(10-19-2020, 04:22 PM)JimBones Wrote: I briefly looked into why confusianism (among other folk religiond) is one of the dominant religions in China. I did this because I wanted to know why a city like Beijing, a city of 21 million people, has half the crime rate of Miami.
At its core, confusianism teaches the importance of the family thereby fostering a learned understanding of social harmony. This is done, in part, with ritualistic behavior demonstrating respect and compassion (for the parents) in order that the lessons learned in the family will produce social behavior among individuals seeking a "middle way" that results in a more humanistic society.
Christians use a different approach trying to teach respect for parents and appreciation of wisdom, they use the threat of death. But the goal for both is essentially the same, if children learn to respect (or fear) the parents, they might grow up to be decent people. People are not threatening death upon children in the US or humiliating children in China to teach the values of respect and harmony. We can all agree (I hope) that this is progress.
Atheists rely upon teaching simple human kindness and respect for others in a more engaging way that doesn't interfere with the developmental health of the child.
My point is this; I no longer care how people are teaching their kids some sense of respect for parents or society as long as the lesson is taught. That's how bad things are getting. Children who don't respect the parents will grow up as adults who don't respect others, society and perhaps not even themselves.
I very seriously doubt christians are teaching their children the benefits of social harmony using the fear of death in modern society (most). I'm willing to cut them a break and ease off a little knowing they are trying. What would a curious believer that came here for a look think after reading the OP? And we wonder why we are hated and avoided. We have to stop trying to shame people into reason, it doesn't work. Shaming them amongst ourselves is arrogant and petty. This is my opinion only, nothing more. If I'm asked for proof, I can't provide it because explaining how I conduct though is beyond my knowledge of human biology.
Well that at least connects the dots of your reasoning process for me. My impression is that the "knockout-game" you linked is very much a minority event and not indicative of a large trend in society... signal-boosted and spread and perhaps even motivated by social media and sensationalist news reporting, but still only a few dozen cases out of ... well, more than the 3xx million in the US, because we're drawing in international stories as well. But (A) that's just my impression and (B) it's not the main point.
Regardless of how telling that particular example might be, you do raise an interesting question of how society is changing and what effect, if any, our collective approaches to parenting are producing. My impression is that society is getting less violent (on average, long-term) rather than more, and that less-severe discipline (not less-discipline, but less-harsh) produces better results. But that's just my impression and I should probably fact-check it. A few minutes or hours of research is worth it to not be a complete fool on the internet, and I like learning new stuff. So let's see what a little search-engine-fu can turn up.
(I'm not going to try to compare Miami to Beijing. Differences in how courts and civil rights work between the two, as well as the Chinese government's lack of transparency and accountability, mean that the way the two datasets are assembled aren't really akin. It would be comparing apples to oranges. There might be a reasonable conversation to be had on the subject, but I'm too dubious about the Chinese data to base any conclusions on it.)
Okay, here's something from Pew Research. It pulls together crime statistics from the FBI and BJS and polling data from Gallup to highlight five main points:
- Violent crime in the U.S. has fallen sharply over the past quarter century
- Property crime has declined significantly over the long term
- Public perceptions about crime in the U.S. often don’t align with the data
- There are large geographic variations in crime rates
- Most crimes are not reported to police, and most reported crimes are not solved
Point 1 basically says that at the same time that society has gotten more liberal in its ways of disciplining children, the crime rate has fallen by a lot. I know that correlation doesn't equal causation, but to quote the great philosopher Saint Marvin of Ares: "Where's the kaboom? There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering kaboom!"
Expanding on point 3, nearly every year a majority of Americans polled by Gallup said that nationwide, crime had gone up since the past year, when in fact nearly every year it had gone down, to the point where 2018 violent crime rate was about 29% of the 1993 crime rate.
For point 4, I just have to follow up on a hunch.
Hunch:
So crime is trending down while child-disciplining gets less harsh. But hey, correlation isn't causation. Maybe there are some psychological papers on the subject of how different types of discipline affect a child? That seems like the sort of thing that psych types like to study.
