MiloCast

As expected, the post which caused the most feedback from people disagreeing with me was the Santa Claus article. People seem to think that lying to children is justified if it makes them happy. I am reminded of an amusing story my wife told me. When she was a little girl, her love of animals caused her to refuse to eat meat. As a result, her parents just told her she had been served fake chicken, or fake beef, and she ate it happily.

Let’s assume that parents want what’s best for their children in most cases. Her parents were probably concerned with her health, and wanted to make sure she received all the nutrients her growing body required. But is deception ever a positive thing?

Teaching children a model of the world where it’s okay to deceive people if you think you’re doing them a favor only encourages manipulation of others in the future. Like it or not, reality isn’t always what we wish it would be. But the answer is to learn to be a strong enough person to deal with it — not to pretend that our fantasy is reality.

Choosing to believe one thing over another simply because you’d prefer it to be true, regardless of evidence, is ignorance at best and evil at worst, and in any case often contributes to the suffering and death of innocent people. Such a strong statement requires an example. Christian missionaries in Africa teach their religious beliefs as their primary goal, even if they are providing medical care or food to the suffering. As a result, they do everything in their power to prevent any education on condom use, simply because it’s against their personal beliefs, which are based on no evidence. As a result, the area of the world most ravaged by AIDS is deprived of the single most effective and cheapest method of preventing the spread of the disease. That is a criminal act.

What would be funny if it wasn’t so sad damned sad is that religious believers do promote circumcision, because it has been shown in scientific studies to reduce the risk of transmission to a man from a woman by about 50%. So here we have a painful medical procedure with zero health benefits in the majority of cases and which exists because of religion. Further, it only prevents the spread to men, and not women. Meanwhile, condoms have been proven to be nearly 100% effective in preventing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases of all types, and unwanted pregnancies. Evidently the faithful see more starving children being brought into a third-world country and more people suffering and dying of horrible diseases to be preferable to the distribution of condoms and the teaching of facts instead of mythology.