thinking by druthers 1
First installment in a series on confirmation bias.
“I disagree with what you’re saying, frankly. Strongly disagree.”
I guess I ought to delight in this kind of challenge, critical thinking enthusiast that I am. But I’m a chimp, too, which means instead of delighting, I have to suppress an urge to fling feces and hoot.
The disagreement came from a gentleman in one of my early seminars. I had suggested we allow our kids to try on different worldviews without pushing one direction or another. I put it this way in an earlier post:
I encourage my kids to try on as many beliefs as they wish and to switch back and forth whenever they feel drawn toward a different hat, confident that in the long run they will be better informed not only of the identity they choose, but of those they have declined. Were I to disown my kids each time they passed through a religious identity, I’d have to keep a lawyer on retainer.
He didn’t like this one bit. “Children need to be made to recognize the difference between faith-based thinking and EVIDENCE-based thinking,” he said. “They need to hear the word EVIDENCE from the very earliest age, as often as possible. ‘What’s your EVIDENCE? What is the EVIDENCE for that?’ Allow them to ‘try on the hat’ of mythical thinking and they just might not take it off!”
Hoo boy.
I gave my usual answer about having confidence in reason, but I knew there was more to it than that. I know my kids really well, and despite my failure to sprinkle the word EVIDENCE throughout my parenting, I know that all three would laugh at the idea that an opinion without evidence is worth squat.
One anecdotal exception doesn’t disprove his assertion, of course. Maybe my kids lucked into their rational hats despite my dippy incompetence. But I had the nagging feeling that this guy had made a more fundamental error — and that night, on the plane home, I realized what it was.
The evidence-free worldview is a straw man. A myth.
It’s the rare believer indeed who tethers belief to faith alone. Religious folks have evidence to support their beliefs — mountains and mountains of evidence. No one says, “I have absolutely no evidence for the existence of God, but I believe anyway.” If the man in the seminar were to offer his challenge (“What’s your EVIDENCE?”) to these folks, they’d offer the human eye, a sunrise, a seemingly answered prayer, a feeling of transcendence, a near-death experience, the Bible, a random act of kindness, Mother Teresa, “the starry heavens above and the moral universe within.” These add up to evidence of a particular kind: bad. It’s all gift-wrapped and insured by statements of faith, but it’s also evidence.
I’m not playing word games here. If we really want to understand the difference, it’s crucial to recognize that both the religious and scientific worldviews are evidence-based. That science does so well at uncovering reality and religion does so poorly is mostly due to the different ways in which the two approaches handle evidence.
The scientific method is largely devoted to neutralizing a single fallacy called confirmation bias — our strong tendency to find and collect whatever evidence supports our preconceptions and desires while ignoring the rest. Francis Bacon and the rest didn’t invent the idea of evidence — they laid the foundation for a systematic method of controlling the incredibly strong human tendency we all have to cherry-pick evidence to confirm our biases.
Both the religious and scientific worldviews are evidence-based. That science does so well at uncovering reality and religion does so poorly is mostly due to the different ways in which the two approaches handle evidence.
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In a post two months back I demonstrated my own ability to put on the blinders of confirmation bias. I had come across the most amazing statistic…(wavy lines and harp music)…
I recently came across a statistic about scientists that, given my own background, ranks as the single most thought-provoking stat I have ever seen.
As I’ve mentioned before, my dad died when I was thirteen. It was, and continues to be, the defining event in my life, the beginning of my deepest and most honest thinking about the world and my place in it. My grief was instantly matched by a profound sense of wonder and a consuming curiosity. It was the start of the intensive wondering and questioning that led me (among other things) to reject religious answers on the way to real ones.
Now I learn that the loss of a parent shows a robust correlation to an interest in science. A study by behavioral scientist William Woodward was published in the July 1974 issue of Science Studies. The title, “Scientific Genius and Loss of a Parent,” hints at the statistic that caught my attention. About 5 percent of Americans lose a parent before the age of 18. Among eminent scientists, however, that number is higher. Much higher.
