I’d like to buy another consonant [Greatest Hits]
[Another favorite from the archives. Next new post on Groundhog Day.]
First appeared on Sept 25, 2007
Went with Delaney to the “Dads ‘n’ Donuts” event at her school the other day. A fine selection. We finished eating and socializing in the gym a bit early, so we sauntered back to her kindergarten classroom. A couple of dads were already there, being toured by the hand around the classroom by their progeny. Laney grabbed my hand and we joined the conga line.
“This is where alllll of the books are,” Laney said. “And that’s the whiteboard. Here’s the globe, and the puppets…and this,” she gestured proudly, “is my desk!”
I barely heard the last two, since I was still riveted on the whiteboard — which, oh-by-the-way, had THIS on it — scroll ye down:
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THIS WEEK!
I am neither making this up nor exaggerating its appearance. Much. The actual medium was dry-erase markers, not tie-dye, but that is amazingly close to the actual appearance of the glorious crux splendidior on the whiteboard in my daughter’s public school classroom.
And what a cross it was! Every color of the rainbow! I’d have burst into a chorus of Crown Him with Many Crowns if not for eleven or twelve things.
Déjà vu. I flashed back to the near-encounter with FAITH at Curriculum Night. But this one was in full view. If anyone else had me in view, they’d have surely assumed I’d suffered a small but effective stroke. I was completely frozen and trying to stay that way. Time stopped, looked at me funny, then continued on its way. I knew that if I came to, I’d leap onto a chair and point and squeal “CROSS! CRAWWWWWWSSSSS!!” I’d have no choice: the point-and-shriek is mandated for all encounters with crosses in the by-laws of the Atheist-Vampire Accords of 1294.
A little girl entered my periphery, guiding her father by the hand. “And this,” she said, pointing to the cross, “is what we’re learning about this week!”
She paused for dramatic effect, then announced, with pedantic precision, “Lower-case t!”
What if she comes anyway? [Greatest Hits]
[I’m up against a conundrum within a paradox. Between now and February 1 I have the busiest two weeks of my freelance writing life, including resumption of the job I loved and left behind when I left Minneapolis — U.S. Communications Coordinator for Nonviolent Peaceforce. But Raising Freethinkers is also due to launch in a matter of moments, so this is no time to abandon the Meming of Life. My solution is a short series of “greatest hits” — five or six of the most popular posts from the past two years. Enjoy, and I’ll see you again with new thoughts on Groundhog Day.]
What if she comes anyway?
First appeared on October 10, 2007
Her name was first spoken in hushed tones among children all over America [over] twenty years ago. Even in Sweden folklorists reported Bloody Mary’s fame. Children of all races and classes told of the hideous demon conjured by chanting her name before a mirror in a pitch-dark room. And when she crashes through the glass, she mutilates children before killing them. Bloody Mary is depicted in Miami kids’ drawings with a red rosary that, the secret stories say, she uses as a weapon, striking children across the face.
from “Myths Over Miami” by Lynda Edwards in the Miami New Times, Sept. 1997
“Dad?”
“Yeah, B?” It was Erin, my nine-year-old, nicknamed “The B.”
“Can you come into the bathroom with me?”
“Why, you need to talk about something?” Our family has an odd habit: one person sits on the edge of the tub and chats up the person on the commode. A gift from my wife’s side.
“No…I’m scared to go in there.”
“It’s the middle of the day, B.”
“I know, but…Daddy, just come in with me.”
“Not ’til you tell me what you’re afraid of.”
She hesitated — then said, “The mirror.”
“What about the mirror?”
She leaned in and whispered, “Bloody Mary.”
I resisted the urge to say, No thanks, I’ll have a Tanqueray and tonic. I knew just what she meant. I was a kid too, you know.
“Desirée at school says if you turn off the lights and turn around three times in front of the mirror with your eyes closed and say Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, then open your eyes — a woman all covered in blood will be looking at you from in the mirror!”
A quiver-chill went through me. I was a kid again. I remember exactly how it felt to hear such ghastly things whispered by a true believer. Their wide-eyed conviction always did a fine job of convincing me as well. But in my day, Bloody Mary came crashing through the glass at you — a detail Erin didn’t seem to need to hear.
“So just go in, leave the light on, and don’t spin around or say the name, B.” I knew how hopelessly lame a thing that was to say. What if she comes anyway? Once the concept is in your head, why, the very thought of Bloody Mary might conjure her up. She might appear just because she knows I know! And she knows I know she knows I know!
