7. Hey…it’s your funeral
(Post 7 of 33 in my 16-hour shift for the Secular Student Alliance Blogathon.)
11:00 am EDT
Speaking of death — if you are anything but conventionally religious, and you love your family in the least, write down your funeral plans in detail.
I know what you’re saying — “Hey, what do I care, I’ll be dead and gone!” This is not about you. You will indeed be as demised as a Norwegian Blue. And it’s not even about sending a “message to the world” about dying without illusions. It’s about the loved ones you’ll leave behind.
When a person with a relatively conventional religious identity dies, there are plenty of decisions to be made by the family. But they are largely a matter of coloring within existing lines — which hymns will be sung, which Bible verses will be said, which church cemetery will receive the remains. If you diverge from a conventional identity and have not made your wishes known, your death can leave your family utterly without lines and uncertain even of which colors to reach for. They want to honor your wishes, but they don’t know how, and you will have thrown them into this situation in the midst of their grief at your loss. Guilt and confusion are not helpful additives to grief.
So right now, this week, even if you aren’t sure what you want, slap something together. Burn some songs on a CD, write down a few instructions, print out some nice readings, and put them where they can be easily found. THEN, once this basic emotional safety net is in place, refine and adjust it until you’ve created the kind of event you’d like to have. They will be grateful for it.
(Have you donated a few coppers to SSA yet? That’s what this is all about. The sidebar widget awaits.)
6. Dying
(Post 6 of 33 in my 16-hour shift for the Secular Student Alliance Blogathon.)
10:30 am EDT
Several friends have asked that I address talking to kids about death. This is an enormous topic, but I’ll touch on some key points.
I’ve received several emails over the years that are variations on this theme: A secular parent tells me his or her child, often age 4-5, sometimes older, is about to lose an especially beloved grandparent, and “I’m not sure how to handle it — we’ve never really talked about death.”
Step 1. Build a time machine.
Okay, that’s not helpful, unless you have Steve Hawking and John Frink as Facebook friends. But ideally you will have prepared your kids for years by talking about death in natural, unforced ways, from the dead bird in the backyard to walks in cemeteries to books (like Charlotte’s Web) and movies (like Tuck Everlasting). Call it mortality literacy.
Despite popular wisdom, kids are often better able than adults to handle the discussion, in part because their grasp of death is not yet fully concrete. The facts that death is universal (i.e. applies to every living thing) and final are realizations that only gradually take hold. The window before they do is an opportunity to ease your child forward in coming to grips with our most difficult reality.
When talking about comforting a grieving child, mainstream grief experts generally discuss religious consolations in a slightly cursory and sometimes even embarrassed way. After offering solid, research-based suggestions, they typically tack on a coda, like, “Depending on your family’s religious tradition, you may wish to explain a person’s death to your children in terms of God’s will or an afterlife. But be aware that such statements as ‘she went to be with Jesus’ can lead to feelings of confusion and abandonment, while ‘God took her to be with him’ can cause feelings of anger followed by guilt and fear.’” Worst of all is any suggestion that the child should NOT be sad (“You should be happy! She’s with Jesus now”) which invalidates the child’s natural grief. Bad thing.
I remember well-meaning people saying that to me when my dad died. I was 13, and I wanted to kill them. (I didn’t do it.)
Some general guidelines for helping kids deal with the loss of a loved one:
Be honest. Don’t pretend that it isn’t one of the most difficult events of their lives. Validate their pain and grief. Tell the child it is not just “okay” to be sad, it’s good. The sadness honors the person who died, showing that she loved her very much, and expresses real feelings.
Share your own emotions. Keeping a stiff upper lip in front of the kids is no help whatsoever for a grieving child. Let her know that you are grieving too—or better yet, show it.
Be patient. There’s no healthy or effective way to rush a grief process.
Listen. Invite the child to share what she is feeling if she wants to. If not, respect her silence.
Reassure. You can’t bring back the deceased person or pretend he or she is somewhere else. But you can and should do everything possible to make the child feel personally safe, loved, and cared for.
