Give Phil Plait 31 minutes
Being an educator is not only getting the truth right, but there’s got to be an act of persuasion there as well. Persuasion isn’t always, “Here are the facts — you’re an idiot or you are not,” but, “Here are the facts and here is a sensitivity to your state of mind,” and it’s the facts plus the sensitivity, which convolved together, create impact. — Neil deGrasse Tyson to Richard Dawkins, 2006
You’re a busy person. But Phil Plait needs 31 minutes of your time.
Phil (of Bad Astronomy) gave a talk at TAM8 in July that is one of the most important and resonant messages I’ve heard in ages. It’s about being heard.
It’s an obsession of mine lately, this topic. I tried to write a simple blog post about it last year and ended up instead writing 11,000 words in an eight-month series of posts called “Can You Hear Me Now?” The thrust of that series, and of Phil’s talk, is that content is all well and good, and argument is lovely, but it’s all for nothing if we don’t think about how to get ourselves heard. And when it matters most, we’d better think not just about how tight our arguments are, but how to stand any chance of having them received on the other end.
This isn’t just about religion. It’s also about politics, social issues, alternative medicine, the paranormal — everything people get hot and bothered about. Discourse is nothing more than shouting down a well if we merely compose zingers for the applause of our stablemates and fail to create a receptive mind in the listeners we hope to persuade.
Neil deGrasse Tyson spoke to this in a rebuke to Richard Dawkins at Beyond Belief in 2006 (which Dawkins accepted with grace and good humor):
Tyson’s precise point is well-taken: “I felt you more than I heard you.” (Many other critiques of Dawkins, et al. are not, as I noted in 2007.)
Now Phil Plait has made a magnificent, deeply personal, effective and well-titled plea along the same lines. Please set aside 31 minutes at the end of your busy day to hear what he says.
But also note what he does NOT say. He doesn’t say that being heard requires us to respect the unrespectable, or bury our passion, or deny our convictions. He’s not calling for a moratorium on religious satire or political outrage, or I’d tell him to bugger off. I intend to continue treating ideas themselves with whatever respect or contempt they earn. But when it comes to discourse with our fellow mammals, the Tyson Equation nails it: facts plus sensitivity equals impact.
I’ve said too much. Take it Phil.
Phil Plait – Don’t Be A Dick from JREF on Vimeo.
Help bring IT’S ALIVE! to life
- August 10, 2010
- By Dale McGowan
- In action, Science, wonder
- 16
Remember BANG! The Universe Verse, the brilliantly conceived and illustrated comic book I blogged about in April, the one with the cartoon Einstein explaining the origin and development of the universe in verse? ‘Member?
Well a sequel is on its way. And to bring it to life, series creator Jamie Lu Dunbar needs a little help from his friends.
Jamie isn’t backed by a powerful international consortium of science comics moguls. He creates and publishes these beautiful things himself. And to make the second volume everything it needs to be, he needs a bit of venture capital.
Volume 1 was gorgeously illustrated in black and white. The setting was space, so that worked out just fine. But the second in the series, titled IT’S ALIVE!, is about the origin and evolution of life on Earth, so it’s crying out for full color. And producing spectacular four-color illustrations will require a wee upgrade in Jamie’s technology.
That’s where we come in. Jamie has set up a Kickstarter website with a five-minute video making his case and a button where we can chip in to help him create life. (If Jehovah had had a Kickstarter drive behind him, he might have managed a better design.)
Here’s the kicker: If Jamie raises the $5000 he needs, he will make the second book available as a free pdf on his website, just as he did for the first. He’s about a third of the way there. (Note: The Kickstarter site shows his goal as $1000. As Jamie’s text explains, that was only the first phase. The total needed is $5K, and we can help him get there, $5 and $10 and $20 at a time.)
Jamie’s work is clever and accessible and accurate and great fun. So let’s click through and help spark that primordial soup!
Progress on corporal punishment?
The possibility of a comprehensive ban on corporal punishment in U.S. schools has the issue back in the spotlight where it belongs.
I wrote about corporal punishment quite a bit in 2007 and 2008, noting among other things that I once spanked my kids. Though seldom and long ago, I’m still aghast and ashamed in the face of the evidence against it — evidence that made me stop on a dime.
A quick rehash of those thoughts before we look at the new developments:
Every time a parent raises a hand to a child, that parent is saying You cannot be reasoned with. In the process, the child learns that force is an acceptable substitute for reason, and that Mom and Dad have more confidence in the former than in the latter.
A second failure is equally damning. Spanking doesn’t work. In fact, it makes things worse. A meta-analysis of 88 corporal punishment studies compiled by Elizabeth Gershoff at Columbia found that ten negative outcomes are strongly correlated with spanking, including a damaged parent-child relationship, increased antisocial and aggressive behaviors, and the increased likelihood that the spanked child will physically abuse her/his own children. The study revealed just one positive correlation: immediate compliance. That’s all. So if you need your kids to behave in the moment but don’t care much about the rest of the moments in their lives–hey, don’t spare the rod!
(From “Reason vs. the Rod,” Humanist Parenting column, Oct 17, 2007)
I later addressed the well-meaning but false claim that the Bible’s reference to using “the rod” is about guidance, not beatings, and linked to a very nice piece by a Christian parent who decided not to spank her children and gave the reasons why.
