Blog on, ye secular parentals!
When first I turned the key on the Meming of Life, I poked around the Internets a bit to see who else might be blogging about secular parenting. I found four: Noell Hyman’s Agnostic Mom, The Atheist Mama, Atheist in a Minivan, and Humanist Mama.
I started writing The Meming of Life in March ’07, two weeks before Parenting Beyond Belief was released, expecting to blog for about six months, just to see the book launch through. Still at it, 255 posts later.
In the past two years, a number of blogs have appeared with a significant nonreligious parenting focus, each helping to open that closet door a wee bit wider. Here’s an attempted timeline:
AUG 2005
Agnostic Mom
NOV 2005
The Atheist Mama
AUG 2006
Atheist in a Minivan
FEB 2007
Humanist Mama
MAR 2007
The Meming of Life
Belgian Atheist
AUG 2007
The SkepDad Blog
NOV 2007
Raising Three Thinkers
FEB 2008
Humanist Dad
APR 2008
A Secular Parenting Blog
Science-Based Parenting by Skeptic Dad
MAY 2008
PhD in Parenting
JUN 2008
Skeptical Mom
JUL 2008
Domestic Father
AUG 2008
Humanist Mom
SEP 2008
Rational Moms
OCT 2008
Atheist Dad
Our greatest deficit — the lack of a connected, mutually supportive community — is slowly being erased. Equally important, this chorus of voices helps us to build consensus about the best practices for nonreligious parenting. So visit ’em, read ’em, comment and link up — and let me know who I missed.
[Watch for a post next week featuring secular homeschooling bloggers.]
As the Right fights…
After dominating the country’s politics for years, the conservatives’ grip on power was quickly fading. The Chief Executive was already enormously unpopular when a financial tsunami struck. Over a million homeowners ended up in foreclosure. Unemployment soared. To avert economic disaster, the government poured billions into a bailout of the financial sector. But it was too late. In the next election, voters expressed their lost confidence in conservative leadership, and the liberals swept to power in a landslide victory.
You’d be forgiven for thinking I’m talking about the past two months in the US. In fact, I’m describing the UK in the 1990s. The British Conservative Party held the reins for 18 years, then was trounced by the liberal Labour Party—at which point the Conservatives went through a “struggle for the soul of the Party” — precisely what’s now happening in the U.S.
They eventually split into three factions: the centrist “One Nation” Conservatives, Free Market Conservatives, and The Cornerstone Group, social conservatives whose motto “Faith, Flag and Family” says it all.
Because compromise is a longstanding element of British politics (and British life in general), the three elements remain under a single party identity, struggling for dominance of the platform. But infighting among the factions is credited in part with keeping the Conservatives out of power for over a decade.
Republicans in the US have a similarly mix of the sane, the selfish, and the sanctimonious, and it’s becoming ever clearer that these bedfellows are heading into a bloody civil war. Because compromise is seen as weakness in American culture (and religion), I don’t see it ending in a three-winged party. The big red tent can no longer hold Colin Powell, Pat Robertson, George Will and Sarah Palin. I think the GOP will split in half. And (in case you were wondering about relevance) this will open a completely new way of looking ideology in the US—including religion.
The new parties:
THE NEW REPUBLICAN PARTY (NRP)
The New Republicans are intelligent advocates of small government, limited social engineering, and fiscal conservatism. They are furious at having their party hijacked by the mindless lunatic fringe and their moralistic obsessions. The NRP will merge with Libertarians to revive Goldwater Republicanism.
THE CHRISTIAN AMERICA PARTY (CAP)
Populist, anti-intellectual, ultra-nationalist and über-religious, The CAP will finally have a party unfettered by compromises with the real world. Informed by American exceptionalism and fundamentalist Christianity, it will be in essence an American fascist party.
I use “fascist” here not as a cheap epithet but as a literal political descriptor. The historian Robert Paxton defines fascism as “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
Political theorist Roger Griffin adds that “The core mobilizing myth of fascism which conditions its ideology, propaganda, style of politics and actions is the vision of the nation’s imminent rebirth from decadence.” A perfect description of the Religious Right.
The Christian Americans will front a candidate for President in 2012 by the name of Sarah Palin.
