DADT and the chaplains
A little while ago I said that accepting a certain level of facepalming human malpractice is one of the keys to passing my short vivre with some degree of joie. But I added that some nonsense is misguided and unworthy enough of respect to get me out of my chair. And sometimes, despite every effort to understand, I can’t muster anything but nauseous contempt.
Such a thing came to my attention yesterday in an action alert from the Interfaith Alliance, an outstanding organization that opposes religious extremism and promotes separation of church and state for the benefit of both. It was a letter, sent to the President by retired military chaplains, claiming that the repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” would infringe on the religious freedoms of active-duty chaplains because they would no longer be able to preach intolerance of homosexuality.
That’s not as much of a paraphrase as you might hope. From the letter:
If the government normalizes homosexual behavior in the armed forces, many (if not most) chaplains will confront a profoundly difficult moral choice: whether they are to obey God or to obey men. This forced choice must be faced, since orthodox Christianity—which represents a significant percentage of religious belief in the armed forces—does not affirm homosexual behavior. Imposing this conflict by normalizing homosexual behavior within the armed forces seems to have two likely—and equally undesirable—results.
First, chaplains might be pressured by adverse discipline and collapsed careers into watering down their teachings and avoiding—if not abandoning—key elements of their sending denomination’s faith and practice. Such a result would be the very antithesis of religious freedom and inimical to the guarantees made by our First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Second, chaplains might have their ability to freely share their religious beliefs challenged and torn away in a variety of everyday situations. For instance, chaplains who methodically preach book-by-book from the Bible would inevitably present religious teachings that identify homosexual behavior as immoral. Thus, while chaplains fulfill their duty to God to preach the doctrines of their faith, they would find themselves speaking words that are in unequivocal conflict with official policies.
(The chaplains had the cojones to footnote this with Leviticus 18:22 but weirdly neglected to mention the required punishment.)
The letter is a festival of fallacies, including the slippery slope, special pleading, ad populum, and argument from authority. But poor argumentation and bigotry are not the real problem here. The chaplains are asking not just for the private right to hold these beliefs about homosexuality, which are theirs to keep, but that their beliefs be given pre-eminence — that military policy be bent and shaped to reflect their beliefs, first and foremost, and that the rights of others be foregone to accommodate them.
Balancing private and public rights is tricky, but a lovely body of law and policy has defined that balance over the years. Better yet for the current debate, the Pentagon’s recent DADT report already examined and dismissed First Amendment concerns:
…the reality is that in today’s U.S. military, Service members of sharply religious convictions and moral values…and those who have no religious convictions at all, already co-exist, work, live, and fight together on a daily basis. This is a reflection of the pluralistic American society at large…
Service members will not be required to change their personal views and religious beliefs; they must, however, continue to respect and co-exist with others who may hold different views and beliefs… [p. 135, emphasis added]
It’s heartening to see the Pentagon grasping the balance of private and public rights that eludes so many of their retired chaplains. Unfortunately it also eludes some of the current ones. Again, from the Pentagon report:
In the course of our review, we heard some chaplains condemn in the strongest possible terms homosexuality as a sin and an abomination, and inform us that they would refuse to in any way support, comfort, or assist someone they knew to be homosexual. [p. 134]
I had to read that three times. I hope and assume that any chaplain following up on that disgusting threat would be dishonorably discharged.
But there are others:
In equally strong terms, other chaplains, including those who also believe homosexuality is a sin, informed us that ‘we are all sinners,’ and that it is a chaplain’s duty to care for all Service members. [p. 134]
I could do without the gratuitous crap about sin, but accepting a certain base level of facepalming human malpractice is etc. Still other chaplains, and many religious laypeople, have come out unequivocally in favor of ending the prohibition, and without the backhanded sin-slap. “[Gay soldiers] were forced by the situation, the system, to be dishonest, and that took its toll on them. And me,” said Rev. Dennis Camp, a former Army chaplain. “It was horrible. Right from the beginning, I was saying, ‘This is bad. This is wrong.”
