Aside from the; obvious bullahit of relegion that you can figure out for yourself quite early .... not to be a bully to get what you want. It's near ubiquitous, from police to government, to wealthy people, business owners etc anyone with an asymmetric relationship gets what they want that way. As a boss, do what I want or I fire you and you starve etc etc.
I still see them pedaling the same lies to children today, bullying and cowexison are linked to inextricably liked to what we call success we are fine with it, the weird part is the denial and lieing to kids about not being a bully .
In Catholic school in the nineties and early 2000's, we were all told that the sex abuse scandal was serious but that it was also "a small number of incidents." That we needed to pray for the victims and the souls of the perpetrators.
Then I went to college. Come to find out not only was the child rape widespread, not only did the church actively hide monsters from legal scrutiny, not only was this all directly effecting the local arch diocese (not my school specifically, but church leaders were forced to quickly rename another high school when allegations against a dead bishop proved too numerous to ignore)... not only all that but that it's still going on, just not in first world countries with robust networks of journalists and legal systems. That an alleged pedophile was (while I was in college) living in the Vatican, being directly sheltered from extradition by South American authorities.
I guess the lie was that it was all over. That it was a small problem. That the church was a safe place people could turn to. I left the church at 18 over it, became an atheist by 19, and that's where I'm at now at 35.
That pulling levers in the basement furnace room wouldn't blow the house up. It wasn't until my 20s when it randomly popped into my head and I thought about it with my adult brain and was like "wait... Why would someone install something that would blow the house up?"
Not as such. But it also doesn't mean that it can't have catastrophic results.
Your water heater has an overpressure valve, but just one. A failure in that valve and a temperature regulator and you can have your hot water heater shooting up through your roof.
Your furnace has a control board. It turns the gas on, hits the igniter, watches for flame. An older, shittier designs, it was entirely possible for just one or two sensors to go bad and run the furnace to the point of melting down and have the house burned down. Source: happened to me on vacation many decades ago.
When I was being taken into surgery they told me we were going into space and gave me gas that they said was to breathe in space. I didn't realize I hadn't actually been to space until I was like eight years old or something like that. Probably older.
Grandma adopted a puppy when I was probably 8 or 9. It got parvo. I remember going to her house and asking where the puppy was. She told me that he was sick, so he had to stay outside and I couldn't go outside for the same reason. When I would ask where the puppy is, she would tell me that he's on the side of the house where I couldn't see him. This went on for a long time, I never saw the puppy again and eventually forgot about it entirely.
A decade or two later I found out that my grandma had spent thousands of dollars trying to keep that puppy alive, but parvo took it anyways. She was very upset about it's passing and instead of having me go through it too, she lied to me about it until I completely forgot about it.
Cancer didn't exist until the very modern age. Evolution is fake, a conspiracy. Jews are basically Christians who don't know if Jesus is the savior or not. I could keep going.
That gay and trans people are all disgusting perverts who hate me and want to destroy everything good. My queer friends provide more emotional support in a day than I ever got from my family, the church, or anyone else inside the Evangelical bubble I was raised in.
That people in "The World" (those outside the church) are all evil or unknowingly controlled by Satan and will always try to hurt me. Textbook cult programming from the people who were emotionally abusing me.
That God is speaking directly to me through a voice in my head, except when that voice says I'm a girl, then it's actually a demon or something. (It was likely undiagnosed DID as a result of childhood emotional neglect and repressed gender dysphoria.)
That scientists are all part of a massive satanic conspiracy to trick people into leaving the church.
Dungeons & Dragons being a satanic conspiracy. Satanic Panic stuff in general.
Lots of anti-evolution propaganda that turned out to be misrepresentations of science or complete fabrications.
That they actually believed in all that stuff Jesus said about loving thy neighbor, helping the poor and the sick, and being kind to immigrants, instead of spending their whole lives voting to hurt all of those people as much as possible.
Same here friend. But they were lies Their parents told them and so on and so on so it's understandable how they thought they were doing the right thing.
True dat but its fairly easy to see through that nonsense and realise your parents are idiots (at best), one of the trials of growing up. Assuming there are no repercussions for it, like death, banishmanet etc
“Ignore them and they’ll go away” really is rubbish advice. But that’s of course not to say that the only other step is violence.
My oldest daughter didn’t have a great time in secondary school (UK, age 11-16) but through persistent discussions and alarm raising to the school, the bullies eventually got the message and left her alone. I’m happy to say she’s having a wonderful time in college now (UK, age 16-18).
Unfortunately that's a minority of cases. Most bullies in my experience, and especially those bullies that are themselves using physical violence, only respond to violence.
Don't meet violence with violence as your first option. But keep it on the table. It's a viable solution if nothing else works. Some people just don't respond to anything short of getting punched in the mouth, especially kids/teens with their brain chemistry fucked six ways to Sunday by puberty.
Don't meet violence with violence as your first option. But keep it on the table.
Something something “speak softly but carry a big stick.”
Basically, pacifism without the capacity for violence is simply inviting abuse. If you don’t have the capacity for violence, pacifism isn’t a choice; It’s being forced upon you as a tool of oppression. In order to be used effectively, it must be a choice, which requires the threat of violence if pacifism fails.
Yep, I had a bully in elementary school and my mom tried to work with the system of teachers, principal, admin, etc. for months, and nothing at all was ever done about it.
Finally when the bullying escalated to physical levels and started to impact my personality outside of school, my parents basically told me that while I might still get in trouble at school, they wouldn't be upset with me at home if I did decide to stand up to the kid. They stressed to me the fine line between standing up for yourself and becoming a bully yourself, and sent me on my way.
A few days later, my bully found me at lunch and started messing with me. Pushing over my stack of booking, taking some food off my tray...I didn't do anything until he tried to push me out of my seat then it was kind of blurry, but basically I just took a swing at him and knocked him back out of his seat and he hit his head against the wall and started crying.
I did get in some trouble at school but nothing too bad (especially once Mom was called in and she explained how if they tried to suspend me, she'd put them on blast for how they'd ignored the situation for so long), and that kid was nice as pie to me for the rest of our schooling.
In middle school, I had an incident where a kid a grade above me (he was held back, so he should've been a high schooler by this point and was HUGE) began to mess with me, unprompted, at the end of the day.
He stepped on my shoes as we walked, poked me, called me names, etc. When I turned around and called him a bitch and kept walking, he sucker punched me and ran. It was so bad I ended up in the emergency room with stitches.
Anyways, my parents were called and they threatened legal action. The school begged them not to, because they were "going to take care of it, we promise." Once we found out he was only suspended for a week, my parents got all the info they needed to press charges for assault. He ended up in juvie.
Looking back, it's a shame he ended up "in the system," but that's what he gets for being a bitch. Lol
My father pulled that "just ignore it" shit, too. Somehow it wasn't the bully's fault for attacking me, it was my fault for being such an entertaining target.