PBB on the air
Two radio podcast interviews coming up!
MOTHERHOOD UNCENSORED
Wednesday May 16, 9:30-10 pm Eastern
Kristen Chase, blogger of the eye-wateringly funny and appropriately titled Motherhood Uncensored interviews me, along with PBB contributor and AgnosticMom blogger Noell Hyman. Click to listen in:
Call in number during the show: (646) 915-8634
FREETHOUGHT RADIO
Thursday May 17, 1:45-2:00 pm CENTRAL time
Freedom From Religion Foundation co-presidents and PBB contributors Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor will interview me about PBB for their Freethought Radio program. Dan and Annie Laurie are two of the most courageous and influential freethinkers of our generation. Click here to set up your “podcatching” capabilities and to hear the program!
I’m not worthy
It seems someone has nominated my humble blog for a Blogger’s Choice Award:
Though moved and flattered by the gesture, I don’t deserve it. I am, after all, just a roomful of monkeys trying to type out the complete works of Shakespeare. If you find some occasional pleasure in reading these words or in clicking on the occasional interesting link, that’s more than enough for me.
Of babies and bathwater, Part II
God is like the shepherd seeking the sheep, He is like the woman seeking the coin, and He is like the father seeking the son.
— from some websiteGod is love. Love is blind. Stevie Wonder is blind. Therefore, Stevie Wonder is God.
— Immanuel KantAtheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
— James Randi, or someone else
How we do love analogies, especially when they get us where we wanted to go anyway. But we’re often so blinded by the cleverness or beauty — or by its confirmation of our opinions — that we forget to wonder whether a given analogy makes a lick of sense.
Is life really helpfully analogous to a box of chocolates? Is love really like oxygen? or a heatwave? or a red, red rose? Does a given analogy actually shed light on its subject, helping us to understand it better — like Sagan’s Calendar — or does it obscure, by doing an amazing impersonation of reason without actually bothering to be reasonable?
Once in a while, poor analogies cross over from merely lame to destructively seductive. Not invading Iraq would be just like appeasing Hitler. Ooh, wouldn’t want to do that again.
If you let gays marry, people will start marrying their appliances. Yikes. I don’t even support civil unions between humans and toaster-ovens. I’m sorry, some things are just wrong. Thanks for the tip.
Destructively seductive in a different but no less insidous way is theologian William Paley’s “watchmaker” analogy, offered in 1802 as proof of the existence of God. If you look at a watch, goes the, uh, reasoning, you can easily tell that it was designed and created by a watchmaker. Similarly, if you look at a given natural phenomenon, you can easily tell that it was made by an intelligent designer.
For five full seconds, this analogy has the force of an inspired illumination of fact. It’s in the sixth and seventh seconds, thanks to Darwin, that it begins to fall apart. Fortunately for “Intelligent Design,” six continuous seconds of thinking is a lot to ask of monkeys.
I forgive Paley for his bad analogy. I’m sure I too would have nodded vigorously in 1802, fully 57 years before Darwin issued his resounding nuh-uhhhh. Less forgivable are those who, having failed to notice advances in knowledge since 1802, continue propagating this vacuous meme today under the banner of “intelligent design.” The analogy, it turns out, is a bad one. It illuminates nothing but the wishes of some that it actually accomplish what it sets out to do.
The stamp collecting analogy, on the other hand — ZING! — actually captures something worth thinking about. I would say that though, wouldn’t I.
There’s one bad analogy that got me started on this tangent, one I hear too often when I’m offering this or that critique of religious belief or practice. I’ve even developed the ability to see it coming, to see it making its way from the neocortex of my conversational partner, through Broca’s area, down to the larynx and up the pie-shaft. As I finish whatever I’m droning on about, I can see it balanced eagerly on the tip of the other person’s tongue, like a diver standing with toes curled over the edge of an analogy.
And then, at last, the moment we’ve been waiting for.
Well, s/he will intone, one must be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Before I continue, let me make clear my sober opposition to throwing babies out with bathwater.
