[aron]

(I meant to write a 3rd part to my comments earlier, but got occupied).

Every child comes into the world helpless, and told (and shown) what to eat, what to wear, what to think and to speak. And there’s always a bias, often implicit, sometimes explicit. “This is the way to do things.” But in fact it is really only one possible way out of many.

In my case, I got the Baptist “hellfire” sermon at around age 7 when my family was invited to church and given the altar call. I went forward. It’s hard to imagine a young person in that circumstance doing anything else. My entire family went forward. But my point here is that eventually one should learn to take responsibility for one’s life, one’s person, and actions. What I do, what I think, what I wear, what I speak are my responsibilities.

So if someone is born into the Islamic faith, or their parents are atheists or agnostic, or they live in a Buddhist or Confucian culture, that’s completely understandable. We all are born into something. But if we are condemned merely for thinking, for attempting to understand and consider, for asking questions to find out what really happened, then we are kept in a state of perpetual infancy. Everything is handed to us, and we passively accept everything like a 4-year old.

This is what I meant by 'learned helplessness'. When we are confronted with a problem, we have no skills to solve it, and resolve the difficulty. We are forced to ignore, to pretend. In the case of WL and the LSM, all other Christian groups were hopelessly defective, corrupt, deformed, and so forth. Then, when WL and family inevitably get exposed, what to do? There is no way to resolve the difficulty.