Sad that your 'Deity'
doesn't make all people
grow up to be good people.
An all powerful and benevolent Deity
should have the power to fix brains
and prevent much pain
and suffering.
The Problem of Suffering
makes me think that the Deity
isn't there and Imperfections
in the Deities'
Purrfect Creations
just reinforces that conclusion
since a Perfect
and Just Deity
could theoretically make the World Perfect.
Some Christian Heresies do speculate
that the Material World is to be hated
and isn't made by a Perfect Deity
and maybe the heretics are correct
and the current orthodoxy is incorrect.
strawman wrote:The first revelation:
"There is a God, and it's not me."
This is related to the scientific discovery that the Universe is not geocentric, or heliocentric, or galaxycentric, which parallels every child's discovery that, after being treated like the center of the universe, come two years old, he is just one of many others. Which is the real reason they are called the Terrible Twos.
To understand the violent criminal, says Richard E. Tremblay, imagine a 2-year-old boy doing the things that make the terrible twos terrible — grabbing, kicking, pushing, punching, biting.
Now imagine him doing all this with the body and resources of an 18-year-old.
You have just pictured both a perfectly normal toddler and a typical violent criminal as Dr. Tremblay, a developmental psychologist at University College Dublin in Ireland, sees them — the toddler as a creature who reflexively uses physical aggression to get what he wants; the criminal as the rare person who has never learned to do otherwise.
In other words, dangerous criminals don’t turn violent. They just stay that way.
These findings have been replicated in multiple large studies by several researchers on several continents.
“It’s highly reliable,” said Brad J. Bushman, a psychology professor at Ohio State University and an expert on child violence, who noted that toddlers use physical aggression even more than people in violent youth gangs do. “Thank God toddlers don’t carry weapons.”
...
As they moved into late adolescence and young adulthood, their aggression grew ever more dangerous, and it tailed off late. At age 17 they were four times as physically aggressive as the moderate group and committed 14 times as many criminal infractions. It’s these chronically violent individuals, Dr. Tremblay says, who are responsible for most violent crime.
(These numbers are all for boys and young men; girls’ physical aggression declines in arcs similar to those of boys, but at sharply lower levels.) The results were surprising. At first glance, they seemed at odds with one of criminology’s oldest tenets — the age-crime curve, first graphed in 1831 by the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet.
Mining French crime records, Quetelet found that arrest rates soared in the midteens before falling in the 20s. His famous curve was later replicated in studies of criminal records going back to the 16th century. By contrast, the Tremblay-Nagin findings suggested that violent behavior peaked much earlier than the teen years.
But as Janette B. Benson and Marshall M. Haith noted in a 2010 child development textbook, the two sets of curves are not contradictory: Quetelet’s curve reflects not violence, but the rate at which we “start arresting and convicting individuals who have been physically aggressive toward others at least since kindergarten.”
In 2006, Dr. Tremblay and Dr. Nagin published a larger study tracking 10 groups of about 1,000 Canadians between ages 2 and 11 for periods of six years. The research echoed the 1999 study. A third of the children were peaceable throughout; about half used physical aggression often as toddlers, but rarely as preadolescents; and about a sixth remained physically aggressive as 11-year-olds. This last group matched groups in other studies that ran in the 5 percent to 15 percent range.
To Dr. Tremblay, the findings suggest cause for optimism: that humans more readily learn civility than they do cruelty.
We start as toddlers. We learn through conditioning, as we heed requests not to hit others but to use our words. We learn self-control. Beginning in our third year, we learn social strategies like bargaining and charm. Perhaps most vital, we use a developing brain to read situations and choose among these learned tactics and strategies.
But what of the relative few who remain physically aggressive? If it’s possible to spot this cohort as early as kindergarten, why can’t we bend their arc downward? Here, says Dr. Tremblay, “the entire field is stumped.”
Programs that provide comprehensive support, including parent training, do seem to help, though they are difficult to deliver to the deeply troubled families that need them most.
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/1 ... blogs&_r=0
They saw the material world as created through an intermediary being (the demiurge) rather than directly by God. In most of the systems, this demiurge was seen as imperfect, in others even as evil. Different gnostic schools sometimes identified the demiurge as Ahriman, El, Saklas, Samael, Satan, Yaldabaoth, or Yahweh.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosticism
many of the authors of the Bible are wrestling with just this question: why do people (especially the people of God) suffer? The biblical answers are striking at times for their simplicity and power (suffering comes as a punishment from God for sin; suffering is a test of faith; suffering is created by cosmic powers aligned against God and his people; suffering is a huge mystery and we have no right to question why it happens; suffering is redemptive and is the means by which God brings salvation; and so on). Some of these answers are at odds with one another (is it God or his cosmic enemies who are creating havoc on earth?), yet many of them continue to inform religious thinkers today.
Read more at
http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/blo ... SGR1LrY.99