Reality: The Taboo Against Truth -- Chapter 5: Feeding Children Lies

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Reality

and The Taboo Against Truth

Feeding Children Lies

It takes a sperm, an egg, a womb and nine months to create another human organism. Mystics and romantics would have us believe that there’s a lot more to it than that, but there isn’t.

Some will suggest that God is involved, others will talk of love, and contrary to all evidence some will say that a family in necessary. While there are certainly many other factors that can affect the outcome of any pregnancy, like nutrition, social and economic factors, and access to medical care, the bottom line is that the process of reproduction itself is pretty much automatic just as it is in other species. Evolution has built an almost uncontrollable urge for pleasure during sex into human beings and many other species to insure that the species will continue to reproduce. It has also created other options, like homosexuality, to insure that pleasure in sex can be experienced without runaway overpopulation. In societies that demonize homosexuality, however, this balancing force is repressed and cannot work.

Unlike less intelligent forms of life like insects, human beings are designed to do more than eat, reproduce and die. Human intellectual abilities are far beyond anything seen in other species; it is the human capacity to comprehend and manipulate the environment that distinguishes Man from all other forms of life. In order to be fully human, however, an individual must be trained to use his mind in ways that enhance his chances of survival. Without such training, a human is little more than his mammalian predecessors.

The human mind is the greatest natural resource in the world. Man has thrived and flourished in the environment of earth because evolution through the adaptive power of natural selection has endowed the human species with an unprecedented ability to comprehend the nature of the physical universe in which he lives. Lower forms of life survive by breeding in astounding numbers. Bacteria and insects can produce millions, if not billions of offspring in the course of a lifetime. The direction of evolution has been away from breeding to survive toward thinking to survive. Humans think in order to live longer, richer, happier lives. The human lifespan has grown as a result of a scientific understanding of how the body functions and improvements in healthcare. This makes nonstop breeding unnecessary for the survival of the human race.

The enormous capacity of the human mind to comprehend the physical world reveals itself at a very early age. In The Scientist in the Crib, authors Gopnik, Meltzoff and Kuhl, report that the brains of very young babies can process the barrage of raw sensory information with remarkable insight. They seem to possess an innate ability to process light, sound waves, tactile stimulation and the motion of objects around them and translate that information into knowledge about the 3-D world they live in. As a result they quickly learn to manipulate their environment.[i]

Very young babies can view the trajectory of a moving object and anticipate its future location, correlate the sight of a bouncing object with the sound it makes, and associate the feel and an object like a pacifier with the corresponding visual image.

When babies are shown a ball that moves across a table and then behind a screen, they will look to the far edge of the screen in anticipation of the balls reappearance. It seems that when shown a moving object, very young babies make predictions about the path the ball will continue to follow.[ii]

When shown two objects bouncing at different rates while listening to an audio recording of a bouncing sound, babies will stare longer at the object that is bouncing in sync with the sound. At a very young age, they seem to understand which sound fits with the bouncing object.[iii]

One-month old babies seem able to correlate the feel of a lumpy or smooth pacifier in their mouth with the sight of a pacifier like the one they are sucking on. Though they were never shown the pacifier that was put in their mouth, they stare longer at a lumpy pacifier rather than a smooth one if they have just sucked on a lumpy pacifier. If they sucked on a smooth pacifier, they will stare longer at a smooth pacifier as opposed to a lumpy one. It’s as if they know what a pacifier should look like just from sucking on it. This suggests that some ability to associate certain tactile stimuli with corresponding visual images is innate. [iv]

From the day they are born, children are predisposed to make sense of reality. Millions of years of evolutionary history have given an advantage to minds that can learn how the physical world is put together and how it functions. Yet socialization works against evolution. Children are fed a steady diet of falsehoods and fantasies at a time when their brains are developing and craving the truth. How would a brain develop if it were only fed the truth while it was developing? The answer to this question is unknown because mankind has not developed societies yet that are not mystical in one way or another. At best, children are raised in mixed environments where equal weight is given to science and some sort of mystical view of the world. In any society built upon mystical premises, a child will have to at least pretend to endorse some mystical views or he will certainly be ostracized.