Freed from the unwieldy social obsessions of the Religious Right, the New Republicans will have more in common with Democrats — not everything, but more — than with the Christian America Party. It would be in the interest of the Dems to work with the NRP to keep the CAP from exerting undue influence.
But if Democrats have become too blindly allergic to the word “Republican,” they may fail to recognize the transformation of the Republican brand, driving the NRP back into the arms of the Religious Right. Which would be bad.
And now the point.
This new fault line in American politics might help dissolve another strained coalition in American life: the big tent of religious faith. Progressive religious believers have long been uncomfortable with those on the wingnut fringe of their worldview but are often compelled to defend “faith” in general because they are under that same big tent. That has made bridge-building between the nonreligious and progressively religious difficult. And that’s a shame, because as I never tire of pointing out, liberal religionists have much more in common with secularists on a wide range of issues and attitudes than they do with fundamentalism.
As Bruce Bawer (author of Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity) has noted,
theological liberals of every denomination have found that they have more in common with one another than with the conservatives in their own denominations. Responding to the research of biblical scholars and the ”historical Jesus” movement, they have de-emphasized doctrine.
Meanwhile leaders of the religious right have preached that salvation depends on believing the correct dogma, even as they have succeeded in reducing the considerable doctrinal distinctions that once divided evangelicals, fundamentalists and charismatics.
As a result, American Protestantism is in the midst of a major shift. It is being split into two nearly antithetical religions, both calling themselves Christianity.
These two religions — the Church of Law, based in the South, and the Church of Love, based in the North — differ on almost every big theological point.
I would simply add that Bawer’s “Church of Love” also has much more in common with the nonreligious than with the “Church of Law.”
You can see this in my August post about the Belief-o-Matic Quiz. A secular humanist shows a 60-75 percent overlap with mainstream-to-liberal Christians, while an evangelical shows only a 20-40 percent overlap with mainstream-to-liberal Christians.
The coming fracture on the right can help to isolate and more clearly define the anti-intellectual, fundamentalist side of religious expression in the US. I think that now is the time for the nonreligious to get over our allergy to the word “religion”—to begin opening dialogues and building bridges of common interest and common values with the sizeable non-insane segment of religious believers in this country.
[UPDATE: AHA! I have apparently convinced Christine Todd Whitman.]
[UPDATE: And now Kathleen Parker!]
My future kids-in-law
ERIN (10): When I get married, I want to marry somebody just like you.
DAD: Like me? Aw, what a sweet thing to say, B. And why is that?
ERIN: Because of the way you care so much about Mom. It’s totally obvious how much you love her. I want somebody to treat me just like that.
[DAD makes mental note to blog about this.]
DAD: Well you deserve it, B. Don’t settle for anything less.
DELANEY (7): And I want to marry somebody who believes in God.
DAD: Really? How come?
DELANEY: ‘Cause then we can talk about how we believe different things, and we’ll always have interesting things to talk about.
Congratulations, Dr. Ann
There are countless congratulatory messages for President-elect Obama this morning, all well-deserved. The most remarkably gifted presidential candidate of our time managed somehow to negotiate an unimaginably grueling campaign, and we, despite ourselves, managed to elect him. Shout-outs all around.
But I wanted to take a moment to recognize one of the people who by Barack’s own account helped make him what he is — his nonreligious mother, Ann Dunham.
It should be a matter of no small pride to nonreligious parents that the next President — a man who has been praised for his ethics, empathy, and broadmindedness — “was not raised in a religious household.”1 It’s the other, undiscussed first in this election — the first black President is also the first President with a completely nonreligious upbringing.