Still, influential Christian parenting author James Dobson is one of several voices on the religious right continuing to applaud the practice. In his book The New Dare to Discipline, Dobson writes that “Spanking should be of sufficient magnitude to cause genuine tears” (p. 35). He recommends painful squeezing of the trapezius muscle on the neck to obtain “instant obedience” (36) and using paddles to hit children as young as 18 months old. He advises parents to hit a toddler whenever he “hits his friends” (66), and if a child cries more than a few minutes after being spanked, Dobson says, hit him again (70). “When a youngster tries this kind of stiff-necked rebellion,” he adds, “you had better take it out of him, and pain is a marvelous purifier” (6).
His advice frequently lapses into sneering contempt for the child. “You have drawn a line in the dirt, and the child has deliberately flopped his bony little toe across it,” he says (p. 21). “Who is going to win? Who has the most courage? Who is in charge here http://levitrastore.net/? If you do not conclusively answer these questions for your strong-willed children, they will precipitate other battles designed to ask them again and again.”
Carefully avoiding reference to actual research, Dobson prefers to blame the media for the growing consensus against corporal punishment. “The American media has worked to convince the public that all spanking is tantamount to child abuse, and therefore, should be outlawed. If that occurs, it will be a sad day for families . . . and especially for children!”
We now return to the sane(r) world, currently in progress.
In Spring 2008, I was asked to draft a resolution on corporal punishment for the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). On June 8, 2008, the resolution was passed unanimously by the General Assembly of the World Humanist Congress in Washington DC. Humanism now has a formal consensus position on this important issue, and I am honored to have been a part of that.
This year, on the heels of new research suggesting that regular spanking has a measurable negative affect on IQ, Congress is due to consider the Ending Corporal Punishment in Schools Act this year. The proposal would “prohibit the Secretary of Education from providing education funding to any educational agency or institution that allows school personnel to inflict corporal punishment upon a student as a form of punishment or to modify undesirable behavior.”
Thirty states currently ban corporal punishment in public schools. Only two of those ban the practice in private schools. Over 220,000 kids were subject to violent punishment in U.S. schools during the 2006-07 school year, with three states managing to do more than half of the total damage: Texas (49,100), Mississippi (38,100), and Alabama (33,700).
The federal act would ban the practice in all public and private schools that receive federal funds of any kind, which is virtually all.
The big news is the inclusion of religious schools in the ban. But despite recent warnings of pushback from that direction, there’s been very little. Though the practice was common just a generation ago, many religious schools have voluntarily joined public schools in abandoning corporal punishment abandoned hitting as a punishment. “Whether you believe it’s right or wrong, it’s just too big of a liability or legal issue,” said Tom Cathey, a legislative analyst for the Association of Christian Schools International, in a recent RNS article.
So we can and should oppose the undue influence of Dobson et al in the debate. At the same time, we should notice the quiet progress of the mainstream, both religious and secular, toward the obvious. It’s how most social progress happens.
[Hat tip to Secular Coalition for America for great work on this issue!]
-My Nov 2007 interview with Elizabeth Gershoff
-Learn about the Ending Corporal Punishment in Schools Act, contact your representative
-Resources from Center for Effective Discipline (incl. alternatives to corp. punishment in schools)
-Dobson’s views fascinatingly juxtaposed with those of actual experts in the field
Pretty memes never die
I remember it like it was yesterday. April 2007. Fox News announced that a sociologist in Mississippi had come out with a study on the benefits of religion for kids… (harp music and waaaavy lines…)
“Religion Is Good for Kids” said the headline. I scanned the story for anything that might temper the triumphant certainty of that headline. The source was Fox News, whose fairness and balance are legendary, so I breathed a relieved sigh at the guaranteed absence of spin. “Religion” (everything from voodoo to Unitarianism, presumably) had been confirmed as “good” for “kids.”
Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be less clear-cut.
I expected the study, authored by sociologist John Bartkowski, to show a correlation between membership in a religious community and certain positive outcomes for children. Other studies have explored this (though even the best studies are oversimplified in the media). The correlation has nothing to do with Jehovah, of course, but simply and unsurprisingly points to the benefits of raising kids in a cohesive and supportive community.
Takes a village, and all that.
Religious communities are just one way of achieving this, but they are indeed one way. I could easily see a well-conceived study coming to such a conclusion, then carefully defining what is meant by “religion, “good” and “kids,” noting that this is just one type of supportive community, that more research is needed, and all the other common earmarks of rigor and prudence.
Bartkowski (author of The Promise Keepers: Servants, Soldiers, and Godly Men and Remaking the Godly Marriage) opens his article on the study with three admirable caveats: (1) The benefit is defined primarily by how well-behaved children are, (2) the data, based on parent and teacher interviews, are entirely subjective, and (3) the data were gathered from a survey conducted for a different purpose and from a cohort consisting almost entirely of first graders.
I consider the first to be the most damning. I want my kids to behave, but that’s sixth or seventh on the list behind many, many other qualities on my list of constituents of the good.
Having acknowledged these three caveats, Bartkowski largely disregards them. By the middle of the paper, he has declared that “the findings that emerge from the present investigation are robust and quite clear.”
In fact, the data are a bit too robust. The study’s data tables indicate that many variables other than religion show significant effects — some even greater than religion — but those go undiscussed in the study. Bartkowski cherry-picked religion and declared it the cause of the child’s “goodness” — a classic example of the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy.
