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Ten Things Every Dad Should Tell His Son
Sigh. Our son Ezra, age 7, fears the Jackal god. That would be Ezra who attends an Orthodox Jewish (actually, Chabad) elementary school and studies the weekly Torah portion. I gave him a copy of a book I liked when I was a kid, The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy, an Alfred Hitchcock “Three Investigators” mystery, in which the scary figure of the Jackal god figures. Did you ever hear of that series?
And the LORD smelled a sweet savour; and the LORD said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done. While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.
posted April 22, 2009 at 8:35 am
If the Hebrew bible assures us weather is not how civilization will end, that means it is not giving any such assurance with respect to climate.
The river-fording analogy is that we may be assured we won’t drown fording a river of average depth 3 feet, due to parts of it being deeper than average, but if the average depth increases to seven feet, that assurance is gone.
There is nothing particularly secular about global warming alarmism. Certainly the insinuation that Gore is a secularist is a mistake.
posted April 22, 2009 at 8:47 am
The “Jackal God”‘s original name translates to “royal child”. He’s just a big royal puppy.
Nothing to be scared of at all!
posted April 22, 2009 at 11:11 am
“The Three Investigators” were one of my favorite series! I was an older teen when they came out but I liked them as much as Tom Swift and the Hardy Boys. Cool books – I could never get my kids to read them.
It is not that hard to scare kids – even the most cynical and pseudo-sophisticated ones can be scared without too much effort. the trick is to recognize the line between scared and scarred. I hope you will introduce your son to Egyptology – a topic with which I became enchanted at about 11 years old. He will learn a lot about the jackal king. Indiana Jones is a good and palatable introduction, followed by Brandn Fraser’s “The Mummy”.
Don’t just let him go it alone, sit with him and talk about what you are seeing and why it is scary. Help him sort our scary from thrilling. In an era of over protected children they have to be introduced to the thrills and the scares of life a little more gently. But they should know what is really scary – nukulahr missles in flight, for example – as compared to what plays and plagues an imagination.
posted April 22, 2009 at 12:17 pm
Fans of the late–and great–Rabbi Avigdor Miller might recall his answer to someone’s question of whether we should be worried about global warming: It is entirely a concoction of the liberals. You needn’t be concerned about it at all.
Of course, he’s not a scientist, but it’s just so hilarious and typically quick-tongued…
See also: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.html?hp=&pagewanted=all
posted April 23, 2009 at 11:35 am
G-d won’t use the weather to destroy the earth, but that doesn’t mean he’ll intervene if human beings alter the weather because of our own misguided selfishness. Climate change is being caused by humans, and if humans don’t solve the problem, we could be in very big trouble.