Mindless, pointless hatred is bad enough, but asking others to feed and water it is outrageous. Little by little and against the odds, we’ve pulled ourselves up out of the tar of so many of our old fears despite the resistance of orthodox religious traditions claiming the special right to preserve those fears. As others have pointed out, the same dynamic was in play when the U.S. military introduced racial integration.
It must be difficult to find yourself doctrinally bound to the wrong side of the great moral issues of our time, chaplains. But while you wallow in the tar, don’t expect the rest of us to offer you an ankle.
The retired chaplains’ letter
The Pentagon DADT Report
“Chaplains’ views on gays strong, varied” – WaPo “On Faith” blog
Countries that allow gays in the military
Countries that disallow gays in the military
The other one
Santa Claus — the ultimate dry run
The annual reposting of my take on Santa, which first appeared in Parenting Beyond Belief. This year is our first fully Santa-less Krismas, as Delaney declared her akringlism in February (described here).
IT’S HARD TO even consider the possibility that Santa isn’t real. Everyone seems to believe he is. As a kid, I heard his name in songs and stories and saw him in movies with very high production values. My mom and dad seemed to believe, batted down my doubts, told me he wanted me to be good and that he always knew if I wasn’t. And what wonderful gifts I received! Except when they were crappy, which I always figured was my fault somehow. All in all, despite the multiple incredible improbabilities involved in believing he was real, I believed – until the day I decided I cared enough about the truth to ask serious questions, at which point the whole façade fell to pieces. Fortunately the good things I had credited him with kept coming, but now I knew they came from the people around me, whom I could now properly thank.
Now go back and read that paragraph again, changing the ninth word from Santa to God.
Santa Claus, my secular friends, is the greatest gift a rational worldview ever had. Our culture has constructed a silly and temporary myth parallel to its silly and permanent one. They share a striking number of characteristics, yet the one is cast aside halfway through childhood. And a good thing, too: A middle-aged father looking mournfully up the chimbly along with his sobbing children on yet another giftless Christmas morning would be a sure candidate for a very soft room. This culturally pervasive myth is meant to be figured out, designed with an expiration date, after which consumption is universally frowned upon.
I’ll admit to having stumbled backward into the issue as a parent. My wife and I defaulted into raising our kids with the same myth we’d been raised in (I know, I know), considering it ever-so-harmless and fun. Neither of us had experienced the least trauma as kids when the jig was up. To the contrary: we both recall the heady feeling of at last being in on the secret to which so many others, including our younger siblings, were still oblivious. Ahh, the sweet, smug smell of superiority.
But as our son Connor began to exhibit the incipient inklings of Kringledoubt, it occurred to me that something powerful was going on. I began to see the Santa paradigm as an unmissable opportunity – the ultimate dry run for a developing inquiring mind.
My boy was eight years old when he started in with the classic interrogation: How does Santa get to all those houses in one night? How does he get in when we don’t have a chimney and all the windows are locked and the alarm system is on? Why does he use the same wrapping paper as Mom? All those cookies in one night – his LDL cholesterol must be through the roof!
This is the moment, at the threshold of the question, that the natural inquiry of a child can be primed or choked off. With questions of belief, you have three choices: feed the child a confirmation, feed the child a disconfirmation – or teach the child to fish.
The “Yes, Virginia” crowd will heap implausible nonsense on the poor child, dismissing her doubts with invocations of magic or mystery or the willful suspension of physical law. Only slightly less problematic is the second choice, the debunker who simply informs the child that, yes, Santa is a big fat fraud.
“Gee,” the child can say to either of them. “Thanks. I’ll let you know if I need any more authoritative pronouncements.”
I for one chose door number three.
“Some people believe the sleigh is magic,” I said. “Does that sound right to you?” Initially, boy howdy, did it ever. He wanted to believe, and so was willing to swallow any explanation, no matter how implausible or how tentatively offered. “Some people say it isn’t literally a single night,” I once said, naughtily priming the pump for later inquiries. But little by little, the questions got tougher, and he started to answer that second part – Does that sound right to you? – a bit more agnostically.
