Surface lies, look beneath
I have been reflecting on what I had been told as a kid about things, and what I now know about those things. It’s all white little lies that we’re fed. Growing up, you are told a lot of things by people who have just a surface-level knowledge of the things they talk about. Here are a couple of them:
I had studied in my English For Today book about Mother Teresa. About four years ago, she was this gentle woman who used to fix the broken and cure the ill. Well, no doubt she has helped some people. But how about we see it from a broader perspective?
Mother Teresa was friends with political and authoritative figures who were later found to be unscrupulous. She took large sums of money from them in order to help the poor. And considering the money that she took, the development was meager.
Mother Teresa was a preacher of Christ. She used to convert people to Christianity, but in her own writings, which were found later, there were doubts about whether she actually believed in it herself or not.
None of these would compare to the last one.
When people suffering from disease, going through physical and mental chaos, were brought to the orphanage, who would take care of them?
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The missionaries would. With no experience whatsoever in medical procedures, they used to administer injections and provide medicine. So, the person who was brought to the orphanage would sometimes be left in a much worse condition.
See, I am not talking about whether Mother Teresa was a good person or not. No doubt, she did things with good intentions, but some of them were beyond her capabilities and management skills. My question, rather, remains: “Why weren’t we taught these things alongside the surface-level kindness and goodness of Mother Teresa?”
“They have got too much to lose telling the truth.” — Anonymous
I grew up around very conservative, stupid toppers who used to excel in their exams, yet their critical faculty was on vacation. Once, someone said, “Darwin is bad because he goes against my religion.”
If only they could have seen beyond the surface upon which their face was thrashed, they would know that Adam and Eve is kind of a story. And a 16-year-old can easily figure that out after thinking for 30 minutes.
Well, why are we not taught evolution? Because most of the teachers were PhD holders with zero rationale regarding what children should be taught. Nobody goes on to speak broadly about evolution because they have got too much to lose. I never even got to learn about it until getting out of school and self-studying.
Religions are another menace. They cherry-pick good verses and teach us only those. Misogynistic teachers, who shouldn’t even have the right to teach, come and talk about what’s moral and what’s not. What a circus I had been in.
If you learn something without knowing it broadly, without really knowing the other sides of it that might contradict what you think about that thing, you’re just floating in the air. No matter what the topic is — Mother Teresa, evolution, or religion — when you’re teaching about God and saying how beautiful the world He made is, also ask children to go through the verses themselves and think about them. Do the timelines match with what actually happened? Is God really all-loving and all-kind when He would announce death for apostasy or prescribe stoning homosexuals?
Surface-level knowledge is very close to a lie. That’s why you should look beneath the surface. Foster critical faculty.
