Hilary (name changed) read aloud to her sons, aged 11 and 10, from Jenny Wood’s chronicle, Herm: Our Island Home. Afterward, she summarised the extract she’d read, adding her own interpretative agenda.
This was over thirty years ago and the boys are men now. I haven’t seen or heard from them in decades. But this episode stays with me, as does the tale of Keva’s (name changed) early babyhood - he became seriously ill as a result of lactose intolerance, losing weight rapidly as he underwent test after test to determine the cause of the trouble. Once his problem had been identified by medics tirelessly and rigorously applying routine laboratory procedures, his diet was adjusted accordingly and he made a rapid recovery, growing up into a ‘drop-dead gorgeous’ young man, in the eyes of his parents. Hilary was quick to contact the local press, appearing on the front page, declaring that miraculous divine intervention had saved her baby son’s life. Almighty God had delivered him, she said. She omitted to credit God with giving little Keva lactose intolerance in the first place, and the laboratory staff who’d laboured around the clock were not mentioned at all.
Back to the island of Herm in the late 1980s. By the yellow light of the hissing Tilley lamp, Hilary held court in the living room area of her frame tent, the boys enraptured as her husband and I looked on from the cheap seats. “So, boys, Major Wood and his wife had walked over to Rosière House for tea, and a storm rolled in. They decided to stay put until it blew over. Major Wood went to the telephone to call home and advise the babysitter of their delay. But there was no ring tone. Mrs Wood tried to reassure him that it was just the wind bringing down the lines, but he was uneasy. The major insisted they return home straight away. They set out, battling the gale and horizontal rain, and were drenched by the time they got home. Still uneasy, Major Wood set about checking all rooms, including the basement, where he found the ceiling timbers smouldering, ignited by the intense heat from the living room fire above. Seizing an axe, Major Wood chopped away the burning sections of timber, saving the house from otherwise certain immolation. As Mrs Wood put it, it was only a matter of time until the whole of the floor would have been ablaze. Wasn’t it amazing, boys, that Major Wood felt he had to return home at that time and, if he had not, his children and their babysitter could have died in a house fire. How did he know? What alerted him?”
Jared (name changed), a year older and therefore entitled to assume himself considerably wiser than his brother, offered, hesitantly, “Was it The Lord?”
“Very probably,” replied his mother, nodding earnestly.
Slam, dunk. Trusted adult demonstrates to impressionable children that her favourite deity saved the lives of a number of people, who are indirectly known to the boys themselves.
My thoughts took a different turn. Who had caused the floor joists to burn, or had at least allowed the incipient fire to get started? No omnipotent deity worth his salt should shirk responsibility for what goes down on his watch. If he didn’t wilfully start the fire, he could surely have prevented it from starting. Hilary, no doubt, would reply that he did prevent a fire, through the indirect agency of Major Wood, his unconnected phone call, and his axe. I’d counter that matters need never have reached the axe stage. If an all-powerful, benevolent deity really is running the world, people ought to enjoy lives untroubled by such perils. God could have stopped the fire before it reached the woodwork. The heat was conducted through the fire bricks, and omnipotent God must have presided over its transmission, a physical phenomenon according to His own laws that never shall be broken.
If I, at that time a raw trainee teacher and a former student of Jared and Keva’s parents, had held forth that all-controlling Yahweh appears to go in for arson, followed up by a seriously hazardous and contrived rescue plot involving damage to property and considerable risk to life and limb, I’d have been quickly put in my place and reminded I had no business filling children’s heads with such stuff. Yet, they saw no problem in teaching the boys exactly that, along with the completely undemonstrated assertion that God was completely right and virtuous in acting as He did.
We are conditioned to accept that it’s OK for parents to train their children in cognitive dissonance. Moreover, it’s generally held to be unacceptable for others to point out the seeds of future mischief that such an education sows. Once you admit that belief in unsupported claims is the norm, you pave the way to suicide bombings, honour killings and a whole load of corrosive mental cruelty that convinces young people they are unworthy sinners, hell-bound unless they follow the self-interested instructions of some random authority figure. This all comes about because beliefs affect actions, and actions affect others.
Accepted norms need to change. The assumed right of parents to inculcate unfounded gibberish into their children’s consciousness should be the first thing to go. Of course it wasn’t the bloody Lord who set Major Wood on his storm-blown way home to take up his axe-wielding rescue mission. If it was, then the same Lord is accountable before us for the state of affairs that led up to the Major’s partial destruction of his living room floor. Worst of all is the ovine acceptance that it’s virtuous to believe that kind of stuff. It is far more virtuous to question everything and to withhold belief until supported by evidence.