Keep the loved one alive in memory. The sudden absence of someone who died is the most painful part of it. Avoiding the person’s name or not talking about him/her can make that sense of absence much worse. Share memories of the person and use her name. If tears come, remember that the goal is not to avoid sadness, but to help the child work through the intense grief. Let her be the one to tell you if a conversation is too painful.
Great resource: Maria Trozzi’s Talking With Children About Loss.
There’s more, but I’m out of time! Donate to SSA in the sidebar!
5. Killing
(Post 5 of 33 in my 16-hour shift for the Secular Student Alliance Blogathon.)
10:00 am EDT
When I saw the photo above, it made me deliriously happy. It probably makes you happy too. For the full effect, click to enlarge it. Go on, I’ll wait.
…
Mirror neurons are partly responsible for our reaction — monkey see happy, monkey be happy. But I have an added reason to like it: these fine people are responding to something I said. Something I said made them all feel like that.
It was at the Freethought Festival in Madison a few weeks back, and the line that slew them so nicely is also found in this blog post from 2008. What makes me happiest of all is that I was making an actual point at the time — not just killing, but educating them as they die. It’s my favorite mix. So I’m only mildly ashamed to admit that this photo is now my computer desktop. The big-ass version.
One of the most perfect moments in Julia Sweeney’s stage show Letting Go of God captures the (literally) intoxicating thrill of getting a spontaneous laugh in real time:
All of our brains are on drugs all of the time. We give ourselves hits: dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and vasopressin. The next time all of you laugh, I’ll get a hit of adrenaline through my veins, and if you don’t when I expect you to, I’ll get cortisol instead and I’ll feel anxious.
I always thought I was a person in my family who escaped addictions, but now I realize that I am up here on this stage right now partly because… I am an addict. [Audience chuckles.] Ooh, thanks. [Big laugh.] Oooooo!!!! [Insanely big laugh]
I started my writing career 11 years ago with a satirical novel and followed it up with another. When I started my blog in 2007, I tried to keep weaving comedy and education together, and I did pretty well a lot of the time.
Then in 2009, I started Foundation Beyond Belief. Running a charitable organization that’s trying to make the world a better place and give humanists a positive way to express their worldview is incredibly satisfying. I can’t begin to describe how much. But it’s also pretty earnest work.
When you’re writing to entertain, you run each word and sentence through a quick filter — How can I make that funnier? But for most of the projects I’ve done in the last three years, including the Foundation and Voices of Unbelief, my filter has been set to a nearly opposite setting: How can I make that clearer?
Humor introduces ambiguity and plays with it. As often as not, it looks for a less clear way to say something, and the ambiguity opens the laugh. Clarity is the kryptonite of humor. So it’s not surprising that I’ve recently started to feel the funny part of my brain atrophying. And not just on the page — I’m not even as silly in real life as I was a few years ago. That’s begun to feel like a real loss.
Then something terrific happened. A project has come along, out of the relative blue, that doesn’t just allow the combination of humor and education I love but demands it. And sure enough, since I’ve been working on it, I can feel this part of my brain coming out to play again. It’s the best thing that’s happened to my head in long time.
I’ll announce the project when I start getting a hint that somebody is out there and awake with me this morning! Time to break the silence, you lurkers. Note that I’ve added FB comments as an option.
4. The first blogger
(Post 4 of 33 in my 16-hour shift for the Secular Student Alliance Blogathon.)
9:30 am EDT
I can’t believe it’s been almost five years since I last mentioned my favorite blog: “The Essays of Montaigne.”
Don’t Google it. This blog was created in the 16th century when French nobleman Michel de Montaigne decided to write down his thoughts on whatever popped into his head. If that isn’t a blog, I don’t know what is.
Fortunately a lot of worthwhile things popped into that head, like the nature of greatness, human vanity, lies, laziness, thumbs, birth defects, the passing of gas (and the closely-related topic of smells), anger, cruelty, cannibals, laughter, solitude, drunkenness, and how it could be that children resemble their fathers. And death. He wrote a lot about death.
But these weren’t abstract essays. Montaigne’s goal was to describe human life with absolute honesty, and he ties each Essay into his own life and the lives of those around him in a way that makes the reader bolt upright in recognition again and again. There’s something so unique and incredible about hearing 400-year-old thoughts so close to my own. The most common reader reaction seems to be, “OMG, he’s talking about my life. It seems like it was written yesterday.”
