the best kind of ignorance
Connor (12) came across the word “dogma” in his social studies homework the other day and asked me what it means.
“Hmm, dogma,” I said. “Well, a dogma is a religious belief that a church says must be accepted without question.”
“WHAT?!?!!!”
If I tagged the html correctly on the word above, it’s an inch high and bright red, which is how it came out of his mouth. It made me jump.
“What…what do you mean, What?”
“If you can’t question it,” he said, incredulously, “how can you find out if it’s really true?!”
I was completely taken by surprise. He was literally standing there in slack-jawed disbelief.
My regular readers might be surprised by my surprise. There’s a line I include in all of my talks and many of my articles — something about my children never having heard of unaskable questions. It also occurs in the intro to the “I’m *so* glad you asked” page of the blog, phrased like so:
My hope in creating this page is to capture just a little of the electric thrill I get from being the father of three bighearted and curious kids who’ve never heard of such a thing as an unaskable question.
But when I’ve said my kids have “never heard of such a thing as an unaskable question,” I’ve always meant it a tad…you know…hyperbolically. I meant that they wouldn’t recognize the validity of such an idea. It never occurred to me that my kids — least of all my twelve-year-old — had literally never heard of such a thing as an unaskable question. I mean, come on.
But when I asked him, he assured me that he had never, ever heard someone say a certain question could not even be asked. Ever. My definition of dogma had shattered the best kind of ignorance for my boy. The unaskable question was quite literally a new (and completely asinine) concept to him.
My work is done here.
incoming!
I’m a tad excited. I got myself a piece of hate mail.
Okay, it’s not really that hateful — just a little irritated, perhaps. So I got myself a piece of irritated mail, then.
But can I just call it hate mail? Because it’s the first one I’ve gotten since the book release that’s even close, the very first, and I was ever-so-ready in the beginning to get a lot of them. I was so ready to be pounced on when Parenting Beyond Belief was released that I pre-wrote answers to six different types of complaints I had anticipated — four for complaining Christians and two for complaining atheists. Spent some serious time on them, I did, and they’re cracking good answers, kill-’em-with-kindness type answers that leave the victim with a goofy, pleasant grin, unsure quite why he can’t feel his extremities anymore and entirely oblivious to the rivulets of steaming scat running down his forehead into his tiny little eyes. That kind of answer.
But the complaints never came. Oh, a little here and there, some of them points well-taken, but not much static to speak of. Almost everyone’s been quite decent about the book, even when they disagree with this or that bit.
Now what kind of crap luck is that?
Then I got this:
To whom it may concern-
The book “Parenting Beyond Belief” is ridiculous. I feel sorry for any child raised by atheist parents. I only hope that you can see that raising a child is the absolute best thing for them.
God Bless —
John R______
See? That’s the worst I’ve received since PBB came out, and it’s not even that bad. Just irritated, and a bit confused in the last sentence.
The angriest letter I ever got followed the lockout debacle/media frenzy to which I alluded in an earlier post, the one at the College of St. Catherine in 2003 when, as a faculty member, I invited a nonreligious scholar to speak on the Catholic campus. That letter (one of dozens at the time) told me I was a “son-of-a-bitch,” instructed me to kiss the college president’s (wait for it!) shoes for feeding my family despite my apparent “intentions to sew [sic] confusion in the minds of students at a Catholic college,” promised me Hell — and ended with “Gods Blessings on you.”
I thought sure PBB would draw more such fire. I was even assured by Lisa Miller at Newsweek that I would be “in the crosshairs of the Religious Right” after the article came out. There’s been a bit of grumbling on websites here and there , but that’s it.
Don’t think I’m really complaining. My word, I’m quite relieved that I haven’t had to waste energy in that direction. But I’m puzzled. Relieved and puzzled. Most of my mail looks more like this, which came in less than an hour after the “God Bless” message:
Dale,
This past year:
I read your book.
Joined a Humanist Group
Told my 12 year old it is OK not to believe
And now the cycle of religion is broken and she is free to focus on life rather than afterlife
Life is good and it’s about time. I’m 50. My parents, brothers, sister and wife are believers but I’ve always had strong but quiet doubt.
