Inattentional Blindness: Personal Jihad
Technorati Tags: Jihad,inattentional blindness,Personal terrorism,child discipline,Walid Shoebat
Moderate Muslims, we are told, consider jihad a personal struggle for spiritual purity.
Americans ignore the facts that over 100 references in the Koran refer to jihad as genocidal slaughter of unbelievers with only one quote referring to an internal struggle[1]. (Source: www.shoebat.com)
Muslim violence (jihad) supersedes peaceful contemplation in every country now ruled by Islam. Americans are too distracted, too comfortable, to pay attention while Islam gains a strategic foothold.
The American approach to Islam is a perfect example of inattentional blindness.[2]
Arien Mack and Irvin Rock, psychologists, first showed that people who were paying attention to something else in their line of sight were “blind” to something that was right before their eyes.
What does this mean for you?
Pay strict attention: your children’s lives depend upon your focused attention to discipline.
Consider your self discipline and their discipline plan.
While you are teaching your children Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, Muslim children learn lullabies and poems about flying body parts and rolling heads.
Here is an example:
“Sharpen my bones into swords, for I am a bomb, I shall eat the flesh of my (Israeli) occupier, O Killers, your blood is ‘Halal” for us, (meaning “kosher” or all right to spill)[3]
Oh, you say, “that’s not me. I’m aware of everything: I’m plugged into news 24/7. I know what is a threat to my family.”
U. Neisser, D. Simons, and C. Chabris, experimented with viewers watching a film. Viewers were focused on counting how many times a basketball was passed from one team member to another, while someone walked through the scene wearing a gorilla suit.
A surprisingly large percentage of subjects did not notice something as obvious as a person in a gorilla suit moving through the scene they were observing, if they are paying attention to something else. (Several examples of these experiments can be viewed on the Visual Cognition Lab page of the University of Illinois.)
Every country in history which has fallen has done so because of failure to perceive a threat.
Let’s look at some brief lessons in military history, you can research further through Wikipedia:
1. Carthage - fell after this city-state’s council failed to recognize the threat Rome posed. They allowed Hannibal’s victory over Rome to slip away simply by not reinforcing Hannibal when he had the upper hand.
2. Rome - many theories here, most show the failure to recognize a threat either from within or outside Rome itself.
3. Greece - the most famous lesson of recognizing a threat was told in the recently fictionalized movie 300. Recognizing the threat where his countrymen did not, Spartan King Leonidas led a personal bodyguard of 300 Spartans to hold a strategic thoroughfare named Thermopylae.
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300 by Frank Miller, Lynn Varley Read more about this book… |
4. Persia - failing to recognize Alexander the Great’s tactics as a threat the entire Persian empire was captured by this young Greek king.
Back to the present
“All four major Islamic schools of thought agree that jihad is not merely a personal struggle, but a call to wage war on the infidels by all means possible: giving money and recruiting and training people are also means of jihad.”[4]
It is not only your Christian faith at risk when you’re not looking. It is your life and the lives of your children.
Discipline is not just for kids. It is for you, the adult, first.
Do you “relax” for hours after work with flickering pictures and telephone chatter? Do you understand that you are being hypnotized into a passive, shallow thought pattern?
Print media requires more logic from you. (See “Twilight of the Books, by Caleb Crain, The new Yorker, December 24 and 31, 2007)
Are you really going to study this, or will you dance past these issues into your chocolate paradise of brain fog?
Do you feel uncomfortable when someone needs to be confronted with facts? Like Pilate when he confronted Jesus, do you wonder, “What is truth?” Have you found ways to learn and grow smarter your whole life, or are you stuck in a high school low effort mentality?
Before you can discipline and teach your children, you must have a plan. Stress Free Discipline provides a tots-to-teens plan for life skill mastery and lifelong family teamwork.
What’s a parent to do?
To begin: I suggest you need to simplify your life and read more, with and for your children. Restrict the phone calls, the ipod, the wireless flood of distractions which pacify but do not satisfy your mind. See the tech junkie quiz at rd.com/tech.