Parenting Beyond Belief contributor Dr. Jean Mercer wrote a response to the Bartkowski piece at the time for the Institute for Humanist Studies. “Bartkowski acknowledged that the direction of causality (if any) was unclear… A study of this type is severely handicapped with respect to interpretation, making it impossible to conclude that one of the measured factors caused another.”
An argument could just as easily be made that cause and effect have been reversed — that the intention to raise compliant kids can lead to church attendance, not the other way around.
Dr. Mercer also considers the subjective data problematic. “It appears that there were no objective measures of child development employed. Instead, parental and teacher assessments of children’s emotional characteristics and ‘approaches to learning’ were analyzed.” Add to this the third element — that a cohort of first-graders represents all kids — and the study’s credibility falls to pieces.
“Membership in a religious group…may have functions similar to those of membership in secular groups such as the Sierra Club or a bowling team,” Mercer concludes. “The appropriate comparison may not involve religion, but the organization of family life around shared interests.”
Given the fatal flaws in the Bartkowski study, I’d suggest the evangelical leanings of the researcher colored his research design and skewed his conclusions, which were then lapped up by an eager Fox. At the very least, the headline should be reworded:
Study: Religion May Make Some First Graders Marginally Easier to Manage
Waaaavy lines…and we’re back in 2010, awakened by the sound of an email hitting the bottom of my inbox (“Have you seen this?”) with a link to an article from the Christian News Wire: “Religious Families Raise Better Children.”
Another study? Well, no. A gentleman by the name of David Beato has written a book testifying to the power of religion in his own life. Religion helped him through personal setbacks and tragedies (among them “deceptive family members who tried to ruin him”), and he suggests it will do the same for others. Fair enough. But to support his case, Beato dredged up none other than the weak Bartkowski study and sent press releases to the usual suspects declaring that “religious families raise better children.”
Hundreds of religious news outlets and church websites have now posted the claim.
“What the research suggests is what many of us have known all along,” Beato says in another release. And there’s the problem. Pretty memes never die. Most people most of the time will pass on claims that reinforce what they want to believe, no matter how weak the foundation. We are ALL prone to this. In most cases, once preference has spoken, no argumentative stake penetrates the heart of a pretty idea.
I usually accept this kind of unkillable thing without retort, and increasingly so as I age and become ever-less-convinced of the ability of argument to pierce the armor of confirmation bias. I know that the most effective response to (for example) the idea that you can’t be good without gods is not to whang on about the Euthyphro dilemma, but to be good without gods.
In this case, the resurrected idea that religion is an essential good for families goes too directly to the heart of Parenting Beyond Belief for me to sit quietly by. I don’t harbor delusions about killing the pretty misconception, but it’s worth making this message available for those who care enough to look for it: Not only is it possible to raise ethical, caring, confident and well-adjusted children without religion, but millions of us are doing so already. The perfect reply. Onward.
Let ’em drive!
Ventured into the backwoods of upstate NY last week for a quick visit to Camp Inquiry, a fabulous science-and-wonder-based summer camp run by the Center for Inquiry. Fifty-two sharp and curious kids and a terrific staff under the direction of the energetic and talented Angie McQuaig.
About 30 parents stuck around on Sunday evening for a parent chat around the campfire. These unscripted discussions are my favorites. And as it usually does, one of my key messages came up over and over — the importance of letting kids drive their own decisionmaking as much as we can, even when we disagree. It’s vital to let them take the wheel as often as possible if we want them to develop the long-term ability to think ethically and well on their own. Obviously there are many times when we have to assert our own judgment. But letting go when we can has some great long-term benefits.
This mostly nonreligious crowd was focused on questions of raising kids in a culture dominated by religion. The Pledge of Allegiance, the proselytizing neighbor, Grandma’s insistence on taking the kids to her church, pressure from religious peers — in every case, the best thing a secular parent can do is help the child assess options and weigh consequences, then let the child make his or her own decision about what to do, even if the parent thinks it’s a mistake. They’ll learn more from the experience than from any pre-emptive lecture we can give. (Not to mention the possibility that our advice would have been wrong.)
I blogged about one such situation in 2008. Erin (then 10) asked if she could wear a pink beaded cross necklace to school. She’d bought it on vacation at the dollar store, but now she said, “I feel weird wearing it when I don’t really believe in god. Like I’m not being honest. But I just like to wear it.”
“It’s fine, sweetie. It’s a pretty necklace.”
She paused. There was more, I could tell. “It makes me feel good to wear it.”
Uhhh, okay, there’s at least one unfortunate way to read that sentence. “You mean it makes you feel like a good person to wear a cross?”
“No, of course not,” she said. “It just…” She smiled sheepishly. “It makes me feel good to rub it.”
I’d been ready for that sentence for years, but the context was all wrong.
“When I’m worried, I rub it with my fingers and it makes the worry go away.”
It was a simple talisman to her. And Erin does spend more time worrying than she ought to. I told her about the jade worry stone I carried in my pocket throughout middle school. Same deal. It did make me feel better. Her cross had no more connection to God than my worry stone. In fact, her concern was that people might think it did when it didn’t. But even if it did have that significance, I was fully prepared to let her drive the decision.
As it happens, she wore it for a week, then told me she didn’t want to wear it anymore because of the dishonest feeling it gave her. And because she had made the decision herself, there’s a much greater chance that she gained something more valuable than if I had simply issued a ruling.
