28. Getting punchy

(Post 28 of 33 in my 16-hour shift for the Secular Student Alliance Blogathon.)

9:30 pm EDT

Starting to look like Jerry Lewis at the end of the telethon. Becca just came into the office, saw my red-rimmed eyes, and insisted on dragging me away from the computer for a walk around the block. A perfect Georgia summer night, wet from a full day’s rain, full of the sound of crickets.

Hey, a thing: Several people have expressed concern that this or that post today will be buried in the blogathoning and be missed by a lot of readers. Very nice to hear that some of them have hit the mark. My plan is to pull out a dozen or so and repost them gradually over the next few months, in among the newbies. But first I’m taking two weeks off, dammit.

Yes, this counts as a post. Donate to SSA!

27. My disappearing kids

(Post 27 of 33 in my 16-hour shift for the Secular Student Alliance Blogathon.)

9:00 pm EDT

Some MoL readers have noticed that there aren’t as many stories about my kids on the blog as there once were. It’s not your imagination.

Two good reasons for this. The first is that they are older now, including two teenagers, and I’m more aware of the need to protect their personal privacy. Now, whenever I do want to share something that happened to them, as I did two weeks ago, I ask if it’s OK first. Usually it is, but sometimes they’d rather I didn’t. And sometimes it’s obvious that I shouldn’t even ask. You’ve missed out on a thing or two that might have been useful, but there was no question about sharing it.

The second reason for their lower appearance rate is that so many of the issues related to secular parenting that were in the fore when they were younger are now in the past. We’ve been through religious literacy in a dozen ways; we’ve explored and experienced death together; they’ve collided with other worldviews and figured out how to communicate across lines of difference; we’ve ironed out most of the extended family dynamics that needed ironing. There’s certainly more ahead, and you’ll hear about it when it’s appropriate. But it’ll never be as much as it was.

My feeling at this stage of parenting is one of deep contentment. Things have gone really well. All three kids are deeply good, smart, compassionate and unique. Like Billy Joel after he married Christie Brinkley and started writing crap like “Uptown Girl,” I sometimes worry that my equanimity won’t fire the forge quite as much as my earlier struggles did.

Whatever. I’m a big fan of equanimity. I’m also a big fan of writing and of parenting. My guess is I’ll find more to say.

26. More than we can handle

(Post 26 of 33 in my 16-hour shift for the Secular Student Alliance Blogathon.)

8:30 pm EDT

Q: I would like to know a Humanist version of the formerly comforting idea of “god doesn’t give us more than we can handle”. I have seem to hit a streak of challenging circumstances and am having trouble finding comfort in the thought that “everything is random and we have little to no control over what happens in our lives”. Any good Humanist ideas for getting someone though a tough spot and back into a positive mentality?

A: I’m so sorry to hear about your challenging circumstances. I can’t offer a humanist alternative to “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle,” and good riddance to it. It’s a shameful lie, and you don’t need that. Those who died at Auschwitz were given more than they could handle, and people every day, all around the world, suffer the same fate.

Fortunately “everything is random and we have little to no control over what happens in our lives” is also untrue. The history of humanity, especially in the 400 years since the Scientific Revolution, has been a gradual recognition that the world is neither divinely controlled nor is it random, and that mastering the patterns and gathering our resources around us can provide a greater sense of comfort, control, and satisfaction than passively hoping for God’s protection ever did.

The humanist response is to turn to other humans. All the support, protection, and encouragement we’ve ever had, including all that was credited to God all these years, has come from ourselves, especially the people around you who love and care for you. Don’t be afraid to ask.

25. Music to say bye-bye by

(Post 25 of 33 in my 16-hour shift for the Secular Student Alliance Blogathon.)

8:00 pm EDT

Hey, it’s your funeral again. Your family and friend are gathered in an appropriately non-liturgical setting.  This is your last chance to inflict your will on a captive audience.  You’re clasping your hands in anticipation.  There will be readings, poetry, maybe even a nice thing said by a loved one or two. Tears will be shed, since you died at the height of pollen season. A couple of singles will hook up — one of those circle-of-life things.