“Okay, I’ll go with you. But you know what I’m gonna do.”
“NO DADDY!”
We went eye to eye. “Sweetie, tell me the truth. Do you think Bloody Mary is real, or just a story?”
She looked away. “Just a story.”
“So why be afraid of a story?” Again, I know. Lame! Yes, it’s true, it’s just a story — but ultimately, in our human hearts and reptile brains, such a defense against fear is hopelessly lame.
Her forehead puckered into a plead. “But Daddy, even if she’s just a story — what if she comes anyway?”
See? I remember.
She sat on the lid of the toilet, whimpering.
I turned out the lights. Nooooohohohoho, she
began to moan, with a dash of fourth-grade melodrama.
_______________________________
I walked into the bathroom myself and pulled the curtains. She followed, timidly, cupping her hand by her eyes to avoid the vanity mirror. “You don’t have to come in if you dont want to, B,” I said. She sat on the lid of the toilet, whimpering. I turned out the lights. Nooooohohohoho, she began to moan, with a dash of fourth-grade melodrama.
I walked to the mirror and began to turn. Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary! I opened my eyes. “See?” I knocked on the mirror. “Helloooooo! Hey lady! Look B, nobody’s home!”
Erin peeled her hands from her eyes and squealed with delight. “I’m gonna do it!”
She walked slowly to the mirror, trembling with anticipation. Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary…Bloody Mary! She peeked through her fingers.
“Eeeeeheeheeheehee!” she squealed delightedly, jumped up and down, hugged me. But if you believe she was cured — if you think Daddy’s words were really enough to slay the dragon — then you were never a kid. Maybe we said her name too fast, you see, or too slow, or or or maybe we didn’t believe in her enough. Maybe she just can’t be tricked by skeptical dads into showing herself. Erin didn’t say any of these things, but I know she was thinking them. And sure enough, the very next day, Erin was requiring bodyguards in the bathroom again.
I haven’t tried to talk her out of it. To paraphrase Swift, you can’t reason someone out of something they weren’t reasoned into in the first place. For a while, it’s even a little bit fun to believe such a thing is possible. And thinking I could talk her out of it anyway would be denying an inescapable fact: that when I pulled my own hands from my eyes in that darkened bathroom and saw the mirror, the rationalist, just for a tiny fraction of a second, dropped back and hid behind me as my little boy heart raced at the question that never quite completely goes away:
What if she comes anyway?
[For one of the most hair-raising and powerful essays I’ve ever read, see the full text of Lynda Edwards’ gripping 1997 piece on the Bloody Mary story as told among the homeless children of Miami — complete with illustrations.]
Blue me away
Just an embedded video today — three years old and no doubt known to everyone else already, but new to me yesterday. I’m a sucker for this kind of combination of wit, originality, and message:
Share with the kids. Mine loved it.
Evolution for breakfast
One of the tropes in my seminars is the suggestion that big ideas are best consumed in little bites over many years. The old “how-do-you-eat-an-elephant” joke is right on the money. Religious education works best this way. No big lectures, no Bible marathons required. A toe-dip a day for 18 years will get you wetter than a whole catechectical bath. Best of all, you don’t get all pruney.
Same with evolution. When we lived in Minneapolis, our family used to take walks through an area called the Quaking Bog in Theodore Wirth Park. I spotted a fawn once and waved the kids over with the universal handsigns for “Come-quickly-and-quietly” and “You-call-that-quiet?” What followed went something like this:
DAD: Look, look. See the deer? You can just barely see it against the leaves.
ERIN (about 8 then): It’s almost invisible.
DELANEY (about 4): Whoa. If I was an aminal that ate deers, I’d never see them. I’d just starve.
DAD: Unless there was a bright pink one.
They laughed. The deer bolted.
CONNOR (10): Oh, good job, girls!
DAD: Okay, pink and slow. I think I’d eat nothing but slow, pink deer.
(*Munch*) That’s one bite of evolution. No need to hammer it home with big hairy terminology. No need to connect every dot on the spot. Just take a bite. Mmmm, Daaarwin.
In the previous post I wrote about the possibility of artificial selection at work on heike crabs in Japan. Fishermen toss back crabs with somewhat facelike markings on their shells, leading over the course of hundreds of generations to ever-more-facelike shell markings. I told Erin the story of the heike that night at bedtime.
(*Munch*)
This morning as the girls ate breakfast, I opened the bottle of their chewable vitamins. “I want an orange one,” said Erin.
