Trees of Knowledge

In response to Caryn: Full post here
Caryn noted that trees often appear in many stories and they always represent knowledge.

I wonder how much of that comes from the fact that trees have incredible life spans. When you mentioned Legend of Zelda, I instantly became more interested. The Great Deku tree in that games was one of the first living organisms created, and as such, has obtained a vast amount of knowledge. If I remember correctly, the great deku tree was based off of Jomon Sugi, a tree whose age is estimated to be between two and seven thousand years old. Additionally, there are many other tree's that have incredible ages, like the Methuselah tree in California (named after Methuselah from the bible). There is also a clonal colony of Aspens which has been  determined to be part of the same organism. OECD estimates that it's roots are upwards of 75,000 years old. With age comes knowledge, I suppose.

Also, it's pretty strange that religions like Christianity and Zoroastrianism deal out punishment for becoming knowledgeable. From the very beginning, it appears, these religions don't want anybody to know anything.

Teaching Independence - Hold My Hand

What does it mean to teach? What does it mean to learn? When I've learned something, or learned how to do something, it means that independent of other people. I suppose, by that definition, to teach means to guide someone so that they can eventually do something for themselves. To teach is to teach independence. I can imagine then, that the best scenario is that the teacher promotes independence, and the student seeks it. The worst would be that neither promotes or seeks independence. I was reflecting on this earlier this week while observing a teacher whom I would not consider good, trying to teach a student whom I would not consider good. Later I was told that the teacher was teaching well, I disagreed. The teacher was essentially leading a blindfolded child, by the hand, across a street and congratulating him for having succeeded in crossing it. The student, essentially the blindfolded child smiled because he had accomplished something even though he didn't know what he did or how he did it.

This happens often in Christianity, I think; though I don't know much about the frequency of such in other religions, I can imagine it's fairly frequent. They claim the lord has taught them something but then continue to pray for guidance in the same situation, they are convinced that god has helped them/will help them, so they rush blindly into a situation. If the situation works out favorably, they get happy and proud. They need to be lead by the hand and told how to live. After all, without god and government, who will tell us what to do?