I returned home from Camp Inquiry to a message from Elizabeth, a parent I’d met. Her son Alex (13) is on a baseball team that has started praying before each game. From her email (reprinted with permission):
Bill, the gentleman who initiated the prayer ritual, is a close friend to our family, and my husband Jason is one of the assistant coaches. Our families have get-togethers at each other’s houses. Bill and Jason have shared many “religious” talks through the years, so we know their family’s belief system and they know ours, and it has never been an issue.
When Bill first started praying before the game, Jason had a private talk with him and explained why he did not feel that it was an appropriate thing to do. Jason explained to Bill that he has no idea what the belief systems of all the kids on the team are, and that it was presumptuous of him to think that all the kids came from religious households. And even if ‘most’ of the kids are religious, he would have no way of knowing what faith they practiced. He also reminded Bill that our own family was not religious. Bill was not persuaded and continued the team prayer before each game.
Nicely done, Jason — especially the choice to frame it in terms of all kids on the team, not just one.
At this point Jason asked Alex how he felt about the prayer before each game. Alex said that he thought it was silly. Jason asked Alex what (if anything) Alex wanted to do about it and gave him a few options. They could “sit out” the prayer, Jason could try talking to Bill again, or they could just “go with the flow” and wink at each other while the prayer was taking place. 🙂
At that point Alex said something that just made our hearts swell with pride -– he said, “I think it is kind of stupid, but Coach Bill means more to me than a prayer. If it makes him happy to say a prayer before the game, then that’s OK with me.” I wish more adults would act like our son did at that moment.
Alex is choosing his battles, and his parents are letting him. The more they do that, the better and more nuanced his decisionmaking will become.
Maybe after a few games, Alex will change his mind, or maybe not. Maybe he’ll just reflect further on the very odd concept of the God-bothering sports team. Maybe Bill will do some reflection of his own. But if Alex’s parents had forced another conclusion — if Jason, for example, had pushed harder in his talk with Bill — Alex would have lost an opportunity to make his own choice, live with it, and learn from it. But they recognized that this was Alex’s situation, first and foremost, and they let him take the wheel.
Kudos to all three.
Embiggening humanism
A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man. — Jebediah Springfield
I’m alternately enjoying and “D’oh!”-ing my way through a controversy of my own creation at Foundation Beyond Belief. The following are my personal thoughts on the matter, btw, not an official statement of the Foundation (which is why they are found here, on my blog, not there, on its).
After repeatedly noting that this secular humanist foundation would consider supporting charities based in any worldview so long as they do not proselytize, we’ve put our commitment to the test. This quarter, FBB is featuring a religiously-based charity as one of our ten options for member support.
The category is Peace, the religion is Quakerism, and the organization is Quaker Peace and Social Witness. And the reaction is pretty much what I expected — a mix of bravos, surprise, outrage, enthusiasm, and revealed (shall we say, and gently) knowledge gaps in some of my beloved fellow nontheists. More on the “gaps” later.
Some blogs ask why on Earth we would do such a thing. “I’m an atheist. I don’t support religious groups,” said one, as if the second sentence follows obviously and necessarily from the first.
So the first reason to do it is to show that it is indeed possible for nontheists to see good work being done in a religious context and to support and encourage it. Far from a contradiction, some of us think that’s humanism at its best.
The second reason is that many of our members want to express their humanism in that way. And since the Foundation exists to allow individual humanists a means of expressing their worldview positively and doing good in the name of that worldview, it seems fitting to occasionally feature a carefully-screened, non-dogmatic, non-proselytizing, effective organization based in a sane and progressive denomination as one of our choices.
“Well,” one commenter said, “if you HAVE TO support a religious group, I mean absolutely HAVE to, I suppose the Quakers would be the ones.”
A glimmer of light there. But we didn’t have to do this. My word, it would have been much easier not to. We wanted to do it. We see value in doing it.
In a way, this should be a non-issue. Individual members have full control over the distribution of their donations and can zero out any category any time. Some members, disinterested in supporting a religiously-based organization no matter how progressive, have made perfect and appropriate use of this flexible system by shifting their funds elsewhere this quarter. Others — including such strong atheist voices as Adam Lee of Daylight Atheism — have actually increased their Peace donation in support of this idea. That’s freethought in action.
Not all religious expressions are benign, of course. The more a religious tradition insists on conformity to a received set of ideas, the more harm it does. The more it allows people to challenge ideas and think independently, the more good it does. Religion will always be with us in some form. It’s too hand-in-glove with human aspirations and failings to ever vanish at the touch of argument or example. So I think one of the best ways for humanists to confront the malignant is to support and encourage the benign, the non-dogmatic, the progressive.
Speaking of whom.
Liberal Quakers are utterly non-dogmatic, include many nontheists in their ranks, and hold that no individual can tell any other what to believe. That’s a religious organization embracing the essence of freethought. It’s no coincidence that they also have a brilliant history of social justice work. While Southern Baptists fronted biblical arguments in support of slavery, Quakers were among the most courageous abolitionists (along with Northern Baptists). While the Catholic Church vigorously opposed women’s voting rights, Quakers were often leading the movement and getting themselves arrested and imprisoned in the process (along with many Catholic individuals who recognized bad dogma when they saw it). And while multiple denominations rend themselves in twain over gay rights, Liberal Quakers were among the first to openly support gay rights and gay marriage. (This last is not so much the case with Orthodox Quakers, who differ from the Liberals in several respects.)
