First off, this one's been brewing with me for a while, Brian Mulroney and his book. I don't care if the guy writes a book. It's totally his perogative. I will never support him by buying it but he can write one. The thing that gets me angry, is how in the TV interviews he has done to promote the book, he is bashing Pierre Trudeau. All of a sudden his resentment over Meech Lake comes out as well as his dislike of the man.
He's entitled to dislike anyone he chooses, but for him to go in front of the country on National television and talk about Trudeau being a backstabbing bastard is just tacky. The man is dead and Mulroney would never dared have taken him on when he was living. Mulroney, simply put, is a coward.
The next thing on my mind is that this morning I read an article about the American Catholic League ordering people to boycott the movie The Golden Compass because of the author's atheist beliefs.
Censorship in any form is wrong. You'd think that these guys would have learned something when they tried to do the same thing with The Davinci Code. Religious fundamentalism in any form is dangerous. It is one thing to have faith; it is a completely different matter to try and silence people or ideas that oppose your own.
People have the right to come to their own understanding of religion. When I was in University I had to take a course on teaching in Catholic schools. For two classes we had a local priest come in and speak to us on issues surrounding the bible and faith. He told us that God wants you to struggle with your faith. He wants us to take that journey through doubt and discover for ourselves why we believe.
If in the end that journey leads you to be an atheist then that is your right as a human being. No one has the right to tell you what to think. They can share their faith with you but they cannot force you to believe it. You'd think after centuries of the battle of "my God is better than your God" people would have realized that it doesn't work. We still have a LONG way to go as a human race.
We say we respect free speech until it comes down to presenting a view that conflicts with our own. All that the American Catholic League will do is turn people off of a religion many already believe is antequated. They won't win much support in this regard.
I suppose it all comes down to the belief that many parents have that they can control what their children think and what they believe. I think that the hardest thing for any parent is to let their child be who they were meant to be without interference.
I like to bug my friend Lisa about this all the time. She insists that if she has daughters they will all be tomboys. I told her that she may not have a daughter that is a tomboy that in fact she might get the opposite - a girlie girl. In which case she'd be doing a disservice to her child by forcing her to be something she is not.
Sometimes I think that children come into the world as a window for us to see a different perspective. It must be really hard for a parent to watch their child choose a path in life they know is going to be difficult, like choosing a career that is not easy to make a living at. (e.g. writer, actor, musician) But the problem is that if that is what makes you happy, you will never be happy doing anything but what it is your heart wants, regardless of what your parents may think you should do.
Parents certainly influence their children and give them a moral base to return to but in the end children make their own choices and parents have to respect that. They have to understand that their child's journey isn't their journey. That they have a different path to follow and as much as they would like to spare them pain they cannot.
“We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.” ~Marcel Proust
The best thing any parent can do is let their child go and trust that you raised them right. Trust that you gave them good instincts and values. To show your child that you trust them above all else is the best gift you can give them.
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