I avoided both lying outright and setting myself up as a godlike authority, determined as I was to let him sort this one out himself. And when at last, at the age of nine, in the snowy parking lot of the Target store, to the sound of a Salvation Army bellringer, he asked me point blank if Santa was real – I demurred, just a bit, one last time.
“What do you think?” I said.
“Well…I think all the moms and dads are Santa.” He smiled at me. “Am I right?”
I smiled back. It was the first time he’d asked me directly, and I told him he was right.
“So,” I asked, “how do you feel about that?”
He shrugged. “That’s fine. Actually, it’s good. The world kind of… I don’t know…makes sense again.”
That’s my boy. He wasn’t betrayed, he wasn’t angry, he wasn’t bereft of hope. He was relieved. It reminded me of the feeling I had when at last I realized God was fictional. The world actually made sense again.
And when Connor started asking skeptical questions about God, I didn’t debunk it for him by fiat. I told him what various people believe and asked if that sounded right to him. It all rang a bell, of course. He’d been through the ultimate dry run.
By allowing our children to participate in the Santa myth and find their own way out of it through skeptical inquiry, we give them a priceless opportunity to see a mass cultural illusion first from the inside, then from the outside. A very casual line of post-Santa questioning can lead kids to recognize how completely we all can snow ourselves if the enticements are attractive enough. Such a lesson, viewed from the top of the hill after exiting a belief system under their own power, can gird kids against the best efforts of the evangelists – and far better than secondhand knowledge could ever hope to do.
_______________________
A related post from Krismas 2007
For Tom Flynn’s counterpoint to this position, see pp. 85-87 of Parenting Beyond Belief.
Look at the puppy
Asking for money is not a strength of mine. My allowance stayed put for about seven years when I was a kid because I never thought to ask for more. So it’s no surprise that my least favorite part of heading up a non-profit is asking those who support its mission to help keep us going financially.
Yet here I am…and there you are.
Hi.
The expenses incurred in running Foundation Beyond Belief are not huge, but they are a decidedly positive number. One hundred percent of our member contributions goes straight to our featured beneficiaries. But before the checks can go out, we have to assess and select the charities and present them to the membership. We’ve created a unique website to showcase their work, to allow our members to distribute their donations as they wish, and to provide a distinctive voice for humanists in the philanthropic community.
That’s what you see in front of the curtain.
Behind it, there’s a tremendous amount of sawing and drilling going on. In addition to assessing nearly 100 new nominated charities each quarter, we have communications with members and beneficiaries, professional web design and maintenance for a complex site, bookkeeping, grant writing, publicity, tax preparation, web hosting, and ever so much more. To pay for all that, we rely on the generosity of our friends — those who believe that what we’re doing has real value.
We’re 60 percent of the way through our year-end fund drive but only 22 percent to the amount needed to finish the year in the black. Our sincere thanks go out to those of you who’ve brought us this far.
Now we need all the rest of y’all. No, really. Don’t make the puppy sad.
IF you think the Foundation is a worthwhile project AND you can help us out, please consider clicking on the big orange button in the pretty blue widget in the sidebar of this humble blog. Thanks!
(Puppy.)
The children of the revolution
One thing is pretty much guaranteed for any social movement that struggles against the mainstream: the children of the activists won’t understand what the big frackin’ deal is.
U.S. civil rights pioneers often end up with kids who (while enjoying the fruits of the struggle) ask their parents, “Why is it always about race with you?” Second-wave feminists spent their youth breaking glass ceilings, only to have their daughters (who’ve never known a time when they couldn’t vote or play hockey or run a corporation) roll their eyes with embarrassment at Mom’s “obsession with gender.”
Without putting myself anywhere near the same plane as those, I’ve started getting a taste of that second-generation thing myself. It’s a good thing for the most part, a likely sign that our own efforts have made it possible for our kids to transcend our obsessions, to find the next beast that needs struggling against instead of tilting with ours — or just to enjoy living in a better, saner world.
