Consumer Protection For Kids

What if you were to discover this announcement:

WASHINGTON, D.C.- In cooperation with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), Advantage Publishers Group, of San Diego, Calif., is voluntarily recalling to replace components in about 160,000 "Let's Start™ Numbers." The red painted numbers included in the kit contain lead; and the gold paint on the black pen included in the kit has lead.

Would you, in spite of this warning, buy the kit anyhow, and take the risk of your child suffering brain damage caused by lead in the product? Probably not unless you are suffering from brain damage yourself.

What about this?

NUM 31:14, 17, 18: "And Moses was wroth...And Moses said unto them, "Have ye saved all the women alive? ... Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman, ... But all the women children ... keep alive for yourselves.

Is this fit for a child? Murdering all the little boys and keeping the young virgins as sex slaves?

No child is born a Muslim or Catholic or Protestant. Children are born as atheists. They must be taught religion. What Christian among you would allow a Muslim to contaminate your child's mind with Islamic beliefs. What Muslim among you would allow a Christian to contaminate a child's mind by teaching that the only way to escape an eternity of punishment is by accepting Jesus as your "savior?" Which of either would allow a child's mind to be contaminated by the Catholic teaching that priests can forgive sin or that one can actually eat the body of Jesus?

Imagine for a moment that the earth was suddenly hit by an electromagnetic pulse, and the result was that we all lost our collective memories concerning religion. Everything else remained unchanged. What do you think would happen? What do you really, really think would happen? What do you suppose your different gods would do. What would the Mormon god do? What would the Catholic god do? The Muslim...the Protestant?

Can you not see how silly all this is? Do you really want to contaminate the minds of your children by making claims that cannot be justified by evidence?

Only in religion do people profess certainty with zero evidence. We should not respect beliefs with no evidence. And we don't. When is the last time you lay awake at night worrying over whether or not you should convert to Islam? You haven't? Why? Think about that for a moment. Why do you not lay awake at night worrying about converting to Islam? The answer should have already occurred to you. The reason is because there is no evidence to support Islam. There is no proof that Mahomet talked to the angel Gabriel in a cave and that Gabriel provided the narrative for the Koran. No evidence. Belief without evidence is what brought us 9-11. THIS is what should be keeping you awake at night. Belief without evidence.

Nobody has explained this any clearer than Thomas Paine. " Every national church or religion has established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals. The Jews have their Moses; the Christians their Jesus Christ, their apostles and saints; and the Turks their Mahomet, as if the way to God was not open to every man alike.

Each of those churches show certain books, which they call revelation, or the word of God. The Jews say, that their word of God was given by God to Moses, face to face; the Christians say, that their word of God came by divine inspiration: and the Turks say, that their word of God (the Koran) was brought by an angel from Heaven. Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all.

As it is necessary to affix right ideas to words, I will, before I proceed further into the subject, offer some other observations on the word revelation. Revelation, when applied to religion, means something communicated immediately from God to man.
No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a communication, if he pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and consequently they are not obliged to believe it.

It is a contradiction in terms and ideas, to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second-hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication — after this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner; for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.

Either you believe certain propositions in your various religious texts (Torah, Bible, Koran, Book of Mormon etc) are true or you don't. If you don't believe they are true or even suspect they are untrue, then why do you insist on contaminating your children's minds by pretending they are true; by pretending that beliefs are the same as facts.

In my view, contaminating a child's mind is just as egregious, if not more so, than contaminating their body.

Your children deserve better, even if it causes you some pain. As Seargent Friday used to say on the TV series, Dragnet, "Only the facts ma'am."