In the area of peace and nonviolence advocacy, Quakers are second to none. Continuing a centuries-old tradition, Quaker Peace & Social Witness is at work in the Ugandan conflict, supporting and training groups working on peacemaking and peacebuilding; facilitating truth and reconciliation work to deal with the past in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia; managing teams of human rights observers in Palestine and Israel; working to strengthen nonviolent movements in South Asia; and advocating at the UN for refugees and for disarmament policies. In 1947, QPSW shared the Nobel Prize for Peace.
Maybe you can see why we’re proud to support them.
Making discernments is difficult, but it’s worth doing. That’s why the (don’t say ignorance, don’t say ignorance) misinformedness of some atheists about the spectrum of religion has troubled me.
“I am NOT giving money to somebody who’s going to hit me over the head with a bible or say my kids are going to hell,” said one. Fair enough. Of course there’s as much chance of a bluefooted booby doing either of those as a Liberal Quaker.
Others who probably recognize a slippery slope fallacy if someone else uses it (“You can’t let gays marry. Next thing you know, farmers will be marrying their tractors!”) went ahead and employed one themselves. “It’s a slippery slope,” said one email. “A year from now, you’ll be paying for Catholic missionaries!” (I especially enjoy it when someone calls a fallacy by name, then pulls the ripcord anyhow.)
And on it goes. This is what siloing will do to good and smart people. It makes them sloppy, myself included. And we talk nonsense, and end up looking silly to anyone outside of our silo.
One atheist friend predicted we would lose a third of our members overnight. In the two weeks since we announced the decision, two members have closed their accounts (neither mentioning the Quaker choice) and 24 have joined.
The weakness of the arguments against our choice has reassured me, and the majority of responses I’ve heard have been strongly supportive of the idea of providing members with this option. “I’m so proud to be a part of this,” said one member. “Honestly, it’s like the free thought movement is growing up all at once. Thank you for showing vision beyond the usual sounding of alarms and building of barricades.”
Can’t you just feel the embiggening?
Pretend you missed me
I always get a chuckle out of blog posts that apologize for a long absence, as if readers are locked in solitary with a Kindle that can somehow only find the one blog. I know you were sleeping around while I was out of town. I’m hurt, but I still love you, and recognize pathetically that I need this relationship more than you do.
I actually tried to post something two weeks back, but a server switch at my host company preferred that I not. They say it’s been fixed, but I won’t know until I click PUBLISH.
Watch for a new post by week’s end. In the meantime, go jump into Hemant’s arms, see if I care, tramp.
Ariadne’s threads [greatest hits]
- June 21, 2010
- By Dale McGowan
- In My kids, myths
- 8
[Still in reruns. First appeared Sept 17, 2007.]
I was seeing my girls off to sleep Sunday night when suddenly, without warning, the Bronze Age broke loose.
It was one of those breath-holding parenting moments when you can’t believe your luck at being there to capture it. Delaney [then 5] announced that she had made up a myth of her own. For some reason I had the presence of mind to grab my laptop and transcribe as she spoke. Read it, then we’ll chat:
The Wall of Parvati
There was a girl named Medusa. And she knew this wall, a big wall, and she hated it. So one day, she sailed off in a boat with her sharpest sword and she went to that wall. When she got there, she took out her sword and destroyed the whole wall.
The god Parvati was watching her, the god of destroying, because it was her wall. So when Medusa left the wall, Parvati made the wall grow back up. When Medusa found out that it grew back up, she sailed off in her boat again, and when she got there, she cut the wall down again.
Parvati saw this happen (she’s an Egyptian), and when Medusa was gone again, she sent two of her Egyptian gods down to that wall and they made the wall grow again.
When Medusa heard about that, she didn’t want to come out in her boat again, so she put out one of her fastest snakes and made it slither to the wall. The snake used its very sharp tail to whip down the wall. But he couldn’t because the two gods were still there. He whipped the gods with his tail, and the poison went straight into them and they fell asleep, and then the snake whipped his tail against every piece of that wall and slithered back to Medusa.
Before I yak this to death, let me repaste her myth with elements cross-referenced to the myths Laney has heard as bedtime stories in recent weeks:
The Wall of Parvati1
There was a girl named Medusa.2 And she knew this wall, a big wall,3 and she hated it. So one day, she sailed off in a boat4 with her sharpest sword5 and she went to that wall. When she got there, she took out her sword and destroyed the whole wall.
The god Parvati was watching her, the god of destroying,6 because it was her wall. So when Medusa left the wall, Parvati made the wall grow back up. When Medusa found out that it grew back up, she sailed off in her boat again, and when she got there, she cut the wall down again.
Parvati saw this happen (she’s an Egyptian),7 and when Medusa was gone again, she sent two of her Egyptian gods8 down to that wall and they made the wall grow again.
When Medusa heard about that, she didn’t want to come out in her boat again, so she put out one of her fastest snakes9 and made it slither to the wall. The snake used its very sharp tail to whip down the wall. But he couldn’t because the two gods were still there. He whipped the gods with his tail, and the poison went straight into them and they fell asleep,10 and then the snake whipped his tail against every piece of that wall and slithered back to Medusa.
1 She knows Parvati from Ganapati Circles the World (Hindu). Parvati is the consort of Shiva and mother of Ganapati (aka Ganesha or Ganesh). Parvati’s also a Gryffindor, of course.