“I’m well aware.”
“Me too,” said Laney.
“I know what color you want, girls, you tell me every morning.” I tapped two vitamins into my hand. Both purple. I poured out a bunch more. All purple. “Pfft. Of course,” I said, showing the handful of purple vitamins.
Erin chuckled. “That’s because we ask for orange every day.”
It hit me like a brick. “Hey, Erin! It’s just like the heike crabs!”
“The wha…oh, the crabs in Japan! Omigosh, it is!” Just as the fisherfolk selected and rejected crab phenotypes, we had selected and rejected vitamin “phenotypes” until purple ruled the bottle.
(*Munch*) Mmmm.
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A frankly incredible annotated list of books about evolution for kids at CHARLIE’S PLAYHOUSE
Mama don’t take my heike crabs awaaaay
Ohhh, the pain. The pain. One of my cherished beliefs is under attack, and I’m doing what we monkeys do when that’s the case. Resisting. Bargaining. Denying.
There are two illustrations of selection — one natural, the other artificial — that I’ve always adored for their explanatory power and elegance.
One is the peppered moth. Peppered moths are light grey with dots of black and brown all over–perfect camouflage for the local light-colored tree bark in 18th century England. A few were completely black, but only a few, because they were easy for birds to spot and eat.
In the 19th century, factory smoke blackened the tree bark in the moths’ range. The black moths were now perfectly camouflaged and quickly became the favored phenotype, while the light grey became visibly delicious. The proportions switched — almost all of the moths in the forest were now black and only a few light grey.
Experiments were conducted to confirm the hypothesis in the mid 20th century. Errors subsequently discovered in those experiments led creationists to trumpet the supposed dethroning of the peppered moth as an illustration of natural selection. But subsequent, better-designed experiments have re-confirmed the original hypothesis to the satisfaction of the relevant experts.
In the book Moths (2002), Cambridge biologist Michael Majerus sums up the consensus in the field: “I believe that, without exception, it is our view that the case of melanism in the Peppered moth still stands as one of the best examples of evolution, by natural selection, in action.”
Sure enough, several other experts in both moths and industrial melanism have also written to reaffirm the peppered moth story as a robust exemplar of natural selection writ small.
Whew.
But there’s another selection story I adore — and that turn of phrase tells you all you need to know about my vulnerability on this one. It’s the story of the heikegani, a crab found in the waters of the Inland Sea in Japan near Dan-no-ura.
The sea was the site of a major battle in 1185 between Heike and Genji warriors. The Heike were trounced, and the survivors are said to have thrown themselves into the sea in disgrace.
In telling the story of the struggle, an epic called the Heike Monogatari refers to a species of crab in the Inland Sea as reincarnations of the Heike warriors defeated at the Battle of Dan-no-ura. And no wonder — the shell of the crab includes markings that evoke a scowling samurai warrior. And I don’t mean “evoke” like Ursa Major evokes a bear (psst, it doesn’t). I mean the crab looks like a scowling samurai warrior.
In the original Cosmos series, Carl Sagan offered the heike face as an example of artificial selection.1 Fisherman in the area have known the legend for eight centuries. During that time, if the nets pulled up a crab with markings resembling a human face, even mildly so, the fisherman — understandably loathe to disturb the spirit of the samurai — would throw it back. Crabs with less facelike markings would end up dipped in butter. The more facelike, the more likely it would be tossed back in with a girlish scream, free once more to fornicate with others of its uncanny ilk.
Eight hundred years of this and you’ll find yourself looking at some pretty scream-worthy samurai crabs.
What’s most awe-striking about this is the fact that unlike other examples of artificial selection — dog breeding for example — the selective pressure exerted by the fisherfolk is wholly unintentional, but still works. It combines random variation and decidedly nonrandom selection in a way that mimics natural selection incredibly well.
I happen at the moment to be putting the finishing touches on a new seminar (this one based on Raising Freethinkers) to be offered for the first time at UUC Atlanta on January 11. While polishing a section on helping kids understand evolution, I remembered that I didn’t just have moths to work with, I also had crabs. Ahem.
But in Googling for images, I came across the last thing I ever wanted to see: a sturdy, possibly even convincing attempt by a reputable scientist to debunk the hypothesis, claiming that the crabs are seldom kept and eaten regardless of markings, and that nearly identical markings are found on fossil crabs. And some other stuff.
