alone at the edge of the darkness
- July 09, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In fear, Parenting
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Sleep, you black-eyed pig
Fall into a deep, foul pit full of ghosts.
19th c. Icelandic lullaby
Ohh, by the sacred lint that girds the lotus in the navel of Vishnu, I do love the research phase of writing. My business handle is McGowan Writing & Research, but some days I’d gladly chuck the middle word if only somebody would pay me to read alllll day.
Anybody?
As I dig into research for the fear book in the coming months, I’ll post the occasional passage here. So:
Researchers in Europe1 recently confirmed — no surprise to me — that parents consistently underestimate the intensity of their children’s fears. It is interesting that in Western culture we send them off on their own to bed when they are least able to handle the solitude. In primates and humans [sic], the startle reflex is potentiated by darkness. Neurologically, we have evolved to be jumpier and more hypervigilant after sunset, whereas, for example, rodents and rabbits are more wired during the day. Yet this is the only time that we actually require our most vulnerable members to fend for themselves. Improbably, we position them as scouts around the periphery of the campfire, then offer them no instructions beyond insisting they not sound an alarm while we slumber.
Patricia Pearson, A Brief History of Anxiety…Yours and Mine
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1Lahikainen, A.R. et al., “Child-parent agreement in the assessment of young children’s fears,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 37, no.1 (January 2006): 100-117.
thinking by druthers 3
[Third installment in a series on confirmation bias. Back to Part 2.]
The mistaken belief that a handful of unexplained anomalies can undermine a well-established theory lies at the heart of all conspiratorial thinking. All the evidence for a 9/11 conspiracy falls under the rubric of this fallacy.
Michael Shermer, in Scientific American, October 2006[Conspiracy theories] use the ‘reverse scientific method’. They determine what happened, throw out all the data that doesn’t fit their conclusion, and then hail their findings as the only possible conclusion.
Thomas Eagar, professor of engineering, MIT
I was cleaning moldy tuppers out of the back of the fridge the other day when Connor (nearly 13) piped up from the computer. “Hey Dad,” he said. “Have you ever heard about these conspiracy theories?”
Oh jeez. “Which ones?”
“All kinds of different ones. You wouldn’t believe what people believe!”
Since people on either side of conspiracy theories use that same sentence to mean opposite things, I asked him what he meant.
“Like some people think we never landed on the moon. But we did!”
I pulled a container of primordial soup from the lower shelf without saying a thing.
“We did…right?”
I dumped the container down the sink. “Well I certainly think so. What do you think?”
“Of course!” His voice had the slightest unsettled catch. He’d never heard it questioned before.
I used to describe two different and opposite extremes of non-thinking to my critical thinking classes. Complete gullibility is one extreme. Our family spent the 4th of July with several neighbors. At one point, one woman said that people have always teased her for her gullibility. “Well,” I said, “when they say that, just point out that the word ‘gullible’ isn’t even in the dictionary.”
A look of surprise crossed her face. “Really?” she said. “I had no idea.”
But just as bad as extreme suckers are extreme cynics, whose every other sentence is “Don’t be so naive.” The sucker believes without thinking; the cynic disbelieves without thinking. Everything is a scam, a sham, a hoax, a conspiracy. The two are opposite excuses for suspending the hard work of figuring the world out, and both are useless.
“All of these things are pretty crazy,” Connor continued, “but there’s one…well, it’s pretty convincing.”
“Oh yeah? Which one?”
“Well,” he said, his voice dropping to a — well, a conspiratorial whisper, what else– “It looks like the World Trade Center was actually brought down by explosives inside the buildings..not by planes.”
I’ll assume everybody’s heard this idea — that the Bush Administration brought the towers down to justify the invasion of Iraq. I have several extremely rational friends who were convinced of this at some point, though most have now given it up. Some even have Dick Cheney himself controlling the planes by remote, presumably while saying, “Bwahahaha!”
“What reasons do they give, Con?”
“Tons of stuff! One thing is that the buildings wouldn’t fall the way they did if a plane flew into them. They fell straight down. And you can see it in the video — boom boom boom boom, one floor after another, straight down, just like if there were timed explosions on each floor!”
It took me a minute to figure out how to proceed. You don’t want to just step right up to the plate and take his bat away.
“That’s interesting,” I finally said. “Is it true?”
“Is what true?”
“Is it true that the buildings wouldn’t fall that way if planes flew into them?”
“Well — I dunno, that’s what this guy said.”
I nodded a bit. “And other people say something different.”
“I guess so.”
And there’s the problem. We talk about critical thinking as if it’s a question of evidence, but we often have no direct access to the evidence that we claim convinces us. What first-hand evidence do I have that the earth orbits the sun? Almost none. First-hand evidence that we’ve walked on the moon? First-hand? None. In both cases I have relied on intermediaries to bring information to me, and I have believed them.
See the problem? A Catholic could say the same about the belief that crackers turn into Christ. They have relied on intermediaries to bring information to them, and they have believed them. Very little of our knowledge today is unmediated, so much of the task is now assessing the messengers and their methodologies rather than the inaccessible facts themselves. In other words, in order to decide whether my confidence is warranted, I use what I do know to ask whether their confidence appears to be warranted.