According to the study, 39.6 percent of top scientists experienced the death of a parent while growing up—eight times the average.
While researching the chapter of Raising Freethinkers on dealing with death, I had come across some random website [RED FLAG 1!] that mentioned the claim that 39.6 percent of scientists had lost a parent as a child. The website also cited the 1974 Woodward study.
“Wow!” I thought. “This precisely bears out my own personal narrative as a person whose thirst for knowledge was fueled by my father’s death! [RED FLAG 2!] Better still, it joins me at the hip to the great scientists I admire! [RED FLAG 3!] In short, this huge and unexpected percentage [RED FLAG 4!] dramatically confirms all of my dearest biases!”
If I had actually thought that in those words, or thought for a moment about what Huxley might say (“Science warns me to be careful how I adopt a view which jumps with my preconceptions, and to require stronger evidence for such belief than for one to which I was previously hostile. My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations”), I might have spared myself the public error. Instead, I made a halfhearted attempt to confirm the stat, couldn’t easily access the original article, and decided to swallow the thing whole without looking further.
The Woodward article, it turns out, was largely devoted to debunking the claim. As blogreader Ryan pointed out, the parent-loss stat was a rough estimate based on a small sampling of scientists in the 500-year period from 1400 to 1900 — a span during which 40 percent of garbage collectors and astrologers also surely lost parents when they were young. The same article notes that 20th century records show little difference between scientists and non-scientists in parent loss.
We ALL do it. The trick isn’t to lead our children into a magical life free of confirmation bias, but to get them to fall so deeply in love with reality that they work hard to fight this tendency in themselves and others — precisely because it deludes us and blinds us to reality more than any other error.
[More on confirmation bias next week.]
ACTS (bookin’ through the bible 12)
[back to DEUTERONOMY]
A few years ago, a Catholic friend and neighbor of mine put the foundation of her belief into words for me. There are lots of reasons to doubt the divinity of Christ, she said, but one powerful thing continues to keep her doubts at bay. During Jesus’ life, the apostles were doubtful, denying, noncommittal. Then something happened to transform them, and they were willing to sacrifice their own lives in the name of their newfound convictions.
“I find it hard to account for that kind of radical transformation unless he really rose from the dead and was really the son of God,” she said with a shrug.
I didn’t say the obvious thing — that using one part of a book to prove another is meaningless. If I said I know Chapter 49 of the Koran is true because Chapter 50 says so, she would rightly laugh at me. But it wasn’t that kind of conversation, so I kept my mouth shut and gained a powerful insight into which book is the keystone and linchpin of the New Testament—the Acts of the Apostles, a.k.a. Acts.
Though its significance hadn’t hit me before, I’d already heard that argument several times before and have heard it since in various forms. The “Easter faith” of the apostles is the clincher. If you want to know something about Christianity, read a gospel. But if you want to understand Christianity, to get a sense of what makes it tick (and fizz, and shine, and honk, and occasionally explode), read Acts. Christ is born in the gospels, but Christianity is born in Acts.
It’s in Acts that we get several post-resurrection appearances by Jesus; the Great Commission, in which Christ instructs his disciples to spread his teachings to all the nations of the world (the origin of evangelism); Pentecost, speaking in tongues, exorcism, and the raising of the dead; the first stories of persecution of Christians and the first Christian martyrs; the conversion of Saul/Paul (who was alleged to have been a persecutor of Christians), his early ministry, and his arrest and imprisonment; and the first glimmer of the spreading, enthusiastic, universal church that continues to motivate evangelists today.
As a result of all of this passionate and very human action, Acts delivers some of the best mythic narrative in the Bible. But by the end of the book, something more profound has been achieved than the gathering of heroes and transformation narratives: Christianity is converted from a Jewish sect to a religion in its own right. The teachings of Christ are now said to be for all humanity, not just a local group.