Your spouse and his/her date are there, looking at their watches. Your children are lined up in the front pew, grumbling about their grandchildren’s complete inability to control their grandchildren, who are running around the pew chasing after their own damn kids. Then, at last, the music begins.

So…what is it?

I’ve been a musician of one sort or another since I was ten, so when it comes to selecting music for an important event, the pressure is on. I picked the music for our wedding, and it worked, we’re still married. But what should I ask to have played at my funeral to be sure I stay dead?

If the idea is to somehow capture what I was all about and what I loved about being in the world for a while, the Gounod Ave Maria, while achingly lovely, won’t do. But I go back and forth on what will do. I need to put some thought into the music selection so my wife can spend the three days after my demise on eHarmony.com instead of my iTunes.

But first I want to hear your ideas. What do you want played at your funeral?

(By the way, as promised, this post has been written completely naked. Go back and see if you can tell. Then donate a lot of money to SSA, I’m out of gimmicks.)

24. Just say it

(Post 24 of 33 in my 16-hour shift for the Secular Student Alliance Blogathon.)

7:30 pm EDT

One of the challenges in Voices of Unbelief was the publishers desire (and a good one it is) to create an anthology of atheists and agnostics only — no heretics, no deists, no pantheists. So much for Jefferson, Paine, Voltaire, Einstein — probably half of the usual suspects in these anthologies. But that’s good, it gives it a really distinctive voice overall.

The challenge was made greater by the never-ending effort throughout history to disguise atheism, especially if the person in question was a good guy. If a person is described as “not very religious,” you might think that means “church every other Sunday,” when in fact it usually denotes an outright secular worldview, i.e. NOT RELIGIOUS.

One reference described Nietzsche as “skeptical of religion.” Nietzsche, skeptical? He killed God, for chrissakes! It’s like saying the U.S. killed Bin Laden because we were skeptical of al Qaeda.

So I finish my work day and settle down in bed to read Just My Type: A Book About Fonts by Simon Garfield. Interesting book, learned a lot. And then I see John Baskerville (designer of the famous “John” font) described as “suspicious of religion.”

And what exactly the hell does it mean to be “suspicious of religion”? Whenever cookies went missing, he’d shoot a hard look at Buddha?

John Baskerville was not “suspicious of religion.” John Baskerville was an atheist. He went so far as to insist that his body be buried in unconsecrated ground, in his garden, under this epitaph:

Stranger
Beneath this cone in unconsecrated ground
a friend to the liberties of mankind
directed his body to be inhumed.
May the example contribute to emancipate thy mind
from the idle fears and superstitions
and wicked arts of priesthood.

Suspicious my eye. John Baskerville was an atheist.

23. Maturity

(Post 23 of 33 in my 16-hour shift for the Secular Student Alliance Blogathon.)

7:00 pm EDT

One of the most remarkable spots in Julia Sweeney’s Letting Go of God is near the end, as she feels herself crossing that line between the will to believe and the will to find out:

One day, as I was Cometing out my bathtub, I thought, “What if it’s true? What if humans are here because of pure random chance? What if there is no guiding hand, no external regulation, no one watching? It is clearly possible that this may be true. In fact this is what our scientific evidence is pointing towards. But if it were true, what would that mean?”

I had spent so much time thinking about what God meant, that I hadn’t really spent any time thinking about what not-God meant. A few days later, as I was walking from my office in my backyard into my house, I realized there was this little teeny-weenie voice whispering in my head. I’m not sure how long it had been there, but it suddenly got just one decibel louder. It whispered, “There is no God.”

And I tried to ignore it. But it got a teeny bit louder. “There is no God. There is no God. Oh my God, there is no God!”

I sat down in my backyard under my barren apricot tree. (I didn’t know trees were like people, they stop reproducing after they get old. Maybe that barren fig tree that Jesus condemned to death was just menopausal.) Anyway, I sat down and thought, “Okay. I admit it. I do not believe there is enough evidence to continue to believe in God. The world behaves exactly as you would expect it would, if there were no Supreme Being, no Supreme Consciousness, and no supernatural. My best judgment tells me that it’s much more likely that we invented God, rather than God inventing us.”

She momentarily struggles with the implications, then has a realization about maturity that I’d never thought of in quite this way:

And I shuddered. I felt I was slipping off the raft.