The purpose of the human mind is to enable man to survive in his environment on the planet earth in the Universe. There is no evidence that Man can exist outside of this ecological niche and therefore his training must teach him about the nature of the Universe and his place in it. Education can only be about things that exist because nothing can be known about things that don’t exist. There is no such thing as knowledge about things that don’t exist. If education is to teach about life if the Universe, it must focus completely on all that exists because the Universe is the sum of all that exists. Any teaching that cannot be supported with evidence from the physical Universe can only confuse the human mind, resulting in an inability to distinguish between existence and nonexistence, between the real and the unreal.

A mixed school system will create a mind that is continually in conflict with what it was designed to do, a mind that has been taught to give equal weight to substantive knowledge and speculation. While the child may learn a few facts in such an environment, he will never be able to think clearly because his mind will have been severely damaged in the process. It is not only a waste of the greatest natural resource in the Universe, it is child abuse. It is unfortunately a process that almost every child in the world is forced to endure in one form or another.

Protecting the integrity of learning and knowledge requires a well-patrolled boundary around existence. That boundary will shift as new information is gathered and old ideas are proven to wrong. It is a mistake to equate well-patrolled with unchanging when talking about a frame around reality. The boundary must be well-patrolled because the connection between knowledge and existence is inviolable; there can only be knowledge of things that exist. It is therefore the responsibility of every individual to be scrupulous, and guarded, in his segregation of existence and nonexistence if he wishes to have knowledge. For those charged with educating young minds, the burden is even greater as it is important to make the connection between existence and knowledge while the mind is still wiring itself.

Education begins from the first day that a child is born and continues throughout the course of a lifetime. The problem that most children face is that those individuals that they rely upon to teach them about existence have never learned to draw an accurate frame around reality. For example, it would be hard to find a parent or teacher today who does not believe that there is a right or an entitlement to an education at the expense of others. No such right exists in the Universe, however. This “right” cannot be known or understood because it does not exist except in the minds of those who believe in the right. They will fight vigorously for their right to force all individual taxpayers to contribute to the cost of education, using the argument that it is for the “public benefit.” The lessons that children will learn from these adults are that nonexistent rights exist if you believe hard enough and that when you need something there is some right to rob anybody who has what you want. The entire public school system is built upon this premise.

It is in the nature of a child to seek knowledge and therefore there is a natural right to learn and acquire information about existence. There is no right to force others to provide or pay for the education, however, because no right to enslave or control others exists. Individuals who value education will voluntarily do everything within their power to help educate children even if the children are not their own. A person who genuinely values education, however, knows that knowledge is dependent upon existence and will not voluntarily support a school system like the public schools which exist because those who created them believe in things that don’t exist. He knows that such schools will confuse knowledge with speculation. He might as well be forced to donate his money to a religious school.

Some will argue that people don’t value education and won’t pay for it voluntarily. This is undoubtedly true given the fact that so many prefer to rely on faith any mysticism; it is much more tempting to believe it is possible to remake reality to suit your own needs than to do the hard work of learning about the Universe as it is. It is also possible to get away with it as long as you can force others to make up for the consequences of your delusions.

Teachers who militantly campaign for more tax dollars to be spent on public education can’t accurately call themselves teachers. A teacher, by definition, imparts knowledge. Knowledge can only be about things that exist. There is no right in nature to force one’s will upon others so when they advocate forcing others to provide them with jobs or to give children an education they are being intellectually dishonest. They are talking about the importance of knowledge while basing their argument on “rights” and “responsibilities” that cannot be known because there is no evidence that they exist. In reality, they are mystics who are babbling nonsense, not teachers who are teaching. They should be kept away from children as they are far more likely to poison young minds than impart real knowledge about existence. Individuals who pervert reality are not qualified to teach anything because they have not learned to make the most fundamental judgment about whether something exists or not. In the real, binary world, where things either exist or they don’t, these individuals cannot tell the difference between a zero and a one.

The right of a child to learn is not the same thing as the right to force others to teach them. The right to learn is not the same thing as a right to enslave. Building a school system on delusions and lies is not a good place to start educating children.