When Becca recently brought up the idea of starting a secular parenting group in our area, my 15-year-old son — a classic apatheist — said, “I don’t get it.”
“Get what?”
“I kind of don’t get why you need something like that. Just don’t believe. Why do you have to get in a group with other people who don’t believe?”
“You don’t have to,” Becca said. “But some parents who aren’t religious find it helpful to see how other nonreligious parents handle the issues that come up.”
“Like what?”
I offered an example. “I just got an email from a mom this morning. Her family is going to church with her parents for the first time, and she wanted to know what her son should do during communion. You know, when the congregation goes to the front for the…”
“But that’s so obvious!”
“Oh? What’s the obvious thing to do?”
“You just do it! You’re in a church, so you do what the church people do. That’s respectful.”
I remember being fifteen, seeing things so clearly, constantly stunned at the density of others.
“Okay. Do you know what communion is?”
He paused. “Well…not really, no.”
“It’s a re-enactment of the Last Supper. Most important part of a Christian service. It’s a way of saying, ‘I believe in the divinity of Jesus, and here’s the moment I’m closest to him.’ So some people feel it’s more respectful to not do it if you don’t believe it.”
“Huh.” Another pause. “So you told her not to let him do it?”
“Well no, I said I’d explain to him what it means and let him decide what to do. He can see what it’s like to stay sitting when most people go to the front, or to take part in a ritual that means you believe when you really don’t or aren’t sure. It’s good experience.”
Two weeks later we visited my mother-in-law’s Episcopal church. I reminded the kids that they could choose to do whatever they wanted. They could sing or not, pray or not, kneel or not, commune or not. And if they had any questions, they could ask us.
Delaney (9) noticed the Stations of the Cross before the service. I told her it was the story of the last hours of Jesus’ life, and we walked the circuit. As a second-generation freethinker (in the lower case), she didn’t have to recoil or push against it. To the kid who was Athena for Hallowe’en, it’s just another cool mythic story.
During the service, Erin (12) was obviously pondering her choices. When the first kneeling moment came, she looked at her Grandma (kneeling), then at the padded kneeler, then at me (sitting), then at the kneeler again. She half-knelt, looked uncertain, then dropped back into the pew. The second time, with a deep breath, she went for the full kneel. Third and fourth times, she sat.
Trying something on for size is classic Erin, and she left the church knowing what both feigned conformity and sore-thumb honesty felt like. Much better than just yakking about it.
Communion came and went, and Connor stayed in his seat. We exchanged wry smiles. Yeah yeah, his eyes said, whatever.
Where thanks are due
[Re-running a post from long ago — a Thanksgiving story by Marilyn LaCourt. Since first reading this in 2007, our family has adopted this as our own tradition. It’s a wonderful, emotional experience and has become one of my favorite holiday traditions. Happy Thanksgiving everybody.]
Thanksgiving Ritual
by Marilyn LaCourt
Last year I had a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner at my friend’s house. I arrived just as we were being invited to take our places at the table and I felt a little awkward because I didn’t know a number of the other guests. I looked toward the kitchen expecting someone to bring on the food. It sure smelled good, and I was hungry.
Imagine my confusion when my host looked around the table at each of his guests and asked, “Who wants to start?”
I knew there was supposed to be food, but I still didn’t see any, not even a relish dish or a breadbasket to pass. What were we supposed to do? Pass imaginary bowls filled with imaginary mashed potatoes, stuffing, turkey and cranberry sauce? No one spoke.
Finally my host’s eyes settled on his seven-year-old niece.
Cindy stood up, cleared her throat and smiled at her brother. “Thank you, Jimmy, for teaching me to play games on your computer.”
Jimmy blushed and said, “You’re welcome.”