This useful phrase first popped up in a 1512 satire by a German monk named Thomas Murner. To “throw the baby out with the bath water” (or “Das kind mit dem badwasser schitten,” as Murner put it, for some reason) is to rid one’s self of a bad thing while destroying in the process whatever good there was as well.
I stare first at the diving board protruding from my friend’s face, still juddering, then at the surface of our conversation, still rippling from the impact of the analogy (which had rudely pulled its knees up into a cannonball just before entering the water). I am abashed. That poor baby. How could I even have considered doing so wretched a thing?
It always takes me a moment to realize that I hadn’t.
The baby, in the current analogy, is all that is good and noble and life-affirming in religion, like frequent instructions to not kill or lie or hate. The bathwater is all that is ignoble and life-destroying in religion — like frequent instructions to kill and lie and hate. My conversational partner rarely offers a middle path, because religious sytems lack procedures for compromise. Real change is accomplished only by calving off denominations (which is why the current estimate of Christian denominations on Earth is 33,000). Within a given church, it is silently implied that one must take the bad with the good, all or nothing, or risk losing the good entirely.
Hogwash.
There is something between throwing out the baby and letting it marinate endlessly in the cold and filthy water. My intention is to do what any parent does: discern which is the baby and which the bathwater, then lift the baby gently from the water, dry her off, dress her in warm jimmies, feed her, nuzzle her, and sing her to sleep.
My single greatest complaint with religion is not that it contains both good and bad, but that it has no procedure for separating one from the other. My highest praise for science is not that it is devoid of bad consequences but that it comes complete with ways to discern, that it is founded on a method for separating wheat from chaff — that it tries, however haltingly and imperfectly, to perfect itself.
The next time someone invokes babies and bathwater, stop the conversation, define the baby — and reach for a clean, dry towel.
(No babies were harmed in the writing of this blog.)
Of babies and bathwater, Part I
- May 07, 2007
- By Dale McGowan
- In Parenting, Science
- 15
(I love a good analogy and despise a bad one. This post is about two unforgettably eye-opening analogies, neither of which includes babies or bathwater, and both of which can help kids grasp an otherwise ungraspable thing: how recent is our arrival in the universe. My next post will look at the unfortunate seductive power of the bad analogy. That’s where you’ll get your wet baby.)
When I was ten, I knew the universe was really, really, really, really old, and that we had only been here for a small part of it. The unarticulated picture in my mind was of universal history as a half-hour TV show, with humans arriving during the second commercial break saying, What’d I miss? What’d I miss? (I picture the Universe rolling its galactic eyes, saying Oh, nothing. Couldn’t very well start the party without baboons. Ooh, hey everybody, the baboons are here! Let purpose commence!)
I had the sequence right, but the proportions were cartoonish: the Big Bang bangs, stuff congeals, life appears, dinosaurs, cavemen, Greeks, Columbus, me.
Then came Carl Sagan’s Cosmic Calendar— and suddenly, vividly, I got it.
Compress the 13 billion year history of the universe into a single year, starting with the Big Bang on January 1 at midnight and ending in the current moment, midnight on New Year’s Day the next year. When did humans appear in the past year? Sometime in the summer, maybe? Fourth of July weekend good for you? That seemed about right to me at age ten.
Even that was progress compared to the biblical version, of course, which at this scale pops humans into the mix ninety seconds after midnight on New Year’s Day, before the last of the noisemakers has even stopped bleating. But even at July 4th, I was still a full paradigm shift away from getting it.
Sagan took care of that in three pages of The Dragons of Eden, and in the process blew my hair back in a way that I wouldn’t even want to recomb.
When you boil 13 billion years down to one, each day is thirty-five million years long. We all have days like that. The Milky Way galaxy forms around May 1st. The Earth is born on September 14th. So for the first two-thirds of the history of the universe, our planet didn’t even exist.
Humans can be safely considered unimportant during this eight-billion-year period.
Life on Earth appears just half a billion years after the planet itself, on September 25th. No, not dinosaurs. Microscopic, single-celled life. They rule the Earth with a tiny iron flagellum until November 12th, when minuscule undersea plants appear. By December 1st, these plants have created an oxygen atmosphere.