Now the only worthy response to this news is Oooo, truth beckons, let’s follow this lively gent wherever and to whatever abysses he shall lead, lest we miss the chance to glimpse our precious reality more clearly!
Instead, I recoiled. Nooooooo, I thought. Bad man. Stranger danger.
I may have mentioned that I love the story, love the elegance of the hypothesis. I want it to be true. It is too beautiful to not be true.
I KNOW, I KNOW. Don’t lecture me, people. This is confessional literature here. These are the moments that make me empathize with religious folks who are disinclined to lift the veil on their own favorite bedtime stories. Once in a while, I feel their pain.
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1Though Sagan got it from a 1952 article by biologist Julian Huxley.
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Postscript: When Erin asked for “something new” as a bedtime story last night, I told her the tale of the heikegani, from battle to Cosmos. But when I reached the hypothesis, I did the right thing: “Some scientists think it looks like a face because…” The caveat made it no less cool to her.
Thunderstruck
Just back from a lovely trip to the Ethical Society of St. Louis where I spoke to a wonderful crowd who laughed at all of my jokes and asked some very good questions. Can’t ask for much more than that. Many thanks to my warm and welcoming hosts, including Trish Cowan and the fabulously-named Kate Lovelady. And to my dear mom and stepdad, who gave me a bed and cookies.
(Thanks also to Dan Klarmann of the blog Dangerous Intersection who blogged about the event and snapped the hilariously ministerial photo of me at right.)
In the Q&A after the talk, one participant asked why I don’t call myself an agnostic instead of an atheist. It’s a perennial question. I answered that I am an atheist and an agnostic and a secular humanist and a freethinker. They are not exclusive of each other; each simply emphasizes something different.
Though I’m sure they exist, I have never yet met an atheist delusional enough to say he or she knows God does not exist. Atheism simply means “I don’t think God exists.” It is a statement of belief, based on the evidence as we see it, not one of certainty. But agnostic is too often misunderstood as a 50-50, “dunno, don’t care” position. That not really an agnostic, it’s an apatheist. I said that I am a teapot agnostic, then explained what that is.
In addition to giving us the teapot, Bertrand Russell tackled the issue of labels with his usual clarity:
I never know whether I should say [I am] “Agnostic” or whether I should say “Atheist”. It is a very difficult question and I daresay that some of you have been troubled by it. As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one prove that there is not a God.
On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.
None of us would seriously consider the possibility that all the gods of Homer really exist, and yet if you were to set to work to give a logical demonstration that Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, and the rest of them did not exist you would find it an awful job. You could not get such proof.
Therefore, in regard to the Olympic gods, speaking to a purely philosophical audience, I would say that I am an Agnostic. But speaking popularly, I think that all of us would say in regard to those gods that we were Atheists. In regard to the Christian God, I should, I think, take exactly the same line.1
As I flew home that night, I was treated to a God’s-eye view of a thunderstorm over Kentucky and Tennessee. It was a good 500 miles wide. The cloud layer, maybe 1,000 feet below us, was completely invisible for 20 seconds at a time, until a pulse of lightning would illuminate a thunderhead from within, spreading across the folds and billows just long enough for the shape to remain on my retina. Then again, ten miles away, and again, right beneath us. Fantastic.
Yet I never saw another person on the plane so much as glancing out the windows.
We just stop seeing how remarkable the world is. Most days I’m as guilty as the next person. I opened my Harvard talk with a bit of this:
We’re all half asleep most of the time. We lose track of how astonishing our situation is because it’s always been this way. Here we are, sitting in an auditorium, I’m the speaker, you’re the audience, sitting attentively. How can we go through this charade? How can we pretend that things are normal? If we were awake, we should all be completely distracted by our own existence: Oh my gosh. Look at this…I’m this combination of mind and body, half my mom, half my dad, made of star material, my thoughts all coming out of a blob of electrochemical jelly in my head, 60,000 miles of blood vessels, and I’m related to redwoods and butterflies and blue whales… But we don’t, because we’ve never NOT been these things.
Douglas Adams captured this perfectly when he said, “The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”
Parents have no such excuse. We haven’t always been parents, so there’s presumably this prior frame of reference to compare to—the period before we created life. And then we created the life, and felt wondrous for a while, but a little later we’re fixing it breakfast and tying its shoes as if it wandered down the street and in the door. There are three people running around our house who emerged from my wife. Think of that. But how awake am I to that fact on a daily basis? Not very.
I do think it would help if we named things according to their real significance. My wife could say to our son, “Hey! Organism-that-was-created-in-my-body-by-a-process-I-barely-understand! Flush the potty when you’re done!”