My neighbor may (or may not) be surprised to hear that the book in whose testimony she places such unsinkable faith is perhaps the most altered, amended, and interpolated book in the New Testament. Here’s bible editor and theologian Bruce Metzger writing in The Text of the New Testament: Writing in The Text of the New Testament, bible editor and theologian Bruce Metzger noted (disapprovingly) the position of many theologians including Brooke Westcott and Fenton Hort regarding the Book of Acts:
Words, clauses, and even whole sentences were changed, omitted, and inserted with astonishing freedom, wherever it seemed that the meaning could be brought out with greater force and definiteness…. Another equally important characteristic is a disposition to enrich the text at the cost of its purity by alterations or additions taken from traditional and perhaps from apocryphal or other non-biblical sources… Another impulse of scribes abundantly exemplified in Western readings is the fondness for assimilation… But its most dangerous work is ‘harmonistic’ corruption, that is, the partial or total obliteration of differences in passages otherwise more or less resembling each other.
That such a well-traveled and freely-altered book continues to convince smart people like my neighbor of anything is testimony to the incredible power of confirmation bias and provides a nice foreshadowing of the upcoming blog series. Acts also provides a handy lens through which Christians can see and “understand” nonbelievers: we are Paul before the Damascus road, the apostles before the Resurrection. They saw the light — someday, surely, goes the narrative, we will too.
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Next and final episode of the series, thank the Lord God Jehovah: REVELATION (date TBA)
the giddy geek
- June 11, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In Science, wonder
- 16
We live in a universe made of a curved fabric woven of space and time in which hydrogen, given the proper conditions, eventually evolves into Yo Yo Ma. — from Parenting Beyond Belief
Last year I wrote about Major Tom and the way the Apollo program lit up my imagination and fueled my wonder in the 70s. I always shook my head in pity at anyone who shook his head in pity at the “coldness” and “sterility” of the scientific worldview.
I touched on this in one of my essays in Parenting Beyond Belief called “Teaching Kids to Yawn at Counterfeit Wonder”:
Religious wonder—the wonder we’re said to be missing out on—is counterfeit wonder. As each complex and awe-inspiring explanation of reality takes the place of “God did it,” the flush of real awe quickly overwhelms the memory of whatever it was we considered so wondrous in religious mythology. Most of the truly wonder-inducing aspects of our existence—the true size and age of the universe, the relatedness of all life, microscopic worlds, and more—are not, to paraphrase Hamlet, even dreamt of in our religions. Our new maturity brings with it some real challenges, of course, but it also brings astonishing wonder beyond the imaginings of our infancy.
I offered a short list of the kinds of scientific revelations that make me woozy with awe:
If you condense the history of the universe to a single year, humans would appear on December 31st at 10:30 pm. That means 99.98 percent of the history of the universe happened before humans even existed.
Look at a gold ring. As the core collapsed in a dying star, a gravity wave collapsed inward with it. As it did so, it slammed into the thundering sound wave heading out of the collapse. In that moment, as a star died, the gold in that ring was formed.
We are star material that knows it exists.
Our planet is spinning at 900 miles an hour beneath our feet while coursing through space at 68,400 miles per hour.
The continents are moving under our feet at 3 to 6 inches a year. But a snail’s pace for a million millennia has been enough to remake the face of the world several times over, build the Himalayas and create the oceans.
Through the wonder of DNA, you are literally half your mom and half your dad.
A complete blueprint to build you exists in each and every cell of your body.
The faster you go, the slower time moves.
Your memories, your knowledge, even your identity and sense of self exist entirely in the form of a constantly recomposed electrochemical symphony playing in your head.
All life on Earth is directly related by descent. You are a cousin not just of apes, but of the sequoia and the amoeba, of mosses and butterflies and blue whales.
Now that, my friends, is wonder.
I’ve tried to pay attention when geeks (a term of genuine endearment from me) of one stripe or another are enraptured at the poetry or wonder of something I can’t see. I know they are experiencing something transcendent, something that I lack the language or knowledge to apprehend directly.
I remember a student of mine, a math major/violist, walking into a rehearsal with a look of utter bliss, as if drunk on a mantra.