For us, you’re thinking, deep inside. They’re getting the world ready…for us. You’re funny. Stop it.
Ready for dinosaurs now? Keep waiting. Thirty-ton lizards do not spring into being from microorganisms. There’s work to be done, and this kind of work takes time. By December 16th – just eight shopping days until Christmas – we’ve reached a critical step on the road to Us.
Worms.
By December 19th we’ve got fish. Not yet grillable, but stay tuned. Land plants thirty million years later on the 20th, insects on the 21st, amphibians on the 22nd…
Wait a minute. Surely I’ve made a mistake. Only nine days left in the year, and still no Lords of the Universe?
On the 23rd, the first trees come to pass. And at last, on Christmas Eve, the dinosaurs begin their 180 million year reign. Christmas Eve. December 28th, wham, an enormous asteroid slams into the Yucatán. Also flowers are invented.
Oh, and humans? Lemme check.
Okay…here it is. On the scale of a single cosmic year, your species – Homo sapiens, was it? – okay, Homo sapiens enters at 10:30 pm on December 31st. That’s ninety minutes ago. Ninety minutes out of a year.
That’s Finding Nemo with one potty break.
The Pyramids were built ten seconds ago. The birth of Christ was four seconds ago. Copernicus, one second ago. So much for the grand human pageant marching across the span of all time.
Richard Dawkins has another spectacular time-grasping analogy. Stretch your arms out to represent the span of the history of life on earth. Now this is not even the whole history of the universe, mind you, just the last quarter of it, the time since life began on Earth just over three billion years ago. You’d need three other people standing to your left with arms outspread to represent the universe prior to life’s emergence on Earth.
From your left fingertip all the way across your middle to well past your right shoulder, life consists of nothing but bacteria. At your right wrist, the most complex form of life on Earth is worms. The dinosaurs appear in the middle of your right palm and go extinct around your last finger joint. The whole story of Homo sapiens is contained in the thickness of one slim fingernail clipping.
As for recorded history – the Sumerians and Babylonians, the Pharoahs of Egypt, Ancient Greece and Rome, Jesus, Napoleon and Hitler, the Beatles and George W. Bush – they and everyone else who lived since the dawn of recorded history are blown away in the dust from one light stroke of a nail-file.
Feeling special?
99.98% of the history of the universe happened before we arrived. You cannot maintain a worldview in which we are the central actors without utterly disregarding that fact. And a fundamental premise of the three Abrahamic religions is that humans are the universal Main Event. Try to make the New Testament work without that idea. Or the Old, for that matter. It all falls to tatters in this context.
We don’t have to indoctrinate our kids away from religion. We really don’t. Theistic religion is a round peg in the square hole of reality. But fortunately for religion, most folks tend not to put too much effort into seeing reality clearly — which makes it much easier to kinda sorta still force that round peg into place. Powerful analogies, carefully applied, can form a relatively effortless bridge between us and otherwise ungraspable concepts. Several great ones appear in the pages of Parenting Beyond Belief, and I’ll include more in upcoming blog entries. Use them to help your kids discover the honest depth and breadth of our remarkable reality and they won’t even go looking for a place to put that silly round peg.
Once their hair is blown back by the real world, they’ll toss that peg over their shoulders with a yawn and never look back.
Keeping the ‘Hell’ away from my kids
No God and no religion can survive ridicule. Mark Twain
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Meet my 9-year-old middleborn, Erin, a.k.a. “the B”:
Oh, she’d KILL me. Heh. Lemme try again:
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Yep, that’s the same kid — a radiant flower one moment and a complete bassoon the next. She’s a typical middle child, a pleaser and a peacemaker, a moralist and a goofbag. I adore her socks off, not least because I’m a middler (and therefore all those things) myself.
So my stomach sank yesterday when she came home from school with the news that her three best friends all agree she’s going to burn in hell.