If you haven’t read Montaigne, get a good translation — the Penguin edition is good — then pick an essay and go. If it doesn’t grab you in a page, pick a different one. Be sure to let me know how it goes.
Currently reading, and also hugely recommended:
How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell
3. Hiding in plain sight
(Post 3 of 33 in my 16-hour shift for the Secular Student Alliance Blogathon.)
9:00 am EDT
Q (from South Africa): Because of my demographics (female, 40, white, Afrikaans speaking) people automatically assume that I’m a Christian. So my usual tactic is just not to say anything and let it pass, but I’m increasingly uncomfortable with this as it feels hypocritical. Comments?
A: This is a great question, and I’ve seen it answered several ways.
Start with the fact that being out, to whatever degree you can be, makes it easier for others to be out, which in turn makes it harder for religious folks to stereotype nonbelievers as a cartoonish ilk they’ve never met, which in turn causes attitudes to evolve. It has worked precisely this way for gays and lesbians, and it will work for us. Being out and normal is the most important and powerful element in changing attitudes.
Some respond to this idea by essentially sewing the Big Red A on their lives, framing their every gesture, message, and wardrobe choice in terms of atheism. I have no problem with this, but it’s not for me. Sometimes I’m interested in going boldly into the fray for positive social change, and sometimes I’m more interested in having a beer. And sometimes these overlap.
A perfect example: When a new acquaintance asks what books I write, I often say “nonreligious parenting books.” But sometimes, like when I’m getting my hair cut and not looking for a big conversation, it’s just “parenting books.” Maybe it has something to do with the scissors by my ear.
I think we have to give ourselves permission to come out to the degree and to the people we choose in the ways that we choose, and to not be bullied into more. At the same time, we should constantly remember that it’s the way to positive change, and that it almost always goes better than we think it will.
Specific ideas:
1. When someone says “I’m praying for you,” say, “I’m not religious myself, but thanks for the very kind gesture.”
2. Wear a Foundation Beyond Belief T-shirt. If someone asks, tell them about nonreligious people coming together to work for a better world.
3. Wear a Happy Humanist or similar pin or earrings. Someone will ask.
4. Post and comment on Facebook in ways that gradually reveal your perspective.
5. Offer a nontheistic “grace” at a family gathering.
Aaaaand, I’m out of time. Add in the comments!
The lazy atheist
Not doing something is usually easier than doing it. Not taking out the trash burns fewer calories than taking out the trash. Forgetting to run a marathon, not getting a Ph.D. in physics, declining to write a novel—each of these non-doings is easier than doing any one of them.
So it should be easy to be an atheist, since all you have to do is not believe in God. But here’s the thing — it’s really hard.
The not-believing isn’t the problem. There are a thousand good reasons for deciding that God was created by humans, not the other way around. But like not breathing or not stopping at a red light, the problem isn’t the act itself — it’s what happens next.
Tell your mother-in-law or boss or boyfriend that you don’t believe in God and suddenly everything becomes complicated. The eyes get all shifty and hands go to wallets. You are quizzed on arcane bits of Sunday School knowledge by people who are sure you missed something. And you’re asked how you can be sure God doesn’t exist when everyone else on Earth but Richard Dawkins and his cat is absolutely sure He does.
Okay, you say, fair questions. Time for a bit of homework. So you read the Bible, cover to cover, and take a good run at the Koran, and toe-dip the Talmud and the Bhagavad Gita. You continue by reading everything that popped into the head of a theologian, only to learn that the arguments for believing in God have enormous names like Ontological, Cosmological, and Teleological. Most believers don’t know these reasons, but if you’d like to claim disbelief, you have to know them, and refute them, one by one by one by one.
You turn for help to the recent surge in atheist writing, only to find another long shelf of 600-page books written by, and apparently for, people with advanced degrees in Philosophy and Neuroscience, not to mention Sentence Structure and Footnoting. You clear your busy social schedule and dig in anyway, finally mastering the complex and nuanced arguments against the complex and nuanced arguments of the theologians.