More on that in druthers 4. Right now, let’s finish with the conspiracy.
I told Connor that conspiracy theorists tend to present at least one “impossibility” about the official version which may or may not actually be impossible, and offer a blizzard of “evidence” that almost never justifies the confidence with which it is asserted. So even if you don’t know anything about structural physics or the melting point of steel, you can take a pretty good stab at a complicated conspiracy theory by stepping back and asking which scenario is more likely. Generally they won’t even be close.
In this case we have two main alternatives:
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1. Islamic terrorists struck a blow at the U.S. by hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings.
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2. The government of the United States intentionally murdered thousands of its own citizens to justify a war.
I loathe the current administration. It will take two generations at least to recover from the damage done in these eight years, if indeed we can recover at all. The combination of ignorance, arrogance, and dishonesty in this White House will be hard to top. I hope we never try.
In short, the 9/11 conspiracy theory plays right into my biases. And my son’s. But I’m a fan of the real world, so I need to control for those biases.
That Islamic jihadis, fueled by religious and cultural hatred, committed this act against a perceived foreign enemy is plausible. That the Bush White House did the same thing to their own tribe requires positing a cartoonish level of baby-eating evil and duplicitousness that should shame any rationalist who suggests it. Add to this the fact that Americans have never required all that much incentive to support a war or invasion, and the 9/11 conspiracy vanishes into the swamp of ludicrous, bias-fueled fantasy.
So we didn’t have to get into the details of the conspiracy claims or their rebuttals. I simply wanted to give the boy some general food for thought that could come in handy the next time he hears an incredible claim confidently made.
fear not (so much)
Raising Freethinkers is in production, so I’m prepping the proposal for another book. One of the major themes of this one is fear, both real and imagined, and its use and misuse. In the process of researching it, I am (as usual) uncovering things at turns delicious and appalling. Thought I’d share a bit.
Media coverage, Internet hype, and even many parenting books seem hellbent on diverting our attention from legitimate but often abstract threats to dangers that are more tangible but statistically quite rare.
Fear sells papers and drives online traffic, so half-overheard urban myths that “a child is abducted every 40 seconds” (false) and “child abduction rates have risen 444% since 1982” — never with a citation of any kind — continue to make the rounds. Christian parenting books often seize this opportunity, sounding a frightening “values” alarm. Crime is spiraling out of control. Morality is on the retreat. Our children are at greater risk of teen pregnancy, kidnapping, and violent death than ever before. And terrified parents are offered the solution: Jesus.
But are the frightening claims actually true? Are our kids really less safe and less moral than ever before? Consider these statistics:
• According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, violent crime rates have declined continuously since 1994, reaching the lowest level ever in 2005.1 Given the fearful hype, would you ever guess?
• Teen pregnancy is on the decline. According the Guttmacher Institute’s 2006 report, teen pregnancy rates are down 36% from 1990 to the lowest level in 30 years.
• Child abduction rates—always infinitesimal—continue to fall. Rates of violent crime against children have fallen by nearly 50 percent since 1973. The child murder rate is the lowest in forty years. Any given child is 50 times more likely in any given year to die from a world-ending comet or meteor (1 in 20,000) than to be abducted by a stranger (1 in 1 million). (“A Fistful of Risks,” DISCOVER, April 1996)
So why do we do this? Why do we fear unlikely things and ignore far greater risks? An article in Scientific American Mind summed up the psychological research:
• We fear what our ancestral history has prepared us to fear, like confinement, heights, snakes, spiders, and humans outside our tribe;
• We fear what we can’t control. The car is less safe than the airplane, but our hands are on the steering wheel of one and not the other;
• We fear things that are immediate (strangers around us) more than the long-term (global warming);
• We fear threats readily available in memory. Every plane crash, every child abduction, every home invasion is covered by the news media and takes on a significance far beyond the actual threat.
We can provide our children the best security and the least fearful environment by assessing risks intelligently and refusing to give in to those who benefit from fearmongering and the sounding of hysterical moral alarms.
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1The Bureau’s phrasing. I assume that “ever” means “since complete modern records have been kept.”
hopeful music
Last night a memory bobbed to the surface of Delaney’s brain — something I’d said in passing a good two years ago when she was four.
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“Remember that music that’s been playing for my whole life?” she asked at bedtime. “I wonder if it’s still playing.”
“Huh? Oh…that! Yes, it is!” I retold the story, thrilled that she finds it as cool as I do:
“There was a composer who lived a long life and died not too long ago. His name was John Cage. His music wasn’t like anyone else’s because he didn’t just want to entertain people. He wanted them to think and wonder and even laugh. Mostly he wanted them to think about music in a new way.
“He wrote one piece I especially like. Wanna hear it?”
“Sure.”
I sat in silence for thirty seconds. “Okay, that was it. Well, just part of it.”
She looked puzzled. “Just…being quiet?”
“Well…was it really quiet?” I asked.
“No! I heard Max [the guinea pig] making little noises. And the ceiling fan going whoosh whoosh.”