Holy horseshit! I thought, mentally springing to the Bat Cave and firing up the Mach 5. Or whatever. I simply can’t bear to see my kids hurt, nor Becca, my wife. I just can’t take it. I have made Becca cry precisely three times in seventeen years, and it unhinges me so thoroughly that I will apologize for my very existence if only she will STOP.
Same with the kids. I’m not talking about fall-down-go-boom tears, now. Those mostly irritate me, since the child usually did something (shall we say) ill-advised just beforehand. But tears of genuine emotional pain — those are something else entirely. You know, like the tears that would result from the unanimous judgment of your three best friends that you are destined for the Lake of Fire.
And though all three kids’ wounded tears slay me, none are harder for me to take than the tears of the B when her heart’s been broken. I swear, the very first boyfriend to break her heart will live just long enough to see his own little cardiac balloon quivering in my outthrust fist.
(Sorry, that was massively heterosexist. Feel free to reread with “girlfriend…her own little cardiac balloon quivering etc.” See, I’m cool.)
So I knelt before the B to get the full story. “Sweetie, what’d they say that for?”
“They were talking about church and stuff, and they asked if I believe in God and go to church. And I said no, I don’t believe in God, and I don’t go to church. And then their eyes got really big and they said, ‘Oooh, you’re gonna burn in Hell.'”
I waited for the first teardrop to appear, flexing my hand in preparation for holding three quivering little hearts at once.
“I’m so sorry they said that, B. How did that make you feel?”
Instead of tears, she shrugged. “It was pretty mean. But also silly.”
I looked at her in amazement. It is silly, of course, a profoundly stupid and childish idea, but how did she come to that so directly? It took me years and years to shift Hell from terrifying to terrifying but unlikely to silly.
And then I remembered. Of course. She’s been inoculated.
If I had hidden the idea of Hell from my daughter all these years, protecting her from the very concept, the sudden invocation of the flames by her friends could have burned a fear into her that would take some serious undoing. But we’ve talked about religious ideas for years. I’ve always made my opinions clear, but I go to great lengths to let her know that other good people think differently. “Dad, did Jesus really come alive after he was dead?” “I don’t think he did, no. I think that’s just a made-up story to make people feel better about death. But talk to Grandma Barbara, I know she thinks it really happened. Then you can make up your own mind, and even change your mind back and forth about it a hundred times if you want.” That’s the usual approach.
But there are exceptions to this evenhanded treatment, and one of them is Hell. Hell gets no hearing from me. I will not allow my children to be terrorized by anyone with the sick fantasy of an afterlife of eternal punishment, especially one meted out for honest doubts. If ever there was a religious idea with human fingerprints all over it, Hell is it. So I’ve always told my children that Hell is not only fiction, it’s also…
That’s right. She was using my exact word. Silly.
Even if there is a God, I’ve told them repeatedly, he’s not going to care if you guess wrong about him. That sounds like a human king, not the all-wise creator of the universe. He might care about how good you are, or even respect your honest doubts more than the dishonest belief of people who are just trying to avoid Hell. But in any case, the idea that any god worth his salt would create a Hell to punish his children is just plain silly.
Just as we inoculate our kids against diseases by putting small amounts of the bad stuff into their arms to build resistance, we have to inoculate them against toxic ideas that can paralyze their abilities to think freely. Specifically invite fearless doubt and they can live without medieval ignorance and fear trailing them through their one and only life. Tell them about Hell, then don’t just ‘disagree’ with it: laugh it to smithereens.
Wondering and questioning, Part II
Meet my boy, Connor.
Connor is nearly twelve, wickedly smart and funny, endlessly creative and thoughtful and kind. I’ve had more outright conversational joy from Connor in the nine years since he started talking than from most of the rest of our species. Combined.
He wants to be an engineer. Sometimes he shares with me his plans for reversing global warming. Once he shared an idea for exceeding the speed of light—and I still can’t figure out why it wouldn’t work, at least in theory. Last week he sketched an ingenious idea for an inexhaustible light bulb. (I know why that one won’t work, but importantly, kept my pie-hole shut.) At the age of seven, he proposed a device that could identify which person in a packed elevator had farted. A panel in the floor would then light up under the perpetrator.
