Lying turns out to be a form of parenting [Addendum]

In an “honor they father and mother” society who would do research into the frequency with which parents purposefully lie to their children? Oh, and publish findings which show parents often seek to teach honesty and other virtues by lying.

A team which included Gail Heyman who is a professor of psychology at University of California San Diego (UCSD), Diem Luu who is a former UCSD student and and Kang Lee who is a professor at the University of Toronto and director of the Institute of Child Study at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

TS-SI news service reports:

Heyman and Lee are now preparing an international study to explore the subject further, and they are also beginning to study the possible consequences of “parenting by lying”: Does it create confusion about right and wrong? Does it undermine a child’s trust?

Well: Does it?

Addendum: Children remember and may lose faith in you

The studies looked at two groups consisting of 127 university students; and 127 unrelated parents. Students were asked whether they recalled their parents lying to them and why. Parents if they had lied to their children.

The University of Tronto’s Kang Lee told Canada AM this week:

They found that 88 per cent of the students said they remembered their parents lying to them. And, 78 per cent of the parents admitted they lied to their kids.

“Kids have very long memories of the lies. We surveyed college students and many of them remembered vividly the lies their parents told 15 or 20 years before,” he said.

…
“The problem is that if the child discovers their parents have been lying to them, they may lose trust in their parents’ parenting efforts,” [Lee] said.

The rapturing of Sarah Palin

The Mudflats bloggers were Left behind in Alaska when former Gov. Sarah Palin “was raptured by the far right fringe” to Hong Kong where the Asia Times reports she received to a mixed reception. Economics Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman observed that her analysis in that speech suffers from an absence of any facts to back up her claims.

Nonetheless inspired, Frank Walker at decidedly Catholic PewSitter.com invented a Palinesque “common sense:”

The honesty and simple wisdom of Sarah Palin is rejuvenating. Many who lead the Catholic Church will hopefully take notice. Today there are bishops worldwide who will go to almost any lengths in the name of social justice. Often when they do, they reveal their allegiances and their worldliness. This week the social justice arm of the USCCB, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, is under intense light again for its openly political, anti-Catholic, and corrupt beneficiaries. In Vienna Cardinal Schoenborn recently tried to squelch a pro-life rally and then forbad clergy to participate. Notre Dame, the pre-eminent American Catholic University, continues to prosecute eighty-eight pro-life demonstrators, including Norma McCorvey, following the Obama honors last spring. In August Boston’s O’Malley scandalized the world with a funeral for anti-life pariah Ted Kennedy, and this past week Scotland’s Cardinal O’Brien railed in the press about global catastrophes, millions of refugees, and the poor before a climate meeting at the UN.

What hath transcendence of Alaska made her then, but a vessel to be filled by conservatives in need of someone about whom to rapture. Factlessness, no object.

Depression kills [Addendum: Series on preachers and depression]

German artist Albrecht Durer’s engraving “Melancholia” (1514)”

Suicide Survivor Resources

• Surviving the First Year
• What Others Can Do
• Suicide Survivor’s Guide
• British Support Group: Shadow of Suicude
• After Suicide
• Healthy Place.com: Suicide and Children
• KidsHealth: About Teen Suicide
• Child Suicide page.

From Buster

Each of us has an organic, living brain which is prey to illnesses to which stigma is typically attached.

The psychic pain of acute depression is, one psychotherapist writes, “wholly incompatible with human life as we know it.” Depression is third among leading causes of death and disability worldwide, according to the World Health Organization, and is expected to be second to ischemic heart disease by 2020. Even the acutely depressed who successfully seek the help of a loving, supportive community like that of Sandy Ridge Baptist Church may not survive.

The North Carolina Biblical Recorder reports that in the death of pastor David Treadway of Sandy Ridge Baptist Church in Hickory.

Several months ago Treadway … told the congregation he was under doctor’s care for depression. An early statement Sunday from church leadership said their pastor had “succumbed to the disease of depression.”

At the spiritual core of this is love for one another and freely given help for those in need — now for his surviving family and congregation — but also the others who are afflicted by one of the mental illnesses into which any of us may fall. No matter where we are, the latter are in fact all around us. There is no better time to notice.