Now I’m OK with not pretending anymore and I don’t sit back when I need to stand up for myself. I accept my way as what normal should be and urge family to accept my thinking as I accept theirs.
Thanks,
G___
I hope I never stop being moved by messages like that.
labels
[continued from the open shelf]
“What does ‘humanist’ mean?” Delaney asked.
I swallowed. You’d think that, given my current work, I’d have sat myself down at some point and worked out guidelines for such inevitable moments:
CONTINGENCY 113.e
Requests for Definitions
iii. Term: “humanist”
Subset 2: Age 5-6
Children in this demographic cohort who make a direct request for the definition of “humanist” and/or any of its etymological class members (e.g. humanism, humanistic) are to be referred to Article 6, section D of the Humanist Manifesto, except in Arkansas and Hawaii.
Lacking such a road map, I simply answered her question. In retrospect, to my surprise, I even answered it correctly.
“A humanist is somebody who thinks that people should all take care of each other, and that even if there is a heaven or a god, we should spend our time making this life and this world better.”
“Awesome!”
I should note that Laney (age 6) uses Awesome! to signify everything from “I find that rather astonishing” to “That’s something I didn’t know before, and now I know it!” The latter meaning was in play here, I think, the word Awesome! signifying a new piece of the world clattering against the bottom of the piggy bank of her receptive mind.
Later that evening, after she’d been read to and sung to and tucked and kissed, I went back to my study to close up for the night. Scattered on and around the recliner she’d been sitting in were The Humanist Anthology, Tristram Shandy, The Kids’ Book of Questions, The World Almanac, The Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, The Simpsons and Philosophy, Cosmos, and Bulfinch’s Mythology. I reloaded the shelves and went to bed.
One week later, during our afterschool snack-chat, Laney informed me excitedly that there are nine different religions in her class.
“Nine, wow! How do you know there are nine?”
“We’re talking about different religions, and Mr. Monroe asked if anybody wanted to say what kind of religion their family believed.”
I was not surprised to hear of some diversity. There are lots of South Asian kids in the class. Compared to the demographic mayonnaise I had pictured North Atlanta to be, I’ve been thrilled with the diversity here. “And there were nine different ones?!”
“Yeah, nine…” She looked at the ceiling and began to rattle them off. “Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Baptiss, Jewish, Chains…” (“Chains” is probably “Jain,” one of the most benign and respectable religious traditions on Earth). She counted on her fingers. “Anyway, I can’t remember all of them.” She suddenly beamed. “And I was the only humanist!”
I paused for a week or so.
I am adamantly opposed to labeling children, or even allowing them to label themselves, with words that imply the informed selection of a complex worldview. Dawkins hits it right on the head when he refers to a long-ago caption on a photo in The Guardian. The photo was of three children in a Nativity play:
They are referred to as “Mandeep, a Sikh child; Aakifah, a Muslim child; and Sarah, a Christian child” — and no one bats an eye. Just imagine if the caption had read “Mandeep, a Monetarist; Aakifah, a Keynesian; and Sarah, a Marxist.” Ridiculous! Yet not one bit less ridiculous than the other.
That incisive analogy is Richard’s greatest contribution to secular parenting. I completely agree, as (I am increasingly convinced) do most nonreligious parents. Once a label is attached, thinking is necessarily colored and shaped by that label. I don’t want my kids to have to think their way out from under a presumptive claim placed on them by one worldview or another. So prior to age twelve, I won’t allow my children to be called “atheists” any more than I’d allow them to be called “Christians”–not even by themselves. (More on the ‘age twelve’ comment in a later post. Remind me when I forget.)
So my first impulse was to give the usual cautionary speech: Now be careful not to stop thinking. There are still too many questions to ask, too much you don’t know. Someday you’ll be able to make up your own mind on this, but it’s not time yet.
I looked at Laney, still beaming proudly through a mouthful of Nilla Wafers. At the time she had learned the meaning of humanist from me, I didn’t know she had said to herself, That’s me. She was obviously delighted to have had something to say when all the other kids were claiming their tribal identities, and clearly had no idea of the dark chain reactions set off in the fundamentalist mind by the word “humanist.”