(We were alone in an elevator when he came up with that one, of course—and when the door opened and admitted an elderly lady, we vibrated with swallowed laughter, imagining the floor lighting up beneath her.)
But sometimes—much of the time—the topic is philosophical. Connor wonders about consciousness, death, ethics, time, and the idea of gods. One of his favorite riffs is to marvel at the fact that he was born at all, which brings us to one of the central differences, imho, between the religious and secular worldviews.
Let’s begin with a song, one that captures a large whack of my own worldview—so much, in fact, that it is one of our favorite lullabies:
It’s inherently humbling, that scientifically-informed worldview. Instead of being specially made in the image of the creator of the universe, given dominion over the world and all that’s in it, and having God’s only son take our form to come to Earth and die so we could live forever, it turns out we’re one transitory species among millions, an unimaginably small blink in time on an unimaginably small dot in space—trousered apes who will disappear into complete non-existence upon the death of our bodies.
But remember, when you’re feeling very small and insecure, how amazingly unlikely was your birth. And it was this thread that my son and I riffed on the other day, picking up an inexhaustible thread.
It started with boxer shorts.
Connor needed boxer shorts immediately. I’ll spare you the reason, a familiar hash of peer pressure and arbitrary norms and middle school locker rooms. I ran him to the mall and we bought a few pairs. On the way home, I suddenly flashed on something from long ago. I turned and mentioned to Connor that he owed his existence to (among many other things) boxer shorts. What follows is, I submit, a definitively secular exchange of wonder.
Boxer shorts? This was news to the boy. Not the general idea of owing his existence to countless small happenstances, mind you. He has long enjoyed the knowledge that several hundred things could have prevented his parents from meeting, from finding each other attractive, from dating, from marrying, and from staying married long enough to spring off. He understands that one particular sperm and one particular egg had to meet for him to ever exist. And he vibrates with dawning excitement as he extends these had-tos back through the generations, back to his Confederate great-great-great grandfather who was felled by a Yankee bullet through the neck at nineteen and bled profusely—almost, but not quite, enough to erase the great-great-great grandson he would one day have. Connor has worked his way back through a million generations of humans and prehumans to imagine two ratlike creatures rocking the casbah at the precise moment the asteroid slammed into Chicxulub 65 million years ago, further clinching the existence of their great-great-great etc grandson. (Oooh, baby, one rat says to the other. Did you feel that too?)
But boxer shorts—that was a new one. He demanded to know what I was talking about.
We’ve already done the sex talk (went very well, thank you). So now I told him that the sperm can get sluggish if they are too warm, that briefs hold the testicles against a man’s warm body, and that four months after his mom and I started trying to create him, without luck, I saw this article that suggested switching to boxer shorts, and boom…
His eyes were wide. “You got pregnant.”
“Well Mom did, technically, but I…”
He clutched his head. “Oh my GOSH! What the freakin’ heck!” (His current favorite pseudo-swear.) He seemed to get it. He turned toward me with an electric look, the look of a person who just missed getting hit by a train. “What if you saw that article a month EARLIER?”
Oh yeah, he gets it. “Or later.” We’d added another casual causal coincidence to the march of time—his father stumbling over some random magazine article…at GreatClips, I think it was, while I waited for a haircut…
“WHAT IF SHE FINISHED THE OTHER HAIRCUT BEFORE YOU SAW THE…?”
Boy does he get it.
I have several religious friends who think that God fixes these things for us. He put the mag there, you see, and kept the haircut going until I could read it. We each have one ideal mate, and God works things out so we meet, fall in love, have the children we’re supposed to have when we’re supposed to have them. Setting aside the revolting idea that God wanted an abused woman to marry her abuser, etc etc, we still end up with a world that makes me yawn, a world with a good measure of the wonder stripped out. In that world, we are Jehovah’s chesspieces, moving in preordained patterns, how exceptionally tedious. Tedious in a holy way, I mean.