“That’s the idea. This composer wanted us to hear all the sounds around us and to think of it as music that’s playing all the time. So he wrote a piece of silence to make us hear all the stuff we usually ignore.”
“That’s so cool.”
Many of you will have heard of this piece, which is called 4’33” and consists of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. It can be performed, Cage said, on any instrument or combination of instruments and in any number of movements. But that’s not the piece she was asking about. “And he wrote another piece for organ called ‘As Slow as Possible.'”
“That’s the one!”
“And then some people decided to play it really slow — so slow it would last for 639 years. They found a little church in the middle of Germany that wasn’t used anymore, and they built a special organ just to play this one piece of music.
“It started playing seven years ago on September 5th, 2001. But the music starts with a rest — a silence in music — so the first thing you heard was nothing! For seventeen months!”
“Haha! Weird!”
“And right in the middle of that silence — you were born.”
“Awesome,” she whispered.
She was right. Somehow, juxtaposing her birth and that silence was awesome. Even better: The bellows sprung to life on that day in September, and pumped away for twenty months as the only sound in the church. Once again, music without music.
“Then one day in the middle of the winter, when you were one and a half, the first notes started to play. Hundreds of people gathered in the little church to hear the notes start. Most of the time, though, the notes are playing with no one there. Little weights hold down the keys. Then every two years or so, it’s time for the notes to change again, and people come from around the world to hear it.”
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“And it’s still playing right now?”
“Yep, it’s playing right now. And here’s the thing: It will be playing on the moment you graduate from high school and when you graduate from college. It will be playing when you get your first job, when you get married, and when your kids are born.
“The music that started the year you were born will still be playing at the end of your life. It will be playing when your grandchildren are born and when they die, and their grandchildren, and their grandchildren, and on and on, for 639 years.”
“Awesome!”
“Just think how different the world will be then.”
“I wonder if they will be different creatures from us then [one of her favorite ponders]. Like we used to be different animals a long time ago.”
“Fun to think about, eh?” I kissed her on the head and she drifted off.
The Cage project will strike some people as bizarre or silly. There was a time it would have hit me that way, back when I thought 20th century art and music was one big con game. But the more I think about the slowest piece of all time, the more it moves me.
The church is in Halberstadt, Germany. Suppose someone had started playing a piece of music in Halberstadt 639 years ago, in 1369. The Ming dynasty in China was one year old. Europe continued to reel in disorder one generation after the Black Death. The music would have ushered in the dawning of the Renaissance, the voyages and outrages of the New World explorers, and the scientific and artistic revolutions of the 16th century.
Luther’s Reformation and the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries would have raged around it. It would have been playing as the town itself changed hands from Prussia to Napoleon’s Westphalia and back to Prussia before becoming part of Saxony, then Germany, playing as Allied bombs fell in 1945, as the town was closed into communist East Germany and as it was returned to the heart of reunified Germany.
Would that piece have found its way to the last barline?
Starting a piece of music implies an intention to finish it. So starting a 639-year piece is, among other things, an extraordinary statement of human hope. it implies that we may still be here in 639 years, and that the intervening generations, with all their own changing concerns and values and ordeals, will nonetheless pick up the baton and run with the project we have begun. It is, in other words, a perfect metaphor for human life itself.
The aesthetics of the piece, as with so much of the music of Cage, are immaterial. It’s the idea that moves me. To hear the chord currently being played is to connect yourself to the recent past and the distant future in a way never before quite possible. That’s part of the reason that every time the chord changes, hundreds of people come from around the world to hear it happen.
The last chord change was in May of 2006, the month I resigned my college professorship. The next change is this Saturday, July 5, 2008.
Thanks to the hopeful gesture of even beginning such a thing, I can picture it finishing. So long as we can keep from killing each other, cooking the planet, or blowing up Halberstadt with technologies still undreamt — and if Jesus can hold off a little longer on his glorious return — then maybe, just maybe, our optimism will have been justified.
thinking by druthers 2
[Second installment in a series on confirmation bias. Back to Part 1.]
An audience member at my Austin talk asked a good and common question. In The End of Faith, Sam Harris apparently made the case that those who do not hold religious beliefs must be willing to challenge the irrational beliefs of their friends and neighbors. (I say “apparently” because I started but didn’t finish EOF. I am the choir, he had me at hello, and I had other fish to fry.)
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“So,” asked Audience Guy, “do you agree that we should more actively challenge the irrational beliefs of friends and neighbors?”
I said no.
I know this will strike a lot of y’all as heresy, and it depends on the relationship in question — but I don’t think we should make a general practice of confronting people we know and challenging their beliefs uninvited. I am opposed to aggressive evangelism of ALL kinds. And not because it isn’t “nice.” The reason is that uninvited personal critiques of belief, especially of irrational ones, are almost never effective. Of the scores of people I know who have given up religious beliefs, approximately zero did so as the result of an uninvited challenge by another person.
There are all sorts of things we can and should do to make it more likely that they challenge themselves, but you can’t force another person to think. You can help another person become curious enough to invite the discussion, in part by being a visibly contented nonbeliever yourself. Once you have an invitation from the other side, a lot is possible. Otherwise, forget it.
