Reference Servall's post #30:
You march in a demonstration protesting the '2G spectrum- sell out' of the country. Why?
You give every month one tenth of your income to Udhavum Karangal (a charity). Why?
You accept responsibility for the mistake of a subordinate. Why?
You tell your daughter she must stop associating with a certain friend who comes from an undesirable background. Why?
When you are dogged by problems which appear to be intractable and without any apparent solution you repent and turn to pray. Why?
Every day most people make decisions of this kind. These are all moral decisions or decisions of right and wrong. Where does the data which goes into these decisions come from? These come from the value system which every one has built up over a period of time. The process of building a valid ethical value system is a lengthy, iterative, painstaking one. In this, parental advice/behavior, influence/behavior of friends, peers and siblings, one’s own experience in life(the pleasures of success, the pains of the hits/failure etc and the reasons for them), continuous updating of one’s convictions and belief using the treatment tool called reality etc. play their role. In the childhood when most of the basic values are formed(which will be accessed several times later in life), the advices of the parents when accompanied by appropriate behavior becomes an enduring value while the advice accompanied by an authoritarian behavior is discarded by the child quickly.
Keeping this in view let us look at your reasoning given in post #30.
- The fact that my kids are born in North America has inherently failed me as a parent from providing them the same childhood experience that I had in India.
You feel so because you believe that the values you picked up in your childhood are useful and enduring ones. You want your children too to have the same benefit. We make a number of compromises depending on the situation. If we do not get what we think is the ideal one we make do with what is available and improvise to serve our higher purpose. I am sure in North merica there are Hindu temples which may not have the same ambience as the village temple in your native village. But by taking your children to the temples in North America you can help them build a value system.
2.
I truly believe, from my experience, going to the temple as a child provided me a sense of discipline, sense of tolerance, calmness, a place of learning which otherwise I may have spent in less useful activities and feeling proud of my heritage.
It would be very difficult for any one to recall and identify each value from
One’s value system and recall when or how that particular value was picked up/formed. It is a very complicated psychological process. Every value is repeatedly accessed from the archive in the mind several times and either discarded temporarily/permanently or refurbished and deposited in the archive. These values guide our behavior in our life.
3.
I don’t want my kids to go to the temple because I want them to; only to empower them to observe, experience and learn the purpose and meaning of God and religion the way I learnt, so they can ask questions, do their own fact finding, and finally make up their own minds, whether they believe or not believe it is their decision. If I didn’t create those opportunities for them, I would have failed as a responsible parent and caused to create a permanent cultural void in their life
We need not hesitate to admit that we, as parents, tell our children what is good and bad. We also tell them why we say that if they can comprehend what we say. Otherwise the children pick up what we say with total trust. ‘Because Dad/Mom says it can only be true’ kind of trust. Later in his life the child will take out this value also and subject it to scrutiny several times and retain it or discard it because he would have grown up and would have picked up a lot of experience in life. Without bothering about what is going to happen in the future, we all help the child build up a system of good values because it is our duty to the child. We try to be very considerate and less authroritative in this endeavour because we do not want an outright rejection or ‘game playing’ by the child.
- And finally, I say this in all seriousness and due respect: If we fail as parents to bridge this cultural gap, we knowingly would cause our kids to question our faith and turn them non-believers and it will not be atheism by research but only through our neglect!!
I understand your anguish. Please read again what I have given under reply to your 1 above.
As usual Atheists have opened shop here also to sell their wares. They have said ‘why’ is more important than ‘how’. For them Atheism is the natural state in which we all were born and so there is no need to burden the children with faith. We keep telling the children to wear dresses even though nakedness is the natural state in which we were all born and what more, it is very convenient too to be naked. Faith and the values which come with it are not known to atheists. We need not argue with them on these values. If they can live without these values happily let them live that way. Atma is always aananthamayam-say Vedas.
I would conclude with a quote:
Bertrand Russel said “Many adults in their hearts still believe all that they were taught in childhood and feel wicked when their lives do not conform to the maxims of the Sunday School. The harm done is not merely to introduce a division between the concious reasonable personality(adult) and the unconscious infantile personality(child) the harm lies also in the fact that the valid parts of conventional morality become discredited along with the invalid parts. This danger is inseparable from a system which teaches the young,
en bloc, a number of beliefs many of which they are almost sure to discard when they become mature.”
Are there then as Russel suggests, valid parts of conventional morality? The answer to this comes from Anthropologist Ralph Linton , who says, “without the presence of culture(values passed from generation to generation in a long chain of many generations), conserving past gains and shaping each succeeding generation to its patterns, homo sapiens would be nothing more than a terrestrial anthropoid ape, slightly divergent in structure and slightly superior in intelligence, but a brother to the chimpanzee and gorilla”
Let us not deny our children the benefit of faith and its good values, thinking that it is an unnecessary burden or that these values may be thrown to winds when they grow up. Conventional morality passed from generation to generation is enduring indeed!
Cheers.