But when at last you find those believers again, the ones who were sure you’d missed something, and share your newfound knowledge, they shake their heads and smile. It isn’t that kind of a question, silly. It’s not something you can look up in books. It happens in your heart.
And they wonder why atheists are cranky.
Most of the people I know and love are lazy Christians—people who technically believe, but haven’t given it much thought or effort. Some go to church, some don’t. Few of them have cracked a Bible, much less a Koran or the Vedas. I’m more likely to know the stated beliefs of their denomination than they are. Just slap a Jesus fish on your bumper and you’re in. Nobody asks you to list the Ten Commandments (well — not usually), or which two fabrics Leviticus 19 says not to combine, or even how you know there’s a God. It’s easy. Just believe—or at least say you do.
There are lots of lazy Christians. It’s time to clear off the couch, pop open a beer, and make room for the lazy atheist.
(Remember the reason for the Blogathon — donate in the sidebar!)
1. Naked
(Post 1 of 33 in my 16-hour shift for the Secular Student Alliance Blogathon.)
8:00 am
Here’s the first of 33 consecutive posts in 16 hours — about the same number I’ve done in the past six months. I do this NOT because I think I have 33 things to say, but because Jen McCreight told me to. I am nothing if not obedient.
I also do it to support the Secular Student Alliance, the World’s Bitchinest Freethought Organization™ and beneficiary of this Blogathon, to which you must donateifyoureachtheendofthissentence. HA! Now go straight to the sidebar and chip in for the future you say you want.
Ideas for ways to pledge (yoinked from Ellen Lundgren):
1. Pledge per word…say 1/10¢ a word.
2. Pledge per post (33 total).
3. Pledge per thing you’ve learned. If a post teaches you something new, you donate your pledge amount. (This may be the cheapest option.)
I’ll post on the hour and half hour until midnight tonight, holy shi’ite. About half will be on topics I’ve been ordered to write about (see? obedient) by Facebook friends and lovers, while the other half will be what I damn well feel like writing about, so OFF me.
Many are drawn from titles on Post-It Notes all over my desk, but none will be written in advance. This is a huge mistake. I usually edit the crap out of everything I write. Today you get it undigested, and it just may look like that.
Between now and midnight I will talk about the part of my brain that’s being born again, convenient monsters, implicit believers and lazy atheists, making Quakers, hiding in plain sight, a 400-year-old secret atheist document, funerals, my disappearing kids, the things that piss me off most when atheists do them, and whether my wife has ever been an idiot (spoiler alert: no). I will make a big, cool announcement and write one post buck naked. I’ll share the one extremely common word in blog names that’s most likely to keep me from reading the blog (sorry), reveal my two degrees of separation from Lisa Simpson, and offer my opinion on the single best intro to freethought. I’ll say nice things about a minister and pissy things about a theologian, introduce you to my favorite blogger (who happens also to have been the first), and wish like hell we would pay more attention to Santa Claus.
I also plan to write off the top of my head about 10-12 hot secular parenting topics (i.e. topics of interest to hot secular parents).
Pray for me.
Blogathon!!!!!!!!!
My usually classy wife made a perfectly sick analogy once for our financial partnership: I’m the anus, she’s the sphincter.
But when it comes to writing, I’m a fully-puckered, Grade A sphincter. I edit the living crap out of everything I write before any other eyeballs get a taste. But this Sunday, June 10, I’ll break my own rules for a good cause: blogging nonstop, live and almost entirely unedited, for 16 hours to raise money for the pure awesomeness that is the Secular Student Alliance.
The spectacular Jen McCreight of Blag Hag usually does this blogging marathon all by her lonesome each year to raise money for the SSA. This year, Jen has invited other bloggers to join her, taking shifts in a massive word dump known as BLOGATHON 2012!!!!
Jen invited me to join the madness, and I’m all over it. It runs June 9-16, and my shift is Sunday, June 10. On that day, I will be blogging the shi’ite out of The Meming of Life for 16 hours straight, 8am to midnight, with at least one new post every 30 minutes, no pre-writing or autoposting allowed.
