Religious laws for secular countries.

[nmgauss]

Sam all I can say is that I had the same reaction as you when I first moved to the US (and I don’t come from.an Islamic.country). I refuse to live in a big city and keep my daughter in private school and teach her what is right and what is wrong. I also surround her by people who share our values and I don’t buy too much into the typical culture style and I am hoping that will work.

My handicap is not being raised in or near a big city. Instead, my childhood was spent in a small city in the middle of a large agricultural region. Most of my relatives were involved in agriculture. The city had limited cultural resources. In my youth, there was no television, no museums, poor libraries, and few concerts. To make matters worse, my father was a high school dropout and never read books. My mother grew up in a rural school district surrounded by farms. My neighborhoods were filled with Christians and Catholics. There was little exposure to the modern world with amenities such as one might find in San Francisco.

Dr. Phil has emphasized that the primary purpose of parenting is to prepare children to thrive in the real world. The broader experiences children have and the more exposure they have to real world phenomena, with quality parenting, they will thrive. It is a big mistake to keep children away from the real world in order to protect them. If they are always protected, then when they leave their parents, they will be poorly prepared to become adults.

 

[Alizarin]

Sam all I can say is that I had the same reaction as you when I first moved to the US (and I don’t come from.an Islamic.country). I refuse to live in a big city and keep my daughter in private school and teach her what is right and what is wrong. I also surround her by people who share our values and I don’t buy too much into the typical culture style and I am hoping that will work.

I’m curious, why did you move to a country that the whole world knows as one that doesn’t share Islamic values? One of the reasons I would never move to the Middle East is that I know the culture is radically different from the one here (in the U.S.), and I like my American culture.

Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m all for welcoming those who move here from other countries, I just wonder sometimes why they do it if they know it will make them unhappy.

 

[nmgauss]

The Amish and Mennonites, although having a narrow view of right vs. wrong and protecting their children from exposure to the amoral standards of the “English”, permit their older adolescents to immerse themselves for an extended period (two years?) in the outside world. If these young people decide to leave the faith after this period, they will at least have an opportunity to weigh the pros and cons of both sets of cultural values.

In other words, protecting them and preaching to them about the sins in the outside world, does not prepare them to be fully functioning adults, able to make their own wise decisions.

Also, lack of high school education is a severe handicap.

Teach, but don’t impose.

 

[Alizarin]

Teach, but don’t impose.