“But but but…I have such a great argument!” You crack me up. Sit down and listen. The very idea of argumentation is based on the premise that you’re after the truth. It works brilliantly when a person is convinced of the virtues of the scientific method, convinced that there is nothing so beautiful as reality and nothing so ugly as self-deception.
But traditional religious belief isn’t arrived at by a critical determination to avoid error. It is arrived at by the focused determination to confirm one’s biases. Now, quite suddenly, you are asking a person to switch pole stars — to reorient his or her entire way of thinking from confirmation bias to a love of reality wherever it lies.
You’re funny. No no, in a good way.
“It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into,” said Jonathan Swift, supposedly. If you have ever tried to argue a religious point with a fervent believer, only to see the goalposts move and terms redefine themselves in midair, you know what he was talking about. But you may not have known why: the other person is working from an entirely incompatible operating system. Stop being surprised that he can’t open your attachments.
A lifetime of cherry-picking evidence on the basis of its confirmation value rather than assessing its value as evidence can lead people into unintentional hilarity. The more they surround themselves with nodding people who are busily confirming the same biases, the more hilarious it gets. The nonreligious are by no means excluded from this disease — more on that in part 3. But traditional religion, founded as it was on the principle of confirmation bias, is an especially fun source of rib-tickling.
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During some down time in my room before my May presentation at the Center for Inquiry in Amherst NY, I indulged in one of my favorite masochistic pastimes: watching EWTN, the Global Catholic Network. A panel discussion was under way, and a priest was going off on the evils of condoms, of homosexuality, of abortion — anything, really, other than unprotected-face-to-face-one-man-on-top-of-one-woman-he-is-married-to-resulting-in-baby-sex. (You know…like the kind priests have.) There was never a risk that the rest of the panel would do anything but nod, so of course his statements got ever-stranger and ever-less-supportable.
Finally he hit bottom. “And why do you think there is a priest shortage?” he asked. “That’s right: abortion! Nothing could be more obvious.”
Nod, nod, nod.
The next topic was end-of-life care. “Too many doctors are woefully ignorant of Catholic bioethics,” said an expert on, presumably, Catholic bioethics. “They will, for example, pull the plug on a patient merely because all brain activity has ceased.”
Nod, nod.
“What they fail to realize is that the suffering of the body in those final hours may be necessary to get that person into Heaven.”
Nod, nod.
“By denying the person that suffering, the doctors, in their ignorance, may be contravening God’s will by denying a chance at redemption.”
Nod, nod.
“And by moving so quickly, they may be denying God the chance to intervene miraculously to bring that person back.”
Nod, nod.
These are very close to verbatim. I was writing as fast as my little paw could push the pen.
An outsider looks at such a fatuously silly misuse of the neocortex with astonishment — and out spill the arguments. Wasn’t the plug contravening God’s will, and the removal of the plug restoring God’s intended situation? Does God, who exists outside of time and space, actually need “time” to perform a miracle? How much, exactly? Yes, yes, yes. Fine.
But those around her are having their own biases confirmed — so nod go the many heads, and she digs deeper and deeper for nonsense.
WE ALL DO THIS, myself included, as noted in the last installment. The key is to make yourself vulnerable to disconfirmation, to be in the room with people who will call you on it when you make a bias error, and to be properly embarrassed when it happens.
Need more? Enjoy this, remembering all the while that the arguments apply only to bananas — especially at 0:19, 0:41, and 0:51:
“Seriously, Kirk,” he says — which is how you know he’s serious.
Yes, fine, these are fairly extreme examples. But I think the essence of religious thought as confirmation bias is nicely captured, as is the essence of the difference between religion and science. Next time I’ll finish up by showing what it is that makes science work differently. And psst…it isn’t the superior moral or even intellectual fiber of scientists.
[On to Part 3.]
reaching out to harry AND sally (3 of 3)
by Dale McGowan
[Third and final installment of the cover story in the current issue of Secular Nation. Back to part 1 and part 2.]
But what do we need to do to move farther? For one thing, we need to serve the needs of people who are quite different from Harry.
Harry was a freethought pioneer because he did not have the same needs or wants as most other people. He was able to leave the church behind because he was exceptional in this way. When people talk to me about the need for community or wax poetic about “something larger than myself” or seeking the “spiritual side” of life, my eyes glaze over. I mutter something about all the other ways in which I achieve community, about how I walk in the woods to get in touch with the transcendent, and so on. It’s all a tad forced. The truth is that I don’t feel these needs in quite the way I hear others express them.
As a result, I and all the rest of those with Harry personalities — whether male or female, and of whatever age or ethnicity — get together and talk quite happily about science and truth and reason. It’s not me I’m worried about—it’s Sally, left standing awkwardly by the coffee urn for ten paragraphs now.
Desperate for something to do, she ambles over to a table of books for sale. Every book without exception is about science, philosophy, critical thinking, or the debunking of religion or the paranormal. She meekly drifts to a group in conversation. Some religious dogma or other is being debunked with a flurry of critical argument and a smug, chuckling sneer.
Is there anything in the world less bearable than smugness, whether religious or secular? Anything?
