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Recasting our image of God
DEAR EDITOR,
While I do agree with Thathai that “We should introduce our children to God from an early age” (Kaieteur News July 5, 2008), I think that the circumstances and environment surrounding that introduction and the peaceful-violent perception of the God personality are the decisive factors in determining the direction of the child’s life.
The mere introduction of the God concept to the child without a nurturing environment and positive parental inputs, hoping that the God-concept will take control of the child, is no guarantee that the child will go in the right direction.
How many parents have bewailed a wayward child crying, “I sent him/her to church/masjid/mandir since he/she was small and now look what he/she has done?”
While the God concept is an important psychological defence against our existential fear of inevitable death, in vacua it is not sufficient to set the right moral and ethical compass of the child’s life.
Even the bandits – both the gun-toting ones and pen-pushing ones – have a need for this psychological defence: hence, the discovery of Holy Scriptures and other religious literature at blue-collar bandits’ hideouts and in the white-collar bandits’ offices.
It is not that they do not ‘know God’, but missing from these bandits’ early childhood were a nurturing environment, positive parental inputs and good role models.
The peaceful-violent perception of the God personality, as I mentioned above, is shaped by the child-rearing practices of a culture. According to Canadian neuroscientist, Dr. Michael Persinger, “When the child-rearing practices of a society are severe, the negative propensities are projected onto the concept of God.
The local deity is depicted as punishing and aversive; it is a thing that must be appeased by pain and sacrifice. In short, God must be placated and left alone, lest he punish the person with death and damnation…
“Cultures that display more severe childhood rearing practices, such as early weaning, frequent punishment for crying, and early failure to attend to the child’s needs, worship gods that show this propensity.
They are fickle beings who, at a whim, withdraw the option for eternity. The children of these cultures do not understand why the sudden changes in status occur; the people in these cultures cannot understand why God wreaks havoc one day and nurtures them the next.
“On the other hand, cultures with less severe child-rearing practices cast God in different roles. Longer periods of intimate contact between the child and mother allow stronger conditioning of expectations.
The child has a longer learning history of crying and receiving milk, whimpering and receiving attention, cuddling and receiving warmth.
Weaning is completed gradually, so that the child can learn other options. “Gods of cultures whose members practice positive child-rearing behaviours are also friendly and positive. The person experiences them in a one-to-one relationship.
God is a comfortable thing with whom the person can share a close communion. It is warm and always there, the sense of security can be found anywhere, anytime.” (Neuropsychological Bases of God Beliefs, Praeger Publishers, New York, 1987, pp. 67-68).
I can remember in the Wesleyan Sunday School my mother sent me to, I was introduced not to the jealous wrathful, tribal Yahweh of the Old Testament, but to the gentle forgiving, universal Yeshua of the New Testament, who loved all the children of the world regardless of colour, who never got mad at them, but only at adult religious hypocrites.
I fear that in some churches nowadays, the image of the gentle Yeshua is being recast to the jealous Yahweh. This is not the kind of recasting that is needed, but a recasting in a gentler mould.
We therefore need to change and improve our environment and child-rearing practices, not so much change and improve our religions, so that our children will go the way they should, that when they are old, they will not depart from it.
Finally, I must save a word for those who use religion to justify their banditry whatever form it may take.
For this, the words of Narendranath Datta aka Swami Vivekananda, 1863-1902, are most instructive: “Nothing has brought to man more blessings than religion, yet at the same time there is nothing that has brought more horror. Religion is the highest plane of human thought and life.
The intensest love that humanity has ever known has come from religion, and the most diabolical hatred. Nothing makes us as cruel as religion, and nothing makes us as tender.”
M. Xiu Quan-Balgobind-Hackett
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