How you should be teaching values to your kid.

Kids should have values, undisputed truth. But how should you teach them?

Easiest way is to teach it according to your own religion. After all that is what you have been doing all your life. Easy and effective, isn’t it?

But the problem is that it doesn’t work always. Plus it is very easy to lose the faith in a god who isn’t really inclined to prove his existence to your kid or anybody else for that matter.

In fact, the probability of existence of such a god is almost negligible so that we can live by simply assuming that she doesn’t exist at all.

Now time for the religions!. They worked because they are unwritten constitutions invented to discipline people. Don’t believe me, just look at the history. Sometimes an enlightened individual wanted to help people, yes. But in most cases there was a pursuit of power associated with it. Every religion is inseparably intertwined with the state.

That tells us a lot about what they are. Constitutions, not just plain constitutions, but bloody constitutions. If you look at their edges, you will find plenty of blood. Even the ones that appear the most benign, like Buddhism, aren’t as innocent. You can ask the Rohinkyans.

Most things that religions claim as “values” can be shown to be in fact different shades of bigotry.

Religions appropriate human values, limit them so that it applies only to their cordoned brethren and proclaims them as great values to be venerated and propagated.

A part of Homo Sapiens might be inherently bad, a portion good. We don’t really know what dominates, nature or nurture. Actualising the highest potential possible for a human being is definitely something more of nurture than nature.

For example, Kinanthropometry shows us that Usain Bolt has better muscular fibres and his body design puts him in a natural advantage when it comes to becoming the fastest human being in the planet. But if he was born in a coal mine or a cotton plantation in the united states in the 18th century, well he could have spent his all life running between two fields fetching water.

And love, peacefulness and honesty. This isn’t something that religions invented! Religions honed the tribal aggression and always taught us to fight. Crusades, Jihadhs, territorial clashes and what not.

What started much before Alexander culminated in the 9/11, but the story doesn’t end there. It is still going on. There is a direct historical link from Alexander to Aleppo in Syria of our times. It is quite straight forward, but it requires immense patience to read history and learn from it with an unbiased world view.

May the peace be upon us. Love has all the answers we need!

Written on June 23, 2017