WHAT IF WE DIDN'T POISON CHILDREN'S MINDS WITH FANTASY?

by Terry 213 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  Terry

  My Auntfanny says:

  And most of all I worry that if I set up Santa as a benevolent, fatherly, all-knowing character (he knows if you're naughty or nice, that is a god-like fantasy), she'll be vulnerable to anybody who dresses up in a Santa suit till she's old enough to discriminate for herself what lies behind the beard.

  We were at a Christmas market recently where this Santa guy was going around talking to the kids, and giving out presents. Then he started talking to my daughter, and what he was saying was appalling: that he was Santa and Santa knows more than all the daddies in the world and rubbish like that. She had been enchanted by him, but when he started in on that she got confused and disturbed. Of course we rushed her away immediately, with a few choice words for Santa, but it gave me a first hand look at how much power you could give the ikon of Santa by creating him as a real figure in your child's inner life. It scared the hell out of me.

  Exactly the sort of thing that follows from a "little white lie". I think of reality as a calm pond like glass which reflects all the world about it as a mirror. But, if you disturb the surface with the tiniest touch everything is distorted. So too with a distortion of truth for even the best of reasons. A childs view becomes, for awhile, distorted as a result. It touches every side of the pond so to speak.
• 

  SixofNine

  I don't think I've ever seen a group of people work so hard, with so much committment, to miss another person's point.
  
  
  As well, if you really believe that fantasy and imagination are important and integral parts of humanity, especially young, developing humanity, why would you be so seemingly religiously devoted to plopping fully constructed, OTHER-people's fantasy and imagination onto your child's mind? Are you really worried that your child needs to be taught how to imagine, how to fantasize?
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  czarofmischief

  Fantasy, in the strictest sense, keeps us all alive. We get paid with money. It is fantasy brought into the real world. Money is just paper. Even with the gold standard, it is still just shiny metal not good for very much in real terms.

  If you teach kids not to imagine, maybe they wouldn't believe in money. Which would be a shame, since that particular game has very concrete and beneficial results.

  So as far as distorting the pristine "real world" pond - I'm not fronting it. Real is real. You can't touch the pond, you can't disturb it. But you can look at it differently. You can kinda squint. You can look at the surface or look underneath for fish. You can hallucinate shark fins.

  "What if we see sailfish?" Eugene Levy, A Mighty Wind

  But you can't alter the reality just by how you look at it.

  CZAR
• 

  Terry

  Fantasy, in the strictest sense, keeps us all alive. We get paid with money. It is fantasy brought into the real world. Money is just paper. Even with the gold standard, it is still just shiny metal not good for very much in real terms.

  I'm going to cry "foul" here!

  Money and economic practicality is agreement between parties.

  It is not fantasy to agree that a chicken is worth all the eggs it produces which can be traded for milk and cheese from the man who owns the cow.

  Man has intelligently assigned a valuation to his needs and agreed to assign this value to an instrument: money.

  Man without money is stuck with a specific good to trade which may OR MAY NOT be valuable to the very person who produces the milk. With money, the value is constant but the particularity is irrelevent.

  This is not fantasy; this is agreement. The power of the money is in the actual goods and services it is traded for. The money comes from actual goods offered or services provided which are very real.

  Money allows the CONVERSION of all goods and services into a MEDIUM for exchange without regard to the particulars. Money is a concept and the goods and services are the definitions.

  When it comes to children's minds we blur the distinction between the goods (actual existing things) and the MEDIUM (television fantasy, for example). This comes at a time when the human being MOST NEEDS to put in place foundational distinctions about REALITY.

  The most specific statement I can make about this entire subject is this:

  Knowing what is real is the most important thing a human can know. If we do anything to inhibt or impair this knowledge we damage the human being for life.

  Terry