My little girl is growing up. Lately she wants to go to bed with Teddy and Mr Lion. She's insists that I cover them up with a blanket or they'll freeze to death. If she wakes up in the middle of the night and finds them uncovered, she lovingly puts the blanket on them. Somehow, I don't know how, children work this out, she knows the reality of things. In the morning, she invariably finds Teddy and Lion on the floor. She doesn't go to pieces, she knows they are only stuffed animals and that they don't have to be protected and nor will they have frozen to ice. Somewhere inside us, the concept of Reality, Truth and Lies is coded from a very young age.
Which brings me to a BBC documentary I was watching last night. A young couple in Delhi give birth to a girl. The girl is born with a rare and almost unheard of congenital defect, facial duplication. That is, she is born with two faces. The moment she is born, the parents and the family instinctively know that this is a defect, a malformation, that the child will not survive. The love and care they display for this child would tear through the heart of any mother. There is one moment, when an aunt in all wisdom tells the camera crew, if a brick fell from a woman's womb, the mother would still love it. Despite all odds, this child survives the first 48 years. This being India, people start filing into their house. Soon the parents and family are convinced that the reincarnation of a Goddess has been delivered to them. And so now a lie, an unreality becomes the Truth. How is it, that religion, the one wonder-drug of humanity, can make people go against the most fundamental coding of reality and truth, and make us embrace the lie? How does this work? Why does this work? If we are to survive in the twenty-first century, we have to find that basic coding which any child will display with the most astonishing clarity and presence of mind. For in the very end, lies always cause us pain. (The child died at two months of heart failure). selma __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