Meditating instead on how amazingly unlikely was your birth—well, if you haven’t done it, please be my guest. It’s hard to take existence quite so much for granted once you realize how very, very, very close you came to missing the dance entirely.
Wondering and questioning, Part I
My greatest thrill as a secular parent is watching my kids follow their intellectual curiosity wherever it leads. My job is to run ahead down the corridor, flinging wide as many doors as possible—or much better yet, to stay the hell out of the way.
I’m convinced that the reckless, ecstatic wondering I’ve seen in my kids owes a lot to secular parenting. Religion, in addition to inspiring a certain degree and type of wonder, tends also to place real limits on the inquiring mind. Some things are sacred, after all, or otherwise unquestionable, or at least inappropriate, or too complicated to explain, or beyond the poor grasp of our human minds, too unseemly, too shocking, too sad, too unthinkable. You can hear one portcullis after another slamming shut.
There are no unthinkable thoughts in our home, no unaskable questions, no unbearable hypotheses. Not one. How can you decide whether something is right, I tell my kids, if you won’t even let yourself think it first? As a result of this simple policy, my kids are growing up with minds that race through fields of possibility, unhindered by the dark barricades of someone else’s fears.
It leads to some pretty strange places, like the time Erin, then eight, declared that she was SO glad we’re white.
I stifled my natural reaction
and asked why. Turns out she had listened carefully on MLK Day, realized what a raw deal blacks have had, and was honestly grateful that she didn’t have to endure it herself.
There was a time when my daughter Delaney came up with a new theological hypothesis every week or so. Once, at age four, she declared that Jesus made all the good things in the world and that God made all the bad and scary things.
The next five words out of the mouths of many religious parents would be No no no no no—in that order—followed by a dose of theological castor oil to set the child straight. Very few would let the day end with their child still entertaining the notion that God is the source of all evil. Some secular parents do little better for the child’s independence of thought when they take the opportunity to say No no no no no—God isn’t real. I’ve always preferred to praise the independent thought and let the child run like mad with it.
Cool, I said to Delaney. I never thought of it like that.
The next week, she promulgated a revised encyclical: God, she said, makes all the things for grownups, and Jesus makes the things for kids. My favorite example: God made the deep end of the pool, and Jesus made the shallow end, for her.
I hugged her. “So God for me and Jesus for you, eh?”
“I guess so,” she said. “I don’t know for sure. I’m still thinking about it.”
She’s parroting one of my constant parental invocations there—the need to keep thinking, to never close one’s self off to further information.
Earlier this year on the way home from school, she told me about a chat she’d had that day with Mrs. W, the teacher at her Lutheran preschool. “I told Mrs. W I think God is just pretend, but I said I’m still thinking about it…And I asked if she thinks God is pretend.”
I looked at her in the rearview mirror, munching on the tart apple I’d for once remembered to bring for her snack, so beautifully innocent of the fact that she had stood with her little toes at the edge of an age-old crevasse, shouting a courageous and ancient question to her teacher on the far rim. My daughter, you see, hasn’t heard that there are unaskable questions.
“What did Mrs. W say?”
“She said no,” Laney said, matter-of-factly. “She said, ‘I think God is very real.’ ”
“Uh huh. Then what did you say?”
“I said, ‘That’s okay…as long as you’re still thinking about it, too.’”
Two years later, I still look at that sentence with awe. That’s okay, she said—because it would never occur to her that people must all believe the same—and then the call to continuous freethought, the caveat against the closed process.
How many people of religious faith ever hear that their faith is okay only if it remains open to disconfirmation? Whatever that number is, if I can keep my kids blissfully ignorant of the “rules,” it will go up.
By the numbers
At the moment (28 April, 2:16 pm US Central Time), Parenting Beyond Belief (aka “The Book Without An Audience”)…
…is selling faster than 99.9% of the titles on Amazon — and we haven’t even started our major marketing. Sales have been so brisk that Amazon has thrown it back to preorder status until they can restock.
…is the #3 parenting reference on Amazon Canada and #4 parenting reference on Amazon.com.
…is continuing to Google over 24,000.
