Children And The Kingdom Of Heaven

It often seems to me one of the most over-looked parts of Jesus' radicalism that he treated children with respect and even saw them as more genuinely open to what living with God means than most adults. Eliezer Yudkowsky wishes his parents had had a similar attitude:

The most fearsome damage wreaked upon my parents by their concept of "adulthood", was the idea that being "adult" meant that you were finished - that "maturity" marked the place where you declared yourself done, needing to go no further.

This was displayed most clearly in the matter of religion, where I would try to talk about a question I had, and my parents would smile and say: "Only children ask questions like that; when you're adult, you know that it's pointless to argue about it."  They actually said that outright!  To ask questions was a manifestation of earnest, childish enthusiasm, earning a smile and a pat on the head.  An adult knew better than to waste effort on pointless things...

This is what I think my parents were thinking:

If they had tried to answer a question as children, and then given up as adults - a quite common pattern in their religious decay - they labeled "mature" the place and act of giving up, by way of consolation.  They'd asked the question as children and stopped asking as adults - and the story they told themselves about that was that only children asked that question, and now they had succeeded into the sage maturity of knowing not to argue.

To this very day, I constantly remind myself that, no matter what I do in this world, I will doubtlessly be considered an infant by the standards of future intergalactic civilization, and so there is no point in pretending to be a grown-up.  I try to maintain a mental picture of myself as someone who is not mature, so that I can go on maturing.

(Photo: a Shiite girl by Mohammed Sawa/AFP/Getty.)