Posted By Brandon
Concerning other people's children I would often hear my mom claim, "if those kids were raised in my house, things would be quite different". She was telling the truth! If the neighbor's child grew up in my house he would have watched Entertainment Tonight at 7:30pm and gone to bed at his age appropriate bedtime (which happened to be arbitrarily decided). If that other person's child was French and adopted by my parents shortly following birth, his native tongue would be English, NOT French. Is this so because the child has made a cognitive decision that English makes more sense to him? No, his environment made the decision for him. It seems fair to say that the previous examples gives us a small glimpse of socialization's influence. To take the same idea a bit further, if any child once born to (insert your favorite religious conviction) _______ parents were to be raised by my parents he or she would be a reform Jew. Same as in the language example, does the child have any say; did the child decide that any one dogma made most sense to them? Probably not. You may be thinking that is only how it is in your family. If you are of that mind, I challenge you to explain your own subscription to faith and that of your parents and their parents before them. I am willing to bet that there is a certain pattern.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
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2 comments:
What about culture? do you identify yourself as a Jew culturally? Is your problem with organized religion alone? Or do you feel that any identifying characteristic that separates the world into groups (Jew, Italian, etc.) that have their own interests is also a problem as should be done away with?
Ah, but there comes a time, at least in my Mormon culture, where they DO decide (at least most do). True, not all do, but I daresay few of the young boys who go out on missions don't wrestle with their faith a great deal before they go out. Of course, this is a generality, and not true in every case.
There are various stages of faith, ranging from what you describe as that young, blind acceptance of kids, but it *usually* continues to develop to the point where individuals have to figure it out themselves. Then comes the point where they start learning things contrary to what the standard dogma states, and their faith gets deconstructed to varying degrees. There is an interesting discussion of this from the mormon point of view based on the works of Fowler, the (non-Mormon) psychologist (google fowler, stages of faith) and for the momron discussion go to mormonstories.org and I believe the discussion is contained in episodes 15, 16, and 17. Now, realize, these are individuals discussing their faith, not officials discussing the church's doctrine. I think you two would really enjoy his works - it's not written in a judeo-christian slant or from any other perspective, but rather on his studies of faith in general.
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