I don’t know if I can keep up, she thinks. Rather than being welcomed into an accepting community, she has the distinct feeling she’d better watch what she says, lest she reveal some substandard thinking. Most of all, she is painfully aware that the chuckling sneer is directed at who she was the previous week.
The meeting begins to coalesce. After a few announcements, the speaker is introduced. And what will our new visitor hear for the next 45 minutes? Here’s a quick sampling of recent freethought meeting topics around the country:
- Jesus of Nazareth—Historical, Mythical, or Some of Each?
Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
Revelation Trumped by the Constitution
The Enlightenment and the Self
Who Wrote the Gospels?
Church/State—Strict Separation or Accommodation?
Debate: “To Believe or Not to Believe”
I’m interested in every one of these topics. Of course I am—I’m Harry. Sally though, not so much. If she comes again and has the same experience—an indifferent reception, an atmosphere of critical disdain, and a debunking lecture—the third time will rarely be a charm. Our brilliant, attractive outreach efforts will have been in vain.
I’ve heard it protested that I’m comparing apples and oranges. Freethought groups are not churches. They can’t be. This is true, of course—but if our prospective members seem to be allergic to oranges, might it be wise to take a closer look at them apples?
Rather than being welcomed into an accepting community, she has the distinct feeling she’d better watch what she says, lest she reveal some substandard thinking. Most of all, she is painfully aware that the chuckling sneer is directed at who she was the previous week.
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A recent post by SecularFuture, a moderator on the Internet Infidels discussion board, summed it up very well:
Religious communities are often filled with social events, music, poetry, inspiration, and life advice. It can be very difficult for someone to give all of this up for a few science books, Internet forums, and an arsenal of ammunition to use against the religious. Where is the poetry? Where is the inspiration?… Although many of us have already found meaning without religion, we should probably try to help those who haven’t.1 [Emphasis added.]
Fortunately, and at long last, many groups across the country are doing just that—expanding their topics, improving the atmosphere of their meetings, and turning to ever-greater involvement in good works. In addition to sponsoring a strip of highway, Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry began a marvelous “revolving charities” campaign last September, designating one charity each quarter as a spotlight beneficiary. In less than a year, thousands of dollars have gone toward orphan relief, domestic violence support services, medical research, and a residential facility for troubled youth. A few other groups are doing likewise. And from Portland to Albuquerque to Raleigh, nonreligious parenting groups and ethical education programs for kids are springing up, adding a family focus, more gender equity, and young blood.
The future of outreach
In one way, I worry that our current positive outreach efforts are too friendly—that they advertise a kinder, gentler freethought than actually exists yet on the ground. I hope both the sizzle and the steak can progress in tandem toward an even more humanistic future. I’d like to see soup kitchen, food pantry, and Habitat volunteering2 added to the freeway cleanups. I’d like to see a Tree of Compassion to complement the Tree of Knowledge. And I’d like to see a future billboard that moves beyond the lovely “you are not alone” to “you are warmly welcomed, just the way you are!”
“The good life,” said Bertrand Russell, “is inspired by love and guided by knowledge.” Thanks to Harry, we’ve got knowledge tackled. In the interest of Sally, and the millions like her, it’s time to match our beautiful outreach efforts with greater emphasis on compassion, emotion, humanity, and love.
[N.B. Though I’ve tried to make it explicit throughout this article, I feel the need to reiterate that both Harry and Sally are archetypes. There is certainly gender, age, and ethnic variation on both sides. But I think it is especially important to recognize that organized freethought tends older, whiter, and maler than the population average.]
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1Thread begun by forum moderator SecularFuture.
2 All of which are currently done by a few locals, and kudos to them.
reaching out to harry AND sally (2 of 3)
by Dale McGowan
[A continuation of the cover story in the current issue of Secular Nation. Back to part 1.]
The public response
It’s always dicey to draw conclusions from the more obvious public responses to our efforts. The disgruntled are much more likely than the gruntled to make their opinions known. A journalist I know estimates that an angry reader is eight times more likely to go to the trouble of making her views known than a happy one. If the mail she receives after an article runs 8-to-1 negative, she figures public opinion was evenly split. If on the other hand the negatives are only 3-to-1, she reads it as an overwhelmingly positive response.
When we measure the success of an atheist outreach effort, it’s crucial to shrug off a certain amount of noise. It’s a given that some wingnut will take it upon him or herself to throw the occasional Holy Hand Grenade. So it’s not surprising that highway signs for Atheists United have been vandalized, nor that the Tree of Knowledge display was repeatedly damaged. Reacting calmly to such nonsense can win even more hearts and minds.
Now consider the fact that all three efforts report a considerable number of positive comments and positive press coverage and you begin to realize just how effective it can be to promote our worldview in a major key.
The third step
The third step in the courtship is the real challenge. Once freethought has made itself noticed and won hearts with our lovely smile, it’s time to deliver the goods. Though there’s movement in the right direction, I’m still concerned about our readiness for prime time. There’s a long way to go before we can call ourselves fully enlightened on the subject of what people are looking for—but at least we’re fumbling mightily for the light switch.
