child abuse and society

Careful, Stoniphi, you may be in way over your head here. Fraggle is clearly demonstrating his ability to reason in spite of his emotions and he may have a patent on boasting.

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Are you trying to solidify inequality through historical misconceptions of what is natural or unnatural? No one is denying that there are biological differences, but there are many myths that do not support, or justify the stereotypes that perpetuate inequality. You are only looking for things that confirm your preconceptions. My advice to you is to stop focusing on our differences and focus on our similarities.

The division of labor benefitted both male and females and continued with the rise of cooperation. However, females hunted, as well. They also had equal status in the hunter-gatherer societies, but lost it during the rise of social hierarchies during the Agriculture and Industrial Revolution. Social acceptance once gained through group-oriented survival was now impersonal. Labor was exchanged for money and marriage became a business venture. Women could only gain power through males.

"Most wars are not fought over shortages of resources such as food and water, and most shortages of resources don’t lead to war. The Dust Bowl of the 1930s did not lead to an American civil war; nor did the tsunamis of 2003 and 2011 lead to war in Indonesia or Japan. And several statistical studies of recent armed conflicts have failed to find a correlation between drought or other forms of environmental degradation and war. Climate change could produce a lot of misery and waste without necessarily leading to large-scale armed conflict, which depends more on ideology and bad governance than on resource scarcity." ~Steven Pinker

With the agricultural revolution came ownership and the creditor-debtor relationship. Nietzsche thought that we took great pleasure in making others suffer and granted ourselves this pleasure to balance unpaid debts. He called it a “festival” and said it was "like the beginnings of everything great on earth, soaked in blood thoroughly and for a long time."

Distance… yes, of course, for hostility and compassion, as well.

I never said that art and music contributed to slavery. I was merely pointing out how our ability to communicate our emotions cultivated our mutual sympathy and lead to the abolishment of slavery.

I don’t deny that we use our powers of reason to reduce temptation. However, the value that we place on anything is attached through our emotions. I was merely pointing out how propaganda was successfully used to change the popular opinion that slaves were inferior and less than human. Reason is closely identified with the ability to self-consciously change beliefs based on new or existing information.

You are failing to make a distinction between the ultimate causation and the approximate causation. Language is most likely an adaptation, but I highly doubt that there is a part of the brain devoted to written communication, given that it is a recent innovation. Besides, the underlying mechanisms that make us do anything is completely different from our day to day mental status.

If we are taking an evolutionary approach, natural selection causes us to want to spread our genes. What man, when chasing tail thinks that he must spread his genes? Is he doing it for utility or because it feels good? William James asked why we eat. He wrote that not one man eats because of utility; he eats because it taste good and it makes him want more, not because he must sustain his body to spread his genes into the future. I asked someone once, why do people desire power? He answered; because it feels good.

Slavery wasn't abolished due to utility. We used our emotions, along with our ability to reason, and placed ourselves in their shoes. BUT you cannot separate the two. We imagined how we would FEEL, if we were them.

Our feelings trumped utility. Our exaltation of love has become the meaning of life. Yet, those without love, deem it madness. Yes, Fraggle, feelings trump reason, but are our emotions an accident or an adaption?

Why do we strive? Is it for life or the love of life?

Thus far, nothing you've said justifies calling all soldiers murderers. By the way, do you put your money where your mouth is? You do boycott all the military contractors, right? :bugeye:

 

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Gun ownership and deaths is a subject being discussed on Oregon Public Broadcasting. Oregon has a relatively high rate of suicide, and guns are often used for suicide. This is highly problematic when there are adolescents in the home, because they are so driven by their hormones and their brains are not fully developed physically, and for sure they lack the life experience for good judgment. This leads to more adolescent suicides by guns, in Oregon homes that are more likely to have guns than in some other states.

Guns and how they are used is directly related to culture. When I was young, and living in small rural town, a man shot his wife in a fit of jealousy and got away with it. Isn't this what you do when you catch your wife with another man? Throwing stones is just low tech.. If it is okay to shoot an intruder or not, is a matter of culture. It depends on your neighborhood. If one lives in a rural area and it is going to take the police 1/2 an hour to arrive, having a gun could determine if one survives or not. Living in an inner city ghetto is living in a high risk neighborhood, with a mind set for violence. Like a war zone.

Getting a gun was once a rite of passage, and it was used for hunting to feed the family. It was clearly understood with rights come duties. Today we speak of rights but not duties and this leads to cultural problems. We are not beating the devil out of our children, but neither do we have culture that is good for raising children. May I say, I thank God I raised my children in Oregon, instead of LA California where I grew up. I thought it was cool to be a Hell's Angel, and so understand the mind set that leads our young into trouble. When my own children came to that age of wanting to be a gang, their idea of a gang was like Spanky's gang than the big city gangs.

 

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This is the like woo woo science. Historically is has no value at all, because today is nothing like the past, so we can not use today to explain the past. And I can not figure out why anyone would value what Nietzsche said. Nietzsche was a sick man. He had terrible headaches and could not have a normal life. He also grew up in a culture with a history of brutality. Can we throw this quote out as having little value?

