Sorry about taking so long to respond to your question; I’ve been spending a lot of time digging into the mysteries of the people of your planet. To get to your question, no, I’m not in favor of molesting children. I’m not sure what “official” means in this context, but no matter; on my planet we see our children as our future, so we do everything we can to support them as they grow up. On your planet, things seem to be the opposite. I’m surprised a species can even survive when it molests its children as much as you do. Apparently, your children have evolved resilience to and tolerance of it.
The first thing that jumped out at me was how common it is for you to hit your children. I see that it’s not as common as it once was, but from what I can gather it’s still unremarkable for parents to do what you call “spanking”. At the earliest ages, you teach your children that physical violence is an acceptable way to deal with others, even family members, when they don’t do what you want them to. Naturally, they grow up to become violence-prone themselves, which maybe explains what you call “war”. I think there’s more to “war” that, though. I think encouraging your children to play with toy guns is another part of it, as well as allowing professional killers to recruit them when their brains are still too undeveloped to exercise good judgment. I’m still working on “war”, so I’ll leave that subject there.
Then there’s sex, the original subject, where you appear to have deliberately set everything up to keep your children from gaining experiential knowledge of this essential part of their lives. Their elders, those equipped to impart useful information, are limited to talking about it, not demonstrating it. To reiterate my earlier analogy, this is like trying to learn chemistry without a lab. Your children are forced to do the lab work in hiding with their equally inexperienced peers. Unsurprisingly, they sometimes get hurt this way, often deeply and with lifelong effects. Why do you do this to your children? Why do you poison your future this way?
But the damage you do with sex is just a subset of a larger issue: molesting your children psychologically. That it’s stultifying and debilitating would be bad enough, but it’s endemic, and the ubiquity seems to make it invisible to most of you, so it runs unchecked.
You have traditions that seem designed to create confusion and cognitive dissonance. On the one hand you have a set of playful myths, such as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, and you reveal the joke when they reach an age to understand and enjoy it. But then you simultaneously introduce serious myths … tales about invisible gods with superpowers who alternate between sadism and mercy, and in order to appease them the child must not only believe they exist but also worship words written about them thousands of years earlier, much of which is self-contradictory, if not egregiously implausible. Or, in the case of the Vedas, gibberish.
Your children are left wondering, “Is this a joke too, and someday they’ll tell us?” But as time goes by they realize the grownups are serious about something that is in many ways indistinguishable from what they admitted was a joke. The result is such deep confusion that the child simply shuts down a part of the rational brain and says, “Many things they tell me make no sense at all, but I guess I’ll go along so they won’t hit me.”
This shutting down of children’s thinking processes makes them easy prey for truly dangerous ideas … such as the one that claims stealing and assault and murder are not evil if enough people gather and call themselves a “government” before they do them. The “nation-state” is so obviously a dysfunctional way for people to live in peace! But I want to stay disciplined about your topic so I won’t get into that here.
As sentient beings, your children’s cognitive abilities are their most precious attributes, and yet you systematically squelch them. Seemingly without the slightest hesitation, you fetter their minds with this thing you call “religion”. To me, assaulting a child’s brain this way is beyond shocking, it’s incomprehensible. As I said before, I’m amazed that your species has lasted this long. I’m also intrigued, so I’ll keep studying you.
But to return once more to your question, I guess I should turn it around: Do you officially support child molestation? You don’t have to answer.
