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Creating Frameworks

Interesting concept that the brain creates religion and the religious experience whatever form it takes boosts serotonin levels which is a state a person will want to return to. My friend R is one of those moms that likes to use religion as a framework to raise her kid- nothing unusual about it. It can be argued that is one of the most practical uses of religion - to give a young person guardrails to protect themselves when they are out in the world, tempted to do things that will harm them and have long-term if not irreversible consequences. The parent will not always be there to help the child decisions many of which are made in real-time. 

The idea is to have the boundaries so well defined that they would naturally stop when they bump into them and disaster is averted even when the parent was not available for consultation. This is the approach my mother took with me and is not at all uncommon for parents in India. From personal experience it served me well in many instances but sometimes it was a great disservice - there is no perfect framework. I decided to allow J come to religion in her own time in her own way and limited my efforts to living a life by moral standards I was raised on. I hoped that would serve her better than me "preaching" how to be. I made many adaptations to give her the opportunity to think for herself instead of providing a prescription. The challenge is the child is often too young to do the level of thinking needed and have no life experience to pull from. So the outcomes are not what you would want or expect.

As in my case, the results have been mixed for her - approach is not ideal either. Fabrication of the brain or not, there is a use for religion but to use it optimally for the circumstances is no easy feat, specially that each parent-child combination is different and there is no universal solution that works in all contexts. 

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