“So what did Mr. Monroe say?”
“He said that was cool!” And I’m sure he did. He’s a great guy. No evidence of dark chain reactions in him, nor in her classmates.
“And he asked what a humanist believes,” she continues.
“What’d you say?”
“I said a humanist believes the most important thing is to take care of each other and the world.”
If she had called herself a secular humanist, I would have protested. But what is there about believing ‘the most important thing is to take care of each other and the world’ that requires more time and thought and study? Is she impeding her thought process by declaring this — or is this a value, like honesty and empathy, upon which she can build her search for an identity? There are, after all, both religious humanists and secular humanists. Erasmus and Paine, two great heroes of mine, were among the former.
Humanism has no connection to atheism for her. The definition I gave her even included the option of believing in a god and being a humanist. By calling herself a humanist in the broadest terms, she hasn’t bought into complex metaphysics; she’s simply embraced a concept that even a six-year-old can sign on to. And in the process, she introduced her classmates, and her teacher, to a new idea, and associated it with her smiling, eager, proud little face.
So Laney’s done it again — she’s taken my armchair abstractions and turned them inside out, making me realize that not all worldview labels are ridiculous or harmful for kids. Some can even serve as catalysts for the next stage in a child’s process of finding her place in the world. And the next stage, and the next.
photo by Paula Porter
EXODUS (bookin’ through the bible 8): guest column by Vast Left
[Editor’s note: I’m not the first to come up with the idea of bible study for nonbelievers. In order to give y’all a taste of the many different ways this can be approached, I’ve invited a couple of guest bloggers to each take the book of their choice and run with it. Our guest today is Vast Left, the brain behind the blog “Bible Study for Atheists,” who has prepared a comprehensive look at Exodus especially for Meming of Life readers. The introduction is below, followed by a link to the entire text. Many thanks to Vast for taking on this task!]
______________________________________________________________
The Exodus Is Here
The ongoing influence of Exodus
Hello, Vast Left from Bible Study for Atheists here, taking you on a speed-dating tour through Exodus. King James Version, of course. I may be a heathen, but I’m a traditionalist heathen.
For an explanation of BS4A’s scope and philosophy, please click here. In a nutshell, the approach is to read the Bible through modern eyes, exploring the literal and metaphorical meaning of each chapter. In every sense, it’s a thoroughly irreverent look at the Good Book.
Ready to take a walk on the wilderness side? Then, let’s via con Dios, and read a summary of all 40 chapters of Exodus, specially prepared for readers of Parenting Beyond Belief / The Meming of Life.
laughing matters 5: the last crusade
[back to laughing matters 4: Saint Sorta]
Official Vatican position on the existence of St. Catherine
____________________________________
It was a bit of serendipity if ever there was. My mind was still humming with gratitude the morning after the critical thinking class in which my students had been so articulately pissed off that the namesake of their college, Saint Catherine, never existed—and that the Catholic church knew damn well she never did, but never bothered too hard to share.
I was wondering what on Earth I could do with my happily tingling neurons when an announcement popped up in my inbox. It was from Professor Floyd Gardner (not his real name) who was once again heading up the committee to award the college’s highest individual honor to a graduating senior: the Helga B. Landers Memorial Award. Floyd was seeking faculty nominations of deserving seniors.
I knew immediately who I had to nominate. There was only one choice: Katie Alexander.
I sat down and wrote an impassioned nomination of Katie, whose accomplishments really did leave her fellow students in the dust. At the end of the letter, I slipped in a fact that I thought would clinch the award. Katie, you see, shared one important feature with St. Catherine of Alexandria: she doesn’t exist.
Never did hear back from old Floyd, for some reason. But when the list of nominated students was distributed the next week, sure enough, Katie’s name wasn’t on it.
The Lord had delivered them into mine hands.
I had just three installments left in my Bible Gal column in the faculty e-newsletter. And now I knew just what to do with them.
GENTLE READERS!
