|
Ironically, the Catholic doctrine considers the age of 7 as "the age of reason", which in effect means that the child would be conditioned enough by the prevailing reality/morality descriptions to be able to differentiate the nominal "right & wrong" behaviors in that culture. Some mystics claim to have gone beyond reason, which historically may have put many of them at odds with the dominant culture's protocols in that regard -- the same cultures habitually rhapsodizing on the innocence of little ones. This is cognitive dissonance, a commonly shared malady of the perceptual/interpretive mechanism.
|