https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=dCILftdCqQk
If you were raising your children in today’s world, would you do things differently? What advice do you have for parents today? Yeah, well I think we did pretty well and I’m pretty happy with our kids. But I think I didn’t bring our kids to church. We didn’t bring our kids to church and that was a mistake. It was a mistake because, you know, I would say our familial environment was pretty religious in its orientation fundamentally. And it was a playful place but it was also a very serious place. And the kids imbibed plenty of, let’s say, moral discipline. And we taught them to negotiate and we taught them to stand up for themselves and they got very good at both of those. But they didn’t have an opportunity to learn the biblical stories. And, you know, I went to Sunday school when I was a kid and I didn’t really like it. But first of all, so what? It’s like who, you know, the cynics used to say in our town, this is when religion was beginning. It’s the descent that it’s undergone particularly in the last 30 years. Like all these hypocritical Christians, you know, they go to church on Sunday for an hour and then they’re just as evil and conniving the rest of the week. It’s like, you know, fair enough. How hypocritical? Fair enough. But what are you going to do? You’re going to replace that with like zero time trying to be good? That’s your improvement? It’s like you got that hour and you’re trying stupidly and hypocritically to be good. And that’s pretty pathetic. But it seems to be a lot better than not ever trying it at all. So and so I did learn, you know, in Sunday school, despite my the impossibility of sitting still during that period of time and the fact that I didn’t want to go to school yet another day, I did learn the biblical stories in some depth and that was insanely useful. And, you know, one of the things I noticed when I was teaching my maps of meaning course, I started teaching that like 1992, I guess. Now, 1980. Yeah, about 82, I guess. Now, it was even earlier than that. Eighty five probably started teaching it. Everyone I taught the course to knew the basic biblical stories. But by the time it was like 2017, 60 percent of the kids didn’t know the stories at all. And so it was almost impossible to teach them course because I’d have to do a course in biblical stories before I could do a course about religious narrative. And, you know, it’s not like they replaced that with any great wisdom. They just didn’t know any stories. You know, it’s like, you know, because their parents might have thought, well, we’ll let our kids sort their way through the whole wonderful world of religious belief. It’s like, no, you won’t. You can’t even manage one religion. How the hell are you going to manage 10? It’s just not going to happen. So, you know, I think we I think that would have been that would probably would have been good for us, I think. And our granddaughter just got baptized and everybody seemed pretty happy about that. And so, you know, and I’ve also come to understand that, you know, modern people are pretty narcissistic. And I certainly fell into that category as a 13 year old. And I thought, well, there’s a lot of things about the church that I don’t really agree with. And I didn’t notice that like who cared what I thought because I was 13 year old kid. It’s like, why was this about what I thought? Who cared what I thought? I shouldn’t have even cared what I thought. So I didn’t know anything. And so, you know, maybe some of you are loath to join a civic organization or a political party or a church because, you know, aren’t they corrupt and hypocritical? It’s like, yeah, yeah, they are. So are you. And and if they’re so damaged and you’re so wise and wonderful, like, why don’t you just go there and fix them up a bit? You know, because you could do that instead of just pretending that you’re above all that because you’re definitely not. And and so so we didn’t handle that as well as we might have. And I suppose we’re atoning for our sins to some degree by doing what we’re doing now. But I don’t know. What do you think? Is there anything else we screwed up? Oh, well, I gave up gluten 25 years ago and nobody paid any attention to it. Yes. You think we could have done that better? I think you could have done that better. Yeah, maybe. But other than that, I think it went all right. OK. OK. Glad to hear it.