They are the undisputed kings of comedy.
Of course they’re pure! From an adult perspective, of course.
I haven’t read the website, so I will just guess that it’s just updated Rousseau.
I don’t know about recent. Jesus said that the Kingdom of Heaven belonged to children and warned converts to have child-like hearts.
(Regardless of your belief in Scripture, the point remains that this is not a new idea)
No, babies are born in original sin. By default, they go to Limbo if thet die in infancy, too young to have committed actual sins, but not having been freed from original sin.
Yeah I remember hearing something about that. Doesn’t make any sense to me that infants would get punished like that. But I am mostly referring to what the link is saying. I have heard it before, people likening children to having “unconditioned minds” and therefor having a more pure vision of reality without us adults “laying everything on them”.
That’s you. I have three children (six, three and four months). The oldest girl still tells me, when I go out on our terrace at night to make sure everything is turned off, “don’t step on the beetles, Daddy! Watch out! Be careful, Daddy!” The younger girl, too.
The nonsense about love? Seriously, children are quite capable of love. I’m not even talking about my own kids here, just what I’ve seen over the years.
No doubt. With my girls (leaving out the four month old boy), my wife and I always try to distract them when one of those begging commercials (either for children or for animals) comes on, if we’ve got the television on. Both girls start to cry. We call them the “sad baby” commercials.
Very much so. My two girls have very, very different personalities. Even the little dude is starting to show signs of being his own person.
I am sorry you experienced that. Some children can be horrible. Many are not.
The church (or at least the Catholic Church, which, as far as I know, is the only church that ever held a belief in Limbo) has pretty much abandoned Limbo.
Only according to the Roman Catholic church. Actual scripture says:
And he said: "Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
and
“See that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father in heaven"
and
Jesus, however, said, “Let the little children come to me, and stop keeping them away, because the kingdom from heaven belongs to people like these.”
Keep in mind that Jesus was referring to Jewish children who had never been baptized from any “original sin”.
This doesn’t mean children were/are sinless.
In Baptist theology they have the age of accountability. Before a kid reaches this age, which is never specified, they automatically go to heaven when they die. They take this from David and Bathsheba’s baby that God killed as punishment. David says he’ll see the baby again in heaven, and an entire theology was built around how this could happen.
True, he should have been saying that you get to be under 5’ tall or like juice boxes. The usual interpretation is that children are innocent though and, whether you subscribe to that it or not, the initial point holds up: viewing children as innocent isn’t a recent spiritual phenomenon as people (rightly or wrongly) have been taking this interpretation for a couple thousand years now.
Keep in mind that not everybody gets to hear the stanza about finding their mittens. Their takeaway is that the kittens don’t get any pie.
My takeaway, when I first heard the rhyme was: I’ve got my mittens right here. Can I have their pie?
And if infants had better coordination and access to weapons, the consequences of delayed feeding or loaded diapers would be far more severe. :eek:
IMHO, too much is read into that verse. It is merely David stating that he believes he’ll see his son again in the afterlife, but doesn’t necessarily mean David is correct. David could be making a wrong assumption with his statement.
I’m at work and can’t do research, but haven’t there been serial killers who exhibited violent or highly atypical behavior from extremely early childhood?
Find me a teacher who agrees [edit: with the titular question]. I dare you.
I was at a party recently, talking with a mom whose ex-husband (and shared-custody co-parent) believed his daughter was an enlightened being. Based on what came out of those conversations, I encouraged her to contact DSS.
The idea that children are enlightened, or pure, or anything like that, may seem on the surface to give kids extra respect. But it doesn’t. It fetishizes and fantasizes them, and is a really dangerous approach to kids.
I love kids. I have two, and I teach them, and I wouldn’t trade my career for most anything. But they’re human beings in a developmental stage, not supernatural entities, and treating them as such is fundamentally dehumanizing.
Your take is as valid as anyone else’s. 
Yes, Jeffrey Dahmer killed and preserved the bodies of animals when he was a child and seemed preoccupied with death and decay.
Edmund Kemper used to play a game where his sister threw the switch to execute him in the electric chair and he was made to sleep in the basement so he wouldn’t molest his sisters. He killed his grandparents when he was 12 because “I just wanted to see what it would be like to shoot grandma.”.
There are many examples like this.
Sometimes kids are really violent due to attachment disorder. When they’re babies they don’t emotionally attach to a caregiver, and so they never learn love or empathy and don’t develop a conscience.
Attachment disorder - Wikipedia
I learned about this from the Lifetime movie Child of Rage. And then I watched a documentary about Beth Thomas, the now adult woman that the movie was based on. I also read the book that her 2nd adoptive mother wrote.
But sometimes kids are just born with defective brains where there is a filter missing that makes it so that nothing stops them from acting out on whatever they want to do. They get angry, then they choke you. And punishments don’t work on these kids. Rewarding positive behavior is the only thing that helps.
When Your Child Is a Psychopath - The Atlantic
I think we probably have to define “pure” before we can determine if infants are born in that state. And then you have to decide if you believe in a soul or not. You could believe that a newborn soul is pure, but that the body/brain somehow corrupts it. Or if you don’t believe in a soul then I guess you could call ignorance of good and evil “purity” or an ability to understand that some things harm other people. Once you’ve passed the stage where you understand “Mom” exists outside of yourself and that she has feelings and can be hurt, then you’re in a different state than before. I don’t know. These are interesting questions, anyway.
There have also been serial killers who didn’t show extreme behavior as children.
Likewise there are people who showed extreme behavior as children and never became serial killers.
As much as it confuses you, humans aren’t simply preprogrammed robots executing code.
While it is disputed how much of psychopathy is environmental, no clinician believes it to be 100%. It is presumed that biology and heredity play a part. Which means at least some babies are born psychopaths. Which essentially means that some are pre-programmed to feel no remorse about immoral behavior.