“For all her professed secularism,” he wrote in The Audacity of Hope, “my mother was in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I’ve ever known.” And even as she expressed her deeply-felt outrage over those aspects of organized religion that “dressed up closed-mindedness in the garb of piety [and] cruelty and oppression in the garb of righteousness,” she urged her children to see the good as well as the bad. “Jesus, she felt, was a wonderful example,” said Barack’s half-sister Maya. “But she felt that a lot of Christians behaved in un-Christian ways.”2
Ann recognized the importance of religious literacy and saw to it that her children were exposed to a broad spectrum of religious ideas. “In her mind,” Obama wrote,
a working knowledge of the world’s great religions was a necessary part of any well-rounded education. In our household the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology. On Easter or Christmas Day my mother might drag me to church, just as she dragged me to the Buddhist temple, the Chinese New Year celebration, the Shinto shrine, and ancient Hawaiian burial sites. But I was made to understand that such religious samplings required no sustained commitment on my part–no introspective exertion or self-flagellation. Religion was an expression of human culture, she would explain, not its wellspring, just one of the many ways — and not necessarily the best way — that man attempted to control the unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives.3
Maya remembers Ann’s broad approach to religious literacy as well. “She basically gave us all the good books — the Bible, the Hindu Upanishads and the Buddhist scripture, the Tao Te Ching — and wanted us to recognize that everyone has something beautiful to contribute.”4
In this and several other respects, Ann Dunham was a nonreligious parent raising a child in the 1970s according to the exact philosophy of Parenting Beyond Belief — educating for tolerance and empathy, lifting up those religious ideas that are life-affirming while challenging and rejecting those that are life-destroying, and seeking the human foundations of joy, knowledge, and wonder of which religion is only a single expression — “and not necessarily the best.”
Barack went on to identify as a Christian. Whether this is a heartfelt position or a political necessity is less relevant than the kind of Christianity he has embraced — reasonable, tolerant, skeptical, and non-dogmatic. His examined and temperate faith is something he sees as deeply personal, possibly because he had the freedom to choose and shape it himself — precisely the freedom I want my children to have. It is difficult to picture this man forcing his religious opinions on others or using this or that bible verse to derail science or justify an arrogant foreign policy. It’s not going to happen.
It is impossible for me to picture this man claiming God has asked him to invade [insert country here] or that ours is a Judeo-Christian nation. In fact, when he lists various religious perspectives, there is an interesting new entry, every single time:
(Full speech here.)
Is it a coincidence that a child raised with the freedom and encouragement to think for himself chose such a moderate and thoughtful religious identity? Surely not. And if my kids choose a religious identity, I’m all the more confident now that they’ll do the same. 
Just like Ann Dunham, I don’t need to raise kids who end up in lockstep with my views. If our kids turn out anything like Barack Obama, Becca and I will consider our contribution to the world pretty damn impressive, regardless of the labels they choose to wear.
Neither do I think it’s a coincidence that the man who has inspired such trust, hope, and (yes) faith is the product of a home free of religious dogma. This is what comes of an intelligent and broadminded upbringing. It’s one of the key ingredients that have made him what he is.
So thank you, Ann, from all the nonreligious parents following in your footsteps. We now have a resounding answer for those who would question whether we can raise ethical, caring kids without religion:
Yes We Can.
________________________
1Audacity of Hope, p. 202.
2Ariel Sabar, “Barack Obama: Putting faith out front.” Christian Science Monitor, 06/16/07.
3Op cit, 203-4.
4Op. cit.
The world holds its breath…
Tonight, sleep. Tomorrow, vote. See you Wednesday.
Edumacation
It’s been a couple of weeks now since the nation was introduced to the execrable Michele Bachmann (R-MN) when she called for witchhunts to ferret out “anti-Americanism” in Congress.
Some of us, especially those who watched her rise in Minnesota, were not shocked. While in the Minnesota House, Bachmann noticed that most college professors are politically liberal. Instead of drawing the obvious conclusion (that education generally leads to the left), she declared that colleges have a hiring bias toward liberals, who then indoctrinate students into liberal thinking, perpetuating the cycle. She called for legislation requiring that Minnesota colleges hire 50 percent Republicans and 50 percent Democrats.
(The bill was DOA.)
I do think education leads to the left by exposing the mind to the wider world, to a variety of ideas and people, thereby reducing fear of the Other — a fear Bachmann still has in spades. This acceptance of difference is at the heart of the divide between liberal and conservative thinking. Conservatism embodies our evolved tendency to value what is familiar, shared, and traditional while distrusting the unfamiliar or foreign. Liberalism tends instead to distrust sameness and to see greater value in diversity and change.
This election captures that distinction spot-on. One candidate, the familiar and safe archetype of the politician/war hero, has benefited from (and at times encouraged) fear of the unfamiliar, and therefore unsafe, Other.
If it’s true that education leads to the left and diminishes fear, fear-based campaigning should increase in effectiveness as education levels decrease, and you’d expect states with the lowest per-capita educational attainment to favor the fearmongering candidate.
