obedient children

obedient children
Saturday December 13, 2008

I am saddened by your presentation of the most beautiful and important of all human relationships. Parents discipline children out of loving concern, not to do so is to propagate the society we witness today filled with lawlessness, immorality, and lack of respect for authority. Yes, I am a Christian. I am not sure I have ever heard anyone suggest, as I read in one of your articles, that you have seen no evidence for Jesus Christ. Certainly, you are entitled to question who He was and what He did. To question the reality of His life and death would be parallel to doubting Abraham Lincoln and his assassination. If you genuinely question the veracity of the Biblical record of Jesus Christ, I would urge you to due diligence in your research. Mary and Joseph, A Message for Christmas (2000 – for parents to emulate”) seems to be a knee jerk reaction to something. Since you do not accept the biblical record, why would you appeal to this spurious story even for illustrative purposes? I take no pleasure in the fact that Carl Sagan knows full well today that the cosmos is not all there is or ever will be . Neither do I find satisfaction in saying, your premise on the discipline of children is wrong. There are destructive radical fringe cases of distorted harsh discipline! Conversely, passive tolerance of disobedience and disrespect is at least equally harmful to a child. P.R.

AM: Could you please answer us the following question: Do you really think that Jesus, the child of God, was beaten by his parents to become obedient? I don’t think so BECAUSE he was far away of becoming obedient as adult. He had the rare courage to question stupid authority. Beaten chiildren can hardly dare to do that, nor even imagine to do that. They first learn to obey out of fear, to beat later their own children or others, weaker than them, and to glorify this cruel and most destructive behavior by calling it discipline like their parents did. They are well adapted to society’s opinion and proud of their upbringing. And parents who pretend to beat their small children “out of loving concern” teach them HYPOCRISY, VIOLENCE, and IGNORENCE. Am I wrong if I think that these lessons are not at all coherent with the person of Jesus whom the Bible shows as a HONEST, PEACEFUL, and WISE man? How can you do both: respect Jesus and propagate spanking?