2 From Perseus and Medusa (Greek).
3 The Iliad (Greek). Much is made of the hated wall around Troy in this excellent retelling for grades 2-4.
4 Several of our recent myths included sailing quests — The Golden Fleece, The Iliad, The Odyssey (Greek).
5 Perseus killed Medusa with the infinitely sharp adamantine sword of Hermes (Greek).
6 Shiva’s pro-wrestling name is “The Destroyer.”
7 No idea. We haven’t done any Egyptian myths yet. The Disney flick Prince of Egypt, maybe?
8 This has been a theme in several of the myths we’ve read lately — the sending of surrogates on tasks — including Cupid and Psyche (Greek) and Proserpine and Pluto (Roman).
9 We’ve encountered two magical snakes recently: in the Garden of Eden (Judaic) and in the Sioux myth of the three transformed brothers. And Medusa has snakes for hair, of course, so maybe she plucked one out and sent it on a mission.
10 A jealous Venus tricked Psyche into inhaling a sleeping draught (Roman).
In that context, maybe you can see why I was all agog. My five-year-old daughter had constructed a syncretic midrash.
Midrash is a process by which new interpretations are laid on old legends or scriptures, and/or new stories are synthesized out of elements of older ones, usually for the purpose of instruction. Though early Jews freaked about syncretism across party lines–don’t make me link to the golden calf!–the construction of fictional midrash from within Judaic sources is recognized as a vital part of Jewish teaching.
In The Jesus Puzzle, Earl Doherty argues that the gospel of Mark was just such a midrash, and that “Mark” did not mean it to be taken as literal fact any more than Delaney did. It was a teaching fiction.
But Laney’s work more closely resembles a deeper kind of mythmaking, one common in the Mediterranean Bronze Age and beyond: the syncretic merging of elements from different belief systems into something new and useful. There is much to suggest that the later character of Jesus is such a syncretic construct, sharing as he does the heroic attributes and biographical details of such earlier mythic figures as Mithras (born on Dec 25, mother a virgin, father the sky-god, 12 disciples, entombed in rock, rose on third day, etc), Krishna, Osiris, Tammuz, and countless others.
A fascinating tangent, believe you me, but I’ll never find my way out if I start with that.
So ancient Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cultures spun new tapestries from the threads of religions all around them. Now here’s a 21st century kindergartener doing the same thing. Makes you think we’re onto something fundamentally human.
If we’d exposed Delaney to just one culture, one religion, she could be forgiven for imagining a no-kidding god on the other end of that one dazzling thread. By instead following a hundred threads, she realizes there are just lots of people on the other end — just plain folks, like Delaney — each of them spinning something lovely and new from the old threads they picked up. Follow enough of those threads and you find yourself outside the labyrinth of religious belief entirely, blinking in the sun.
The thing that left me most awestruck is that she even thought of mythmaking as a thing she could do. Picture a Sunday School kid making up his own bible story. Even though that’s just how Matthew and Luke were elaborated out of Mark, once the 4th century bishops weighed in and made it “gospel,” further creative energies have more often than not been (shall we say) discouraged. With rare but notable exceptions, we are now receivers of that written tradition, not co-creators. That’s why the experience of hearing Delaney spin her tale moved me so deeply. She recognizes other human hands in the spinning of the mythic tapestry — so why not add her own?
The Relaxed Parent Film Festival [greatest hits]
- June 17, 2010
- By Dale McGowan
- In morality, My kids, Parenting, sex, values
- 13
[Continuing the reruns during my busy weeks. This one first appeared on May 23, 2007, so adjust ages etc. accordingly.]
Our Friday night tradition started sometime last year. Every Friday we get a pizza the size of a Buick and a family movie.
By family movie, I don’t mean “family movie.” I mean a movie that our whole family watches together, which believe you me is not often the same thing. And here’s where it gets interesting. It’s my job each week to choose the film. Here’s the audience:
MALE, 44, WRITER. Enjoys philosophical themes; unpredictable, non-linear narratives; line-crossing humor.
FEMALE, 41, EDUCATOR. Enjoys chick-flicks, ro-coms, foreign films. Has never seen a movie without crying.
MALE, 11. Enjoys science fiction, sports, fantasy, adventure. Hates everything he loved at ages nine and five.
FEMALE, 9. Enjoys character-driven dramas and comedies. Gets lost in non-linear narratives, requiring frequent paternal trips to the pause button.
FEMALE, 5. Enjoys an amazingly wide range of flicks, from Pokemon to war movies to comedies to space epics. Can’t read, so captions are out. Hides eyes whenever the music turns minor.
(As of this reposting, we are 47, 44, 14, 12, and 8. The 14-year-old now hates everything he loved at 11, and the 8-year-old reads better than I do, but still hides eyes when the music says to.)
Okay now…find us a movie.
When it comes to parental concerns on movie night, our guidelines might strike some as reckless. I prefer the word relaxed. And that relaxation is a good fit with our worldview.
Conservative religious denominations often teach that humankind is inherently sinful — that beneath a thin veneer of civility lurks a boiling depravity, just itching to stretch its legs. We must erect all sorts of protections and precautions to avoid opening the floodgates, lest we crack each others’ heads open to feast on the goo inside.
Not a Veneerist myself. Though we humans do occasionally screw things up rather royally, most of the time most of us behave well, especially if we feel loved and supported by those around us. It’s yet another gift of evolution. Populations with a tendency toward self-destruction would quickly lose the selective advantage to cooperative ones. The outlook that my kids are evolutionarily inclined to be good changes almost EVERYTHING about my parenting, especially compared to those who see their kids as simmering pots of potential felony and monitoring the flames beneath them as the most urgent parental task. It allows me, among other things, to focus on drawing them out instead of beating them in.
