Fear's Natural Enemy
  by Steven Mahone

What if your fourth grader came home from school one day and told you, "Mom, Mrs. Johnson said that I have to love math and learn my multiplication tables, otherwise I'm going be injected with a lethal substance!" My guess would be that Mrs. Johnson's (and her principal's) phone that evening would not go undisturbed.

Now, what if your fourth grader came home from Sunday school and told you, "Mom, Ms. Julie said that God loves me but if I don't do what he wants I'm going to burn in hell with Satan forever!" Ms. Julie might be advised to clean up her presentation skills a little, but no doubt she and her pastor would get an uninterrupted night's sleep. The fourth grader, however, has quite a bit to contemplate about what comes next for him.

Fear can be a powerful tool to "motivate" someone, but it's not generally a tactic that is condoned or tolerated for very long. It's also not an approach that can usually be relied on for long-term results - especially with kids. Skepticism is fear's natural enemy. How many children have had to comfort themselves with nothing but the company of doubt after the lights were dimmed at bedtime and they were left alone to reconcile the thought of God killing children just like them in order to punish Pharaoh for his hardened heart? (Exodus 7-13) Maybe, just maybe, it never happened or God didn't have a thing to do with it.

Whatever knowledge we can truly depend on must be able to withstand the test of doubt. If it can't, then it's not true knowledge. We can teach our children that evolution is false, but nature has no obligation to honor our ignorance. We can tell them that God flooded the planet to expel wickedness, but when they ask about the evidence for such a catastrophe and notice that the "wickedness" is still with us, how will we regain their trust? As Thomas Paine, a founding father of this nation said, "Any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child, cannot be a true system."

What any one of us believes has no effect on the truth. However, what we believe does affect us, and our children, and our society, and that is precisely why it's important that we use logic and reason as the guiding influence for what we choose to have faith in. There are many people out there who claim to know for certain what the truth is and it only seems prudent that we should be skeptical of such folks. There are others who don't care to know and for them our only responsibility is to respect their indifference. Then there are those who want to know and want to understand - they are the ones that have neither given into fear nor have they been made a slave to someone else's superstitions. They are the ones who will lead the way and it matters very little if you choose to remain left behind.

It has been said that "eternity is how long it will take to know everything". Well, I don't think that any of us is under the illusion that we'll get that much time to figure things out. Still, doesn't it seem reasonable that nothing more can be expected of us than to make our best effort possible? If we intimidate our children into believing that their best effort isn't worthy, then aren't we just perpetuating the same cycle of fear and guilt that has always been our biggest obstacle? Our persistent search for the uncompromised truth will be its own reward and part of that effort will result in a restful sleep -- especially for all the fourth graders out there who must learn to survive on the moral character and insight which we leave for them to build on.

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