The list below ranks all 50 states and the District of Columbia in order by proportion of college degrees in the population (highest to lowest). Those in blue are favoring Obama (as of Nov. 1). Those in red favor McCain. Black indicates a current toss-up:
TOP THIRD BY EDUCATION LEVEL (15 blue, 2 red)
District of Columbia
Massachusetts
Maryland
Colorado
Virginia
New Hampshire
Connecticut
New Jersey
Minnesota
Vermont
Kansas
California
New York
Washington
Utah
Delaware
Illinois
MIDDLE THIRD BY EDUCATION LEVEL (7 blue, 8 red, 2 toss-up)
Rhode Island
Hawaii
Nebraska
Missouri
Oregon
Arizona
Florida
North Dakota
Georgia
Ohio
Montana
Pennsylvania
Texas
Iowa
Oklahoma
Wisconsin
Alaska
BOTTOM THIRD BY EDUCATION LEVEL (12 red, 4 blue, 1 toss-up)
South Dakota
North Carolina
Maine
New Mexico
Tennessee
Michigan
Alabama
Idaho
Louisiana
South Carolina
Indiana
Kentucky
Nevada
Wyoming
Mississippi
Arkansas
West Virginia
[Source: Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the 2003 Current Population Survey, U.S. Census Bureau, 2003-04, quoted here. State electoral polling via FiveThirtyEight.com.]
When it comes to strength of support in each state — the percent of the population by which the candidate is favored — the correlation is even clearer. Eight of the 10 bluest states, i.e. where Obama support is highest by % of pop (DC NY CT VT CA IL MA DE) are in the top third educationally, while 7 of the 10 reddest states, i.e. where McCain support is highest by % of pop (ID AL WY AR LA KY TN) are in the bottom third educationally.
Bill O’Reilly calls me a “secular progressive,” and as labels go, it’s damn close to perfect. But religion and conservatism aren’t my real enemies. They are symptoms of something much more fundamental — ignorance and fear — and education is the remedy for both. If wanting a better-informed, less fearful world makes me an elitist, then honey, we ALL ought to embrace that label.
(N.B. To save y’all some emailing, rest assured that I know there are many people of great intelligence and worth who lack a college degree. I have only used the college degree stat as a general indicator of educational attainment. But I do think it’s fair to say that susceptibility to political fearmongering tends to decrease as education increases. Kirk out.)
Best Practices 2: Encourage active moral reasoning
The second installment in a nine-part series on best practices for nonreligious parenting. Back to BEST PRACTICES #1.
If the Ten Commandments had been posted at Columbine High School, the April 20 massacre would never have happened.
—former Republican Congressman and current Libertarian Presidential candidate BOB BARR, at a press conference on June 17, 1999
Children’s understanding of morality is the same whether they’re of one religion, another religion or no religion. But if it’s simply indoctrination, it’s worse than doing nothing. It interferes with moral development.
—Dr. LARRY NUCCI, director of the Office for Studies in Moral Development, University of Illinois, Chicago
ast May I mentioned a powerful study in which 700 survivors of Nazi-occupied Europe—both “rescuers” (those who actively rescued victims of Nazi persecution) and “non-rescuers” (those who were either passive in the face of the persecution or actively involved in it)—were interviewed about their moral upbringing. Non-rescuers were 21 times more likely than rescuers to have grown up in families that emphasized obedience—being given rules that were to be followed without question—while rescuers were over three times more likely than non-rescuers to identify “reasoning” as an element of their moral education. “Explained,” the authors note, “is the word most rescuers favored” in describing their parents’ way of communicating rules and ethical concepts.1
This echoed work by Grusec and Goodnow in the 1990s, which showed that “parents who tend to be harshly and arbitrarily authoritarian or power-assertive are less likely to be successful than those who place substantial emphasis on induction or reasoning.”2
Both the Oliners’ results and the central role children play in their own moral development are underlined by cross-cultural research from the Office for Studies in Moral Development at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Children in cultures around the world tend to reach certain landmarks in moral development reliably and on time, according to lead researcher Larry Nucci, regardless of what their parents do or don’t do. “Children’s understanding of morality is the same whether they’re of one religion, another religion or no religion,” says Nucci.