With the enormous appetite for knowledge that children have there is a natural, huge, billion dollar market for educational materials and facilities. In a free, competitive market, the products and facilities that were the most effective would make fortunes for entrepreneurial educators. Ineffective or overpriced products would quickly become extinct. In a free market in a free country, public schools would quickly become extinct and be replaced by far more effective methods of teaching.

Religious schools face a similar fundamental problem. They might be financed voluntarily but they will force children to spend many hours each day learning about things which are not supported by evidence. A child’s mind cannot develop properly in such an environment, as it will learn to blur the line between existence and nonexistence as well as reason and irrationality.

With most schools devoting so much time, money and energy to the futile task of learning about nonexistence, it is clear that educating children is not the exclusive or even the primary function of schools. If education was the primary goal, all the effort would be directed to existence and supporting evidence. Schools as they operate today are suited for providing taxpayer-funded day care and babysitting so that parents can work, providing teachers and government workers with jobs, and delaying the entry of younger, more competitive workers into the job market. Since all schools must be accredited by the state, they also provide a way for the government to control what is being taught.

A child’s mind is designed to learn and it will be attempting to segregate existence from nonexistence even if parents and schools are thwarting this process. To the extent that a child can successfully make this distinction he will be getting and education but he will also be in conflict with those who are attempting to blur the line. Under these circumstances, intelligent children will find themselves in the strange position of being dependent on the authorities that are also making it difficult for them to learn the truth. It is not surprising that so many children turn to drugs and other forms of self-destructive behavior in an effort to cope with the huge conflict that this creates for them.

From their first days, children are absorbing information about their environment whether they are at home, in school, playing with other children, watching TV, or at social gatherings. They are also learning language, the process of forming mental concepts which will become the building blocks of their internal representation of reality. It is easy to see how a child’s thinking and ability to cope with reality can become corrupted during this stage of development if he is taught concepts and definitions that do not correctly represent reality.

For example: many children are raised in religious homes and attend religious schools. They are all taught about God and Man’s relationship to Him. There is no objective referent for God, however; nothing concrete that a child can look at and say, “That is God.” He can look at a ball or a house and quickly learn the associated words. In the future when somebody says ball or house, the child will immediately have a picture in his head of the object being discussed. When somebody says God, the child will most like think of a picture that he’s been shown from a religious text book of a man with long hair, a beard and probably a particular expression on His face showing love or anger. Lacking a first-hand experience of God, however, the child will have to rely on what adults have taught him to believe about God. The adults will speak as if they have seen God and spoken to Him, but the fact is that they can produce no evidence of such an experience. If every individual who believes in God was asked to draw a picture of the God that they personally met or if they were asked to write a paragraph that describes the meeting, they would have to make something up. In addition, every person would have a different picture and a different description. The concept of God will differ from person to person, have no objective referent, and be impossible to validate with evidence.

Without evidence of existence there is nothing that can be known about God; children can only know about beliefs, faith and delusions about God. They can see the evidence of beliefs, faith and delusions but they cannot see God. While they are being taught that they are seeing evidence of God, they are actually seeing evidence of faith and fantasy. They are seeing evidence of what happens when minds are filled with concepts that cannot be associated with objects or actions in physical reality. When children saw airplanes fly into the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001, they saw evidence that people kill themselves and other people too. They were told that the men who did this were terrorists who were acting on their faith in Allah, the God of the Muslim faith. With no objective referent for God or what God intends there is no possibility of universal agreement; there are only conflicting beliefs about who God is and what He intends.

Some will argue that the same thing can be said about molecules. In chemistry class children will learn about atoms and molecules but they will never see them; only drawings. They will, however, be able to conduct experiments that validate the existence of molecules. They only have to look around the room, at the clothing that they are wearing, or cars on the road so find many examples of products that were created by scientists who understand the nature of molecules.

The list of individuals who are capable of corrupting the minds of children is as long as the number of individuals on earth. Every individual has a different view of Universal Reality and nobody has the complete picture. The best thing that adults can do for children is to teach them concepts that are directly related to things that exist so that the child’s mind can build ideas that are directly related to reality. Children should not be taught to accept things on blind faith or to ignore evidence; they should be taught to study the world around them, evaluate evidence and make rational judgments based upon what they learn.

