The Parenting License

"Some people should have a parenting license before they have kids..."
- Emi Spicer

I agree. Maybe not a license, but at the very least basic training. Have you heard about the tragedy of the kids who died when they locked themselves in a car trunk? There's an apparent dissonance when one of the parents blamed the police. The truth, of course, is that the parents are to blame. And the sad part is, that one parent is taking this to court. He thought the police searching for the boys had a higher responsibility. He didn't want to take responsibility for his own negligence. Blaming is a natural self-defense reaction, especially if you think you can do no wrong. Still, the parents should have had the common sense to watch their kids. Not only that but they should have briefed their kids on simple things like "don't get into a car trunk, that's where you store things and dead people" and "don't be as stupid as me." The principle is true, there needs to be a requirement that if you're going to have kids, my word, swallow your pride and learn from wise people how best to take care of them. There's much more to child-rearing than the first six years and then just coasting along when they go to school. And even then, most parents just wing it and do what their parents did and rely on what they learned before they had kids (which usually amounts to nothing). Responsibility and education go hand in hand. The more you have to look after, the more you have to learn how to look after it. There are so many resources to raising a child right, it's not even funny. And yet a quick look at book sales shows that books about child rearing past kindergarten decline sharply and only books about ADD and strong-willed children generate sales (the latter among Christians mainly, of all things). Kudos to those parents who do their best to learn everything about child-rearing all the way to when the kids get married. And even then, they still need to learn to communicate to their kids as adults. Learning at every stage of the game, that's the key to raising well-adjusted people. It's the toughest job on Earth, but it can be accompished.

Intelligent design or something else?

An article by a Rabbi Gerard spoke against intelligent design (ID) claiming it is based on false assumptions. He discussed a lot of basic arguments opposing ID, but doesn't go in-depth. The article is more of a thought provoker than a thesis. Even then, I'd like to counter the arguments he presented. He began the article by asking the supporters of ID to explain mildew, mosquitoes, lower back problems, cancer, and childhood leukemia. I sat there thinking, What about them? To me they're minor issues. Yes, I'm aware that minor issues tend to be a stumbling block to people. "I just get stuck at childhood leukemia," he writes. Really they don't want to submit to the idea of being accountable to God and would use any excuse to not understand, even simple things. He doesn't want to understand because he has a fundamental misunderstanding of God and the Bible.

The essence of his article, and a question many people ask is, if this God who designed the universe is a good God, why does he let these bad things happen? So his article is not so much ID, but "the seeming irreconcilability of a good God and the world all around." It's the reason he can't get around those five "bad" things he mentioned. Why he's a rabbi and doesn't have a basic understanding of the Bible, I wouldn't know. His rabbinical school must've left a few things out. Or he slept through Torah class and missed a few good points about life and God. He tells a story about a conversation between Tanna, one of the earliest rabbis, and a person who asked why fruit rots. Tanna's answer: "so that produce merchants cannot hold on to their merchandise indefinitely, selfishly driving up the price." Much like Bryan's answer to Darrow's question "Where did Cain's wife come from?" Bryan: "Why are you asking about another man's wife?" Cute and curt, but it doesn't answer the question and it is a bad example for creationists and ID supporters. (For that Bryan could've at least said that Adam and Eve had more children other than Abel and Seth. And if he knew any genetics, he could've at least said that the gene pool was still clean and free of mutative effects.)

Gerard goes on to say "scientists claim the problem with ID is that it's not subject to testing; it can't be proved or disproved and thus remain in the realm of religion. But this is an unsatisfying conclusion because it leaves us with the possibility that it might be true. And it can't be." All I have to say to that is, the claims of evolution also leads scientists to the same conclusion, that "it can't be proved or disproved and thus remain in the realm of religion." Evolution is nothing more than modern man's origins myth, a religion of the self with science terms ornamenting it. Gerard's statement is an extension of his problem - he can't figure out the answer to the good God question so everything else can't be true. He compares Darwinian evolution (DE) and ID saying that if DE is accurate then some things will look intelligently designed while others not and if ID true then all things will look intelligently designed "and very clearly it is not." I know a provoker opinion article isn't the place to state scientific findings, but he should have at least presented one. Those five he mentioned aren't good enough, and, fortunately, not much of a challenge. I'll take on one of them (I won't be too detailed, just want to give an idea):

One problem he mentioned is lower back pain. Evolutionists believe that humans have lower back pain because we were originally hunched over quadrupedally before our ancestors decided to stand bipedally. But we still naturally want to hunch over, much like one of the middle pictures in the debunked “evolution of man” chart. Evolutionists believe that the spine was a suspension bridge rather than a tent pole and only over time did we start to develop a stronger lumbar region. I’m sorry, but our lumbar region has no clear sign that it ever acted like a suspension bridge. It was like that from the very beginning because it was created to be that way. Many years ago, because evolutionists believed the lumbar lie, they developed a method to treat lower back pain, but with negative results. They were confounded when they realized that the treatment needs to be based on the simple fact of keeping the lumbar erect with good anatomically correct exercises instead of treating it like an evolutionary anomaly (ie they suggested to bend forward like an animal). Lower back pain is usually the result of poor body mechanics, a sedentary lifestyle, and obesity, not because of an evolutionary change. People in Third World countries have dramatically less instances of lower back pain than in Industrial nations. They actually move around and do manual labor instead of sitting in front of a computer all day in an office, hunched over like a Neanderthal.