One would think Barnes & Noble would like a piece of that action…
Oh, and speaking of the big booksellers:
Blog reader Augustus Gloo… I mean, STEELMAN has found one of the 78 PBBs planted in Borders bookstores around the US! Only 77 left! Sprint to your local Borders and snap ’em up, then report back here!
I want a PBB, Daddy, and I want it now!
UPDATE: make that 76 — another has turned up in Florida!
Coming out
Something rare and humbling happened to me in 2002. I had a novel released that January, Calling Bernadette’s Bluff, which got some quite lovely reviews and was well-received by both of its readers.
(No, that wasn’t the rare and humbling thing. Good reviews aren’t humbling; they make you feel like this.)
The novel explores the gradual frustrations of a tired secular humanist professor at a Catholic college, his eventual (pathetic) coming out and the hilarity that ensues. But the most incredible thing happened about four months after the book’s release. The phone rang. It was my mom.
She had finished reading my book.
Oh here we go, I thought. “And?”
She told me how much she’d liked it (and believe me, she’d tell the truth, damn her), then said: “I’m a secular humanist.”
“You…you’re…you are?”
“I didn’t have the name for it before, but…yeah. That’s what I am.”
I was floored. I hadn’t known, you see. We hadn’t discussed religion much growing up (which gave me the space to think for myself), but we did go to church regularly. I had assumed she was some sort of indemnity Christian at least, a Pascal’s Wagerer if nothing else. But no. I had to wait forty years and write a humanist novel before I could find out my mother shared my beliefs.
It was a stunning feeling for a child to have that impact on a parent. Usually goes the other way.
In the preface of PBB I describe similar scenes in book clubs I’ve spoken to about my novel. At some point in the discussion, someone will inevitably say, “Hey, you know what — I guess I’m a secular humanist, too.” And everyone says, “LIN-da!! Really?!” — not the least in judgment or condemnation, but in genuine surprise.
Then someone else chimes in “Actually, me too,” (“MAR-garet!!”), then someone else. It is electric. Everyone assumes everyone else is a believer — including those who aren’t themselves. The result of the uncloseting is a deepening of relationships as we realize how much richer is the diversity among even our closest friends.
One of the most moving and fascinating aspects of the launch of PBB has been hearing stories of self-revelations, including people who reveal to friends and family for the first time that they don’t believe when they forward an email announcement about PBB. Such revelations are almost always followed by an outpouring of supportive replies — not 100%, of course, but always more than we think will be the case.
I was touched to read a blog entry by PBB contributor Shannon Cherry in which she (somewhat nervously) came out to her readers at the same time she announced her co-authorship of the book. Her beliefs had been unknown to many in her life even though her husband Matt runs an international humanist foundation and think tank. If Shannon Cherry was partially closeted, who among us is completely out?
Another contributor, Pete Wernick, is an internationally-renowned bluegrass banjo player (listen here!) and…secular humanist. The bluegrass world is apparently extremely evangelical, so Pete, despite being a very active humanist, had kept his two identities separate. Until now. After much thought and worry, Pete sent out a broadcast email to his bluegrass circle of friends announcing his beliefs and his participation in the book.
The result? An outpouring of supportive replies — and, I’m sure, some silence. That’s OK. The cathartic honesty is worth a little uncomfortable silence.
The goal is a world in which someone can answer belief questions with the nontheistic label of choice and elicit nothing more than you’d get from saying, “Presbyterian.” A long way to go, yes, but we’re on our way.
A quick ten
- April 20, 2007
- By Dale McGowan
- In PBB, Uncategorized
- 24
Ten interesting bits about the book:
10. Say hello to Tom Flynn.
I just found out one of the pieces (one of my favorites) was left out of the Table of Contents: the point/counterpoint on Santa Claus between Tom Flynn and me. Tom (editor of Free Inquiry and marvelous guy) was incredibly gracious about the unfortunate and unintentional snub. If you have the book, turn right now to p.85 and dig in.