“What on Earth happened to you?” I asked.
“Laplace transforms,” she said. “Laplace transforms happened to me. They are so beautiful I can hardly stand it.”
I knew she was right, and that I would never know why. I was envious.
So imagine the fellow-feeling I felt when I saw this wonderful video by Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy. Next time someone starts into the drone about the cold, passionless world of science, show them this:
The awe-inspiring picture isn’t even my main point — it’s what the picture has done to Phil, someone who knows what it means, and better still, takes the time to share his amazement with the rest of us. Thanks, Phil!
[Thanks to Tim Mills at Friendly Humanist for leading me to this video.]
go ahead, judge the book by it
A first glimpse of the cover for Raising Freethinkers. I think the folks at Amacom did a very nice job, wouldn’t you say?
I’m now at work on a blog series that’s gone completely out of control. It’s been years since I taught courses and workshops in critical thinking, but this topic has it all flooding back. It’s confirmation bias, the one critical thinking error at the heart of most of our worst thinking.
A comment from a parent in the Minneapolis seminar in March got me thinking about confirmation bias again. My own thinking error in a mid-April post was a classic example of it. An idle comment I heard while watching Global Catholic Network EWTN during my May visit to Amherst NY brought it up again. The presidential campaign is laced with it. My son is tripping over it. And I’m just tucking in to David Linden’s fascinating book The Accidental Mind, which among other things looks at the biology and neurology of it.
In short, I don’t know where to begin. But I’m having a ball. Becca’s also finishing Part 2 of her post today, so watch for that as well.
Other fun: The Meming of Life is undergoing a secret facelift by one of my favorite web artists. Stay tuned…
parenting and the safest sex of all
by Dale McGowan
We have reason to believe that man first walked upright to free his hands for masturbation.
Lily Tomlin
Joycelyn Elders, the most quotable U.S. Surgeon General of all time, once said, “Condoms will break, but I can assure you that vows of abstinence will break more easily.”
That kind of quotability can get a political appointee fired. At a UN conference on AIDS in 1994, Elders was asked whether it would be appropriate to promote masturbation to prevent young people from engaging in riskier forms of sexual activity. “I think that it is part of human sexuality,” she replied, “and perhaps it should be taught.”
Never mind that the answer was sensible. Never mind that it was true. Once U.S. conservatives pictured their progeny receiving instruction in self-gratification—complete with cucumber-based demos, no doubt—Elders’ dismissal was assured.
Sense and truth have never had much place in our cultural discourse on sex, and few aspects of the topic have been more twitchingly mismanaged than masturbation. Those who recall the baffling mix of intense pleasure and intense shame that accompanies most discoveries of masturbation should want nothing more than to spare our own kids the unnecessary torment. Yet masturbation, the very first form of sex kids will generally encounter, is the topic most often missing from parent-child discussions of sex.
The roots of our dysfunctional attitudes toward masturbation are intertwined with the age-old distrust of bodily pleasures. That distrust probably didn’t originate in religion. Among other things, religion is simply a place to put our most beloved bad ideas for safekeeping. But when it comes to perpetuating and reinforcing dysfunctional attitudes toward the safest sex of all, it’s hard to beat the Abrahamic religions for over-the-top hysteria.
The Catholic catechism calls masturbation “an intrinsically and gravely disordered action.” One popular 19th century Jewish theologian called it “a graver sin than any other in the Torah.” Mormonism teaches that “masturbation is a sinful habit that robs one of the Spirit,” while Shi’a Islam forbids it completely, quoting sect founder Imam Ali as saying “one who masturbates commits a sin equal to killing me eighty times.” ¡Ay caramba!
But at least one influential religious conservative has voiced support for a more accepting, naturalistic parenting approach to masturbation—and has been excoriated for it by his fellows. The following passage refers to a conversation he had as a boy with his minister father:
We were riding in the car, and my dad said, “Jim, when I was a boy, I worried so much about masturbation. It really became a scary thing for me because I thought God was condemning me for what I couldn’t help. So I’m telling you now that I hope you don’t feel the need to engage in this act when you reach the teen years, but if you do, you shouldn’t be too concerned about it. I don’t believe it has much to do with your relationship with God.” What a compassionate thing my father did for me that night in the car.