The list of lies that children are told could fill volumes. They are taught that Santa Clause exists and that he brings them presents on Christmas if they are good and obey their parents. Children see pictures of the Santa concept in storybooks and can also see men in bright red suits with white fringe at the local shopping center. They start to figure out that there is more than one Santa and then their parents tell them that the men in red suits are not really Santa but Santa’s helpers. At some point, the children find out that Santa doesn’t exist and the must reconcile that those who have always told them to tell the truth have been lying to them. They learn that lying is a way to show love and have fun.

Children are given a mixed message about lying from a very young age. They are told to always tell the truth but then are told to lie when the truth might hurt somebody's feelings. They are taught that they should respect and obey adults but not to talk to adult strangers. They are told to tell the truth by their parents who have consistently lied to them and tried to shelter them from anything that is distasteful about reality. They are told to study science but at the same time they are told that it is moral and good to embrace mysticism. They are taught that education is good for them but that they should sacrifice their rational minds to faith, lies, and the realm of the unreal.

Children are told that their lives don’t really belong to them and that they should do as they are told. Boys are taught a particular sex role and girls are taught another sex role. Boys are not born in pants and girls are not born in dresses but children learn very early that if they are going to be accepted in society, they must conform to their assigned sex roles even if they are not comfortable in them.

As members of a family, a church or a school, children are trained from an early age to belong to groups and to get their identity from the group. The group has a personified identity and is given human traits that the child is told to emulate. Only the individual children have human traits, not the groups. It is confusing for a human child with real personality traits to try and emulate a non-human group that doesn’t have any personality traits. The child has to become nonhuman in order to accomplish that task.

Children are told that they must be willing to sacrifice their lives for their country; that a nonliving collection of people is more important that their own lives. They are taught that heroes are individuals, usually men, who sacrifice their lives for others. They are not told something that is obviously true: individuals who sacrifice their lives for whatever reason are dead, they don’t exist anymore. An individual who is dead cannot be of value to anyone because he doesn’t exist anymore.

Perhaps most important is the fact that children aren’t told that when a person dies, they are gone forever. Instead, they are told, “She’s still with us, looking down from heaven.” By telling children lies about death, adults are by default telling them lies about the nature of life. They are teaching children to reject evidence and embrace faith and mysticism as a way of coping with life’s tragedies.

Catholic parents will force their children to go to church on Sunday and watch a Catholic priest give the sacrament of the Eucharist. They will teach their children that the priest has turned a small wafer of bread and a chalice full of wine into the body and blood of Christ. These are not symbols of the body and blood of Christ, the Catholic belief is that the bread and wine have really become the body and blood of Christ. Even though they still look like a wafer of bread and goblet of wine, and scientific evidence would indicate that they are still bread and wine, the children must believe that it really is the body and blood of Christ of they are not good Catholics.

This will create confusion and tension in any child's mind. At a time when they are asking questions and expecting their parents to give them informed honest answers, they are being told lies and that is it good to believe things that cannot be proven. They are being told that the unscientific beliefs and fantasies of the Catholic religion are the truth and they are morally obligated to believe them or they will spend eternity in the fires of Hell.

When children start to ask where they came or how they got here their parents become anxious. Many parents still avoid any discussion of sex even though that’s how children are born. How many children around the world are still told that Mary conceived Jesus through Immaculate Conception? It is a process that as never been seen or since repeated. God chooses Mary out of all the women in the world and impregnates her with the Savior of the world without sex.

In the end, however, it's all very tragic. God, being an avenging and cruel Creator, wants to murder his own son. In fact, God created his only begotten son for the specific purpose of sacrificing him. It is a natural instinct for most human fathers will fight to the death to protect the lives of their children, but the Christians worship a God who kills his own son in order to save man from the eternal fires of Hell, a sentence that God issued in the first place.

So when the young minds of children are being formed, when they are eager and ripe to learn everything they can about the world and existence and life, adults tell them fantastic stories of paternal Gods and perhaps eternal damnation. They are told that God the Father impregnated a poor woman so that he would have a human son to kill. Why did he allow his own son to die on the cross when any Omnipotent God could certainly have saved him? He let his own son be tortured and killed so that the human race could be saved from His own sentence of death. If God is Omnipotent and the Creator of all things, then He could have said, "Oops, I made a mistake. I apologize for my temper tantrum that I threw in the Garden of Eden, and from this day forward, no more men will have to die. All men have eternal life."