Until very recently, I didn’t even see too much of that. I’d hear the occasional grumble at freethought meetings about why the numbers remained so low, the median age so high, and the modal gender so male. And then, in a dismissive grunt, I’d hear the same conclusion, over and over: They’re all just brainwashed.
This is our very own God Delusion.
The persistent delusion I hear from freethinkers is that people go to church for God. If we could just break through their belief in God, goes the argument, they’ll walk away from church. It isn’t true, and we need to grasp this, once and for all, if we are ever to capitalize on these brilliant outreach efforts, bringing people in the door and keeping them there. If we don’t have what they are looking for—and by and large, we don’t yet—they will walk right out again. And by and large, they do.
I mentioned this disconnect to a gentleman in a freethought meeting last year and he scoffed. “Sorry,” he said. “If eternal life and pretty fables are what they need, we’re fresh out.” He didn’t seem inclined to question his assumption. In fact, I’m convinced the revolving door on freethought meetings isn’t about the absence of God but the absence of something much more human.
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In a recent Gallup poll, only 27 percent of respondents directly mentioned God when giving their primary reason for attending church. They go to be a part of a loving community, for a sense of belonging, to be inspired and supported, to be involved in social justice and good works. One friend told me she goes so she can be surrounded by friendly people once a week. Simple as that. Yet we harp and harp on theology and epistemology.
Suppose our outreach efforts are successful. A young woman—let’s call her Sally—sees the Tree of Knowledge or one of the freeway signs. It’s that last little nudge she needed. One Sunday morning she decides to check out a freethought meeting instead of pewsitting. She finds a local group and goes to a meeting.
Sally walks in the door of the meeting with a nervous smile. A few men are setting things up. No one acknowledges her. Ten minutes after milling about awkwardly, reading scattered pamphlets and counting ceiling tiles, she crosses paths with one of the men.
“Visitor?” he asks.
“Yes, I am, hello!” she replies.
“Hello, good to meet you,” he says. “Help yourself to coffee and nametags over there.” And off he goes to set up the chairs.
Sally has just met Harry.
I heart Harry…but does Harry heart Sally?
Imagine for a moment a future theocracy in the U.S. (Go ahead, make your jokes about the word “future” being unnecessary. I’ll wait.) Freethinkers have been implicated in a series of thought crimes, and the police have been ordered to pull over every driver who fits the standard American freethought profile. So who are they looking for? Young Hispanic women who garden? Hippies with large vinyl record collections? Families of four in minivans?
No. There are surely freethinkers who fit those descriptions, but that’s not how profiling works. We’re looking for the typical freethinker. Fortunately, one of our operatives intercepted a profile advisory from the state police. Here it is:
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PROFILE: FREETHINKER
Scientifically-oriented, well-read and well-educated white male in his early seventies. Grey-to-white hair and beard. Driving mid-sized vehicle with multiple incendiary bumperstickers. Officers are cautioned to expect an argument. Suspect may be armed with syllogisms.
Aside from the car, they’re essentially looking for Socrates.
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The guy they are looking for—let’s call him Harry—is the backbone of organized freethought. The majority of our membership fits a good three-fourths of that profile, regardless of gender, race or age. Harry was there when Madeleine Murray O’Hair first stated the obvious, and he’s still here, staffing the tables, giving the talks, bringing the cookies, and just showing up, even when the rest of us have turned into the nonreligious equivalents of Christmas and Easter Christians.
I love Harry. Without the dedication and courage of Harry and those like him, the freethought movement would never have made it this far.
But what do we need to do to move farther? For one thing, we need to serve the needs of people who are quite different from Harry.
Reaching out to Harry AND Sally (1 of 3)
by Dale McGowan
[An essay in three parts on current atheist outreach. Appears in the current issue of Secular Nation.]
The scene was the ballroom of the Kansas City Airport Marriott at the 2006 convention of the Atheist Alliance. On stage was the smart and articulate Hemant “Friendly Atheist” Mehta.
Hemant was talking about his book I Sold My Soul on Ebay. He was also, unsurprisingly, talking about friendly atheism, suggesting that atheists show a friendlier face to the religious world than we often do.
Intentional ridicule and insult directed at religious folks, he said, are especially counterproductive. Included among his examples was the “Smut for Smut” campaign at the University of Texas San Antonio, in which atheist students offered to trade pornography for Bibles.
“BULLSHIT!” screamed an audience member near me. “THAT’S BULLSHIT! Those people have courage, they’re out there fighting for your rights, and you ought to be honoring their courage!! For you to stand up there and…”
You get the idea. A kind of atheist “Support Our Troops” thing.
It was a seminal moment, a genuine clash between two different heartfelt visions of atheist activism. Both seek to move atheism out of the margins, but only one of them sees force as the way to get there.
Mr. Bullshit isn’t alone in thinking that a two-by-four between the eyes of religious folks is the best tool for advancing freethought. But neither is Hemant alone in thinking otherwise.
