In response to
(e:enknot,43055) I know that religious folks will totally disagree with me for this but I don't think children should be introduced to religion until they are a bit older as they are so suggestible and imaginative and can get carried away with it in unhealthy ways.
My Two cents: This is really going to make me seem insane but read the whole thing before responding. First of all my parents were religious, but not overbearing about it or anything - so don't read that into this. They went to church on Sunday, we prayed before meals, etc but not like its all we talked about.
I know for many Christians this is impossible to even think about. I think sects with adult baptism make more sense.
As for the moral/ethics argument, here is no reason not to teach them the same moral values outside of the religious context.
It is just that I can see how imaginative, strong willed children could get totally carried away as I did myself. Now I am not saying all children, in all circumstances - just something to think about..
As a child I was really religious. Like I thought about it all the time and it really controlled my life. Mix that with a little imagination and OCD and I had a hard time checking myself before I wrecked myself.
I invented all these imaginary friends to accompany me and God on our adventure in life. I thought those imaginery friends gave me super powers - just ask any of my close childhood friends
(e:iriesara) - which honestly, sounds insane now - but put it in a religious context and it isn't that weird. Even Jesus was one of my imaginary frinds. HE took the form of this water creature. In fact, I believed it so much that I could see him wiggling on the ross in church and then he would "drip off"into water creature and fly around. That creature mated with another one and became another friend with other powers, etc.
So I created this whole fantasy world around them and their existence based on what I thought was possible from reading the bible. Just like God, my imaginary friend all had requirements/commandments for loving me.
Some of them required simple things like me repeating chants, others required more complicate stuff like particular movements or blood dripping on rocks, etc. It sounds totally crazy but in a bible reading child world, these kind of stories seemed congruent with what I was reading. It was like my sacrifice to these minions that God and I knew about.
This sadly went on until my mid teens. Then I went on some bible camp scavenger hunt where their existence came out and the people made me get down on my knees and prey to let Jesus into my heart. That was definitely the most terrifying moment of my life because I felt like I definitely had jesus in my heart and they were trying to poison me with some fake jesus. I was confused and for sure scared. I had my imaginary friends create this mystical bubble around me to protect me from them. In fact I even had prayers I would use to command my imaginary friends to do stuff.
Basically, what I am saying is that opening up a child's mind to religion, can open it up to the possibility of insanity because accepting the idea that all this supernatural stuff exists, is a concept that is hard to put reigns on once it is fully accepted.
Luckily for me, this girl named Daniel Woodman,w ho also had imaginary friends came along and stole all my imaginary friends in some sort of imaginary friend battle and they went away, like all in one day. It was both tragedy and a relief.
As a side note and testement to my OCDness as a child, I remember this one chant I would use. The beginning chant came from some religious book about protecting yourself from witches and the end I made up.
"Black lugie and hammer head, rowan tree, and red threat - but the warlocks to their speed, everything, everywhere, disconnected and also extras."
After, a little search I found some info about its origin here
I love the ending. It completely describes my OCD as a child. It referred to the fact that I would give myself time limits to say the chant and previously I would have to include things like requesting that my family and friend don't die, we had food on the table etc. But he list became so long I created this macro that basically included, "everything I ever asked for, for everyone, everywhere and that if there were conflicted requests, their dependencies were disconnected and that I would also like an extra things I might think of in the future to be included in my current requests.
I used to also mix this up with the Lord's Prayer as I kind of ending to it that no one else knew.
Plus, I feel to a degree it stymied my creativity. I found a box poetry I wrote as a child and almost every freakin' poem has some overbearing religious context and god overwatching his children. I wish instead I could have thought about other stuff.
To see just how bad it can get check out Jesus Camp
I know
(e:enknot) that you and meg are nothing like the woman in this movie but check out Jesus Camp if you hadn't, to see how crazy kids can get with religion.
Here is the wiki article
luckily your great brother was driving by in a minivan and picked you up!
That does sound like a pretty cool system. In terms of Metro's It is ok and it seems to make a good way to print out a schedulle if you need one. But the one problem with PDF is that a lot of people don't have Adobe Acrobat for there home use. I have a viewer so it is ok, but I'm sure a lot of people don't.
I dunno if you made use of it when you visited SF but they have a great site where you can view in real time the location and approximate arrival time of your bus/train in the Muni system. All real time via GPS technology. I thought, "wow how useful would this be with a phone that has internet functionality?" My phone's ghetto though.
damn, my life was ghetto in blo. riding the bus everyday. now i got a sweet ride... i kinda liked the bus though.
You KNOW you are in the Ken-Ton area if there's a pharmacy in the background!