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Post by Vyckie D. Garrison on Feb 22, 2010 15:29:55 GMT -5
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Post by calluna on Feb 22, 2010 17:42:57 GMT -5
This story just hits the point harder, that apparances can be so decieving. Which for me as a Christian, the verse about man looking on the outward appearance but God looks on the heart rings so true. There are so many countless stories where, in my legalist days I would look at someone in awe over their examples in their Christian life, only to be SHOCKED that there was a double life/standard, and seeing the nasty fruit. Thanks Vyckie for sharing this blog post and blog Erica
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Post by arietty on Feb 22, 2010 19:32:35 GMT -5
I read that blog post yesterday from following links and I could not post on this forum all day because I was too upset.
What I would like to see is the tide turning against this teaching from within the movement. I recall when the Pearl books first came out, they were not universally loved and they were always controversial with some QF families I knew outright rejecting them. I got into an argument with one family about the To Train Up a Child, I found the whole book weird and very counter intuitive.
It would be awesome of some prominent QFers would stand against the Pearls publicly. Many families are really quite umm.. sheep like in their following of chosen voices and if the Pearls began to lose some of their endorsement and there was a counter voice within the movement this would have a huge effect.
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mara
New Member
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Post by mara on Feb 22, 2010 21:18:12 GMT -5
Yes, thank you for posting this.
My mother-in-law was upset when a couple of her children started hailing these books.
My brother-in-law has special whistles for each of his kids, to call them (kinda like the guy on the Sound of Music only w/o the little tin whistle).
She wondered what would possess people to whistle for their children like dogs.
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maicde
Junior Member
Posts: 69
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Post by maicde on Feb 22, 2010 21:23:14 GMT -5
Excuse me for my bluntness, but people who torture and abuse their children have deep-seated issues including self-hate. Wrapping religion around the sadism and self-hate is merely a diversion.
I keep reading about how the people who fall into this pit are confused, well-intentioned people. I find that a load of hogwash. I've posted on large family boards with such people (the woe is me, professional victim type fundie) and quite frankly, for being so subjugated and held down, they sure knew how to rip a new one for any person who dared defy them or say anything to the contrary. This is exactly how they treat their children. What I'm saying is that I am quite certain that a lot of these parents who use the rod, switch, etc. know quite well what they are doing, there's no "confusion" about it. They are criminals - period and such be treated as such.
As far as the Pearls, they are hypocrites, wolves in sheep clothing. I hope there's a special 1/4" plumber's supply line waiting for them in the special place they end up.
Sign me as a mid-aged mom of 7 who is sick and tired of B.S. A poor, defenseless, child died because of lunatics who gave themselves the permission to murder a child due to the fact that the bible tells them so. The bible tells people to do a lot of horrific things; sane people know how to draw the line. This proves to me that the adherants to this system are NOT sane. They have no business running around in free society or having children.
By the way, I'm also sick and tired of these fundie losers being able to adopt children while more qualified and "normal" people are turned away routinely. The system is broken.
The ONLY thing I want is this story and others like this to be disseminated nationally. This little girl's death cannot be for vain.