“Okay, okay, My-portal-into-the-world, jeez!”
Whenever I see a good lightning storm, I picture a classified ad on another planet:
SETTLERS NEEDED to colonize third planet in Sol system. Advantages include temperate conditions and plentiful resources. Challenges include tendency of planet’s atmosphere to discharge one-billion-volt columns of energy toward ground in random patterns approximately 100 times per second. Include two references.
Still a damn nice place.
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1from Russell, Bertrand, “Am I an Atheist or an Agnostic? A Plea for Tolerance in the Face of New Dogmas” (1947)
A (really) new kind of politics
Okay, okay. OKAY! I keep getting a drip drip drip of emails asking me to weigh in on Obama ‘s decision to invite pastor Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation.
At first I thought it was a strange and galling. Warren is awful on several issues, though admittedly good on several others. Then, with the help of several smart commentators on the left, I began to see it very differently.
It began with the benefit of doubt. The more I observe him and learn about him, the more my opinion climbs regarding Obama’s intellect and values. Since it started quite high, that’s saying something. So when I find myself thinking he’s done something stupid, I have to take a moment to see if he’s actually figured something out that I haven’t yet.
I’m convinced that’s the case with the Warren invitation.
Most of our left-wing chatter about “change” — let’s be honest — has really meant “doing things our way for once.” But Obama and his team are thinking on a whole new level. The answer to the favorite caustic headline on progressive blogs since the Warren invite — some snide version of “THIS is Change We Can Believe In??” — is Yes, dammit, it is!
Every President-elect talks about reaching across the aisle after an election, of “healing the divisions that plague our nation,” blah blah blah. Until now they haven’t been all that serious. Oh, they’d meet with leaders from the other party to repeat their platitudes, appoint a member of the opposing party as Secretary of Feng Shui — but it always stopped at such window-dressing. Until now.
Those of us who’ve obsessively studied this man for the past two years should have seen this coming. When Obama joined the Harvard Law Review, the organization was bitterly divided between a conservative faction called the Federalist Society and…well, everyone else. From his first days on the Review, Obama (in the disbelieving words of a fellow progressive on the Review) “spent time with [members of the Federalists] socially — something I would never do.” And when he became president of the Review, Obama appointed not one, but three Federalists to top editorial positions.
Did he do this because he agreed with them? Hardly. He did it because, as the inelegant but spot-on proverb puts it, he’d rather have them inside the tent pissing out. He was in charge, but he had the confidence to allow everyone a real voice. A real voice. And it’s not just for show — as many of those in his inner circles have noted, he genuinely wants and needs to hear everyone.
Now consider the whole fracas over Obama’s expressed willingness to talk to our enemies, including Ahmadinejad. Conservatives hooted with derision: You’d be endorsing evildoers!
No, liberals replied. It’s essential to build relationships and keep communication open, especially with our enemies. Isn’t that obvious?
But now that our own issues and enemies are involved, we seem not to be able to see the same principle at work. Instead, we liberals hoot: You’re endorsing evildoers!
For all his wrongheadedness on key issues, Rick Warren has shown a willingness to reach across the aisle, to open lines of communication when others have refused, often angering his team in the process. Obama has seized this opening despite their differences. In so doing, he may help moderate evangelical attitudes toward him. By co-opting one of their generals with a gracious gesture of inclusion that goes beyond the usual tokenism, he has quite possibly made it easier to move forward on several fronts. And progress on those fronts matters much more than the opportunity to pack the inaugural moment with partisan purity.
So before we declare ourselves utterly betrayed, let’s at least consider the possibility that the us-vs.-them politics we’re angrily demanding is less helpful in the long run than Obama’s longsighted approach. If the operative root of progressive is progress, I think Obama just may be more progressive than those of us who elected him.
More on Obama’s tenure as president of the Harvard Law Review
An outstanding column by E.J. Dionne on the Warren choice
Follow the bouncing meme!
As y’all know, on December 6, a number of nonreligious parents gathered at Harvard’s Fong Auditorium to get some ideas about raising kids without religion. Greg Epstein also led a discussion about how best to form a more lasting community to serve the needs of nonreligious parents in the Boston/Cambridge area.
Washington Post reporter Robin Shulman spent the day with us and wrote an article about it for the December 21 edition of the Post. Aside from one previously-noted misquote and one eyerollingly cheap shot ( “someone sneezed, and there was a long silence — no one said “Bless you” or even ‘Salud’ or ‘Santé'” ), it was a lovely and fair piece.
