Proselytizing is a fundamentally narcissistic act - the perpetrator has no empathy for their target’s position on matters spiritual. I hearted @teapot’s acerbic, but deeply honest response to an act, that I, too, find offensive.
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Actually, no, birth creates atheists. You will never find a human being that came into the world believing in any god you’ve ever heard of. Every single one of us was born a devout atheist. Any other outcome requires years of indoctrination.
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A well-known company out west uses that same strategy in the branding of a word processor and operating system, and seems to do pretty well with it. Why mess with success?
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Or life, and experience, and possibly religious experiences, and different ways of making sense of things.
And you could just as well say that people were born agnostic or ignostic as athiest.
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I wandered into a Christian bookstore one day and started glancing through a Dobson book. It was appallingly written about about a fifth grade level but I was also saying “Well that stuff right there about marriage and the nation is also in Mein Kampf …there’s some more …Mein Kampf … there’s more…Mein Kampf …Mein Kampf … yep, it just goes on and on.”.
Various Hitler biographers have always said that Hitler was beaten quite often by his father, and that this was key in creating his vicious character. Note that people were saying this at a time when corporal punishment was the norm.
Also, there are lines in mein Kampf about how male children must be taught to endure pain and even false accusations and random punishment.
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Every individual needs revolution, inner division, overthrow of the existing order, and renewal, but not by forcing them upon his neighbors under the hypocritical cloak of Christian love or the sense of social responsibility or any of the other beautiful euphemisms for unconscious urges to personal power (Jung, 1966:5)
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“Parents should always be conscious of the fact that they themselves are the principal cause of neurosis in their children”
Carl Jung
“Neurotic parents have in their turn neurotic children”
Otto Fenichel
Gee-golly, Mister! You sure are ignorant. I don’t think you’ve stepped foot in the south since 1964, to hear you talk about it (and you sure sound like you fancy yourself an expert). Hell, we don’t even use words like “Yankee” down here anymore. You do, though. Maybe you shouldn’t comment on things that you obviously know so little about. You might embarrass yourself and appear as a pretentious condescending jack-ass. Well, maybe I’d best digress now. I have to go beat some Jesus in to my wife and son…
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No, I’ve been living in the Bible Belt for 10 years now among the primitive apostates.
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I’m also from southern Indiana, born in 73 as it happens. I was spanked - and paddled, and switched, and hit with a wooden spoon or belt, and etc. Not often, but often enough. By white, college-educated parents and grandparents even.
I’m very glad that hitting children is slowly, slowly falling out of fashion because the research is unequivocal - whatever it is that parents are trying to accomplish with it (getting children’s respect, teaching obedience, instilling morals, curbing risk-taking), physical discipline pretty much accomplishes the opposite. While also leaving lasting damage to the parent-child attachment relationship, and by extension, the child’s attachment behaviors and self-image in other relationships as they grow up into adulthood.
Indiana is not doing terribly well by any measure, as far as I can tell - I still read the Indy and E’ville papers online every so often, and most of my family is still there, and from what I can tell the infrastructure is crumbling, state educational rankings are a joke, job and income growth is non-existent, Mike Pence is selling everything he can grab off to the private sector, it’s some kind of small miracle that Purdue and IU still have enough money to function as ranking universities, and the majority of students who earn a college degree are aiming to move out of state afterwards. Indiana: the Alabama of the north, basically.
Then again, I’m just citing research that comes out of Child and Family Studies, a perfectly Midwestern, kinder-kuche-kirche respecting discipline that arose at Kansas and Illinois and Indiana land grant universities, so it should be perfectly acceptable to your average Hoosier, right?
I’ll wait.
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My dad lives there so I see it regularly: you are entirely correct. And yet, perversely, they’re proud of how much greater (they perceive) Indiana is than their neighbor Illinois because it’s a red state instead of blue. Why people don’t see that taxes are the price of having a functioning infrastructure, I don’t understand.
Their educational outcomes are more like the southern states than other Midwestern states. They take more federal money than they pay in. Industrial jobs have all but disappeared. The only reason Michigan is doing worse is because it was (basically) a one-industry state for so long, whereas Indiana has had a slower slide into severe, long-term unemployment. It’s really sad to see how poorly they’re doing.
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Whadoya mean Michigan’s doin’ worse? The Governerd insists everything is totally awesome since he signed all the ALEC legislation he was instructed to by his benefactors.
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Here’s ALEC’s list of how the states are doing:
2014 Economic Outlook RankUtah
South Dakota
Indiana
North Dakota
Idaho
NorthCarolina
Arizona
Nevada
Georgia
Wyoming
Virginia
Michigan
Texas
Mississippi
Kansas
Florida
Wisconsin
Alaska
Tennessee
Alabama
Oklahoma
Colorado
Ohio
Missouri
Iowa
Arkansas
Delaware
Massachusetts
Louisiana
West Virginia
South Carolina
New Hampshire
Pennsylvania
Maryland
Nebraska
Hawaii
New Mexico
Washington
Kentucky
Maine
Rhode Island
Oregon
Montana
Connecticut
New Jersey
Minnesota
California
Illinois
Vermont
New York
Apparently Indiana is #3 in the whole country…ALEC says so!
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This is the list of states that have passed ALEC legislation, from most laws to least, right?
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That’s just what I was thinking!
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It’s not surprising that California, Illinois and New York are in the bottom 4. After all, we can see how poorly they’re doing. Doesn’t California match the entire country of France for GDP? And come on, who lives or works in New York or Chicago? Really, those are ghost towns in comparison to all those mountain and southwest states (where there are ACTUAL ghost towns).
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