Each of the two approaches can be effective, just for very different receivers. I have met a few formerly religious people who said they needed a little cranio-lumber contact to rattle the fillings of their faith. They couldn’t hear Corliss Lamont or John Stuart Mill with an ear trumpet, but a good wedgie from Hitchens got them kicking the tires of their belief system at long last. There are also the silent, anonymous atheists among us who finally found their voice once someone like George Carlin or Pat Condell assured them that yes, it’s okay to call breathtakingly stupid things breathtakingly stupid.
These things can certainly go a bridge too far. David Mills’ response to the Blasphemy Challenge (in which Mills uses a bible to pick up dog feces, smearing the feces on a picture of Jesus while swearing a blue streak in front of his laughing 10-year-old daughter) leaps to mind. But it’s much more often the case that atheists are accused of playing too rough—Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens—when in fact they have merely refused to pull punches in a fight that genuinely matters, and the entrails on the ground are evidence not of excessive force but of the opponent’s refusal to go sensibly to the mat for anything less.
But there’s another audience out there, one that dwarfs the fans of the two-by-four by a good many multiples. This includes believers cautiously open to disconfirmation and closeted nonbelievers cautiously open to coming out. Numbering in the millions, they are predisposed to our message but unwilling to gird for culture war.
Though both approaches have long been available, only the two-by-four has generally been audible. Lamont’s joyful Humanism was there at the same time as Madeleine Murray O’Hair’s “Religion is induced insanity,” but only O’Hair’s efforts made it to the general radar. She achieved great and noble things, Madeleine did, but her approach, even as it emboldened the True Unbelievers among us, also made the cautious, silent majority of the nonreligious slump ever-further down into the “no comment” pew.
There is an audience that is well-served by the no-prisoners approach, and I count myself among them. But I’m thrilled to see that the “friendlier” frequency is gaining bandwidth of late, beginning at last to tap that huge reservoir of potential self-identified freethinkers who are reached more effectively on that wavelength than the other.
All three of the outreach efforts featured in this issue [of Secular Nation] — the Tree of Knowledge (Freethought Society of Greater Philadelphia), the turnpike billboards (FreeThoughtAction and now PhillyCOR), and the highway cleanup (Atheists United and dozens of other groups nationwide) are operating on this less abrasive frequency. I believe that in doing so, they are moving us into the second of three phases in our courtship with the population at large.
The Courtship Challenge
Though we need to make ourselves visible to the public, visibility is not enough. A four-car pileup is also visible, but that doesn’t mean you want to be a part of it. We need to engage in something beyond exhibitionism—something closer to courtship.
Courtship is a three-step process: (1) be noticed; (2) be attractive; and (3) deliver the goods. In the all-too-recent past, freethought was stuck in step one, trying desperately to convince the public—and each other, for that matter—that we exist. As recently as 2003, when I began floating the proposal for a book on nonreligious parenting, agents and publishers shrugged it off, saying “there’s no audience for such a book.” Then the Four Horsemen took care of visibility once and for all.
Now for step two.
To make yourself attractive to the beloved, you’ve got to see yourself through that person’s eyes—an effort organized freethought has too seldom made. Too often we spend our time ranting in frustration at the general public’s inability to see how darn good-looking we are instead of finding out what really turns them on.
All three of the featured outreach efforts are giving consideration to attractiveness. Each is positively focused and speaks to one or more of the specific human hungers that church has traditionally satisfied.
The highway cleanup by Atheists United and others sends a message of civic responsibility and a desire to work for the greater good.1 FSGP’s Tree of Knowledge (a holiday tree decorated with freethought bookcovers) makes use of a familiar, attractive holiday symbol with happy and loving associations, underlining what is shared between worldviews rather than what differs. Finally, the billboard by FreeThoughtAction speaks to the desire for the embrace of community while at the same time cleverly addressing the existential fear of human aloneness in the absence of the divine—i.e., “you are not alone” in your disbelief and “you are not alone” despite the absence of God.
All three also invite the public into the third step in the courtship—assessing the substance of organized freethought. The FreeThoughtAction billboard provides a prominent and memorable web address, leading to a brilliantly-designed site with well-organized links for additional exploration of the world of freethought.2 The book covers on the Tree of Knowledge represent invitations to explore freethought. And the Atheists United name on the freeway adoption sign provides an easy-to-remember, Googleable point of contact.
These three efforts share another crucial feature: simple clarity. In five seconds, I get it. And I know I’m not alone in finding wit—especially nuanced wit—to be an intellectual aphrodisiac. The Tree of Knowledge names and celebrates precisely the thing that Yahweh forbade in Genesis 2:17, while the FTA billboard is a gentle (and cheerier) counterpoint to the white-on-black messages signed by God.3
[continue to part 2]
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1Though I winced hard when one spokesman for the group was quoted as saying they made the efforts “so we get to keep the sign.” A nice benefit, but if exposure is all it’s about, that’s more than a tad duplicitous.
2And, through the use of the capitals, turns the potentially unfamiliar concept of “freethought action” into three positive and lively words: FreeThoughtAction. Brilliant!