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Post by denelian on Feb 22, 2010 21:27:03 GMT -5
i remember a social worker telling my mother once that "Perfectly behaved children are almost always a sign of something. we are always hoping that we are seeing the 1% where perfect behavior is a sign of good parenting; sadly, it's 99% a sign of abuse. Kids are loud, messy, curious, ignorant, and often rebellious ... if you want a child whose clothes are always perfect and who never cries, talks back, or gets into things - buy a doll" i am quite sure that the social worker was exaggerating [and it was part of a larger conversation about Child Protection Services and the foster system; the social worker was a friend of my mom's, and advising my mom on what she needed to do to *keep* custody of my two cousins, because my aunt is a heroin addict ] but it FEELS true. it's one thing to teach your kids to say "please" and "thank you" and "sir" and "ma'am". it's quite another to turn them into Miss Manner's Perfect Autonomans. changing the topic slightly - i really *really* wish BS about "spanking" kids being ok "if you don't use your hand" would just DIE. giving a swat or two isn't really the issue [although, like everything, it depends upon circumstances]. if you are swatting with your hand, you are *probably* going to not want to hurt *yourself* - the whole point is to be shocking, not hurtful. in all the years that i was the primary caregiver of my niece, i "spanked" her TWICE - both times, a single swat, because she was doing something that would get her hurt. [running into the street; lying to me about what she was going to do - she said she was going to go to the bathroom - and instead trying to get into the stove because she wanted a cookie, that was baking] but using an -object- totally different. my mom took parent classes while she was pregnant with me, and they told her and my dad, over and over, that spanking/slapping was BAD - use something, like a spatula or wooden spoon, because this "distances the parent from anger and punishment". bullshit. it's *abuse* and it makes it *much* MUCH easier to cause REAL HARM. [personal note: i do speak from experience. my step-father was horrible abusive. the first time he beat me, mom threw a *fit*, they had a huge fight about "appropriate ways to punish" and the upshot of that was from then on, he beat me with an object. generally his belt, but sometimes a wooden spoon. and mom never said a WORD about him beating me with something, not even the night he BROKE *THREE* wooden spoons. she only complained when he used his hand. so when he broke my hand, it was *my* fault for trying to interpose my hand between his belt buckle and my butt; when he "knocked" me into the wall and broke my nose, it was *my* fault for trying to get away from him. and i literally cannot image how PLUMBER'S LINE could not be WORSE than a wooden spoon! sure, there may not be surface bruises... but i have nerve damage from that damned spoon, and had several broken bones... THE INSTRUMENT DOES NOT MATTER. what matters is HITTING YOUR CHILD - in almost ANY fashion - IS ABUSE AND CAUSES HARM. the *only* time i have *ever* found force to be necessary is when the child is incapable of understanding that X action can hurt them, and even then, only use the minimum amount to get across that X IS BAD. that's IT erm. sorry. rant over] thank you, everyone, for linking this story; thank you, Laurie, for writing about it and being willing to share it here at QF.
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Post by susan on Feb 22, 2010 22:11:36 GMT -5
This story is so heart-rending. Arietty, I agree with you: I hope some people will start to speak out against the Pearls' teachings from within the QF/P movement. Re: the parents who are trying to determine how much "swatting," "tapping," or whatever is okay: I think those parents should ask where they'd draw the line if it were their child, or even some other adult, who was "tapping" them (the parents)? I also wonder if someone "tapped" them in the way that some of the fundamentalist "experts"are encouraging parents to "tap" their children -- would they call it a "tap," or would they call it hitting? Just sayin', if someone inflicted a blow upon me that caused me to feel pain, I wouldn't see it as, "Oh, he just 'tapped' me." And here I'm not trying to heap guilt on anyone who may have followed the fundamentalist advice to spank their kids. What's important is what we all decide to do now. I'm just saying -- let's think about what we are doing. If I'm thinking of treating my child in a way that I'd see as disrespectful if it were my child treating me that way, then doesn't it stand to reason that it's also disrespectful for me to do it to my child?
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Post by verklempt on Feb 22, 2010 22:25:52 GMT -5
I think the parents (said loosely) are monsters. I think the Pearls are monsters.
I can not mentally separate the two. One taught the evil. One followed the evil to the letter.
Both damaged children or in some cases, killed them.
No. Im sorry. No differentiating for me.
Monster is as monster does.