It’s a really bad idea, this is. I am guaranteed to say something stupid in Hour 14 that I can’t take back once you twits take a screen shot of it. I will say on other things with awkwardly. I will get inscrutable and profane, as I often do when I’m tired. I’m just so glad the Internet is wiped clean once a week.
It’s hard to really capture how brilliantly the folks at SSA do what they do. Just a terrific, fist-pumping, dilithium-crystal-powered force for good. And they are growing at a frankly insane clip, from 42 to 365 campus chapters in ten years. That’s why they need a little cash.
And that’s the best news of all — this can cost you something! Just as someone can pledge money to support a walkathon, you can support this freethought blogathon relay team. The current, ever-expanding schedule includes bloggers like Jen, Greta Christina, JT Eberhard, and many more. Should be a blast, and it benefits my favorite organization. Win-win.
To support the SSA through the Blogathon, donate here or in the sidebar widget. At the bottom of the form is a field to suggest a blogging topic, OR you can put it in the comments below for free. I’ll pick a few of the most interesting. Secular parenting questions are certainly fine, but you don’t have to limit to that, or even to freethought. Ask anything, seriously. I need 33 posts, so I just might bite.
And ooh! The SSA currently has a matching offer going on, so whatever Blogathon raises will be doubled.
Ideas for ways to pledge (yoinked from Ellen Lundgren):
1. Pledge per word (such as 1/10¢ per word).
2. Pledge per post (33 total).
3. Pledge per thing you’ve learned. If a post teaches you something new, you donate your pledge amount.
See you Sunday!
Venus envy
- June 06, 2012
- By Dale McGowan
- In Atlanta, My kids, Science, wonder
- 2
When I was 10, my dad tried to show me Comet Kohoutek, which was unfortunately a fizzle, at least where we were. But we saw a lot of other cool things over the years, and he taught me to watch the sky.
My daughter Delaney is now 10, and she’s been a skywatcher from the start. I wanted to show her the last transit of Venus for 105 years, which happened yesterday, but it rained pretty much all day. Which reminded us both of something I told her years ago.
Guillaume Le Gentil was part of one of the most unimaginable scientific undertakings ever. Somebody in the 17th century, I can’t even remember who or how, realized that Venus crosses the disc of the Sun twice, eight years apart, then repeats the pair about 105 years later. Then somebody in the 18th century — Ed Halley, I think it was — figured out that viewing the transit from different parts of the globe, and taking accurate measurements of when Venus enters and exits the disc, and comparing the readings, could help us figure out the distance from Earth to the Sun, which could then be used to figure out every other astronomical distance in the solar system. And that the next opportunity to do this would be in June 1761.
May I just say this about myself. If I’d been sitting in the bar with Halley, and I’d heard this, I would have found it very interesting, then gone back into me pint. “If only this weren’t the bleedin’ 18th century,” I might have funk to meself.
Fortunately, better folks than I were there, and they started chanting the Nike slogan, then made plans to dispatch over 100 observers all around the planet, in the 18th century, to figure out how far away the Sun is.
One of the dispatched was a French astronomer named Guillaume le Gentil, who left Paris a year before the transit and headed for a spot on the southeast coast of India called Pondicherry. He was delayed in landing by an extended naval skirmish, part of the Seven Years’ War. Weeks passed, then Transit Day came and went with le Gentil trapped on a rocking ship, unable to take useful measurements.
Instead of returning home, he decided he might as well hang out until the next transit eight years later, on June 4th, 1769. He killed some time mapping Madagascar, then returned to Pondicherry, built himself a little observatory, and bided his time.
June 4th dawned bright and clear, and le Gentil sat with growing excitement in his observatory, waiting for the transit.
Moments before it began, a cloud rolled over the sun. The view remained obscured for the duration of the transit, then cleared nicely when it was too late. Le Gentil nearly lost his mind. Honestly, who wouldn’t.
Then things got worse. He decided to return home, but first got dysentery and had to miss his ship. He got better, then caught another ship, which wrecked off the coast of Réunion. He made it to shore, then eventually caught a Spanish ship home. He arrived in Paris eleven years after he left, only to learn he’d been declared dead and had lost his coveted seat in the French Academy of Sciences. His wife had remarried — although seriously, can you blame her? — and everything he owned had been sold off.