Aside from “I hope you don’t feel the need” and the bit about God, this is almost precisely the message I want to get across to my own kids. And it comes from none other than James Dobson.
He still tangles it with silliness, suggesting that boys in the act think not of any girls they know but only of their “eventual wives.” Christian author Herbert J. Miles goes one better, suggesting that boys pray first, thanking God for the gift of sexuality, then think only of him during orgasm (which certainly gives “Oh, God!” a whole new meaning). But let’s give credit to both of them for getting the basic message right and thereby reducing the number of children growing up with unnecessary self-loathing and sexual repression.
In the absence of communication on the issue, children are guaranteed to feel tremendous shame and guilt when the natural developments of early adolescence lead them to self-stimulation. When your child is on the cusp of puberty, casually let him or her know:
- What masturbation is;
- That it’s a normal thing nearly everyone does at some point;
- That it’s a natural indication that the body is becoming ready for sexual activity and reproduction;
- That all of the stories about grave consequences are complete nonsense;
- That though it is not shameful, it should be done only in private.
Removing the guilt and shame from our children’s first encounters with their sexuality requires no detailed description or instruction—just simple permission. And nonreligious parents, free of repressive doctrines, are in an ideal position to give their children that permission, as well as the mental, emotional, and sexual health that comes with it.
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This column also appears in the June 4 issue of Humanist Network News.
A nice page of info on masturbation from Cool Nurse — Teen Health, Teen Advice.
see you in a bit
- May 30, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In My kids, Parenting
- 19
I’ve been ordered by my family to go one week without opening the laptop, starting tomorrow. Thought I’d share a funny moment from this afternoon before I go.
I was sitting at the breakfast table, panting and sweating after mowing our STEEP front yard, when Laney (6) asked if I could play catch with her.
“Aw sweetie, I’d love to, but you know what I just did?”
“You mowed the lawn.”
“And if I juuuust finished mowing the lawn, then I am…what?”
“Uh……free?”
“hey, mr. cunningham”
You never know someone until you step inside their skin and walk around a little. –Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird
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A few years ago I was teaching a seminar on the use (and misuse) of the arts in the Third Reich when a student asked a great question — one of the best I ever heard as a professor:
“What would you say is the basic difference between ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’?”
What an unusually great question. I stared at the carpet for a week or so as I worked out an answer. Then, amazingly, an answer that I still consider the right one came bubbling to the surface.
I think the central distinction between liberal and conservative is the attitude toward difference. 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. It seems to (liberal) me that this distinction is at the root of things.
Correct me since I’m wrong.
We watched To Kill a Mockingbird a few days ago. I wasn’t sure if the kids would take to it — B&W, some wooden acting, etc. — but once again they surprised me. As of this morning, Laney and Erin have watched it three times.
I remembered the story as an indictment of racism, but the racial narrative is just one thread in the larger message of the film (and book) — that we fear what is different or unknown, and that that fear drives us to kill mockingbirds (i.e. to hate and harm the innocent).
Tom Robinson is a black man falsely accused of beating and raping a white woman. Mrs. Dubose, the cranky elderly neighbor, is assumed by the children to have a pistol under her shawl. The unseen Boo Radley is assumed to be a homicidal maniac who “eats raw squirrels,” while his father is assumed to be “the meanest man who ever drew breath.” Even a dog walking down the street erratically is assumed rabid and has the Bush Doctrine unleashed on him.
If my definition of the difference between conservatism and liberalism holds water, To Kill a Mockingbird seems to be an extended tribute to the liberal impulse and indictment of the conservative. But again, I’m a damn liberal, so I might very well be engaging in confirmation bias. I’d be interested to see if a conservative sees it differently.
