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Show On Whom Do You Blame Your Sin? We were raised in the spirit of animism. To us, it meant that the only roacnn fnr Mine to church was they had tVVUVM - O lots of good candy and plenty of funny music. Happiness was listening to Tchaikovsky, and anger expressed itself in swearing at tables and chairs you bumped into. The Devil was now Hitler, now Stalin. God Lately, witch-hunting in this country has taken on a new form. It has become better organized, got itself deceptively mild names built around the theme of conservatism, and probably has begun a new era of mind-warping. Dr. Benjamin Spock, the famous pediatrician, pedi-atrician, warned last week that right-wing, right-wing, anti-Communist teaching in schools and homes will produce an unstable generation gen-eration easily induced into the mass hysteria of a super McCarthy era. Speaking before a group of Women Strike for Peace in Washington, D.C., Spock said American children are developing de-veloping hostilities "far greater than all the common tensions" of daily family life by being taught that "Communists are supernaturally clever and evil people who are likely to outwit us and destroy us." These views, he said, also crush the traditional childhood ideal that American self-confidence can cope with any situation situa-tion and with all kinds of people. These "right-wing distortions" will breed "wholesale suspiciousness of fellow Americans . . . which will make the McCarthy Mc-Carthy era pale by comparison." That set us back a few spells of gaiety. We could see litle children at school, refusing to play with some other little children because those would have "Communist" parents. And the children grew up scared out of their wits about doing anything "Communist". By that time, those daring enough to lead a sane, non-Redhunting life, would probably be ostracized to say the least. Whatever the right-wing thinks it is doing, it needs not take this country back to the 16th century with a new sin complex. The majority of people haven't got over the old one yet. In the words of Spock, Americans should realize that all the care and expense ex-pense they spend on raising healthy generations gen-erations of youngsters "can be wiped out unless (American youth) grow up to understand the world and to lead it." The animist would like to pray for that, but we don't know to whom. Animist was much harder to think of. Sin naturally was completely unknown. We were not too surprised then, when we read that Bertrand Russell thought the sin complex was one of the worst inventions of Christianity. Sin has been warping human minds for centuries. Sometimes it incited people to burn other people in the hope of going to heaven. Too many times it served as a pretext for preserving riduculous idiosyncrasies idio-syncrasies spawned from supposedly holy men, and bestowed upon a sin-crazy populace. |