He essentially sued everyone, got his stuff back, got back into the academy, got him a new wife, and did just fine. But he never saw the transit of Venus. And after about 18 hours of clouds and rain, it looked like we wouldn’t either.
But then, then, just as the transit began yesterday at 6pm, I saw a sudden brightness outside. I jumped up from the dinner table, threw together a pinhole camera and ran out to the front yard with Laney in tow. Sure enough, after about five minutes of focusing and refocusing, Laney and I saw that tiny magic dot and screamed.
We walked back inside. My wife was still there, and no one had eaten my tilapia. In the history of transit-watching, that counts as a win.
In which a really smart man makes me sad
I just finished writing a short piece on the ways in which “atheist” and “agnostic” can both describe the same worldview: it is my considered opinion that God does not exist (atheist), and because you can never be quite sure of such a thing, I’m not quite sure (agnostic).
While doing the research, I came across a February interview in which philosopher Anthony Kenny asked Richard Dawkins why, if he admits to being less than certain, he doesn’t call himself an agnostic.
“I do,” he answered.
A planetary gasp ensued. The next morning, the religious affairs editor of the Daily Telegraph wrote breathlessly that Richard Dawkins, “the most famous atheist in the world…admitted he could not be sure God did not exist [and] preferred to call himself an agnostic rather than an atheist.”
Not only has Dawkins said the same thing countless times, including in The God Delusion (p. 74), but he said nothing whatever about preference. Like a Christian who is also Lutheran, he was laying claim to two entirely compatible labels. Russell did warn about putting that kind of nuance in front of a general audience, but oh well. (Dawkins has clarified, for all the good that will do.)
I read about the Dawkins flap the same day I saw a BigThink video by Neil deGrasse Tyson plowing similar ground, though at right angles to Dawkins. For nearly three minutes I was in nodding agreement with Dr. T — then, in the final seconds, he lost altitude rapidly, finally slamming hard into Mt. Misconception. Here it is with my play-by-play:
0:10 Totally cool with that. No one should force anyone else’s hand on this, ever.
0:18 (Okay, that’s unfortunate. Though you have to be careful, belonging to a movement does not have to mean leaving your brain at the door. Was there no one thinking for himself or herself in the civil rights movement? The women’s rights movement?)
0:20-0:45 One of the best descriptions of this problem I’ve heard.
1:17-1:30 This describes me, and almost every atheist I know. Word for word.
1:45- He’s right — this is maddening bullshit. HE gets to choose his identity, no one else. It’s like a believer telling you you’re really a Christian, deep down. Maddening.
2:15 A really clever response to the problem. I would never have thought of that.
2:30- It’s easy to react against what he’s saying here, but listen closely. He’s talking about a pragmatic difference, and he’s right. Calling himself an atheist would be an enormous distraction from his work. Agnostic is also accurate and allows him to focus on his primary work.
2:38-2:48 Listen to the weariness in his voice here. I am completely with him on this.
2:55 Uh oh.
2:58 Oh. No no.
3:01 Oh please don’t do that. Please stay smart.
Picture saying to Gandhi, “Nonviolence? What’s up with that? I don’t play cricket, but is there a word for non cricket players? Do non cricket players go on hunger strikes and allow themselves to be clubbed?” It’s a thoughtless, vacant analogy from a really brilliant guy. Tyson doesn’t have to agree that the act of stepping outside this overwhelming cultural norm is worthy of a name, but to so thoroughly fail to grasp why others might think it is, even to the point of demeaning caricature, is really hard to watch.
3:30 This is an indictment worth hearing. Tyson is not the first accomplished agnostic or atheist to say this kind of thing. It’s worth asking if there’s something we can do as a movement to make it easier for people like Tyson to stand anywhere near us without losing their ability to do their work.
I do wonder if Tyson would so easily shrug the movement away if his own area of science was still under siege by geocentrists. Nowadays it’s mostly biologists struggling to keep religious assumptions out of their work. Maybe it’s not surprising, then, that Einstein, Sagan, and Tyson have all shoved the atheist label away with great irritation, while people like Dawkins, PZ Myers, and Jerry Coyne see it as a point worth making, despite the enormous distraction from their other work.