Right now a flood of raw data makes you anxious because you cannot use it all or digest it, but you keep trying. Distractions, as good as they may be, may be a real threat to your thought life.
Inattentional blindness can kill you. Pay attention. Read up. Prioritize.
[1] Why I Left Jihad, Walid Shoebat, Top Executive Media, 2005, ISBN 0-9771021-1-4, p. 36[2] http://www.skepdic.com/inattentionalblindness.html [3] Ibid, p 20[4] Ibid, p.96
Brain-pong #1: Parent Discipline
As manager of a senior apartment complex, I learn a lot about the pressures, perks and pitfalls of aging.
One resident, call her Mary, has focused for years on life according to her feelings. She dwells on her son’s murder, her husband’s infidelity, T.V. and slurs, imagined or real, on her heritage. The bipolar critic who lives downstairs has added to years of unforgiveness, swelling Mary’s bag of complaints. Mary drops that bag on anyone sympathetic enough to stay in range.
Victim-hood for Mary has become a comfortable cloak for reality. For half of my 64 years I created my own reality like that.
At U.C. Berkeley I majored in fiction and creative writing while getting my degree. Picture Berkeley in the 60’s: the Vietnam War, Student Rights, Free Speech, Kennedy’s assassination. To that heady brew I added Buddhism, self-hypnosis, automatic writing, Transcendental Meditation. Did you know that if you are adept at T.M. you can levitate?
My liberal friends and I felt that a group of loving people with our intelligence could resolve the world’s problems. Our parents had been too materialistic, unaware, uneducated. People were, after all, basically good.
It was only a matter of culture—American culture—that enslaved their spirits. Not a Christian at that time, I felt that Christianity was just a mythical crutch to make weak people feel better.
Generosity and service to others would shore up the life style and attitudes of those downtrodden unfortunates who were victimized by our culture.
Hiring quotas, pay equalization, more welfare and social engineering were our answers when my peers and I wore the power hat.
Teaching, my profession, progressed during the 19 years I was in it through a series of stages.
Grades were a problem.
The military and business worlds needed some useful kind of sorting device to categorize high school graduates so they could do their jobs: defend our country and raise the bottom line for shareholders. They needed some sort of predictability.
But grades were a big problem. Grades discriminated between educable mentally retarded and high level thinkers.
People FELT bad when they were labeled with a grade, and they aimed lower in life. They got depressed and discouraged.
Grades pounded the life out of a person’s self image and thus their future. No caring educator wants to do that.
Coursework and in-service education for teachers stressed solutions to self-worth problems in order to bring teachers into an enlightened interaction with students. Sarcasm, negative body language and other destructive baggage were rightfully removed from the student-teacher relationship.
However, drop-out rates, drug use and teen suicide kept climbing. It did not compute.
Schools were not making a positive difference. More administrators were added in order to help teachers do their job. Curriculum gurus lowered P.E. requirements and dropped art, music and vocational education in favor of academics.
After all, academics were high status and status made students feel good. Everyone ought to be able to attend college, gaining high status and bigger pay, if they so desired. Even my remedial fisherman in Alaska, who could not grasp basic concepts of Senior Economics, had to be dragged through the course with incredible accommodations, hints and outright answers to every test question. The Special Education teacher saw to that.
Nobody was left out: an excellent fisherman had to get a diploma just like everyone else. His goal was to be an attorney. His true inability and our failure to be truthful doomed him to years of fruitless accommodation until the Bar Exam truthfully rejected him. Did we do him a favor by eliminating realistic boundaries?
Reality and truth were not our objectives as educators.
Our questions given any choice were not “Is it true? Is it right?” but “Can we make it work? How will it feel?” Feeling good about your self was the objective.
However, drop-out rates, drug use and teen suicide have kept climbing.
Our true levels of practical life skills such as Math, English, and Science have dropped dangerously in relation to students around the world at the same age and stage.
Our students cannot compete in a global marketplace where "feel good" has no place. Furthermore, we now find that false self esteem is tied to school shootings, low productiion and skyrocketing divorce.
