Is it hypocritical for Christians to be terrified of death if heaven is

[kx000]

When I die I will awake from my eternal rest. Again, why do you fear death? Mourn the dying, let the dead fly, and rejoice for the children.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

You must be from the old dictator school . . .

I may be old but I've never been a dictator.

. . . and spend a lot of money in security forces,.

I don't quite understand that phrase. When I was of draft age during my country's reprehensible participation in the Vietnamese civil war I went to great lengths to avoid serving in the military, if that's what you meant. Alternately, my home today is adequately guarded by two Lhasa Apsos, if that's what you meant. Or... as a former data security officer who attended many of the same classes and conferences as the guys with guns and badges, I think the United States practices irrational risk management, by spending three trillion dollars in an attempt (which has yet to be proven effective) to protect us against terrorists, who kill the same number of Americans per decade as peanut allergies... if that's what you meant.

How are you going to educate people who don't want to be educated?

Humanity has developed ways of doing that for (to?) children, so perhaps it can also be done for (to?) adults. In any case, getting to people during childhood is a very effective way to influence their attitudes in adulthood. At the very least, since you postulate me with dictatorial powers, I would revise school curricula so that rationality and science were stressed more strongly and also presented in a more positive light. And as I already mentioned, I would immediately stop treating the greatest force of irrationality on this planet--religion--as one of humanity's most respectable institutions. If a government presents a religion, or religion in general, in a positive light by freeing it from taxation, institutionalizing its holidays and other arcana, and immunizing it against many of the most powerful criticisms, that elevates it to a status it does not deserve and gives it a huge advantage in recruiting the citizens to its warped view of the universe.

As I stressed earlier, I do not advocate discriminating against it, merely putting it on the same level as any other unproven hypothesis such as Jungian psychology, or any other controversial subject of advocacy such as animal rights.

People, especially adults, have tremendous control over what they learn. But it is not complete control. Making something easier to learn, or more appealing, will usually increase the number of people who learn it.

 

[arauca]

I may be old but I've never been a dictator.I don't quite understand that phrase. When I was of draft age during my country's reprehensible participation in the Vietnamese civil war I went to great lengths to avoid serving in the military, if that's what you meant. Alternately, my home today is adequately guarded by two Lhasa Apsos, if that's what you meant. Or... as a former data security officer who attended many of the same classes and conferences as the guys with guns and badges, I think the United States practices irrational risk management, by spending three trillion dollars in an attempt (which has yet to be proven effective) to protect us against terrorists, who kill the same number of Americans per decade as peanut allergies... if that's what you meant.Humanity has developed ways of doing that for (to?) children, so perhaps it can also be done for (to?) adults. In any case, getting to people during childhood is a very effective way to influence their attitudes in adulthood. At the very least, since you postulate me with dictatorial powers, I would revise school curricula so that rationality and science were stressed more strongly and also presented in a more positive light. And as I already mentioned, I would immediately stop treating the greatest force of irrationality on this planet--religion--as one of humanity's most respectable institutions. If a government presents a religion, or religion in general, in a positive light by freeing it from taxation, institutionalizing its holidays and other arcana, and immunizing it against many of the most powerful criticisms, that elevates it to a status it does not deserve and gives it a huge advantage in recruiting the citizens to its warped view of the universe.

As I stressed earlier, I do not advocate discriminating against it, merely putting it on the same level as any other unproven hypothesis such as Jungian psychology, or any other controversial subject of advocacy such as animal rights.

People, especially adults, have tremendous control over what they learn. But it is not complete control. Making something easier to learn, or more appealing, will usually increase the number of people who learn it.

If you are a dictator you want to enforce you policy you will nee a lot if enforcers .

As you know the public school are attempting to educate in the ghettos , their success is not great , They are bringing teachers from other country and paying them good money , their success is small. There is a segment in this society that will not bend , or they don't give a damm for education.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

If you are a dictator and you want to enforce your policy you will need a lot if enforcers.

