A good idea is sometimes described as a “brain child”. Such an “offspring” often has more time and money devoted to it than a real child. If the person who produces a “brain child”, and spends a lot of time and effort on it, light bulbs may illuminate the world. Or, a new kind of electrical generating device. Squirt guns, swim fins, typewriters, computers, and every other product that we use was, at one time, someone’s “brain child”.
We see how important a contribution such things make to our lives by how often we use them and how important they are to our own lives and careers. Complicated “brain children”, like artificial hearts, have many fathers.
Some ideas are bad. The person who came up with the idea of the guillotine helped to cause lots of deaths, as did those who came up with various poison gases, iuds, and abortion inducers. These “brain children” are monsters.
Ideas, in and of themselves, are children of human minds. The ideas transmitted through The Church are helpful to all concerned. Other ideas are hurtful, and cause destruction, monstrous in their effects. We see in the recent exposure of fraud in the Global Warming “Problem” that some ideas are twisted things that lead others farther from the truth.
An idea that changes the way people think and act may be compared to a living being. Ideas that lead people to God, love, and truth are, in a way, angelic beings. Those that encourage others to nothingness, hate, and lies are demonic in their nature. As they spread through minds, the corruption that they are keeps people away from God, truth, and love. Such ideas include communism, unrestrained capitalism, manic environmentalism, and all forms of population control.
We may use Kant’s “Categorical Imperative” to judge whether “brain children” are good or bad. “If everyone did this, would we be better off?” Utterly heartless cultures used to expose their babies, putting them outside after they were born. If they survived the night, despite cold, dogs, and their infant weakness, they might be brought into the family.
Brain children should be exposed to the harsh criticism of the world so that those which are harmful may not be allowed to infect the rest of us. As it is, only those ideas that encourage belief, love, and truth are so exposed. The others are protected in an artificial bubble, maintained at great expense. Upon its inevitable bursting, much harm is found to have been done.
