Quote:
Originally posted by Whit
However, I find myself working hard to not set my kids up for the pain of it. Trying to raise them without a lot of illusions to have fall apart, if you will.
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There is a delicate balance, I think, in protecting children from disallusionment. On the one hand, we want the kids to know the truth and not have to experience the turmoil which can occur when the disillusionment is broken; but on the other hand, one who experiences little disillusionment in their life will likely become cripplingly naive.
As far as disallusionment in my own life, I used to think that thrre was this giant toad lurking under the ocean's dark surface... oh wait, that wasn't me, that was somebody else.
I had a pretty big, life-changing disallusionment many years ago, when I realized that the Mormon belief system is complete bullshit. I had been raised in the church, and had always harbored doubts, but I always gave the church the beneft of the doubt. After a while I found that things about the church came unstitched pretty quickly when you started pulling on loose threads, and my doubts quickly became certainties that the church was no more than a huge machine for the manipulation and control of it's members. And now the church is enormously wealthy, owning most of Salt Lake City, hundreds of buildings in Utah, temples around the world... but despite this huge wealth, they still demand that all memebers pay to the church 10% of every penny they make, whether that person lives in wealth or poverty.
Their flagship song is "We Thank thee O God for a Profit" for Christ's sake.
Now my poor LDS mother has to live with the thought that one of her sons "fell away," and is living it up in the Agnostic/Athiest lifestyle. What a pity. Hi mom!