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Post by MoonlitNight on Feb 23, 2010 17:23:21 GMT -5
I think the truth about whether or not parents abusing children for religious reasons know what they're really doing is somewhere between. Some are indubitably monsters. Probably a fairly large proportion. Another fairly large proportion will be people who are not outright monsters, but damaged by abuse themselves, and are perpetuating it. Some are probably new to abuse. But I believe that most, maybe all of them do it because they were told is the right way to live. Humans DO have a powerful urge to conform -- after WW2 there were many studies done on this topic, to try and understand what happened to Germany, so that we could keep it from happening again, anywhere. The degree to which we will obey authority and conform to peer expectations is just plain disturbing. We will ignore the evidence of our own senses, hurt, or kill in order to follow orders or avoid deviating from the group opinion. Dissent takes a lot of courage. So let's think about this idea: religious abusers believe that they and their children are subject to the ultimate authority, omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient. God is worse than the Gestapo: he is ALWAYS watching, so unless He happens to feel like being merciful, you will be eternally punished for every mistake, no matter how tiny. And of course God is always right; that's part of being God. Wouldn't you do anything, anything at all to keep your beloved child from that eternal punishment for the mistakes he or she is bound to make for being human? Even if it means hurting him or her? After all, it hurts less than the Pit, doesn't it? Of course these people are wrong -- the kind of logic I just wrote above is exactly why I cannot, will not ever believe in the Christian God. Whether or not He exists, and what He is actually like if he does, humans are so very, very good at turning him into the ultimate abuser who can only inspire more abuse, and from whom there is NO escape, ever, not even death. When your brain is in a box like that, you really can't think straight. I think Vyckie's posts make it pretty clear that how she thought then and how she thinks now are so different that she has trouble believing it. Religion isn't the only thing that can do it to you, either. Poverty, isolation, and desperation are really good at it: that's how a couple kids (~20 years old) that I know ended up as runaways from the US armed forces. The recruiters convinced them that when you join the Army, you won't be asked to go out and kill people. This is of course a patently ridiculous statement, but the alternatives in their lives sucked badly enough that they fell for it. People fall for many different kinds of cons. If you really want to understand how people could do that sort of thing, even to their kids, you really need to read Bob Altemeyer's The Authoritarians: home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/. There's also a lot of good stuff on authoritarianism over at Orcinus ( dneiwert.blogspot.com/), though it too focuses more on politics than religion alone. Check out the series "Cracks in the Wall" and "Tunnels and Bridges" from the left sidebar for the especially relevant stuff.
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aimai
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Post by aimai on Feb 23, 2010 20:26:31 GMT -5
Hi everyone, I saw this terrible news today and thought that my friends here at NLQ would have a lot of insight into it. I'm sorry I've been missing so long--nothing to worry about but terribly busy wrestling with life.
On this subject I have to agree with Bronwen up above--the answer to "how can people do things like this" isn't to be found in black/white "they are abusers" or "these are good people" but in some understanding that certain kinds of people--perhaps most people--can very easily lose touch with reality and follow a set of rules, blindly, to destruction.
Family life is complex, children are needy and active and undisciplined. Children adopted from a war zone will have special needs and require special handling. The Pearl's model of "the good child" and "the good family" is quite unyielding. Its a "one size fits all" model. And not only that, its a model based on a totally unrealistic appreciation of a child's capabilities and needs. A newborn infant *ought not* to be silent for several hours so that its parents can pay attention to a sermon. If we said that a child ought to keep still and silent for several hours so that its father could attend a gambling session, or so that its mother could watch TV, we'd see the absurdity of that kind of thinking. The child's developmental needs--for sound, movement, interaction, simply can't take a backseat to the parent's desires for spiritual or non spiritual enjoyment.
Children can be brought up in a family, and in a culture, to learn to value that family and culture's goals--whether its deep sea diving for pearl divers or sunday school silence for Quakers--but its a long term process, a process of education and leadership and love. It can't be short circuited by mere discipline and acts of violence. You can get compliance, submission, and silence by beating a child. But you can never get truly voluntary maturation and understanding. And, of course, if you don't have some kind of theory of "enough"--a line that you draw before you kill the child--you run the risk of overstepping the physical boundaries between mere spanking and outright torture.
So why didn't these nice people realize that their good intentions were having a bad outcome? Because winning--forcing the child to conform to their rigid scheme--had become everything. They were unable to imagine that "just a little bit more" of the same discipline they thought was a good thing would produce a phase change and spill over into irreversible damage. In that they were, in a sense, voluntarily replicating the Milgram experiment--they turned their conscience over to a higher authority and proceeded to do, by increments, something that in the abstract they would never have thought to do on their own. Unlike the students in the Milgram experiment, of course, they choose to administer the pain to their own children, not strangers. But of course this just made them more likely to follow through on the course they had chosen because they were much more wedded to getting a "good outcome" (compliance) and they were also much more wedded to devotion to their chosen authority figure (because the Pearls had substituted themselves for the parents conscience and their god).