There’s one scene that seemed relevant to the nonreligious — who are, after all, among the hated-different-unfamiliar in our society. A classic lynch mob has gathered at the jail to kill Tom Robinson, only to find his lawyer, Atticus Finch, sitting in the doorway, reading a book.
The mob already has Atticus neatly labeled and dismissed as a “nigger-lover” and a “tricky lawyer” (and now a book reader! Pinko elitist to the core, this one). Having replaced his humanity with a caricature, they will find it a simple matter to do whatever it takes to get past him.
But then Atticus’ children Jem and Scout show up. He orders them to leave. They refuse, and Atticus does not beat them to death (permissive parenting!). Then Scout recognizes a face in the crowd: Mr. Cunningham, a farmer for whom Atticus has done work and whose son Scout knows. “Hey, Mr. Cunningham,” she says:
I said Hey, Mr. Cunningham. Don’t you remember me, Mr. Cunningham? I’m Jean Louise Finch. You brought us some hickory nuts one early morning, remember? We had a talk. I went and got my daddy to come out and thank you. I go to school with your boy. I go to school with Walter. He’s a nice boy. Tell him ‘hey’ for me, won’t you?
She says his name. She says her name. She reminds him of their connection and offers a kind greeting. Cunningham’s body language says it all. He squirms. He looks at the ground. He tries to hide behind the brim of his hat. He can’t keep the caricature from dissolving in the face of Scout’s humanizing connection.
I spend a lot of time telling nonreligious parents that one of the best things we can do for our children is to be out — to have our views known by those around us. It’s far less important to engage and challenge other beliefs than to simply put a known and loved (or hell, even mildly liked) face on the abstract bugaboo of religious doubt.
It works for every kind of reviled “other.” It’s easy to go to war against distant foreigners as long as “they” are “over there,” safely unknown and simplistically drawn. It’s easy to convince yourself that gays are a perverse threat to all that’s holy as long as you don’t know anyone who’s gay. And there’s no difficulty in convincing yourself that atheists are immoral hedonists if you continue to assume that those around you are all believers.
That’s why it’s important for those who differ from the majority — blue people in red states, red people in blue states, gays, atheists, the works — to be out of the closet, to be a smiling, normal, ethical contradiction to all the fearful assumptions. So I try to convince nonreligious folks to seize those “Hey, Mr. Cunningham” moments and put a human face on disbelief. And it’s equally important for us to avoid drawing a caricature of all religious belief — to recognize the normal, sane, ethical believers all around us. That’s the way the caricature crumbles — one person at a time.
three koans at turner field
- May 27, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In Atlanta, My kids, Parenting
- 14
We all went to see the Braves play the Diamondbacks on Sunday, our first trip to Turner Field since moving to Atlanta — and it was exactly as captivating as I had expected. Not a sports guy, you see. But in the stands, as one by one the kids joined me staring at the sky, wondering why baseball is called a spectator sport, I was peppered with questions so difficult to answer they were practically koans — those essentially unanswerable, Buddhistic questions on the order of “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” or “Is there another word for synonym?”
Here are three, each a perfect illustration of the asker. After reciting each koan aloud, sound the bell and lose yourself in contemplation:
KOAN #1 (Delaney, 6)
What makes gravity?
KOAN #2 (Erin, 10)
Hey, why aren’t there any girls on the baseball team?
KOAN #3 (Connor, 12)
Why is card-counting against the rules at casinos if it’s really just a way of carefully paying attention?
Not just because I said so
We often talk about moral development as if it’s a mysterious process by which a child, born either tabula rasa or seething with apple-infused evil, somehow becomes good. Or not.
In our rush to replace amorphous mystery with rock-solid fable, any discussion of morality will eventually run straight to the most obvious off-the-rails moment in modern history: Nazi Germany. And even though the technique is so overused that it has its own fallacy and even a Law to describe our tendency to overuse it, I think it would be even dafter to not look to Nazi Germany for moral lessons.
But why stop with the guy on top? And why do we waste time debating whether Hitler was a Christian or an atheist, as if both worldviews were not already rife enough with examples on both extremes?1 Nazi Germany consisted of millions of people, some of whom participated in the horrors, others of whom heroically opposed it. Why not look deeper than Hitler for our moral lessons?
