They tell me that eventually one’s charity becomes so great that it extends even to one’s past self. President Holland is one example:
http://bit.ly/cvgnWm

Forgive me for a personal conclusion, which does not represent the terrible burdens so many of you carry but it is meant to be encouraging. Thirty years ago last month, a little family set out to cross the United States to attend graduate school—no money, an old car, every earthly possession they owned packed into less than half the space of the smallest U-Haul trailer available. Bidding their apprehensive parents farewell, they drove exactly 34 miles up the highway, at which point their beleaguered car erupted.

Yet in my mind’s eye, for just an instant, I thought perhaps I saw on that side road an old car with a devoted young wife and two little children making the best of a bad situation there. Just ahead of them I imagined that I saw a young fellow walking toward Kanarraville, with plenty of distance still ahead of him. His shoulders seemed to be slumping a little, the weight of a young father’s fear evident in his pace. In the scriptural phrase his hands did seem to “hang down.” 15 In that imaginary instant, I couldn’t help calling out to him: “Don’t give up, boy. Don’t you quit. You keep walking. You keep trying. There is help and happiness ahead—a lot of it—30 years of it now, and still counting. You keep your chin up. It will be all right in the end. Trust God and believe in good things to come.”

Have seen a situation that may fall into this category.

Certainly the man has every incentive to implant such an idea in the boy. I hasten to add that, while I consider all homosexual acts sinful, I do not make the mistake of thinking most homosexuals are pedophiles or of equating what goes on between consenting adults (however disordered) with child molestation.

I can disagree respectfully with ordinary homosexuals about the appropriateness of their sexual practices. I don’t think I could be respectful in a discussion with, say, a member of NAMBLA.

It’s a sad topic all around. Whether allegations are true or false, someone’s life is changed for the worse.

I would be very careful citing Kinsey. His conclusions about the sexual response of children may be correct, but remember that those he was interviewing were criminals with every reason to give a self-serving spin to their stories (“The kid liked it!”) and Kinsey did not generally interview the victims to get their side of the story.

That said, I once spent an exceedingly uncomfortable evening as a young Jedi-in-training eating dinner with a rather creepy family and then helping them prepare to move to a different state. You know how Jedi are always being called on to help ward members move. Among other things, the very young daughter … gosh, how does one say this in polite company? There isn’t a way. Suffice to say that her actions towards one of my fellow Padawans strongly suggested the creepy father was abusing his daughter. But we couldn’t, or wouldn’t, connect the dots. This was many decades ago and it was a different world then.

Not all victims of abuse go on to be promiscuous. Some become prudes. A few do both at the same time. I wish I could elaborate without violating confidentiality.

Don’t know if this was what you were alluding to, but the reason why Beck is not at all credible is not that her sisters are certain they were not themselves abused. It has to do with the family living arrangements, which made it physically impossible for the abuse Beck described to have taken place, and equally impossible for it to have gone unnoticed by others if it somehow had anyway.

A further complication in her case is that she was apparently molested by a neighbor boy, an occurrence the family became aware of very shortly afterwards, and not as a “recovered memory.” In real time, so to speak. Given what I know about the pliability of memory — it’s discussed in the original article — I find it easy to believe that Beck’s memories of the real incident with the neighbor boy were transferred onto her father, with some nudging from her therapist. The parallels with the case in the article are, in fact, quite striking. Except that Beck is still profiting from her allegations, and has not yet moved on to profiting from repudiating them.

When started young enough, or done gradually enough (ie, “grooming”), the victim may not know that what is going on is a bad thing. It may not be until years later that the child realizes that the “special secret” is a bad thing or that not all other children have that “special secret” with daddy or grandpa.

That’s a tactic: get the victim accustomed to it before they realize it’s a bad thing, then, when the victim finally realizes it’s wrong, they’re ashamed for not having said anything to anyone while it was going on, so they keep the secret.

Nambla’s “sex before 8 or it’s too late” is a summary of that idea.

What Kinsey found out from his interviews of child-molesters is that children can have a sexual response, and that child abusers generally knew it, and used it to their advantage.

That is one reason why child sex abuse victims go on to be very promiscuous in their teens. Not only do they (falsely) see it as a way of being loved and valued, they may already be addicted to the endorphins from sex.

This point was driven home by a story a friend told me. He married a divorcee who was physically beaten by her previous husband. Her previous husband had also sexually abused their daughter from an early age. I don’t remember how old the girl was when my friend married this woman, but he told me that at one point, the little girl climbed on his lap, cuddled up to him, and asked him to do what her father had previously done to her.

Next point: crafty adult abusers don’t abuse all the children who are available to them. They cultivate and build proper relationships with the majority so that they have character witnesses. So the case where only one of a man’s daughters claims to be sexually abused by the father should not be disregarded merely because the other daughters don’t make accusations.

A related item I would like to point out: whether or not something is of rare occurance generally has no bearing on whether or not it actually happened in a particular case.

Since the main thesis of outside influence convincing the mind of something opposite of what it knew has been illustrated, let’s not forget that the other side is equally plausible, and has been documented: adults convincing a child that they were _not_ molested when in fact they were. Example: the many centuries where children were branded as liars in the past, and whipped/beaten when they made accusations against Catholic priests.

Therefore, I would conclude that not all cases of recovered memories are false. Maybe some day psychiatry and other branches of medicine will be sophisticated enough to tell the difference. But for the time being, it seems that when the human mind is convinced of something, all metrics of measurement and observation from the outside are unable to distinguish fact from a non-factual belief.