And then I thought, “But I can’t! I don’t know if I CAN not believe in God! I need God. I mean we have a history together.”

But then I thought, “Wait a minute. If you look over my life, every step of maturing for me, every single one, had the same common denominator. It was accepting what was true over what I wished were true. This was the case about guys, about my career, about my parents.

So how can I come up against this biggest question, the ultimate question, “Do I really believe in a personal God, and then turn away from the evidence? How can I believe, just because I want to? How will I have any respect for myself if I did that?

It goes on in a brilliant cascade as she wonders how the Earth stays up in the sky, realizes Hitler got off without a final judgment, and proceeds to (as she puts it) kill off everyone she knew who had died, before finally showing God, who she sees as a tired old man, gently to the door. It’s an extraordinary metamorphosis. And it’s all made possible by her decision to accept what is true over what she wishes were true. We can prepare the landing place, we can encourage them — great word, en-courage — but ultimately it’s a decision that every person has to come to on her own.

22. The will to find out

(Post 22 of 33 in my 16-hour shift for the Secular Student Alliance Blogathon.)

6:30 pm EDT

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.
Bertrand Russell

I make the point in PBB and again every Christmas that doing Santa the right way, with a light touch, can be a perfect critical thinking dry run for thinking about religion. But there’s a secondary point I think is especially fascinating and useful in drawing out the parallels — what Russell calls the difference between the will to believe and the will to find out.

When kids begin to wonder about Santa, they first wonder around the edges, not at the heart. Their desire to believe still trumps their desire to find out, and even the brightest kids will often accept the most ludicrous, spit-and-sealing-wax answers to how the reindeer fly or how Santa manages the global transit in a night and skip happily away to play. Eventually they cross that Rubicon into the will to find out. They ask the question right at the heart, and the myth falls apart.

The same thing happens with belief in God. Initial questions are around the edges (“Why does God allow evil?”, “How can God be everywhere?”), to which ministers and theologians have constructed answers that are (to those of us in post-transition) transparently of spit-and-sealing-wax. And the person whose will to believe is still stronger than the will to find out will skip happily away to play.

Because the promised consequences of disbelief are so unthinkable, many never cross that Rubicon, and all the shouting and exasperation and argumentation we can muster will fall, more often than not, on deaf ears.

A big part of the solution is creating a clear, satisfying place to stand on the other side of the question — a world of nonbelievers in which the gifts still arrive, and the dire consequences of questioning the Man Behind the Curtain are seen for what they are.

20. In which I rival Dan Barker for Christmas cred

(Post 20 of 33 in my 16-hour shift for the Secular Student Alliance Blogathon.)

5:30 pm EDT

You know that Dan Barker is the composer of two children’s Christmas musicals, yes? Well I have a holiday secret my own self.

About 12 years ago, a Christmas carol of mine called The Snickelways of York (I used to be a composer, please keep up, geez) was a national finalist in a competition sponsored by the American Composers Forum. It’s published by Hal Leonard and usually gets itself sung somewhere in the world every Christmas. From the publisher’s site:

For a winter or Christmas concert, this humorous tale follows the travails of a Yorkshireman as he tries to hurry home on Christmas Eve. An unwise shortcut leads him through the alleyways of York, on a trip around the world, and finally, a meeting with St. Nick himself. For high school through adult choirs, this “breathless, rollicking 6/8,” a cappella journey includes whistling and onomatopoeia to add to the fun.

It’s one of the few things I ever wrote that I still like. It’s not easy, but it’s funny and fun if the group is up to it. Any choir directors out there wanna tackle it? If you do, record it for me. I haven’t heard it in years.

18. First steps

(Post 18 of 33 in my 16-hour shift for the Secular Student Alliance Blogathon.)

4:30 pm EDT

Several readers have asked, in various ways, how you can get your child started down the path to critical thinking as a lifelong value.

In the earliest years, I think it comes down to one thing — curiosity. Raise a child who is genuinely curious about the world (what I’ve also called the unconditional love of reality) and s/he will develop a distaste for self-deception. And there’s no better definition for critical thinking than “the systematic attempt to avoid self-deception.”