Fortunately someone has. Everyday Germans of the Nazi period are the focus of a fascinating study discussed in the PBB seminars and in the Ethics chapter of Raising Freethinkers. For their book The Altruistic Personality, researchers Samuel and Pearl Oliner conducted over 700 interviews with survivors of Nazi-occupied Europe. Included were both “rescuers” (those who actively rescued victims of persecution) and “non-rescuers” (those who were either passive in the face of the persecution or actively involved in it). The study revealed interesting differences in the upbringing of the two groups — specifically the language and practices that parents used to teach their values.
Non-rescuers were 21 times more likely than rescuers to have been raised 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 said, is the single most common word used by rescuers in describing their parents’ ways of talking about rules and ethical ideas.
Ethicist Jonathan Glover applied the same questions cross-culturally, looking at the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda in addition to Germany, and came to similar conclusions. Dictating a set of authority-based rules turns out to be the worst thing we can do for ethical development — yet we are continuously urged to do exactly this because it feels ever-so-decisive and bold.
The alternative is not a home in which kids are free to ignore rules. All that’s required to get kids actively engaged in their own moral development is a willingness to explain the reasons behind the rules. My kids know they have the right to hear our reasoning, and yes, it’s sometimes a pain. But it’s a path that leads more reliably to ethical adults who will question both commands and commandments rather than boldly do whatever Zod says.
In short, instead of doing what feels right, I humbly suggest we try the approach that appears to, uh…work.
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1Not that it isn’t a fascinating sidebar to the topic. If you’re interested, start with this excellent and thorough Wikipedia piece on the complex subject of Hitler’s beliefs. Good news: both atheists and Christians can reasonably disown him, and neither should throw him into the other’s camp.
sex and the balls of the evangelical
Life in Lubbock, Texas taught me two things: One is that God loves you and you’re going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on Earth, and you should save it for someone you love. –Butch Hancock, country singer/songwriter
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COLORADO SPRINGS — After dessert, the 63 men stood and read aloud a covenant “before God to cover my daughter as her authority and protection in the area of purity.”
The gesture signaled that the fathers would guard their daughters from what evangelicals consider a profoundly corrosive “hook-up culture.” The evening, which alternated between homemade Christian rituals and giddy dancing, was a joyous public affirmation of the girls’ sexual abstinence until they wed. (from “Dancing the Night Away, With a Higher Purpose,” New York Times, May 19, 2008.)
The photo is of a “Purity Ball” in Colorado Springs, where evangelical dads pledge to protect the “purity” of their daughters until marriage. It’s one of a growing number of such balls from coast to coast. “It’s a huge effort,” said one evangelical father. “A single ball won’t do it. Spreading the message that abstinence works takes a lot of balls.”1
Let’s begin by recognizing my common ground with these evangelical fathers. I too want to keep my daughters from becoming pregnant (and my son from getting someone pregnant) before certain events run their course. “Certain events” for me include education and time getting to know one’s adult self; for evangelicals, it’s marriage. So let’s just say we’re both happier with the idea of a daughter who is pregnant at 25 than at 15. I’ll call that common ground. But then the ground opens up. The Times article continues:
“Fathers, our daughters are waiting for us,” [event host] Mr. Wilson, 49, told the men. “They are desperately waiting for us in a culture that lures them into the murky waters of exploitation. They need to be rescued by you, their dad.”
(“Rapunzel, Rapunzel…”)
“The culture says you’re free to sleep with as many people as you want to,” said Khrystian Wilson, 20, one of the Wilsons’ seven children, including five girls. “What does that get you but complete chaos?”
This is another constant refrain: you have a choice between being Raped by The Culture (one monolithic thing) or being Rescued by the Men of God. Either way, there’s a man on top.
I for one never got the memo that I could sleep with as many people as I wanted to. That’s a bad idea for reasons that go beyond “purity.” The invitation to promiscuity is out there, but so are other voices. How about teaching kids to discern between good messages and bad, even when Dad is not in the room?