Addendum

Hickory Daily Record obituary

Online Guestbook

Biblical Recorder series on preachers and depression

• Preachers and depression
• Culture, isolation push some to depression
• Members should help pastor set boundaries

Refried Paige

Paige sings, eyes closed

Christa at Stop Baptist Predators brought perspective to Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary President Page Patterson’s tough-guy “taking the hill” for Christ video.

She recalls the deaf ear Patterson gave female Criswell College students at Criswell College, where Patterson was then in charge, who tried to tell him of sexual abuses by his protege, Baptist pastor Darrell Gilyard.

But Patterson turned a blind eye to Gilyard’s reported abuses and a deaf ear to the young women who tried to get some help.

Finally, after two decades of do-nothingness from Patterson and other Baptist leaders, the law put a stop to Gilyard when it convicted him of molesting a 15-year-old in Florida.

Read her entire blog here.

Sometimes while blogging late at night …

According to the Boston Phoenix:

This photograph was taken on March 29, 2004 when the Massachusetts Legislature voted to ban gay marriage and establish civil unions.

[Signs] held by gay marriage supporters that [focused] on gays who’ve made history such as Leonardo da Vinci, Alan Turing, who invented the computer, and Katherine Lee Bates, who wrote “America the Beautiful. “The [tongue-in-cheek] sign focusing on Turning, for example, read: DESTROY THE COMPUTER! IT’S A HOMOSEXUAL INVENTION BY ALAN TURING. WHO CARES IF HE CRACKED THE GERMAN ENIGMA CODE AND WON WORLD WAR II. IT’S A HOMO’S DEVIL MACHINE.

Tom Lang of Manchester by the Sea held one of the signs — which have taken some viewers a few moments to figure out. “We’re trying to show how important gay people are to the American culture,” Lang explained. “We’re not mental. We’re not immoral. But we’re important to society and interwoven into the tapestry of America.”

Some bloggers, like Bruce, Mark and PZ Myers, almost seem to take the sign seriously. Bruce is, after all, “speechless.” Whereas she speaks clearly, making her sympathies abundantly clear by holding, immediately beneath the sign, what we discovered is an LBGT Rainbow Flag.

Turing, of course, did not invent the computer.

Even so, sometimes while blogging sleepily, very late at night, regardless of the sexuality of the various inventors involved in creating these devices …

Regarding ‘International Blasphemy Day’

Atheist Paul Zachary “PZ” Myers saw in Blasphemy Day International 2009 the opportunity to live his unfaith and make a point, while Al Mohler saw the opportunity to live his faith and make some converts.

Blasphemy Day is at its core a protest against the U.N. Resolution 62/154 on “Combating defamation of religions,” which Mohler also finds offensive.

The Blasphemy Day Facebook page says:

The UN, rather than standing up for free speech, has given in to pressure from Islamic nations and has proposed a resolution to essentially ban criticism of religion. In its pursuit of “tolerance” for religion, this resolution wants to strip everyone, everywhere, of their freedom, even their obligation, to criticize what they oppose. Unlike one’s political affiliation or favorite sports team, religion demands – and has been granted – unique immunity from criticism since its very inception. Labeling anything deemed critical “blasphemy”, religions have effectively defined the boundaries for what can and can’t be said about them. We propose we knock down this barrier and break this spell.

As Mohler wrote in his April 17 blog:

This United Nations Human Rights Council resolution offends Peter Singer, and it offends me as well. The United Nations has no right protect adherents of any religious belief system from being offended. It should expend its energies defending the religious liberty of all persons everywhere. That policy would put the offense where it belongs.

Bruce Prescott at Mainstream Baptist, who has no truck with either Mohler or the likes of Myers, wrote on April 17:

Defaming Islam is rude and insensitive and is a faux paux for which many Southern Baptists are guilty, but it certainly should not be criminalized.

At their best, both Christianity and Islam recognize that open inquiry permitting honest critique is central to the search for truth.

If there is any blasphemy here on Sept. 30, it will be accidental and we expect you to hold us to account for it, but opposition to U.N. Resolution 62/154 is just.