Eric, a nice looking young man with bright blue eyes was next. He thanked his parents for giving him his first telescope when he was ten, and for the many hours they spent encouraging his appreciation for the wonders of the universe. I learned later that Eric had been accepted into a post graduate program to study Astronomy.
My friend, Ron, the host, said thank you to his wife. “I really appreciate the way you put up with my complaining, your understanding and patience with my cause fighting. I love the wonderful meals you prepare for me everyday, your companionship and your sense of humor. Thank you for being my wife.”
Liz smiled and answered, “You’re welcome.”
I was beginning to get the picture. I had some thank-yous of my own and was getting heady with the whole idea, but I decided to watch and listen a bit longer.
“Thank you for taking care of me when I had such a bad case of flu last winter, Rose. I know how terribly unpleasant that must have been for you, and you were so kind to put your own life aside for a few days to stay with me.” Gina’s eyes were damp when she looked at her daughter. “You were such a comfort.” Then she turned to her son- in-law. “Thank you too, Karl, for fending for yourself and the kids while she was taking care of me.”
“You’re welcome.” “You’re welcome.”
Then Rose stood up and walked over to where her husband was sitting. She bent down and gave him a kiss. “Thank you, honey, for working so hard and supporting us and giving me the opportunity to be the stay at home mom I’d always hoped I could be.”
Chuck thanked his friend Bob for all the wonderful tomatoes and other produce Bob gave him during harvest time. He also thanked Jerry and Judy for teaching him how to make the world’s greatest apple sauce.
Jean thanked Patty for listening when she needed a sympathetic ear.
Juan thanked his grandmother for the loan and told her he had put the money to good use. Sonja thanked her neighbor, Dorene, for the wonderful homemade mayonnaise and other goodies. And on it went.
I was thinking about all the wonderful people I wanted to thank. I guess I was drifting off in some sort of a trance when I heard the next person mention my name.
“Thank you, Marilyn,” she said. “You helped my daughter and son-in-law through some rough spots in their marriage.”
I waved my hand in a never mind gesture. “I was just doing my job.”
Ron nearly knocked over his water glass as he stood to interrupt me.
“No, no, no. That’s not allowed.” He shook his pointer at me. “These are the rules. You only get to say ‘you’re welcome’. If you explain it away you discredit the message and invalidate the sincerity of the person saying thanks. You just got a sincere ‘thank you’, Marilyn. Now, say ‘you’re welcome’.” He sat down and fiddled with his napkin.
“Oops. I’m sorry. I mean…” I looked at the woman who’d thanked me and said, “You’re welcome.” Then I smiled at my host and hostess.
“And thank you, Ron and Liz, for inviting me to share in such a beautiful tradition.”
Ron grinned. “You’re welcome.” Liz nodded, “You’re welcome.”
It took a full thirty minutes to get around the table and all the thanks-givings. When we finished Liz excused herself to put the finishing touches on the food and Ron poured the wine.
One of these things is not like the others
- November 20, 2010
- By Dale McGowan
- In My kids, schools, values
- 12
Delaney’s (outstanding) third grade teacher put together a nice slideshow for the parents to watch during the “Thanksgiving Feast” day at school this year. In the show, each student offered a list of things s/he is thankful for.
I don’t mean in the least to diminish the lovely expressions of gratitude by her classmates when I say that I would have recognized my daughter’s own list of gratefuls even if I were blindfolded and they were read by James Earl Jones. Not better or worse, but distinctively Delaney. Can you find her in this sampling?
Student A: I’m grateful for my parents, my school, God, my country, and my teacher Miss Jones.
Student B: I’m grateful for my family, food, my house, my pets, and my teacher Miss Jones.
Student C: I’m grateful for God, Jesus, my family, a roof over my head, and my teacher Miss Jones.
Student D: I’m grateful for my family and friends, for a roof over my head and a meal every night, for a good education, and for freedom of speech.
Help Foundation Beyond Belief finish 2010 strong
It’s been a great year. With six weeks to go in 2010, the humanist members of Foundation Beyond Belief have raised over $70,000 for 37 outstanding charities.