For the Wilsons and the growing number of people who have come to their balls, premarital sex is seen as inevitably destructive, especially to girls, who they say suffer more because they are more emotional than boys.
There was a time when I’d revel in the double entendres of that sentence, but I’m far too mature now. Instead, let me point out the continuing message that girls are weak and in need of male rescue.
Recent studies have suggested that close relationships between fathers and daughters can reduce the risk of early sexual activity among girls and teenage pregnancy…Abstinence is never mentioned at the Colorado Springs Purity Ball, but a litany of fathers’ duties is — mainly, making time to get involved in their daughters’ lives and setting an example.
Excellent! Again we overlap as evangelicals find their desires in sync with the research. But as the name “Purity Ball,” the white dresses and the constant pledging make clear, S-E-X in general and abstinence in particular are the unmentioned elephants humping in the corner. As is so often the case in the evangelical movement, any research that is inconvenient to their preferred narrative is simply ignored. The abstinence-only approach, like so many of our well-intentioned crusades, makes things worse:
But studies have also shown that most teenagers who say they will remain abstinent, like those at the ball, end up having sex before marriage, and they are far less likely to use condoms than their peers.
An inconvenient truth.
In a ballroom after dinner, bare but for a seven-foot wooden cross at one end, the fathers and daughters gathered along the walls. Kevin Moore, there with his three girls, told the men they were taking a stand for their families and their nation. Then he and Mr. Wilson walked to the cross with two large swords, which they held up before it to make an arch.
Is it chilling in here, or is it just me? Read that bolded passage again — an amazing condensation of religion, militarism, nationalism, authority, and patriarchy. That’s our favorite soporific, a seductive brew that bubbles up over and over in human history, right before everything goes to flaming hell.
Each father and his daughter walked under the arch and knelt before the cross. Synthesized hymns played. The fathers sometimes held their daughters and whispered a short prayer, and then the girls each placed a white rose, representing purity, at the foot of the cross.
The girls, many wearing purity rings, made silent vows. “I promise to God and myself and my family that I will stay pure in my thoughts and actions until I marry,” said Katie Swindler, 16. Every half-hour, Mr. Wilson stopped the dancing so that fathers could bless their daughters before everyone.
Yeesh. Yeesh.
One of things that most deeply saddens me about all this is the way it demonizes sex. Yes, it’s a powerful thing. It can turn your world upside down in several ways, not all of them good. But I want my kids to know that it’s also beautiful and amazing and fun and good. It’s the reason we’re here, after all. In evolutionary terms, it’s the best thing there is, which is why it’s fun.
Connor and I have talked about the fact that our bodies “want” to have sex for evolutionary reasons as well as emotional ones. Imagine two populations, I said. One is wired up to enjoy sex; the other is indifferent to it. Which one is going to pass its genes along, and which will die out? He got it immediately, even declared it “so cool.” And when his body starts insisting that sex is a good idea, he won’t be blindsided by the feeling (unlike some kids in Schenectady). He’ll understand it, which gives him a better chance of staying in control of it. If instead kids learn that these feelings are evil and inspired by Satan, they’ll spend their adolescence convulsed with guilt and retain a deeply dysfunctional view of their bodies and of themselves.
Equating abstinence with “purity” sends the instant message that sex is not a great good but something that renders us impure. Evangelicals counter that it suddenly goes from purely impure to wholly holy after marriage — but by then you’ve rather insulted and debased it, haven’t you? Just imagine the confusion in these kids’ heads when that coin suddenly flips.
[Thanks to Hemant Mehta, I think, for bringing Purity Balls to my attention.]
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1Unfortunately I made this one up.
Visit the new BY THE NUMBERS page for some interesting sex ed stats.
View the documentary Abstinence Comes to Albuquerque on Google Video (2006, 27 min.) The compelling story of a faith-based organization using federal funds to bring abstinence-only sex education into public schools in Albuquerque.