To get back to the important issue, Gerard simply doesn’t understand God. He doesn’t have good Theology proper. Rabbi Gerard, the reason why the world is messed up is because the first humans rebelled against their Creator God. (This account is in the Torah if you want to read about it. And no, it’s not a metaphor.) God made everything good, but because man sinned, everything was shot to pieces. Death, disease, destruction (and lower back pain) entered the world because man disobeyed. He didn’t want to choose God. He instead chose to elevate himself and sinned and everything in creation was negatively affected. Once you get that from the Torah, realize that there’s more scientific evidence out there supporting what you studied in rabbinical school than there is on the defunct ideas of evolutionists, which amounts to nothing more than science fiction.

Self-defense training is a must

“Many believe that the problems in society start with unloved children with little self-esteem. Duncan seems to have felt loved so we can rule that out. But Duncan, like most mass-murderers before him, was not suffering from too little self-esteem but too much. Maslow, you bastard idiot, the problems of humanity stem more from selfishness than from lack of self regard.”
- taken from The Jawa Report http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/100103.php

Shasta Groene
The remains of Dylan Groene, 9, was finally found in a Montana campsite. How in the world did this guy JD3 (won't even dignify him by mentioning his name) even get away with this? He bound then killed Dylan's mother, her boyfriend, and his 13 year old brother. He later killed Dylan, and leaving his little sister, Shasta, for last and sexually brutalized her for three weeks. She told investigators he did the same to her brother. May that animal be tied to a millstone and sent to hell. If it wasn't for the customers and the intuitive waitress at the Denny's, most likely he would've done more of his evil on her as well. Knowing this type of monster, he would've moved on to other victims. Got me enraged when I first read about this a month ago. (Don't even get me started on that human excrement who killed his daughter and her friend. I'm glad he was caught. Also glad he didn't have the intelligence to cover his tracks. Time for him to die, obviously.)

I don't know the details of what went down, but if the killer had enough time to tie up the entire family, there was definitely a chance for any one of them to fight him off. My word! Was the boyfriend of the mother a little wimp or something?! Was he that intimidated by the attacker that he couldn't mentally handle it? JD3 had a shotgun and a hammer. Was the boyfriend in that much of a stupor that he couldn’t do something, anything? And from what I read, the mother had time to wake Shasta and bring her to the living room. Why did they not fight back?

The society we live in unfortunately places a low priority on efficient self-protection. Selfishness can kill people. Asocial behavior is nothing more than the purest form of selfishness and expresses itself in criminal actions. And people are potential victims if they are too prideful to think that they’ll know what to do in an attack without proper training. Either that or they’re just gullible about the evil in the world. The law isn't good enough to fully protect children. You can have all the laws to protect a child and catalog every single person who talks about doing anything to a child, but it won't help in the long run. It's up to the family and the child to learn safety and survival skills. And if that includes learning how to fight efficiently then great! I'm now more inclined to teach a seminar or two on children's self-defense. The classes I teach are for 13 years old and older. Not that I don't like teaching young children, but my experience in the past was that most parents send their kids to karate for baby-sitting and discipline. From what I recall, that's the parents' job, not the instructor's. The instructor only reinforces what the parents teach. But that’s another issue.

A seminar for a couple of hours I can deal with. Kids really don’t need prolonged self-defense training, anyway. It would be idiotic to think a kid can go toe to toe with someone more than twice their size and weight. No, there’s a different approach and it’s a whole lot better than forcing them into karate training for a few years in order to learn “self-defense” and then giving black belts to ten year olds after three years of training. It can help but usually what they learn at the local McDojo isn’t enough. A combination of training in self-defense, street smarts, and survival skills are absolutely necessary for a child. Confidence and caution should be taught concurrently. Both parent and child need the self-protection training. And it doesn’t take years to accomplish this, just an afternoon of learning and a monthly or even annual retraining. Parent and child can practice at home as well.

There are a lot of programs out there and they aren’t expensive. A parent who cares will take a little time to research and find something with a decent price and exceptional teaching. It's sad to hear about anything evil done on children. We can't totally eradicate it, but we can at least help prevent any more of that evil from happening.