Its terrible, and creepy, and sad--but totally expected. Its not the kind of people who don't have a notion of a higher moral authority who do terrible things. Its precisely the kind of people who put moral authority outside themselves, and abase themselves to it, who do these things. We quoted this a lot at the start of the blog, I think: Voltaire's observation:
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
Isn't that what happened here? This poor family turned their conscience and their very material senses over to an absurd, outside, authority--one who told them that their child's cries were evidence of her learning, that her pain was necessary, that her mistakes were intransigence. And instead of pulling back and saying "this is crazy! this child is suffering!" they threw common sense out the window and dreamed of what can never be--that a child can be brought to "godliness" or "holiness" through pain and grief.
aimai
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Post by Vyckie D. Garrison on Feb 23, 2010 21:52:46 GMT -5
Hi everyone, I saw this terrible news today and thought that my friends here at NLQ would have a lot of insight into it. I'm sorry I've been missing so long--nothing to worry about but terribly busy wrestling with life. snip aimai Aimai ~ Welcome back! ♪♫•*¨*•.¸¸♥ So glad to hear from you again.
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em
Full Member
Posts: 176
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Post by em on Feb 23, 2010 22:10:41 GMT -5
Excuse me for my bluntness, but people who torture and abuse their children have deep-seated issues including self-hate. Wrapping religion around the sadism and self-hate is merely a diversion. I keep reading about how the people who fall into this pit are confused, well-intentioned people. I find that a load of hogwash. I've posted on large family boards with such people (the woe is me, professional victim type fundie) and quite frankly, for being so subjugated and held down, they sure knew how to rip a new one for any person who dared defy them or say anything to the contrary. This is exactly how they treat their children. What I'm saying is that I am quite certain that a lot of these parents who use the rod, switch, etc. know quite well what they are doing, there's no "confusion" about it. They are criminals - period and such be treated as such. As far as the Pearls, they are hypocrites, wolves in sheep clothing. I hope there's a special 1/4" plumber's supply line waiting for them in the special place they end up. Sign me as a mid-aged mom of 7 who is sick and tired of B.S. A poor, defenseless, child died because of lunatics who gave themselves the permission to murder a child due to the fact that the bible tells them so. The bible tells people to do a lot of horrific things; sane people know how to draw the line. This proves to me that the adherants to this system are NOT sane. They have no business running around in free society or having children. By the way, I'm also sick and tired of these fundie losers being able to adopt children while more qualified and "normal" people are turned away routinely. The system is broken. The ONLY thing I want is this story and others like this to be disseminated nationally. This little girl's death cannot be for vain. In the 70's (I think) there was an experiment done by Milgram (again I think. Please excuse me, it's late, I'm tired, I worked today, so my brain is fried) about this type of thing. Basically, normal people agreed to do this experiment. Two people were introduced and they picked roles -- one person would ask questions to the other and every time the answer was wrong they'd shock the other person, and each time it was a higher voltage. It was set up so that an actor always was the one answer questions and getting shocked, and he was not actually getting shocked (they were in different rooms so he just screamed in fake pain). You'd think most people, being decent people who didn't want to hurt others, wouldn't go along. But they did. The Dr in charge kept telling them "the experiment must proceed" or something very like that. Pretty much everybody kept going up to what they thought was a very high voltage. Plenty of them were even exhibiting nervous laughter. Human beings are definitely capable of bad shit, like abusing -- or believing they are abusing -- another person when told they have to. The experiment was actually after WWII and I think kinda meant to show how the Nazis got so many people to join and so such horrible stuff even when they were basically good people. Anyway, as I said my brain is fried at the moment so I'm probably not making sense. But tomorrow I'd be happy to get out my notes and clarify if anybody wants.