I don’t have to psychotically protect my children from scratches to their protective layer. I want to immerse them in the colors and contrasts and confusions of the world — gradually, yes, but definitely. I believe this fearless approach is ending us up with some pretty remarkable, multifaceted, complex, wonderful kids. You should meet them. I think you’d agree. So, dinner on Thursday, then?
I once had a student, a college freshman, who had never seen a non-Disney movie. It was the standard her parents had developed to protect her from certain ideas, images, and themes — call them “colors” — that could have scratched her veneer, damaging the porcelain doll beneath, or worse yet, letting loose the she-wolf within.
As a result, she hadn’t seen The Wizard of Oz. She hadn’t seen E.T. Is there a Disney film that deals with the longing for home as beautifully as those two?
Since we began our movie tradition about forty Fridays ago, my kids have been exposed to a fantastic variety of themes and ideas, cultural touchpoints they refer to over and over. Yes, we’ve seen Flicka and Flipper, Over the Hedge, Little Manhattan and The Karate Kid. But then there are these:
Pleasantville • Edward Scissorhands • Cool Hand Luke • The Great Escape • Jesus Christ Superstar • Rain Man • Big Fish • Empire of the Sun • Life of Brian • Groundhog Day • Walking with Cavemen • South Pacific • Raising Arizona • Intimate Universe • The Truman Show • Walking with Dinosaurs • The Pursuit of Happyness • Stranger than Fiction • I, Robot • About a Boy • Brian’s Song • Parenthood • Bridge on the River Kwai
In addition to the Gs and PGs, they’ve seen plenty of PG-13s, and a few carefully-chosen Rs (like Rain Man). That means once in a while our kids hear a good solid swear or a reference to actual human sexuality, and have somehow avoided the plunge into foul-mouthed promiscuity.
I think this kind of low-key, normalized exposure makes it less likely they’ll gravitate toward these behaviors. If instead we hide these things, we make them powerful, attractive…forbidden fruit. When a Veneerist jumps for the remote at the first deep kiss or angry curse, he underlines the message that something truly magical is afoot.
Readers who tend toward Veneerism will naturally suppose that I’m advocating porn and slasher marathons for toddlers. Non-Veneerists know there’s something between Little House on the Prairie and Debbie Does Dallas — a great big juicy wonderful and textured middle. My kids have been there, and they’re all the richer for it.
In less than a year, the five of us have explored the importance of honesty (About a Boy, Liar Liar), felt deep compassion and empathy (Brian’s Song, Pursuit of Happyness), learned to care deeply about those who are different (Rain Man, Edward Scissorhands), admired courage and perseverance (Empire of the Sun, The Great Escape), contemplated the meaning of humanness (I, Robot), challenged smiling conformity (Pleasantville, Life of Brian, Big Fish) and questioned our assumptions about reality itself (The Truman Show, Stranger than Fiction, Groundhog Day, Big Fish). We even stood with Judas as he took Jesus to task for neglecting the less fortunate as he pursued his own fame (Jesus Christ Superstar), traced our origins (Walking With Cavemen) and learned never, ever to build a bridge for the enemy, even if your craftsmanship makes you proud (Bridge on the River Kwai). Can’t tell you how many times that lesson has come in handy.
My kids have cried with empathy for people who initially scared them.
Most important of all, they’ve learned that a man really can eat fifty eggs.
Yes, fine, Charlie Babbitt [Tom Cruise] says “fuck” about a dozen times in Rain Man. He does so because he’s an arrogant, selfish jerk — and arrogant, selfish jerks don’t say “boogers” when they’re mad. My kids didn’t want to be like Charlie Babbitt, so why would they emulate his language? Instead, they marveled at how his selfishness slowly transformed into first tolerance, then selfless love for his brother — something underlined by his changing use of the full palette of the English language.
About the tenth time Charlie cussed, Erin shot me a look and said, “Boy, you can tell what kind of person he is.” She had a chance to handle it, process it, and put it in perspective in our living room rather than on the schoolbus.
Best of all, they’re developing a taste for the unique, the creative, and the offbeat, for imaginative narratives and complex visions of the world.
Sure, sometimes I cringe and leap to the remote when a scene heads a little further than we’d expected. But it’s worth the risk. So next time you’re thinking about a film for the whole family, reach beyond G and PG. Let them engage the messy, fascinating world out there while you’re in the living room with them. They can handle more than we give them credit for.
Words fail me [greatest hits]
Six busy weeks coming up, including a week unplugged at the beach, a speech to the UU General Assembly in Minneapolis, a visit to Camp Inquiry in New York, and moving. Rather than let the blog grow all weedy, I’ll run a few of my own favorite posts from long ago.
Words Fail Me
First appeared Sept 28, 2007
Love is too weak a word for what I feel – I luuurve you, you know, I loave you, I luff you.
WOODY ALLEN in Annie Hall
I was born in the Sixties. My first two kids were born in the Nineties. But try to name the decade my youngest was born in, the one we’re in at the moment, and you’re left muttering clunkers like “the first decade of the twenty-first century,” or sounding like Grandpa Simpson by referring to the “aughts.” It’s called a lexical gap, a concept for which a given language lacks a concise label. German is said to lack a precise word for a person’s “chest,” while English speakers are left speechless when it comes to Fahrvergnügen.