This was over thirty years ago and the boys are men now. I haven’t seen or heard from them in decades. But this episode stays with me, as does the tale of Keva’s (name changed) early babyhood - he became seriously ill as a result of lactose intolerance, losing weight rapidly as he underwent test after test to determine the cause of the trouble. Once his problem had been identified by medics tirelessly and rigorously applying routine laboratory procedures, his diet was adjusted accordingly and he made a rapid recovery, growing up into a ‘drop-dead gorgeous’ young man, in the eyes of his parents. Hilary was quick to contact the local press, appearing on the front page, declaring that miraculous divine intervention had saved her baby son’s life. Almighty God had delivered him, she said. She omitted to credit God with giving little Keva lactose intolerance in the first place, and the laboratory staff who’d laboured around the clock were not mentioned at all.
Back to the island of Herm in the late 1980s. By the yellow light of the hissing Tilley lamp, Hilary held court in the living room area of her frame tent, the boys enraptured as her husband and I looked on from the cheap seats. “So, boys, Major Wood and his wife had walked over to Rosière House for tea, and a storm rolled in. They decided to stay put until it blew over. Major Wood went to the telephone to call home and advise the babysitter of their delay. But there was no ring tone. Mrs Wood tried to reassure him that it was just the wind bringing down the lines, but he was uneasy. The major insisted they return home straight away. They set out, battling the gale and horizontal rain, and were drenched by the time they got home. Still uneasy, Major Wood set about checking all rooms, including the basement, where he found the ceiling timbers smouldering, ignited by the intense heat from the living room fire above. Seizing an axe, Major Wood chopped away the burning sections of timber, saving the house from otherwise certain immolation. As Mrs Wood put it, it was only a matter of time until the whole of the floor would have been ablaze. Wasn’t it amazing, boys, that Major Wood felt he had to return home at that time and, if he had not, his children and their babysitter could have died in a house fire. How did he know? What alerted him?”
Jared (name changed), a year older and therefore entitled to assume himself considerably wiser than his brother, offered, hesitantly, “Was it The Lord?”
“Very probably,” replied his mother, nodding earnestly.
Slam, dunk. Trusted adult demonstrates to impressionable children that her favourite deity saved the lives of a number of people, who are indirectly known to the boys themselves.
My thoughts took a different turn. Who had caused the floor joists to burn, or had at least allowed the incipient fire to get started? No omnipotent deity worth his salt should shirk responsibility for what goes down on his watch. If he didn’t wilfully start the fire, he could surely have prevented it from starting. Hilary, no doubt, would reply that he did prevent a fire, through the indirect agency of Major Wood, his unconnected phone call, and his axe. I’d counter that matters need never have reached the axe stage. If an all-powerful, benevolent deity really is running the world, people ought to enjoy lives untroubled by such perils. God could have stopped the fire before it reached the woodwork. The heat was conducted through the fire bricks, and omnipotent God must have presided over its transmission, a physical phenomenon according to His own laws that never shall be broken.
If I, at that time a raw trainee teacher and a former student of Jared and Keva’s parents, had held forth that all-controlling Yahweh appears to go in for arson, followed up by a seriously hazardous and contrived rescue plot involving damage to property and considerable risk to life and limb, I’d have been quickly put in my place and reminded I had no business filling children’s heads with such stuff. Yet, they saw no problem in teaching the boys exactly that, along with the completely undemonstrated assertion that God was completely right and virtuous in acting as He did.
We are conditioned to accept that it’s OK for parents to train their children in cognitive dissonance. Moreover, it’s generally held to be unacceptable for others to point out the seeds of future mischief that such an education sows. Once you admit that belief in unsupported claims is the norm, you pave the way to suicide bombings, honour killings and a whole load of corrosive mental cruelty that convinces young people they are unworthy sinners, hell-bound unless they follow the self-interested instructions of some random authority figure. This all comes about because beliefs affect actions, and actions affect others.
Accepted norms need to change. The assumed right of parents to inculcate unfounded gibberish into their children’s consciousness should be the first thing to go. Of course it wasn’t the bloody Lord who set Major Wood on his storm-blown way home to take up his axe-wielding rescue mission. If it was, then the same Lord is accountable before us for the state of affairs that led up to the Major’s partial destruction of his living room floor. Worst of all is the ovine acceptance that it’s virtuous to believe that kind of stuff. It is far more virtuous to question everything and to withhold belief until supported by evidence.
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