The reliability with which kids hit these moral landmarks was underlined by a University of Zurich study published in the August issue of the journal Nature. Kids between 3 and 4 were seen to be almost universally selfish, after which a “strong sense of fairness” develops, usually by age 7 or 8. Fairness was most evident toward those with whom the children identified—in this case, kids from the same school as opposed to a different one.
Ideas of fairness and of in-group preference appear to go hand-in-hand. “The simultaneous development of altruistic behavior and preference of the own group provides interesting new impulses for the conjecture that both of these processes are driven by the same evolutionary process,” said Professor Ernst Fehr, one of the principals in the study. This development, which has never been shown to occur in other species, “may be an important reason for the unique cooperative abilities of humans,” he said. Unlike animal and insect societies, human societies are based on a detailed division of labor and cooperation in large groups of genetically unrelated individuals who are nonetheless joined by common concerns.
So once again, for the vast, vast majority of kids and situations, morality happens. We are wired up, however imperfectly, for cooperation and fairness. Parents can and should encourage these tendencies, but we mustn’t think we are writing on a blank slate, or even worse, rowing against a current of natural depravity. Our job is to draw out and enhance the ethical nature that evolution has already put in place, then expand it beyond the in-group by widening those circles of empathy. Knowing that our children’s tendency is toward the ethical can help us relax and row with the current, knowing that kids in a supportive, “pro-social” environment tend to turn out just fine.
Nucci’s work does point to one way in which parents can actually impede their children’s moral growth. Any guesses?
“If it’s simply indoctrination,” he says, “it’s worse than doing nothing. It interferes with moral development.”3
So the one practice conservative religious thought insists is vitally important in moral education, the one thing we are begged and urged and warned to do—to teach unquestioning obedience to rules—turns out to be the single most counterproductive thing we can do for our children’s moral development.
Instead, the best thing we can do is to encourage our kids to actively engage in the expansion and refinement of their own natural morality—asking questions, challenging the answers they are given, and working to understand the reasons to be good.
Marvin Berkowitz, professor of character education at the University of Missouri, puts it just that clearly: “The most useful form of character education encourages children to think for themselves.”4
______________________________
1 Oliner and Oliner, The Altruistic Personality, 181-2.
2 Grusec, J.E. and J. J. Goodnow, “Impact of Parental Discipline on the Child’s Internalization of Values: A Reconceptualization of Current Points of View,” Developmental Psychology, 30, 1994.
3 Quoted in Pearson, Beth, “The art of creating ethics man,” The Herald (Scotland), January 23, 2006.
4 Ibid.
You are the Weakest Link, Governor…Goodbye
The most stressful moment of my life was my doctoral dissertation defense. For two hours, a committee of people who already hold PhDs in the subject do their level best to make you screw up, to reveal gaping holes in your knowledge of the field. Their tone is often contemptuous — more Weakest Link than Who Wants to Be A Ph.D. — and always with an eye to protecting their field from poseurs. The trick is to uncover any serious deficits before you walk out the door with a degree they’ve signed off on, only to show you slept through some key fundamental. If they decide you aren’t ready, you can be denied both the degree and a second chance. You can, in theory, toss away five years of effort with a single…gaffe.
Once in a while the process fails, and we get a stealth creationist who managed to fake his way through the last gate in a biology program without revealing that he thinks evolution is “just one guy’s idea,” or a law grad who thinks Marbury vs. Madison was a football game. But the whole purpose of the grueling, humiliating dissertation defense is to find these people out and show them the door.
Political campaigns at their best serve the same purpose, ferreting out candidates who are clueless not just on this or that item of knowledge, but on the absolutely non-negotiable fundamentals of the office they seek.
There are mere gaffes — Howard Dean saying the Book of Job is in the New Testament, McCain referring to the ambassador of Czechoslovakia (which no longer exists), Obama saying he’d been to 57 states, Biden putting Roosevelt on TV in 1929. These are amusing, but all honest people know they are sideshows of little real import. Thirty seconds later, the candidate usually self-corrects, because he or she simply misspoke.
And then there are GASPERS, statements that reveal such a breathtaking deficit on the part of the candidate that all the oxygen goes out of the room, and a bug-eyed, oh-shit silence hangs like a shroud. These don’t deserve to be called gaffes because the candidate didn’t misspeak. If asked to clarify, he or she would say the same thing, over and over, because it is what s/he actually believes.