There are countless ways to lie to children; sometimes it is done purposely, other times out of ignorance. It is unfair and inaccurate to blame all the lies told to children on religion because any rejection of reality is a lie and will have the same result: another mind that is divorced from existence and incapable of being in sync with Universal Reality. Anything that rejects evidence and accepts unsubstantiated ideas as the truth is fantasy and mysticism. It all falls into the realm of faith. And once a person accepts that faith is the way to the Truth, rather than reason, anything is possible. Reason is no longer required and any delusion can pass for reality and Truth. For centuries, adults have fed the young minds of children the big lie that is the foundation for all other lies, that existence and nonexistence are somehow interchangeable. From this it follows that delusion and fantasy are interchangeable with the truth. It also follows that A is not A, that one thing is magically transformed into something else by the process of faith or by ignoring evidence.

Under these circumstances a child's brain must short-circuit itself to insure that certain connections are never made. Logic and reason must be circumvented as one irrational idea is embraced after another. A child must defeat his natural inquisitiveness and lust for knowledge. He must repress his natural instinct for survival and defeat his instinct for judgment. A child raised in such an environment will grow up to resist his own capacity to learn, understand, analyze and judge. He will not trust himself or any other person who possesses a lust for learning. He will be prone to self-destruction, habitually sacrificing his own judgment to win the approval of others. Since he presumes that all good people are like him and share common values, he will place an obligation on others that they sacrifice their own capacity for reason and judgment. In turn, others must be willing to sacrifice their minds to the common set of values in order to survive his aggression toward them.

A young child's mind is like concrete. In the early stages it is soft and malleable and capable of being shaped into many forms. Once it has hardened it is difficult, if not impossible to break the connections and make new ones. That precious little computer, the greatest natural resource in nature, will be deformed and short-circuited into something that is programmed to destroy itself and others. Those early years can never be recovered. The most important developmental years in a child's life are drowned in a sea of lies, contradictions, and fantasies. And because they have been programmed to view the world in this way, they will grow up to be parents who will do the same thing to own children. They will recycle the mold that was placed on their minds and reuse it on their own children by creating families, cultures, societies, government and religions that embody and reinforce their collective delusions.

If a parent cut out the eyes of a young child or punctured his eardrums, most people would be horrified. If a parent cut off a child's arms or legs any rational person would consider it cruel and barbaric. If society ordered that all children should have their tongues cut, mobs of people would protest the abuse. Humans have eyes in order to see and ears in order to hear. We have a nose to smell and a mouth to eat and communicate. We have arms and hands to touch and to manipulate objects in our environment. We have legs and feet so that we can go where we want to go and escape dangerous situations. We have a brain and the capacity for reason so that we can integrate all the information from out other senses. We have a brain so that we can think and make sense of the universe in which we live.

Mystics have a different view. By believing that knowledge is obtained through faith and intuition and by the rejection of evidence, they are saying that humans have a brain so that they could not think, just as they have eyes so that they should not see and legs so that they should never walk. Using the same premise that ability exists so that it will not be used it follows that humans have ears to be deaf and a nose so that odors cannot be perceived. Humans also have the capacity to feel pleasure in sex so that they should not experience pleasure in sex.

The brain is the most important organ in the body but there are no cries of protest as adults systematically destroy the minds of young children by teaching them to confuse existence with nonexistence. Nobody is thrown in jail for teaching a child that the Law of Identity does not exist or that A is not equal to A, or that truth is not truth. There are no laws passed to prevent parents or teachers from sabotaging a child’s ability to think clearly. There is a simple reason for this: those who pass laws giving themselves control over the lives of others are already at war with reality. The have already given themselves a right to dictate how others live their lives, a right that does not exist. An effective war on reality requires the destruction of the human mind for it is Man’s only tool for understanding and embracing Universal Reality. Once the human mind and its capacity for reason have been defeated, mystical assaults on Universal Reality can proceed without obstacles.