force-feeding the doctrine”. He poses a valid question asking what I would think if I had been raised Muslim and given no choice in my spiritual development. I’ll go ahead and answer that question. First, there’s absolutely no way we can divorce ourselves from our past. Our past is who we are. Second, there’s no way children can escape the profound impact of their parents—either for good or bad. I believe the Bible is true and is “the inspired Word of God.” I believe it is “sharper than a two-edged sword” and can “pierce the heart” convicting man of what’s True and Right. As such, I’d hope and pray that I would be able to study the Bible with an open mind and come to believe the Truth. I guess I can’t resist. Both of these posts regarding my parenting seem to have one thing in common. Both decry taking the spiritual training to some excess. I think nearly everyone would agree that excessive spiritual training is a bad thing. What’s different is where we all draw that line. I don’t know where Fufie would draw the line. My impression is that he’d rather me demonstrate my own Faith and leave it at that. Varjag seems to think that taking kids to church is OK. My position is that it’s my duty to actually teach them about God. I said in my earlier post and in IRC discussions that I wasn’t advocating “force-feeding” “The Answers”. What I understood Barna to be advocating, and what I’m advocating is to pose philosophical questions to my kids (such as “Does God exist?”, “What is the nature and character of God?”) in an age appropriate manner and let them reach their own conclusions based on their own thinking. I think the key to Barna’s research is that if you wait until later in life to ask these questions, odds are they won’t really be open minded about the answers. Finally, a word about my blog. It has always pretty much had two purposes. First, I wanted to journal my thoughts as a parent raising my kids. As a parent over the last seven years, I’ve often wondered what my parents were thinking during certain circumstances from my youth. This blog is an effort to record some of those thoughts in the hope that one day my children will find it valuable. Why make this publicly available? Two reasons. First, I’m inherently lazy and don’t really accomplish very much without accountability. Making this blog public is a form of holding my feet to the fire to make sure I write regularly. Second, since my immediate family is mostly isolated from our extended family, there are people scattered about who find value in keeping up with us this way. My second purpose is actually much less important. As a geek, I like to have an avenue for noticing cool things as they happen. I talk about Emacs, Linux, my Mac and my camera. In the grand scheme of things, those posts really don’t matter. However, Google doesn’t discriminate my blog content and people find my site by searching for things like “thinkpad a22m”, “calibrated powerbook profile”, and “dotemacs”. I’m glad people can find useful information on my website. I also secretly hope to impart some amount of geekness on my very non-geek family who reads my blog. The point is that if you find one part of my blog more annoying than another part, I’m sorry. I have RSS feeds for each category of my blog. Simply add “index.rss” to the end of my url followed by a category (for instance http://lathi.net/diary/Photography/index.rss). I’m also sorry I don’t have comments enabled so you can express dissenting views directly on my blog. Email them directly to me or post on some place I can find and I’ll try to post links to them. And now I’ll consider this topic sufficiently beat upon. As I said, I’ll welcome email about either of these topics and of course, feel free to post about them on your own blog. However, I doubt I’ll post on these topics again until either something new happens or something new is said. So long, and thanks for reading.