A Call to Action from the Bible GalPlease join me expressing outrage against an injustice currently brewing at the College of St. Catherine! A student by the name of Katie Alexander has been denied the right of consideration for the Helga B. Landers Memorial Award – excluded on the basis of a characteristic not even mentioned by the committee as grounds for exclusion!
In addition to stellar academics, Katie has exhibited extraordinary leadership skills and a heart of gold. In 2002, she founded Hey Hunger – Bite Me!, a foundation that to date has served over 150,000 hot meals to the homeless. In early 2003, Katie launched a student antiwar movement called Hey War – Fight Me!, successfully ending the Iraq war in May 2003, just in time for the President’s carrier landing.
Closer to home, Katie has twice served as governor of North Dakota. Granted, it’s just North Dakota, but it still counts as leadership in my book. She also won the Pillsbury Bake-Off and cured Restless Legs Syndrome. Apparently it just isn’t enough for the committee.
Katie shares an astonishing number of characteristics with the namesake of our beloved College: she is intelligent, ethical, courageous, virginal, and fictional. It would be strange indeed if the qualities that inspired the naming of the college after St. Catherine of Alexandria would not also merit recognition of Katie F. Alexander for this award.
Strike a blow for those among us who happen to be allegorical, a blow against blatant actualism! Let committee chair Floyd Gardner and the rest of these fictophobes know what you think: fgardner@stkate.edu. JUSTICE FOR KATIE!
The next week, a somber turn of events:
ASK THE BIBLE GAL
A Lighthouse in the WildernessGentle Readers –
There will be no BG column this week, my friends. As you may have guessed from the somber darkness of my font, I bring you terrible, terrible news. Our beloved Katie Alexander has been struck down in the prime of her non-existence, martyred by a seething mob of actualists who could not share the world with one so beautiful. The rabble fell upon her as she sat in prayer to her greatest imaginary friend, Saint Catherine of Alexandria. They dragged Katie off and bound her to a wheel, which, though admittedly making her quite dizzy, did not break her. So they smooshed her.
Whenever a human soul is torn prematurely from this realm of suffering and tears and condemned to an eternity in Paradise, my heart weeps. If only Katie’s cruel fate had been delayed for even an hour! Alas…it was not to be.
Will there ever be another as brave, as accomplished, as virginal and selfless and thrifty as our Katie? You know the answer. Yet still she lives – in our hearts, in our memories, and on our DWKD bracelets (Do What Katydid, available for just $16.95 plus shipping at www.dwkd.com. All proceeds go to the beatification campaign). – BG
And finally, my last hurrah:
ASK THE BIBLE GAL
A Lighthouse in the WildernessGentle Readers!!!
As you can tell by the cheerful whiteness behind my font, I bring you great good news!! In my previous column I cried out from the depths, mourning the martyrdom of our precious Katie Alexander. But the LORD has banished grief, as he is wont to do, sending down a torrent of signs and wonders such as our suffering world has not seen since the 1980 Miracle on Ice!
My inbox is filled with figuratively thousands of testimonials, all telling of miracles that have come to pass after praying to the departed Katie. Mrs. Frieda Groot of Bemidji, Minnesota found the rosary she lost seven months ago, tucked beneath the passenger seat of her Buick Riviera. The Lundgren twins of Kingdom City, Missouri simultaneously got over the nasty sore throats they’d been trying to shake for four days. Just ten minutes after beseeching Katie for financial help, one Gertie Holtz of Pine Bluff, Arkansas opened her mailbox to find that she may very well have already won ten million dollars! And the topper: the very day after Katie’s ascension, the air temperature in Saint Paul hit seventy-two degrees, five degrees higher than the prediction – five, the number of letters in Katie’s name! Take that, ye skeptics!
But – according to the critically rigorous Vatican procedures for sainthood, these many miracles can only be considered preludes to, not reasons for, Katie’s canonization. Though the required period between a person’s death and sainthood was reduced by Pope John Paul II from fifty years to seventy-two hours, all of the above miracles occurred, alas, within two days of Katie’s smooshing.