When I first heard Alvy Singer struggling to express his feelings for Annie Hall, I thought it was just for laughs. But I’ve begun to struggle in recent years with precisely the same lexical gap — so much so that I’ve almost entirely stopped telling my wife and children that I love them.
Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.
The problem is the overuse of what was once, I suspect, a more sparingly-used, and therefore more powerful, word. The fact that Paul McCartney’s only response to the problem of “silly love songs” was to sing the phrase “I love you” fifteen times in three minutes seems to prove my point.
As a result of using “love” to express our feelings about everything from self-indulgence (“I love sleeping in on Sunday”) to food (“I love Taco Bell’s new Pizzaburgerrito”), I find the word “love” now entirely inadequate to describe the feeling engendered in me by my wife and kids. I don’t love them. I luuurve them.
No no, come back. I’m not going to wax rhapsodic. I’m zeroing in on a practical, lexical problem, that’s all.
Mawwiage
Mawwiage. Mawwiage is what bwings us togevah today. Mawwiage, that bwessed awwangement, that dweam wifin a dweam. And wuv, twu wuv, wiw fowwow you, fowevah.
IMPRESSIVE CLERGYMAN from The Princess Bride
Whenever I think of the reasons I luuurve my wife, I recall an event I attended two years ago — a debate between an atheist and a theist. I described the scene in PBB (pp. 96-7):
When the discussion turned to morality, [the theist] said something I will never forget. “We need divine commandments to distinguish between right and wrong,” he said. “If not for the seventh commandment…” He pointed to his wife in the front row. “…there would be nothing keeping me from walking out the door every night and cheating on my wife!”
His wife, to my shock, nodded in agreement. The room full of evangelical teens nodded, wide-eyed at the thin scriptural thread that keeps us from falling into the abyss.
I sat dumbfounded. Nothing keeps him from cheating on his wife but the seventh commandment? Really?
Not love?
How about respect? I thought. And the promise you made when you married her? And the fact that doing to her what you wouldn’t want done to you is wrong in every moral system on Earth? Or the possibility that you simply find your marriage satisfying and don’t need to fling yourself at your secretary? Are respect and love and integrity and fulfillment really so inadequate that you need to have it specifically prohibited in stone?
I first dated Becca because of conditional things. Non-transcendent things. Had she not been so unbearably attractive to me, had she not had the most appealing personality of anyone I knew, had she not been so funny and smart and levelheaded, I wouldn’t have flipped over her like I did. It may sound off to say it this way, but she fulfilled the conditions for the relationship I wanted, and I, thank Vishnu, did the same for her. I asked her to marry me in large part because of these not inconsiderable things.
But then, the moment I asked her to marry me, something considerably more transcendent began to happen between us. She said yes — and I was instantly struck dumb by the power of it. This splendid person was willing to commit herself to me for the remainder of her one and only life.
Holy (though I try to keep this blog free of both these words) shit.
No, I am not waxing, dammit, I am making a point. We were moving into the unconditional, you see. She had moved from being one of the many attractive, magnetic, funny, smart people I knew to The One Such Person Who Committed to Me. See the difference? And then, once she actually took three small packets of my DNA and used them to knit children — well, at that point, it became hard to look at her without bursting into song. I’m still not over it. What was a strong but technically conditional love moved decisively into unconditional luuurve.
So yes, there are things beyond the seventh commandment that keep me from cheating on my wife. Like the hilarity I feel at the thought of finding any other woman with any amount of those conditionals more attractive.
As for the children…
You’re an atheist? So then…you think your children are…just a bunch of…processes?
JEHOVAH’S WITNESS at my door last year
Last week a radio interviewer asked about my kids, with mild facetiousness: “So how about your own kids? Good kids, ya love ’em and everything?” In addition to the pure silliness of answering such a question, I fell head-first into that lexical gap once again — and the resulting three seconds of dead air probably did me no favors with the audience. I finally sputtered something about them being amazing kids, terrific kids, but it fell short, as it always does, of my real feelings.
I don’t make up for this lexical gap with the kids by telling them I luuurve them. Instead, almost every single day, I tell them, “I do not love you.” And they smile and say, “Oh yes you do!” — and all is understood.
They know in a thousand ways that I am transported by being their dad. They’ve become accustomed, for example, to the sudden realization that Dad is staring again. They’ll get that prickly feeling and turn to see me lost in a contemplative gawk. They’re very good about it, usually returning a smile rather than a roll of the eyes, which I think is very nice of them.
Recognizing that the love of our children is rooted in part in biology — that I am, in part, adaptively fond of them — does not diminish the way I’m transported by contemplating the fact of them, and of our special connection, of their uniqueness, and of the generational passing of the torch.
But it’s interesting to note that, unlike my relationship with Becca, this meditative gawking began on day one. The order of things is reversed. My marriage started in the conditional and added the unconditional. I loved her from the beginning, but only slowly came to be so completely slain by her.
Kids, on the other hand, begin in the unconditional and add the conditional. From the moment they emerged from my wife — seriously, reflect on that for a moment — they were unconditionally wonderful to me. They were half me and half she. They were our connection to the future. Etc.
Gradually we formed additional bonds based on their actual attributes. They are smart as whips, wickedly funny, generous and kind and fun to be around. But that’s all frosting on an unconditional cake. Marriage, on the other hand — if it goes well — starts with frosting and gradually slips the cake underneath.
So yes, my kids are “processes,” whatever that means, and so is my wife. But they are also the main reasons I wake up grateful and filled with meaning and purpose every single day.
(Wax off.)