A very stupid thing for a parent, of any religion, to do is let their children, or the deviants who entice them, decide what is right and wrong. [Post #11]

 

Quite agree. Part of my reason for arguing that parents shouldn’t have any right to indoctrinate their children in a particular religion – or to allow various “faith-based” schools to do likewise.

 

It's easy to have children, it's hard to be a father.

 

Yes, I quite agree – at least to do a good job at it – or at being a mother. I seem to recollect that Obama made some comments along the line of criticizing the black community for the disproportionate number of single parent homes headed by women therein.

 

Just out of curiosity, you mentioned in #2 about “two rocks that ought to be ground to dust”: which would those be? Literally speaking I see the Black Stone of Islam being one of them, but I can’t see an analogous one for Christianity. Although, metaphorically speaking, I think the Bible and the Quran can easily qualify, at least as far as their literal interpretations go, and may have been what you had in mind. On which I think T.H. Huxley had, as usual, something of some degree of relevance and profundity:

 

The truth is that the pretension to infallibility, by whomsoever made, has done endless mischief; with impartial malignity it has proved a curse, alike to those who have made it and those who have accepted it; and its most baneful shape is book infallibility. For sacerdotal corporations and schools of philosophy are able, under due compulsion of opinion, to retreat from positions that have become untenable; while the dead hand of a book sets and stiffens, amidst texts and formulae, until it becomes a mere petrifaction, fit only for that function of stumbling block, which it so admirably performs. Wherever bibliolatry has prevailed, bigotry and cruelty have accompanied it. It lies at the root of the deep-seated, sometimes disguised, but never absent, antagonism of all the varieties of ecclesiasticism to the freedom of thought and to the spirit of scientific investigation. For those who look upon ignorance as one of the chief sources of evil; and hold veracity, not merely in act, but in thought, to be the one condition of true progress, whether moral or intellectual, it is clear that the biblical idol must go the way of all other idols. Of infallibility, in all shapes, lay or clerical, it is needful to iterate with more than Catonic pertinacity, Delenda est. —T. H, Huxley, Science and Hebrew Tradition