Now we’re asking for a little help ourselves.
In 2010 our members fed, clothed, and paid school tuition for 22 impoverished children in Nepal. We have funded science education in India and in US public schools and supported efforts to fight global warming and protect biodiversity.
We put textbooks in Uganda’s humanist schools and peacebuilding teams in Uganda’s conflict areas. We funded efforts to improve access to health care for marginalized populations on four continents and in the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake. We helped launch a new Camp Quest in Virginia and helped build a new school for girls in Pakistan.
We’ve added humanist voices and dollars to the fight for LGBT rights, the key civil rights struggle of our time. We’ve empowered adoptions, fed the hungry, and worked to protect the most vulnerable—refugees in war, victims of torture, women under threat of religious violence, political asylees, people struggling with addiction, and those hoping for dignity at the end of their lives.
Creating a new humanist community effort has been so gratifying. But it also comes with expenses, such as grant writing, publicity, web hosting, member communications, and professional accounting. Since we are committed to remaining a 100 percent pass-through organization, we rely on separate donations for our operational costs. Because the current economy took a serious bite out of our major funding sources, we are left with an operating deficit for 2010.
Can you help us close that gap?
We have big plans for 2011, including tripling membership and donations, creating a disaster relief fund, and launching both a kids’ giving program and a cutting-edge initiative reaching out to other worldviews. It’s going to be an amazing year of active, compassionate humanism.
Please help us end our first year strong and secure by clicking on the big blue ChipIn box in the sidebar OR by going to our ChipIn page to make a tax-deductible donation of any amount to the Foundation itself.
Deepest thanks for your support and encouragement!
Dale McGowan, Executive Director
Foundation Beyond Belief
New blog to support secular parenting groups
While writing and researching Parenting Beyond Belief in 2006, I went searching for secular parenting groups in the U.S. and found precisely one.
I certainly might have missed some, but the fact that a diligent search didn’t turn up more than one is a pretty clear indication of how few and far between they were.
Zip forward four years, and though we’re still a tad short of Starbucks-level saturation, the landscape has changed pretty dramatically. I’m currently aware of more than forty groups in North America ranging in age from three weeks to three years and in size from half a dozen to nearly 150 members.
As I’ve tracked the activities and growth of these groups, I’ve come to realize how isolated most of them are from each other. Most start from scratch, finding members and planning activities by trial and error. Wheels are reinvented — and they’re occasionally square. While some groups thrive, others disappear within a few months.
One of the original purposes of Foundation Beyond Belief was to provide a central source of information and support for these groups. We did some good work along those lines early in the year, conducting a large-scale secular parent survey and helping to birth about a half dozen new groups. But we kept running into a problem.
Me.
The IRS had expressed reasonable concern that a firewall be maintained between the non-profit Foundation and the for-a-wee-smidge-of-profit world of Parenting Beyond Belief. To demonstrate their seriousness, they brought the tax exemption process for FBB to a screaming halt when a staff blog entry on the Foundation website linked to a site that in turn included a sidebar link to buy my book.
That delayed our approval by six weeks.
So we were understandably skittish about ever so much as mentioning Parenting Beyond Belief, Raising Freethinkers, the PBB Channel on YouTube, the PBB Forum, this blog, etc. in Foundation communications. In other words, we could support secular parents as long as we avoided mentioning 75 percent of the resources for secular parents.
It eventually became crystal clear that this just wasn’t going to work. I am now in the process of building deeper support resources for secular parenting groups on this very website. And the first effort in that direction is a new blog called Parents Beyond Belief.
The blog is a space for secular parenting groups to help each other create effective communities for nontheistic parents by exchanging ideas and stories. If all goes well, you’ll hear precious little from me and tons from people who know what they’re talking about — the actual leaders and members of secular parenting groups. The first post is already up, and six others are on the way.