For examples of such epic, terrifying moments of revealed ignorance, we need look no further in this election cycle than the governor of Alaska.
I’m not talking about dinosaurs living 4,000 years ago. That’s bad enough, but it is at least conceivable that she could get her cladistic timescales just that wrong and still function as a head of state without doing too much damage. Not a desirable thing, but conceivable.
However…when I first read about her book banning efforts in Wasilla and the subsequent firing of the town librarian (who refused to consider such a request), I had one of those genuinely oh-shitting moments. We differ on energy policy, foreign policy, blah blah blah. Those we can argue about. But someone who doesn’t even understand why censorship is bad, inherently bad, no-matter-who-is-doing-it-or-why-or-what-books-are-involved bad, has instantly outed herself as the Weakest Link and needs a gentle shove to the exit.
When she showed for the third time that she hasn’t taken the 90 seconds required to read the description of the job she seeks, she earned a somewhat rougher shove to the door by inventing a startling new power for the VP — being “in charge of the United States Senate”:
Thank you for coming. And don’t let the door hit you on your way out.
If the camel’s back weren’t already busted enough, the last straw came over the weekend when during a speech advocating increased funding for research benefiting special needs kids, Governor Palin said:
She kids us not! Fruit flies! What kind of stupid science is that?
The, uh…scientific kind. The smart and useful kind.
It’s hard to get through eighth grade science without learning that a huge portion of what we know about genetics comes from fruit fly research. Thanks to their rapid regeneration, huge fecundity, and simple genome, fruit flies are the single most studied organism on the planet. It’s okay for Jane Sixpack to not know that. It’s not okay for a potential policymaker to state an intention to foist breathtaking ignorance of the most basic science on the rest of us. Again.
There is irony as well, of course: While urging greater funding of research to benefit special needs children, she mocks and derides the funding of research that directly benefits special needs children. Among other things, the fruit fly research she derides has recently provided breakthroughs in understanding autism. By shooting off her mouth about things she knows little about, she achieves the opposite of her intended result.
This fits into a larger pattern — a world and worldview in which this kind of inside-out thinking is a way of life.
In the religiously conservative world Palin inhabits, you can be opposed to teen pregnancy, then advocate abstinence-only sex ed, which increases rates of teen pregnancy.
You can oppose antisocial behaviors in children, then advocate corporal punishment, which has been shown to increase antisocial behaviors in children.
You can decry immorality in children, then advocate a commandment-based authoritarian moral education, which reseach has shown to “actually interfere with moral development” (Nucci, et al.) more than any other approach.
Now imagine instead a person who wants all the same things — meaningful and useful science, a reduction in teen pregnancy, and kids who are well-behaved and moral — but goes beyond what “seems” right to find out what we’ve actually learned, through careful research, about genetics, teen pregnancy, and moral development.
Then vote for that person.
Two ways blind
Someone please pull this video out from under my eyes. I’m riveted and repelled. I can’t stop watching it, analyzing it, pausing and advancing it, trying to learn something from it. It somehow holds the key to…something. In just one minute, this woman manages to illustrate the intersection of blind faith and blind intolerance more succinctly and powerfully than I’ve ever seen:
[SIGH. Careful what you wish for. The production company has pulled the video from under my eyes. Go here to see it. You’ll have to wait for it to load and go to 8:25 to see the segment in question, but it’s worth it. I hate stingy copyright holders.]
It’s not like I haven’t seen the combination before–it’s not exactly rare–but I’ve never seen such a richly-illustrated portrait of the way faith and intolerance can, and often do, spoon. Watch her eyes. Listen to the cadence of her voice. Catch the suppressed violence in her last sentence. Most of all, watch that smug, self-satisfied blink/head-toss combo that appears first at 0:17, then again in some form six more times, in each case following a declaration of blind faith or blind hatred.
If you aren’t yet convinced that religious moderates share more in common with the nonreligious than with a wingnut like Ms. Kerlee, share this video with your religious moderate friends and watch their reactions. Recognizing our shared outrage over ignorance posing as “values” would be good for both groups–and who knows, might even get that long-overdue bridge-building underway.
(via Pharyngula.)