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Post by cindy on Feb 23, 2010 23:03:54 GMT -5
Excuse me for my bluntness, but people who torture and abuse their children have deep-seated issues including self-hate. Wrapping religion around the sadism and self-hate is merely a diversion. I keep reading about how the people who fall into this pit are confused, well-intentioned people. I find that a load of hogwash. I've posted on large family boards with such people (the woe is me, professional victim type fundie) and quite frankly, for being so subjugated and held down, they sure knew how to rip a new one for any person who dared defy them or say anything to the contrary. This is exactly how they treat their children. What I'm saying is that I am quite certain that a lot of these parents who use the rod, switch, etc. know quite well what they are doing, there's no "confusion" about it. They are criminals - period and such be treated as such. As far as the Pearls, they are hypocrites, wolves in sheep clothing. I hope there's a special 1/4" plumber's supply line waiting for them in the special place they end up. Sign me as a mid-aged mom of 7 who is sick and tired of B.S. A poor, defenseless, child died because of lunatics who gave themselves the permission to murder a child due to the fact that the bible tells them so. The bible tells people to do a lot of horrific things; sane people know how to draw the line. This proves to me that the adherants to this system are NOT sane. They have no business running around in free society or having children. By the way, I'm also sick and tired of these fundie losers being able to adopt children while more qualified and "normal" people are turned away routinely. The system is broken. The ONLY thing I want is this story and others like this to be disseminated nationally. This little girl's death cannot be for vain. In the 70's (I think) there was an experiment done by Milgram (again I think. Please excuse me, it's late, I'm tired, I worked today, so my brain is fried) about this type of thing. Basically, normal people agreed to do this experiment. Two people were introduced and they picked roles -- one person would ask questions to the other and every time the answer was wrong they'd shock the other person, and each time it was a higher voltage. It was set up so that an actor always was the one answer questions and getting shocked, and he was not actually getting shocked (they were in different rooms so he just screamed in fake pain). You'd think most people, being decent people who didn't want to hurt others, wouldn't go along. But they did. The Dr in charge kept telling them "the experiment must proceed" or something very like that. Pretty much everybody kept going up to what they thought was a very high voltage. Plenty of them were even exhibiting nervous laughter. Human beings are definitely capable of bad shit, like abusing -- or believing they are abusing -- another person when told they have to. The experiment was actually after WWII and I think kinda meant to show how the Nazis got so many people to join and so such horrible stuff even when they were basically good people. Anyway, as I said my brain is fried at the moment so I'm probably not making sense. But tomorrow I'd be happy to get out my notes and clarify if anybody wants. Stanley Milgram's experiment. Harrowing. I have two or three videos about it in this blog post: undermuchgrace.blogspot.com/2008/09/more-about-milgram.htmlAnd ambrosia ;) and I recommend watching the MIT video featuring Zimbardo which is well worth the time. He discusses the Milgram study at length: undermuchgrace.blogspot.com/2009/01/bad-apples-or-bad-barrels-short-and.html
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Post by cindy on Feb 23, 2010 23:15:03 GMT -5
Milgram was curious about the Holocaust and what factors could explain the seduction of an entire group of people -- a nation. He recruited everyday people, a cross section of everyday people. They were told that it was a study of memory, and they wanted to test the affects of negative reinforcement on memory. So the subject goes into a room and sits in front of a panel full of switches, and a person in a lab coat, the investigator, stands with them. The subject thinks that there is another person on the other side of a partition that they cannot see but can hear so as to administer the test. They are told to ask questions of the volunteer behind the partition, and at first, the people answer correctly. When they make an error, the person is directed to shock the other subject. (There were no shocks delivered, but they play acted to make the subject think that they were delivering shocks.) On the panel of switches, there are red zones and danger levels, and with each error, the voltage of shock is increased. They then have the actors start screaming and such, and eventually they will go silent, presumably because they have fallen unconscious (as they stop responding to the questions). If the subjects complained to the researcher, the researcher explained that they were obligated to continue to fulfill their agreement and stated that the other subject who was being shocked was also a willing participant. And most people finished the study. Cialdin's "Weapon's of Influence" describe human tendencies that we have to be consistent and to follow our commitments, to respond to social proof and pressure, and we have a natural tendency to respond to authority. All of these factors work against the subject in Milgram, making it very hard for them to exit the situation. Something like 90% of the subjects followed the whole study. Another interesting study looking at social proof is the Asch experiment: undermuchgrace.blogspot.com/2008/09/asch-conformity-experiments.htmlWe tend to do what those around us do or encourage us to do.