Don’t wait for an invitation! If you are currently in a secular parenting group and would like to submit a post about anything related to your group — finding members, naming the group, childcare issues, what to do at meetings, field trips, book clubs, play groups, food, dues, online presence, community service, resolving disagreements, you name it — just write up a brief description of your intended piece and send it to me for consideration. If it looks like a good fit, I’ll invite you to write the piece.
Guidelines for posts: Submissions must be relevant to the blog’s purpose, under 700 words, well-written and engaging.
A small group of reviewers will help me select entries in the early going. Contributors who have a few pieces accepted will be considered for a position as blog administrator. And once we have a few of those, I intend to step quietly aside and let y’all run with it.
A mindgasm of scientific proportions
This is quite simply one of the most astonishing, original things I have ever seen. Ever.
I’ve said too much. Set aside 15 uninterrupted minutes.
It’s filled with phrases that express what I often find inexpressible. Add your favorites to the comment thread.
(Profound thanks to my step-nephew Dan Nolan for this one.)
Review: The Humanist Approach to Happiness
One of the great benefits of being a secular humanist in the 21st century is easy access to the thoughts and insights of others who share your basic worldview.
Even a generation ago it took some genuine effort to find those voices. And step one was overcoming the natural inertia of not knowing whether there was anything to find. The belief that Madalyn Murray O’Hair and I were the only nonbelievers on the planet kept me from even trying to discover otherwise until I was in my early thirties.
Now it’s all just a Google or Amazon search away.
For many years, virtually all of the books for nontheists had a kind of superhuman quality to them — stratospheric works of science or philosophy that blow your hair back with articulate rigor. I couldn’t read The End of Faith or pretty much anything by Russell or Hitchens without feeling both amazed and a little bit cowed by the intellectual horsepower.
I leave such books grateful for the support they provide my own position. But until recently, there hasn’t been much in the way of personal accounts of everyday folks living a humanist life.
Nica Lalli’s Nothing: Something to Believe In, published less than four years ago, was a welcome departure from the hifalutin’ — a personal account of a life lived without religion. Andrew Park’s Between a Church and a Hard Place: One Faith-Free Dad’s Struggle to Understand What It Means to Be Religious (or Not) was also a wonderful read — not just because it describes my parenting seminar at Harvard for several pages (heh), but because it’s the voice of someone so damn normal, living a life very much like my own.
The latest entry on the shelf by and for humanist mortals is Jen Hancock’s The Humanist Approach to Happiness, a book that likewise distinguishes itself by the author’s down-to-earth voice and perspective.
Look in vain for arguments against religious belief or ways to deal with the evangelical schoolteacher. To paraphrase the cover tagline, this book is one humanist’s thoughts on personal ethics and how to lead a happier, more productive life.
Jen never tries to speak universally. She speaks for herself, clearly and informally, thinking out loud about decision making, simplicity, honesty, body ethics, sex, vibrators, relationships, addiction, self-image, pooping, death, and more. Her own thoughts are salted with quotes from Bertrand Russell to Britney Spears, including some keepers I hadn’t seen before. The net effect is a conversation about everything with an intelligent, unpretentious friend.
About thirty pages in, I began to recognize something I have seen before: the relaxed assurance of a second-generation humanist. I flipped the book to read the author blurb, and sure enough, Jen is that still-elusive beast — a humanist who was raised by humanists. PBB contributor Emily Rosa, also a second-generation humanist, writes with the same delightfully relaxed style.
Jen makes one point that for all its obvious simplicity is rarely made: that behaving ethically and doing good tends to increase a person’s own happiness. It’s often implied that doing good is an uphill battle, a fight against our sinful nature that requires surrender to a greater power. In fact, doing good is one of the smoother paths to a satisfying life. The rewards, both internal and external, are substantial.
I wasn’t surprised to learn that Jen writes a regular humanist column for her local paper, surely one of the few in the country. Her authorial style resembles the personal voice of the columnist — a good thing for this kind of work.
The Humanist Approach to Happiness is a delightful read and a useful resource. Learn more at Jen’s website, or grab it (for under 11 bucks!) at Amazon.