Hi there,
Think I'm siding with Hartreefoch on this one. We keep going on about Santa Claus here, and at the end of the day you can actually look at "beliefs" in this context in a wider sense.
The way that's being promoted here, is how wonderful it is that children believe in Santa Claus and how horrible adults are to control their minds and destroy that belief by introducing them to "reality" after a certain age.
What's a bit one-sided about all of this, is that no one ever questions that a child's belief in Santa IS in fact an indoctrination by adults in the first place - ie. an imposition of fairy tale ideas on a child's mind. Why is this not equally destructive to a child's open-mindedness? Hartreefoch does highlight further on this point, that this kind of indoctrination can then basically be used as a means to control behaviour (be good and you'll get presents etc.) - in fact has this not been what religion has been doing so successfully to society for so long?
With regards the Golden Goose. If a goose exists which lays golden eggs - great. A religious person will be less interested in the goose or its laying of eggs - it will be more interested in the unobservable, undetectable and basically totally conceptual notion of an "intelligent designer" or some such notion who created the goose and what the spiritual meaning for it all is. Science, on the other hand (and I keep highlighting that I am not a scientist), would try and focus on understanding how the goose actually works, how best to nurture it and to breed it. It would look at the patterns of why and how the golden geese are in fact regularly slaughtered by foxes, and the field of social sciences would look at the (to me even more) interesting reasons why humans slaughter EACH OTHER in order to get hold of Golden Geese and claim the geese to be the property of their particular "intelligent designer". The fundamental difference is, religion deals with "out-there" concepts which impose value systems on people (and destroy children's open-mindedness pretty effectively too, it should be added) whilst sciences at least base their work on the world as it is currently functioning and operating in all its complexity.
Don't get me wrong - there's always room for a Eureka moment in science, for thinking out of the box, so to speak. But scientific method is required first as a premise for investigation (and not all science is dissecting and test tubes and Josef Mengele-type experiments funnily enough)
Just a thought from someone who actually thinks that ALL the thoughts and ideas of this world are what actually keep us deluded.
best wishes
Ingrid
but then of course, my thoughts are no doubt just deluding us all further.....!