Early in the article, Robin used the word “congregation” to describe the intended parenting community. It wasn’t her word choice but that of Greg Epstein, who favors staking a shared claim in such language rather than retreating allergically from it. It was that single word that set off a memetic devolution of the article’s message.
It started at the Post. Reporters rarely write their own headlines. Whoever wrote this one apparently saw an opening in the word “congregation” and wrote the following head:
Humanist Parents Seek Communion Outside Church
Like “congregation,” communion has a general meaning and several specific ones. In the general sense ( “a joining together of minds or spirits”), the headline is perfectly accurate. But comments on the article, in blogs, and elsewhere show that many readers read the specific meaning ( “A Christian sacrament commemorating the Last Supper of Christ”) and went ballistic. And well they might, since the reference to “church” does indeed narrow the meaning.
Equally interesting is the syndicated life of the meme. Robin’s unchanged article appears today (Dec 28) in newspapers and online columns around the U.S. Sometimes the headline is unchanged (as in the Loveland, Colorado Reporter-Herald, for example), but more often, the copy editor or columnist in question has his/her way with the meme, often revealing his/her own biases or intentionally stirring the pot.
Here’s a sampler of headlines currently running across the U.S., including some less wobbly than the Post headline…
Humanists Want Community, Too
(Atlanta Examiner)
(No surprise that one of the simplest, most accurate headlines of all was hat-tipped from the Friendly Atheist.)Humanists look to form parenting group with no religious elements
Organizers of a Boston seminar wanted to reach out to parents looking for guidance
(Wichita Eagle)Humanist families find guidance, rituals without religion
(Santa Fe New Mexican)
…some with the same wobbly c-words…
Humanist parents seek communion, support
(Canton Repository)Humanist parents consider their own congregation
(Winston-Salem Journal)
…some that I’m sure must mean something, but who knows what…
Parents seek life without religion
(The Tennessean)
…and some that are just plain silly or willfully ignorant:
Atheists trying to replicate church
(Reformed Chicks Blabbing at Beliefnet)Teaching Children How to Go to Hell
(Covenant News)
For those of us trying our best to articulate a clear and consistent message about what humanism is and isn’t, the key to a peaceful inner life is truly giving up the illusion of control — making peace, once and for all, with the perpetual mutilation of our carefully-crafted memes.
Add that to my resolutions.
This Is Only a Test
ERIN (10): Dad, I’ve been thinking.
DAD: I’m telling Mom.
ERIN: Dad, seriously. Okay — If God is real, I think I figured out why he would mix really bad things in with good things in the Bible.
DAD: And why is that?
ERIN: It’s to see if we can use our brains and figure out what’s good and what’s bad, then only do the good things…or if we’ll just do everything it says, like robots. It’s a test to see if we’ll think for ourselves.
(CORRECTION: I wrote this conversation down without attribution shortly after it happened. When I added it to the blog a week later, I credited it to Delaney (7). I have since learned that it was Erin (10) who said it. Mea culpa.)
“Getting” belief
A final P.S. to the Santa discussion — The post I linked to last time (by philosopher and PBB contributor Stephen Law) just reminded me of another benefit of doing the Santa thing, one I’ve spoken of but may not have written about. Stephen puts it like so:
[Allowing kids to believe in Santa, etc.] gives them an appreciation of what it’s like to be a true believer. Even after the bubble of belief has burst, the memory of what it was like to inhabit it — to really believe — lingers on. The adult who never knew that is perhaps kind of missing out.
I think it even goes beyond missing out. I’ve found that adults who never “inhabited belief” of any kind often (not always) exhibit utter bafflement when it comes to religious belief. You can see this in countless blogs and essays and comment threads — I just can’t understand how anyone could believe abc, Why can’t they just wake up and realize xyz, ad infinitum. A natural lack of empathy ensues.
Bafflement is not good. It’s a kind of incomprehension. I don’t want my kids baffled by any major part of the world. If Stephen and I are right, Santa belief is an opportunity that can be drawn on for a lifetime — a source of empathy for those who willingly immerse themselves in belief even when the evidence against that belief is overwhelming. Not a bad thing at all, that empathy. In fact, it’s a precondition for dialogue.
Even if my kids never get religion, I at least want them to “get” religion — and being a true believer for a little while just may be the ticket.
Empathy symbol courtesy EmpathySymbol.com.