3Which I must admit to adoring. It’s fairly rare to see religious folks making effective use of humor.
blasphemy, the game
- June 18, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In humor, reviews
- 17
I don’t ask for much from my entertainments, but what I do ask for, I insist on. Among these are wit, intelligence, and most of all, originality. Favorite movies: Memento, Run Lola Run, Being John Malkovich. My favorite book is narrated by a fifteen-year-old autistic boy who tries to solve the pitchfork murder of a giant poodle. You get the idea.
So when I was asked to take a look at a new game called Blasphemy, I was hoping for something funny, clever, and out of the ordinary. And holy mother of pearl, did I ever find it.
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Blasphemy™ is an amazingly clever, well-made, and carefully-researched board game that manages to provide religious literacy and skewer the sacred at the same time. The game builds on the fact that there were many claimants to the title of Messiah in ancient Judea. Each player maneuvers one would-be Messiah through six phases in the life of Jesus. Whoever can attain baptism in the Jordan (you have to catch John the Baptist first), resist the devil in the wilderness (without losing all of your Faith cards), give the greatest sermons, perform the most impressive miracles, discredit his rivals, and make his way first to the cross wins the game.
Every last detail of the game has been thought out by someone with that rarest of combinations: biblical smarts and a sense of humor. Equally stunning is the craftsmanship of the game itself, from a gorgeous silk-screened cloth playing surface to the tiles, the cards, and the Messiahs. You’ll find yourself stroking the lovely little pieces as you play (a sin in 14 denominations). As for the cost ($99.99), the game’s website FAQ is absolutely correct: “It’s worth every shekel. The manufactured components for the game are both unique and top of the line. If you treat the game properly, it should easily last well over two thousand years.”
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Be advised: this is not a game for anyone who lacks patience, a sense of humor, or a high tolerance for complexity. Not difficulty — it isn’t difficult to play. But if you (or your teens) don’t like multifaceted, multilayered games with the potential to stretch into the wee hours of the night, this isn’t for you. If on the other hand that last sentence made you drool, and you think of sacred cows as excellent skewer-holders, this is the game for you.
If you do tend toward the opinion that religion should be protected from a good-natured ribbing, other games are more likely to be your cuppa. [Not sure where you land on the blasphemy tolerance spectrum? Here’s a test.]
Myself, I think a game built around the essence of a big idea is a delicious thing. Wouldn’t you love to see a game in which simple life forms compete and evolve until one of them ends up as Charles Darwin? Me too. In the meantime, have a spot of fun following the evolution of a Messiah.
Humanists weigh in on corporal punishment
Shortly after I put together the ONE SAFE GENERATION initiative for the Institute for Humanist Studies, I got a note from Institute director Matt Cherry.
The London-based International Humanist and Ethical Union (or IHEU, the worldwide union of humanist organizations) convenes a World Humanist Congress every three years. One of the tasks of the Congress is to consider resolutions and statements submitted by member organizations. Passed resolutions then serve as a kind of evolving statement of generally accepted humanist positions on issues of the day. If you want to know what the consensus is among humanists on abortion, euthanasia, contraception, reproductive rights, the environment, armed conflict, women’s rights, and a host of other issues, the IHEU resolutions offer the best available summary.
Matt had noticed that the organization had not yet taken a position on corporal punishment and asked that I draft a resolution. Here’s the text:
The International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) supports worldwide efforts to abolish the use of corporal punishment for the discipline of children.
Corporal punishment is defined as “the use of physical force with the intention of causing bodily pain or discomfort so as to change the subject’s behaviour or to punish them.”
Corporal punishment teaches children that violence is an acceptable means to make others do something, thereby perpetuating violent behaviour from generation to generation.
A growing body of research strongly indicates that corporal punishment is ineffective as a disciplinary measure and has strong associations with multiple undesirable outcomes, including an increased risk of depression, aggression, antisocial behaviour, and the continued use of violence in subsequent generations.
Nonviolent disciplinary techniques have been shown to be as effective as, or more effective than, corporal punishment. As humanism teaches the preference for nonviolent means whenever possible, IHEU supports efforts to educate parents and teachers regarding these disciplinary alternatives.
In response to growing evidence against corporal punishment, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, UNESCO, American Academy of Pediatrics (USA), Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (UK), and many other national and international organisations have condemned the practice. Twenty-five countries to date have declared corporal punishment illegal, and bans are under consideration by several others. Most national statutes already prohibit violence against adults, including family members. A corporal punishment ban seeks to extend the same protection to children.
The IHEU calls on all Member Organisations and Individual Members to promote opposition to corporal punishment at the national and international level by means of publicity, discussions, and education, with the aim to secure the abolition of the practice.
On June 8, the resolution was passed unanimously by the General Assembly of the 2008 World Humanist Congress in Washington DC.
The next phase of ONE SAFE GENERATION — an orchestrated campaign to focus attention and action in the humanist blogosphere on a series of child protection charities — is scheduled to launch on September 1. Watch for it.
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Related posts:
- Encourage South Africa’s spanking ban
Spare the rod — and spare me the rest
Responses to “spare the rod”
Interview with corporal punishment researcher Elizabeth Gershoff, Ph.D.
Article: Most Parents Condone Spanking — Child Development Research Doesn’t (from Civitas)
Alternatives to corporal punishment