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9. Borders has purchased only 78 copies of the book and planted them around the country to see how they sell before ordering more. Fetch, Gentle Readers! Fetch!
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8. I asked Kurt Vonnegut — a literary and personal hero of mine — to write a piece for the book. He never answered my letter and is now with Jesus.
7. Michael Shermer’s excellent Foreword to the book refers to a priceless scene in the movie Parenthood: Keanu Reeves’ character (“that Tod”) bemoans the fact that you need a license to drive or catch a fish, but anyone can be a father. In his initial draft, Michael quoted the character verbatim:
“You know, Mrs. Buckman, you need a license to buy a dog, to drive a car – hell, you even need a license to catch a fish. But they’ll let any butt-reaming asshole be a father.”
It works beautifully coming out of Tod Higgins, but I had my doubts about a parenting book. As it turns out, all direct quotes from films must be cleared, and we had no time to get permission. So alas, ours did not become the first parenting book of all time to include the phrase “butt-reaming asshole” on the first page. The world will just have to wait for James Dobson’s next book for that.
6. When I picked Delaney up from her Lutheran preschool yesterday (the day after Laney shared my book for show and tell), her teacher pulled me aside to say (genuinely) how wonderful it all was — that I was so open about my beliefs, that I brought my kids to a church school instead of avoiding religious ideas, and that Laney was so unbearably proud of me. A great lady to whom this photo does no justice.
5. I just got the news that Barnes & Noble will not be stocking the book in their stores. This is NOT about the content — they just have to make decisions based on projected sales, so the book needs to prove itself. If we show them there’s a market, I’m sure they’ll jump on board. It’s all about the bucks.
4. I did my first press interview this week for a small local paper and was so distracted by the incredible speed of the reporter’s laptop typing that I completely lost my train of thought. I type with the middle finger of my left hand and the first three fingers of my right. She uses at least six others. I continued yammering while my mind searched for the right simile — which turned out to be “like rain on a rubber roof” — then had to beg her pardon and start a sentence over. I’m mostly but not entirely sure I didn’t say, “My Dark Lord Satan shall guide my parenting with his cloven hoof” during the simile search. I guess we’ll see when the piece comes out on April 26.
3. The Minneapolis Star Tribune did a profile on me in the Faith and Values section of today’s paper. It’s a regular feature called “Believer,” and they apparently went back and forth a bit over whether to call mine “(Non)Believer.” In the end, it posed too many problems for the template, so they said, “Well, you do believe in things, just not God.” Okie doke.
2. We’re starting to work on small local tours before I permanently leave the Upper Midwest for the Lower Mid-Southeast. Madison WI and Mankato MN are in my sights at the moment.
1. PBB has received a FABULOUS review from Library Journal. This is one of the most important possible review venues, since a good review can ultimately lead to the acquisition of scads of books for libraries across the U.S. What? Oh, the review? If you insist:
Parenting Beyond Belief: On Raising Ethical, Caring Kids Without Religion.
AMACOM: American Management Assn. Apr. 2007. c.288p. ed. by Dale McGowan.
McGowan, a professor, freelance writer, and novelist, has collected essays from some of contemporary secularism’s big names, e.g., Richard Dawkins, Margaret Downey, in support of those nonreligious American parents who seek to “articulate values, celebrate rites of passage, find consolation, and make meaning” sans religion. Contributor Ed Buckner writes that secular means “not based on religion” rather than “hostile to religion.” Though a few entries do evidence anger or resentment, it is clear that all of these astute essayists have thought carefully about God’s nonexistence. Most of the 30-odd contributors recommend imbuing children with the ability to think well independently; when pressured or rejected by real and figurative institutions that tend to favor the religious (e.g., schools, scouting, holidays), parents are advised to stick to their nontheistic guns. The book considers parents as pedagogues, recalling Deborah Stipek and Kathy Seal’s Motivated Minds: Raising Children To Love Learning. Engaging and down-to-earth, this collection balances the scores of religious parenting titles shelved in the average library and is highly recommended for large public libraries and parenting collections.
— Douglas C. Lord, Connecticut State Lib., Hartford