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Post by cindy on Feb 23, 2010 23:23:01 GMT -5
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Post by cindy on Feb 23, 2010 23:32:33 GMT -5
In these kinds of social psychology studies, if people go along with the crowd and people don't voice dissent, the tendency is to go right along with everyone else.
BUT, if one person in the group goes against the flow, standing up to yell that the emperor has no clothes, then more people will have confidence to break with the majority.
It says quite a lot about the power of one voice. We might think that no one listens to us, but when we stand up and brave the social stigma of not following the group, it gives other people permission to stand up against the pressure.
When Hannah Arendt reported on the Nuremburg Trials, she coined the phrase "the banality of evil." People were under pressure to just go along with the crowd, and the system made evil the norm.
(What Dr. Zimbardo of the Stanford Prison Experiments wants to promote is something of the "banality of heroism" instead. What can we do as a society to make it easier for people to voice their concerns and to brave the pressure and punishment if they don't follow the crowd?)
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Post by cindy on Feb 23, 2010 23:50:01 GMT -5
On this subject I have to agree with Bronwen up above--the answer to "how can people do things like this" isn't to be found in black/white "they are abusers" or "these are good people" but in some understanding that certain kinds of people--perhaps most people--can very easily lose touch with reality and follow a set of rules, blindly, to destruction. aimai This is one of the things that these studies demonstrate. People are fragile and easily manipulated because of basic human tendencies. These things can be manipulated, and if you are unaware of the tendencies, you are easier prey. And we become more malleable when we are needy. If someone can meet our needs, we become easier to sway. If we are off balance, we are not as critical. I remember talking to Karen Campbell about this, asking why someone would do some of these things to their daughters. (Botkin stuff, etc.) She said that people are so terrified that they are going to loose their children that they will do anything and believe any promise. So much of this is fear motivated, too, a very potent factor of influence. You don't think clearly when you are operating out of fear. These social experiments are powerful. Karen and I have also talked about what it's like for the wide eyed pregnant woman wandering through the homeschooling conferences. You have a heart full of idealism, particularly if you are a new mother or new homeschooler, and there are a million people there to help you. It can be overwhelming, and people take advantage of that vulnerability. There is also much to human nature and our desire to mitigate our responsibility. If someone else does the thinking for us, we somehow feel less culpable. When we live in a world where we are bombarded by information, we have to use shortcuts to survive. We develop rules of thumb which are truisms that are generally true but not always and under all circumstances. So there is a margin of error in taking the shortcuts. Dostoevsky really nails this in the Brothers Karamazov when the Grand Inquisitor in the story tells Jesus: “We have corrected Thy work and have founded it upon miracle, mystery and authority. And men rejoiced that they were again led like sheep.” We are suckers for miracle, mystery, and authority. We will tend to sell freedom for bread. It is not as much work and we get to escape certain dilemmas when we take someone else's shortcut. We can ride in the back seat. So not only can you let Michael Pearl do all the thinking for you (its easier to follow a rule than to discern for yourself which is always an appeal of legalism), everyone else is doing it, and it solves a problem fairly simply. Too simply sometimes. Why do you think they have men in labcoats selling aspirin? "I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV." We can keep the mystery, but we don't have to be about the busy work of thinking about it. If everyone around you accepts it, it becomes harder to be a dissident.