You're the one who postulated my new career as a dictator. If you're going to create an imaginary scenario you need all the imaginary supporting details too. Successful dictators do indeed have a huge support staff. This isn't the way I do things but it's your scenario so I'm just playing along with it.

As you know the public schools are attempting to educate in the ghettos ,

"Attempting?" The last segregated public schools in the United States were integrated four decades ago. Ever since then, the same government bureaucracy that runs the schools in the Euro-American neighborhoods also runs the schools in the Afro-American neighborhoods or "ghettos."

their success is not great

A cynical observer would point out that their success rate is not exactly stellar in the predominantly Euro-American schools either. Our universities now have to offer "remedial English" courses to incoming freshmen, because the average American high school graduate now reads at what my generation calls the sixth-grade level. That means they can understand the sports page in the newspaper.

They are bringing teachers from other countries and paying them good money

Teachers in American public schools do not make "good money." $40-50K is typical. That's not exactly "bad," but it's certainly not what would be called "good money" in any other profession that requires an excellent education, excellent communication skills, excellent social skills, the patience of Job, significant risk of physical injury, and far more hours of work per year than most of us have to put in.

There is a segment in this society that will not bend , or they don't give a damm about education.

The Washington Post recently ran a series of articles on this problem. Their conclusion was that this is yet one more second-order effect of the dismally failed "War On Drugs." Even though the rate of drug usage and drug commerce in the Afro-American community is roughly identical to that in the Euro-American community, a "black" American is something like 30 times more likely to be imprisoned on a drug charge than a "white" American. Racial prejudice is a major factor in this phenomenon, but other factors also play a part, such as the crowded housing that encourages Afro-Americans to spend more time in public, where they're more likely to be seen by the cops no matter what they happen to be doing at the moment.

As a result of this skewed drug policy, a huge portion of the adult men in the Afro-American population are either in prison, where they can't play a role in their children's lives, or they're out but have a prison record, which makes them unattractive husbands or live-in boyfriends as well as unable to get good jobs, with the same result that many Afro-American children grow up with no positive male role models. (A woman receiving government welfare assistance is specifically prohibited from allowing a convicted felon to live in her home.)

Further on, the research into this problem revealed the astounding fact that Afro-American mothers who are raising their children by themselves put an extremely low priority on their education. They are more worried about their physical safety, their nutrition and their access to health care. The majority of them (according to various writers) have never met their children's teachers, have never attended a PTA meeting, have never been inside their school, and have never discussed their homework or noticed whether they're even doing it.

An issue that was not raised in this report, nor in other reports on similar Afro-American issues over the past several years, is one that perplexes many of us: Why do these women speak as though the only men they would consider dating and marrying are Afro-American men?

These days, five decades after the struggle for racial equality and harmony, Afro-American men routinely date and marry Euro-American women. Euro-American men find Afro-American women as attractive as women of any other ethnic group. Yet it's not easy for us to get dates with them. On the Oprah Winfrey show one day, I heard them calling Afro-American men who marry Euro-American women "traitors"!

This is ironic. When I was a teenager in the late 1950s and segregation began to disappear, it was not too remarkable for a "white" boy or man to date a "black" girl or woman (although that terminology was not used in those days). But if a "black" boy or man was dating a "white" girl or woman, he could very easily become the target of violence. Only in Los Angeles and other cities in the Southwest, with their more liberal multi-ethnic culture (including people from Mexico, China, Japan, the Philippines, Native Americans, etc.) might one see very many Afro-American men married to Euro-American women back in those days.

To sum up, the War on Drugs has had a disastrous effect on American culture, and many facets of this are only now beginning to be recognized. Many single women have raised their children to be perfectly wonderful adults. But to do this in a community in which there simply are not very many positive male role models is much more difficult. For the government to create these communities by enforcing drug laws that are blatantly unconstitutional, in addition to being the continuation of racist polices that we thought had been abolished half a century ago, is a travesty.