Tray tables up! Flights of nonsense landing in Texas schools
The next act in the long and ugly creationist end-game will take place in Texas. After the previous two acts, my confidence is high.
One of my dearest hopes for the next generation is that they get a real shot at understanding evolution. My own teenage understanding of the theory was fuzzy around the edges, since we touched on it for all of about eight minutes in high school. I didn’t encounter it again until Anthro 1 at Berkeley–at which point it dazzled me so much I changed my major from psych to physical anthropology.
And am I ever glad I did, because understanding evolution changes everything. It is not just true but transformative and elegant and exquisitely, lastingly wonder-inducing. And the wonder is increasingly evident the deeper you dig — as opposed to religious wonder, which pales with each stroke of the spade. Yes, I want kids to understand evolution because it’s true, but I also want to gift them with the giddy perspective it brings, both humbling and exalting in its implications. It is indeed the “best idea anyone ever had,” but also the most astonishingly wonder-full.
When I fight to keep evolution in the schools and creationism out, it’s that wonder that I’m fighting for as much as fact. The fact that ignorance and cowardice among parents and educators keeps our kids from learning much about the Coolest Thing We Know simply breaks my heart.
That’s why I’m so excited to hear that creationists are busily reviewing state science standards in Texas.
(Wha??)
You heard me. When I read about this on Pharyngula, I squealed with girlish glee. Here’s why: When lunacy flies too far below the radar, the good guys slumber, the middle shrugs, and untold damage is done. But once in a while it flies high enough and caws loud enough to wake enough of us up to do something serious about it. That’s why I’m a big fan of those flights of nonsense.
It happens in politics as well. A recent such flight was piloted by the ghastly Michele Bachmann, a fascist (and I don’t use that word lightly) from my former state who won a seat in Congress in 2006 despite my objections. She’s been a dangerous nut for two years but only came to the country’s attention when she went on Hardball recently to call for a McCarthyesque rooting out of “anti-Americanism” in Congress:
Bachmann’s no more dangerous this week than last — she’s simply visible. As a partial result, the most admired Republican in the country endorsed the man she slandered. And as a direct result, three quarters of a million dollars poured in to her opponent’s campaign.
Another example: Would the left ever have gotten its act together if John McCain had selected a sensible running mate?
So we really shouldn’t gnash our teeth too much when nonsense flies high. Pass out the peanuts and encourage them to enjoy the in-flight movie while you spread some foam (or not) on the runway.
Evolution education has benefited tremendously from such high-visibility nonsense in recent years. The Dover trial was a lopsided victory for evolution, and the judge, a Bush appointee, wrote the most devastatingly powerful and scornful evisceration of “intelligent design” in the history of the issue. (If you haven’t seen the NOVA program about the trial, oh my word, people, click here.)
Without that high-flying attempt by the creationists, a crucial moment of progress couldn’t have occurred.
Then there’s Kansas, where the state Board of Education’s attempt to throttle evolution education ended with evolution more firmly ensconced in the curriculum standards than before and every last one of the creationist board members out of a job. Again, progress not in spite of, but because of, overt lunacy.
Now the flight is landing in Texas, where the Texas Board of Education (itself stocked with two creationists for every science-literate member) has named a six-person committee to review science standards — three science-literates and three high-profile creationist activists. The committee is headed by a seventh member, Don McLeroy, a creationist dentist (of all things).
See where this is going?
So why should parents outside of Texas care? Here’s why, from the Texas Freedom Network:
Publishers will use the new standards to create new textbooks. Because Texas is such a large market for textbook sales, publishers typically craft their textbooks for this state and then sell those books to other schools across the country. So the results of this curriculum process could have consequences for far more than just the 4.6 million children in Texas public schools.
Unsurprisingly, the National Center for Science Education is on it. They’re the good folks who coordinated the brilliant victory in Dover.
So be glad the lunacy is flying high where we can see it — but don’t be complacent, especially y’all in Texas. If nothing else, get yourselves informed before the board election by listening closely to this incredibly clear message from a well-informed Texas gentleman whose resemblance to Satan is almost certainly coincidental:
“What happened in Kansas and in Dover, Pennsylvania is about to happen here in Texas, too,” he says. Well I certainly hope so. It won’t be easy or smooth. The fable purveyors will do some damage along the way. But I’ve never been more confident in our ability to win in the end.