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Post by tapati on Feb 24, 2010 0:01:38 GMT -5
The Stanford Prison Experiment is another classic: www.prisonexp.org/This is chilling--it takes quite a bit of tissue damage to do this: Waste products from dead tissue can overwhelm the kidneys--but there has to be a significant injury. Now I grew up being smacked with rulers and fly swatters and switches and hands, and I never had anything approaching this level of injury. A few red welts is pretty much all I ever had. (Not saying this was normal or right, but that even parents who use these methods don't all go to this extreme.) Nowadays we know legally it is abuse if it leaves a visible mark. This left deep bruises and still they continued to inflict more. I am sad for their bewildered and confused children who don't understand why their parents are in jail as well as for the other, injured child. It breaks my heart to think of Lydia's suffering before she died and I hope that the Pearls reap their karma someday soon. I remember going to their site and writing something in one of the topics here about the crazy things they had to say about child rearing and discipline and avoiding the authorities' interventions. I wish someday they would get arrested for their role in these cases of abuse and death.
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Post by tapati on Feb 24, 2010 0:12:31 GMT -5
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Post by cindy on Feb 24, 2010 0:29:36 GMT -5
Tapati,
I appreciate your posts.
When I worked in intensive care, the only people I ever saw with renal failure from muscle tissue in the blood were people who had been in very bad car wrecks. They were purple over large areas and had deep muscle damage. It makes me wonder if they had been doing this over time, she may have had pre-existing kidney damage from previous beatings before. That would make her increasingly compromised.
It was mentioned in one of the earlier threads here, and all I could think was that it was blunt force trauma to the flanks. I didn't even want to think and could not wrap my head around the idea that these folks had inflicted so much muscle damage. If the kidneys had been damaged by a direct blow that was a fluke of poor aim or something, it would have meant fewer blows and less impact. It is just so hard to think about.
What did Lydia endure as she died, and what did she endure before? What about the first time they hit her after they brought her from Liberia?
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Post by krwordgazer on Feb 24, 2010 2:25:55 GMT -5
I can hardly even bear to think about Lydia and those other poor kids. So I'm going back to this: In these kinds of social psychology studies, if people go along with the crowd and people don't voice dissent, the tendency is to go right along with everyone else. BUT, if one person in the group goes against the flow, standing up to yell that the emperor has no clothes, then more people will have confidence to break with the majority. It says quite a lot about the power of one voice. We might think that no one listens to us, but when we stand up and brave the social stigma of not following the group, it gives other people permission to stand up against the pressure. When Hannah Arendt reported on the Nuremburg Trials, she coined the phrase "the banality of evil." People were under pressure to just go along with the crowd, and the system made evil the norm. (What Dr. Zimbardo of the Stanford Prison Experiments wants to promote is something of the "banality of heroism" instead. What can we do as a society to make it easier for people to voice their concerns and to brave the pressure and punishment if they don't follow the crowd?) One thing about this. Bronwyn said: So let's think about this idea: religious abusers believe that they and their children are subject to the ultimate authority, omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient. God is worse than the Gestapo: he is ALWAYS watching, so unless He happens to feel like being merciful, you will be eternally punished for every mistake, no matter how tiny. And of course God is always right; that's part of being God. Wouldn't you do anything, anything at all to keep your beloved child from that eternal punishment for the mistakes he or she is bound to make for being human? Even if it means hurting him or her? After all, it hurts less than the Pit, doesn't it?-- and I see her point. But when it came to the cult I was involved with, Maranatha Campus Ministries-- a group of dissenters who were in middle positions of authority (pastors of individual churches, but not in the upper core leadership ) came together in the end and essentially forced the dissolution of the group, and a mass return to sanity. One of the things that made this possible was that Maranatha's leaders, though they did use God's name to bolster their own authority and teachings, could never quite get away from the Protestant idea that individual laypeople could and should have their own spiritual lives, read and study the Bible themselves, etc. I do know that there came to be many areas in my own life where my own spiritual experiences and Bible study just did not jive with what the Maranatha leadership was saying-- so that when the middle leaders began to dissent, I and many others were ready and willing to dissent too. The picture of God that Brownwyn draws is simply not the picture I drew from the Bible or from my own spiritual life. And I was not the only one. Eventually that picture-- the picture of a God who is Love-- overwhelmed the picture that Maranatha painted. So it doesn't simply boil down to religion being bad because it can be used coercively. It can also encourage anti-coercive action. A lot depends on whether those who desire power and authority, are using religion as the ultimate booster pack for power-wielding-- or whether people are encouraged in some way towards individual self-empowerment in religion. Trust in God can be just as effective in giving courage to stand up against abusive authority-- when that authority ceases to be seen as spiritually legitimate.