America has done such a good job of shoring up self image that unrealistic expectations rule the home, schools and workplace. Feelings have gained control of thinking: they play ping-pong with the brain.
Mary was so disturbed by her feelings that she became more and more unhappy. Finally her unhappiness threatened her ability to remain in an independent living apartment. The "brain-pong" had to stop. Mary accepted the county’s offer of counseling and has changed her attitude.
What Mary, educators and I did not realize was that feelings are the culprit. Emotions in the driver’s seat cause life wreckage. The brain-pong has to stop before the damage is permanent.
Christianity has become for me a standard for measuring truth about our selves. We are born greedy and selfish, and only the Lord’s input can made us generous, unselfish and happy. What do you know!
In giving, we receive. In loving we become beloved. In submission to Christ we become powerful.
Dissolving Negative Peer Pressure
Our Culture: Paris Hilton. Pro Wrestling and Steroids. Lindsay Lohan.
It’s an unfortunate fact of life that uncooperative, sometimes hostile, bored, disinterested behavior is catching. Sometimes it can get so bad that desperate parents feel they must resort to outside sources in order to break the cycle. From Teen Options Blog:
Military teen boot camps are known for their no nonsense approach to dealing with out-of-control-teens. In many cases, boot camps are the right solution for a teen teetering on the edge of a full blown discipline problem and likely only needs a wake-up call.
Negative children, especially teens, appear to have dropped their lifelong love for you and your values in favor of something which makes all their problems worse. They may be very good or very poor students. They not only disconnect with you but with most of their peers at school.
They may be gang “wannabes.”
For Parents Fighting Gang Involvement
You may feel intimidated, confused, rejected, helpless and angry. How could they do this to you? Their gang seems all powerful. You feel weak. If you are facing a tag team within your own family they will support each other behind your back, sharing and negating everything you say. Suddenly your influence is nil. Years of effort are gone—useless. Don’t believe it.
Your child, your gift from God, is in that gang because of a need. It may be a need for power, influence, achievement, status. A negative group may help your child escape from the pain of social failure with more positive people.
If relationships outside the negative group improve, your child may prefer to leave the negative status or power group.
Peer Pressure Analysis and Combat
Study recent events which reinforce or cause the negative turn. Does Negative Ned need active listening? Do you need information? Are there biochemical causes? Is this evidence of physical growing pains?
Go into computer mode in your head: feelings are your enemy. They push you into adrenalin-driven rejection of others and stupid choices of correction. Deep breathing is essential to your health.
Pinpoint precise wrong behavior and the consequences. Deal proactively with wrong choices. Impose immediate consequences every time the wrong choice occurs. This is simple (not easy) with Stress Free Discipline. Do not attack group membership or make awful generalizations about the future.
Stay specific and impersonal in spite of their identity with poor choices. Never let them see you sweat. After all, you plus God are a majority. You have taken this to Him, right? Offer a positive course of action after prayer, Godly counsel and lots of active listening.
Stress Free Discipline can fill your child’s needs to be assertive, to have influence and to achieve. You cannot force your child to choose the positive action, but it is really hard to keep up the negative one when you show a willingness to open up, listen, and investigate mutual solutions.
Have you been withholding personal power development by not allowing your child to make some choices? We all learn by wrong ones, within reason. Remember that over-protective parenting is disastrous to personal growth. At the same time, do not let your child work together with a negative peer. Keep your contacts positive ones. I moved into a different town to remove my pre-teens from negative influences. Above all, don’t nag.
Christian Steps
Have you provided a Home Fellowship group which is real, available, and interested in your child? Your child will be more likely to leave the negative peer group if his or her need for status can be filled in a positive, God centered way. You don’t need to be watering the seeds of Truth if your child prefers to connect with a personality unlike yours. Make ways to provide that.
Negativity is so fatiguing and self-defeating your child will gradually begin to desire the relief of real, positive relationships. People usually act in line with the expectations of others.
