The application of law in our society depends largely on who you are and what resources you have. Ah — there’s the rub! We have entered a great technological era, and as a nation, we have exceeded far beyond our dreams, and we are just at the beginning.
Unfortunately and too often, pursuits by our children are guided not by their desires or interests but by our desire that they become wealthy and influential. Their desires and interests are often suppressed by our promise that we know what’s good for them. We often pressure them into careers they qualify for, based on outcome and the perception that wealth and influence is the goal that will give them happiness.
The reality is that many become overstressed trying to live their parents’ dream for them, and wind up unhappy and disillusioned. The careers we choose for them are often at a price of stress and self-denial few of us would choose for ourselves.
The pillars of our society, a society that we have created for them, has turned into a nightmare, with our religious institutions caught in one scandal after another, and we have our young people following men of straw, who far from examples of morality have fallen from grace.
Politically, we teach our children to respect our laws and defend our free and open elections, then suggest to them that some of us are not really Americans, and we must be prepared to defend ourselves against our own law enforcement and our own government. The young are being taught that money is everything and that our laws can be circumvented by special interests. Yet we decry the “abandonment of moral and religious values,” values we talk loudly about only when they don’t conflict with our own interests, in a land where money is king!
Richard Nielsen, Royal Palm Beach
I totally agree with Dr. Nielsen that what we teach our children is important.
HIV/AIDS kills, and while it is unmentionable it is avoidable and billions have been spent on a cure. Traditional morality taught that sexual activity should be enjoyed by married monogamous couples. I have no doubt that a good number of atheists would agree, if only because the spread of sexually transmitted diseases occurs more abundantly in a society that encourages recreational sex with multiple partners, which sadly and too often involves teachers and underage students.
According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) more than 5.1 million people as of last year have been saved from an early death caused by AIDS. More than 11 million pregnant women were in need of counseling and 750,000 HIV-positive pregnant women were treated for HIV transmission and of those 230,000 infants were born HIV-free. The CDC rendered care for nearly 15 million people including more than 4.5 million orphans and vulnerable children and gave counseling and testing to more than 46.9 million people.
One in four new HIV infections occur in youth ages 13 to 24 years, the occurrence is about 1000 new infections per month. And 60% of all youth with HIV do not know that they are infected.
It would be interesting to conduct a study of youth raised under traditional moral teaching to see if the incidences of HIV/AIDS is lower than in the general population of un churched youth.