Here's an interesting meta-analysis on the subject of harsh child discipline. It's the first paper on the subject I found, so no, I'm not cherry-picking. It's got hundreds of sources to follow up on if anyone feels like it. The whole thing is a disturbing but fascinating read. Two key quotes relevant to this conversation:
Quote:In one meta-analysis of twenty-seven studies, every single study found that the more parents used corporal punishment, the more aggressive their children were. Similarly, twelve of thirteen studies found that the more frequently or severely corporal punishment was administered, the more strongly it was associated with more antisocial behavior. Although the majority of this research has been conducted in the United States, these findings have been replicated around the world. Indeed, corporal punishment has been associated with more aggression in Canada, China, India, Italy, Jamaica, Jordan, Kenya, Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand, and with antisocial behavior and other behavior problems in Brazil, Hong Kong, Jordan, Mongolia, Norway, and the United Kingdom.
Quote:Having learned that they can use aggression and force to compel others to do what they want in childhood, children persist in using aggression to control others’ behavior into adulthood. Indeed, an increased likelihood that individuals who were physically punished in childhood will perpetrate violence as adults on their own family members has been found consistently in the literature. Adults who recall receiving more corporal punishment from their parents also report more verbal and physical aggression with their spouses or dating partners. Whether children were ever corporally punished has been found to signal whether they have hit a dating partner. Sadly, this increased likelihood to act violently includes violence against their own children. Not only does the experience of corporal punishment increase aggression through that child’s own lifetime, it is transmitted to the next generation in a cycle of violence.
To summarize the paper, the only thing corporal punishment does effectively is produce immediate, short-term compliance to the parent... and other disciplining techniques do that just as well, without the numerous downsides. Fundamentally, corporal punishment teaches the child to respect not the violent parent, but violence itself. It also fails to help them internalize moral principles, leaving the impetus to behave entirely extrinsic and removing the need to behave when the parent won't find out. The child's relationship with the parent becomes one of avoidance and fear rather than respect, which makes it harder for the parent to impart moral teachings. That fear creates long-term stress which can cause severe depression and anxiety. Also, two-thirds of child abuse cases begin as corporal punishment that went too far, making corporal punishment easily the biggest gateway into child abuse. And all that's before we ask the question, "Am I really happy about hurting my own child?"
So, what about the idea of a death penalty for a disrespectful child? Is fear of lethal punishment for parental disrespect likely to promote the children growing into peaceful, well-adjusted, well-socialized adults? Extrapolating from these results, no, it isn't. The child will be taught to respect threats of death rather than respect their parents. The child will grow distant from the parent, making it harder for the parent to instill moral reasoning. Without internalizing that moral reasoning, only the threat of punishment is there to control behavior, and if that vanishes (perhaps because the child thinks they can get away with the crime) then so to does the inhibitions against misbehaving. Death threats will be modeled for the child as both acceptable and effective behavior. If the child becomes aware of object lessons (ie, actual other children who have been killed) then the lesson will shift from "death threats are acceptable and effective" to "killing people is acceptable and effective". Heightened stress will cause mental health problems. The child, grown into adult, will have greater propensities for violence and anti-social behavior. And that's before we ask the question, "Am I really happy about stoning my own child to death?"
If things are really getting so bad that desperate times call for desperate measures (it seems like they aren't, but hypothetically), then I'd suggest your attitude of "I don't care how people do it so long as they do something" is not desperate enough. If things are really that bad, we should be desperate enough to take some time, even if it's just a few hours of internet research, to look into which strategies have no effect, which ones are counter-effective, and which are most effective. And then we should be desperate enough to embrace the most effective strategies and denounce the counter-effective ones.
And finally, we come full circle to the OP being pissed at the Biblical Jesus for endorsing capital punishment for disrespecting your parents. Is it reasonable to have expected some apocalyptic preacher two millenia ago, mired in his own cultural frame of reference where such things were the norm, to have known better? No. It would have been possible, but not likely. But when we're told that it's what the perfect, omniscient, omnibenevolent font of all morality said we should (and must) do? Well then the ones pushing that idea of a deity on us have earned a bit of scorn for it, and so has the idea of a deity that they're pushing.
It's yet one more example (of how many?) of how the religious doctrine is obnoxious. (At least if it is taken literally and without picking-and-choosing the parts we like, which the most obnoxious of Christians insist is how we should take it.) So yeah, we're going to come to a forum of like-minded people, and we're going to vent, because after catching so much crap from the opposite side holy fucking damn do we need to vent. Is that the best tactic for deconverting theists who come here or establishing a happy, mutually-respectful coexistence with them? Probably not. But given that the theists who come to this forum are nearly all drive-bys or proselytizing trolls, that wasn't going to be happening here anyway.
"To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today." - Isaac Asimov