On the other hand why not say art and music contribute to slavery? Both convey culture and it is culture that makes slavery acceptable or not acceptable. Russian had serfs before its communist revolution, and the Orthedox Christian church supported it. The difference between a slave and a serf is the slave is sold as human being. The serf is by law part of the land, and sold with the land. The bible promoted a lot of art and music that promoted monarchies and slavery. But why are we even talking about this here? Perhaps separating children from their parents and selling them as slaves is child abuse?

 

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This is pathetic and so not true. How many people go to work every day because they feel like it? I HATE EDUCATION FOR TECHNOLOGY BECAUSE IT HAS LEFT THE MASSES SO IGNORANT. :soapbox: Human beings are different from animals because they can learn and they can make decisions based on reason. However, before they are much good at doing that, they need to learn how to do it. Education for technology is producing products for industry and it is not preparing humans for life.

Ignorant mothers and fathers may rely on their feelings when dealing with children, but today we have great information about how to raise children, and a well educated parent is apt to do better than an ignorant one. If we were educating our young for life, we might realize our human potential is much greater than it once was.

 

Nietzsche was no idiot. His quote may not be historically accurate but his use of it was brilliant. I wasn't attempting to apply evolution to culture change, nor was I defending the allure of group level selection. I was pointing out the obvious. AND OBVIOUSLY, persuasion has always been used for good and bad.

 

So, your emotions do not motivate you to go to work? Pain, pleasure, nor hunger have an emotional component?

Darn it, you reminded me that I have some work to finish.

See ya later.

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I knew that we passed measures to phase out incandescent light bulbs but I didn't know that we had to have security clearance to buy them. :bugeye:

The ability to learn to read and write is a byproduct, not an adaptation.

Yes, reasonable people CAN disagree. *walks away shaking her head*

Carry on with your fatherly advice and rants to Rita.

See ya later…

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Humans are emotional, but they are not controlled by their emotions unless they have a mental deficit, or abnormal emotional problems. Some people like Buddhist and Stoics intentionally learn to subdue their emotions to reason. The masses tend to be more controlled by culture than emotions, but unfortunately we do not speak of this, so we are not normally aware of it.

 

Sometimes the ignore function is the best way to handle some post. This thread has been taken completely off topic and I am resenting the personal attacks that have done so. This is beneath the standards of science isn't it? I will request this thread be closed.

 

Do you think that Buddhism has a moral edge over Christianity?

Do you think that Buddhism offers a way of being spiritual without being metaphysical?

Are these spiritual practices the only way to improve our emotional traits?

Mindfulness: Do you think that the modern understanding departs significantly from the Buddha’s own account of sati, and from those of the most authoritative commentators in the Theravada and Indian Mahayana traditions?

Do westerners cherry pick Buddhism?

Like Fraggle, who watches “NCIS”, did you watch "Kung Fu"?

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“Let’s say you get some evidence that might actually be legitimate evidence,” he says. “Much of the time people will automatically try to shoot down evidence, but you can get evidence for things that are not true. Just because you have evidence doesn't mean you should change your mind. But it does mean that you should change your degree of belief.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes'_theorem

Very well then, good day to you.

 

Let me try to go back to child abuse and society.

One form of child abuse, that is never addressed, is divorce. This remediation is all about the needs of the parents, but does not take into account the pain and abuse it can cause the children. It does not take into account using the children as pawns in the divorce settlement, or the undermining of one parent by the other, so children have to choose in a no win situation. This can lead to complexes. It does not take into account the pain within sensitive children who can't figure out why or if they caused this. The young man who did the shooting in Connecticut was a victim of divorce abuse, which caused him to free float, leading to bad choices on his part.

Maybe we can ask children which they think is worse; a spanking if they are bad, or their parents getting a divorce? Based on their answers of relative pain/abuse we can regulate the worse offender. Keep in mind child first!

 

Wellwisher thank you for getting us back of track. I think our attitude towards children is terrible. Divorce is terrible and so is living in a bad environment where people resent each other.

Fraggle, what you have mentioned is very interesting!

I became familiar with the reality of retarded people having children and not being good parents. However, they loved their children and wanted to be parents, and weren't bad to their children. They just needed more help than other people do. I thought we should have a special apartment complex for these parents with someone on sight to supervise the children and give parents extra help. What is said of a living situation with several adults makes me wonder if an apartment for retarded parents would work even better than I thought. If there were an intent to create this as group living situation focused on the children's needs. Can you provide more detailed information? What were the sleeping arrangements? Were children of different ages separated or put together? Are there any books or papers explaining these arrangements for caring for children?

 

If you want to start a thread for this religious discuss, please PM and I will joy it.

 

I thought I had made that clear - my apologies. Posts that are presented as being substantive and thereby valued contributions to a discussion loose a significant portion of their value if they are inherently smug and pretentious. It is that posting style which I take exception to. As evidence I offer the content of in excess of 19,000 posts.

It was not a cheap personal attack, it was a personal attack seeking to highlight what I consider to have been a blight on this forum for some considerable time. I stand by it.

 

Which is exactly why I made the observations that I made. You are free to believe that specific individuals bring value to the forum and that others do not. You are free to comment on these beliefs. Feel equally free to deny me the same freedoms.

Now I will withdraw so the thread can remain on the tack it had been correctly returned to.