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Post by coleslaw on Feb 24, 2010 8:56:19 GMT -5
That's interesting. I wonder if Milgram is the one who misunderstood what "negative reinforcement" means, or if he just counted on his subjects not to know what it means. Because administering a shock in response to an error is punishment, not negative reinforcement.
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aimai
Full Member
Posts: 172
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Post by aimai on Feb 24, 2010 9:33:41 GMT -5
But coleslaw, since there were no shocks administered there was neither punishment nor negative reinforcement. Its not a question of Milgram "misunderstanding" anything--the protocol simply put ordinary people into a situation in which they could choose to use their own moral sense and decide not to administer a killing shock to another person, or in which they could suspend responsibility, or put it on to imagined authority, and do so. I read a discussion the other day in a book called...oh...blank me...uh...."Soul Made Flesh" www.amazon.com/Soul-Made-Flesh-Discovery-Brain/dp/0743230388 the other day of brain scan ethical "test" in which people are asked whether they would, personally, push one man off a bridge to save a train load of people. Apparently people have to think really hard about that one and they do their thinking about the choice in a very old part of the brain that involves emotion. But if you ask them whether they will "flip a switch" to "move the train" to another track *thus killing one man* to save the entire train load they don't have to think as long and hard--they do a simple math calculation in the rational, late part, of the brain and weigh that one life against the many as an easy problem in subtraction. What appears to be happening is that the intervention of the "tool" (the switch) as opposed to the image of the person being physically shoved to his death puts the entire mental debate into a different part of the brain and its handled differently. The tentative conclusion is that the more distant the act of cruelty can be made to appear from the individual actor the more the individual actor is likely to perform it, or to say he will perform it. In the case of this misbegotten parent couple I see the "distancing" mechanism being the turn to authority--the Pearls--but of course the Pearls are only standing in for their version of the Christian God. And they have plenty of social backing and authority to make that claim. Their expertise and their claim to speak for god are authenticated every time someone buys or teaches their books. aimai
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Post by coleslaw on Feb 24, 2010 10:18:43 GMT -5
But for Milgram to get results that mean anything in his real study, he had to convince his subjects that the fake study was real. Anything that could serve as a giveaway that the memory study was not a real study would undercut Milgram's findings. The fake study was set up in such a way that it appeared to use electroshock to punish errors. Yet the subjects of the real study (the moral behavior study) were told that the fake study (the memory study) was to study the effects of "negative reinforcement", which is not the same thing as punishment.
So why did Milgram do that? Did he not know that "negative reinforcement" is not the same thing as punishment? Did he count on his test subjects not knowing? If I were setting up this study, I would do everything in my power to make sure that I didn't give my subjects clues that the electroshock study was a fake, because if they suspected it was a fake (say because the description they were given didn't match what they were actually asked to do), their willingness to give shocks is meaningless.
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Post by musicmom on Feb 24, 2010 10:22:33 GMT -5
Could I make a request? Could we please limit the use of names like "monster" and "criminal" when describing human beings?
As much as this story turned my stomach, I need to remind everyone here that many of us ex-QF moms either participated, or allowed quite a bit of corporal punishment to be inflicted on our kids. For me, standing up to my husband on this issue ended the marriage and left me a single mom of 8. Yes, it was the right decision - I have no doubt. Was it easy? No - I knew that I'd be dealing, by myself, with a houseful of angry, abused kids and my ex would not be around to hold down the fort anymore. They are now pretty much normal, mouthy but lovable kids - all doing well and happy.
But it was NOT easy getting to this point and believe me, I feel guilty enough about what happened in the past without being called a monster for using the Pearl's "pearls of wisdom". People can and do change and choose better - please remember this. People can have good intentions and make huge mistakes. Dont' de-humanize them - you have not walked in their shoes.
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