At last the clock ticked away those interminable three days – and bingo, a French nun was miraculously cured of restless legs syndrome after praying to Katie for something very similar! Doctors around the world are baffled, noting that diseases never go into remission on their own. Pope Benedict XVI immediately beatified our precious Katie, waiting until later that afternoon to canonize her as Saint Catherine, Jr.
I’m sure you’ll all join me as I sing her praises: Dear Saint Catherine, guard our college, bless us all where e’er we roam; saint seraphic, hear our pleading, watch our weight and guide us home!
This is the Bible Gal, signing off! – BG
I don’t really know if the Bible Gal accomplished anything for others at the college. But she did a helluva lot for me.
laughing matters 4: Saint Sorta
[back to laughing matters 3: the bible gal]
THE HYMN TO SAINT CATHERINE
O sing, my soul, Saint Cath’rine’s praises
who for Christ did live and die
The student’s saint our Church proclaims her
and exalts her name on high.
Dear Saint Catherine, guard our college,
bless us all where e’er we roam
Saint seraphic, hear our pleading
Watch our ways and guide us home.
School song of the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, Minnesota.
A vocal arrangement by a Dr. Dale McGowan is still regularly performed
by the St. Catherine Women’s Choir.
_______________________________
In my final year on the faculty of the College of Saint Catherine, I made a discovery both startling and embarrassing – that Saint Catherine of Alexandria, the person after whom the college is named, apparently never existed.
Why embarrassing? Because this seemingly enormous fact had eluded me for fifteen years. I’d never heard it even suggested that the college was named for a fictional character. To the contrary, the details of her biography were painstakingly woven into college lore and song and symbolism, right down to the wheel on which her martyrdom was first attempted.
“St. Catherine of Alexandria”
Though I didn’t buy the various miraculous details of her life and martyrdom, I’d assumed that she, like St. Thomas Aquinas and hundreds of other verifiables, had at least been an actual person. Apparently not. Catherine was one of 200 saints removed from the calendar of saints by the Catholic Church back in 1969 due to (are we ready?) “insufficient evidence of historicity”— a Catholese phrase meaning “she was pretend.” Catherine was one of 46 saints on the list whose existence was further declared “seriously doubtful.” Others included St. Christopher and St. Valentine.
The church at the highest level had done the right thing, ridding itself of a few false beliefs. I was impressed. But there was little felt need to see it through. Colleges and cathedrals named for beings now acknowledged (at the top, anyway) as imaginary continued to act as if nothing had changed. Millions upon millions continued to venerate and pray to the characters, like someone praying to Tiny Tim or Scarlett O’Hara.
Interior of the Church of the Sacred Heart
and St. Catherine of Alexandria in Droitwich Spa, UK —
considered by many to be among the most beautiful churches in Britain
I asked about a dozen faculty colleagues if they had any idea St. Catherine had been declared pretend. It was absolute news to all but two. Neither of the two thought it was of any big deal that a known fiction continued to be presented to the masses as true. And both of them, by the most astonishing coincidence, were Catholic.
You may now stop wondering why the place drove me to satire.
It gets much worse. Catherine’s story has the noble Christian woman steadfastly defending her beliefs, then being tortured and executed on a wheel by the pagan king for not embracing the pagan religion. But current scholarship indicates that “Catherine’s” biography was filched from the actual philosopher, mathematician and astronomer Hypatia of Alexandria, who, according to Socrates Scholasticus, “made such attainments in literature and science, as to far surpass all the philosophers of her own time.”1
Hypatia of Alexandria (actual human person)
So why didn’t the early church just make Hypatia a saint? Because of a sore spot in her resume: Hypatia was not a Christian.
Ick.
So an imaginary double was created in her stead, christened Catherine, and martyred dramatically, if ironically, for the one attribute the real person did not possess: Christian faith.
The irony goes deeper still: Scholasticus reports that Hypatia was murdered by a group of Christian monks, an assassination later applauded in the Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiû for “destroy[ing] the last remains of idolatry in the city.” I mention this not to brand all Christianity with charges of intolerant homicide, but to underline the demented irony of the subsequent theft of her identity: a pagan woman murdered by Christians for her beliefs was transformed into a Christian woman murdered by pagans for her beliefs. The perpetrators thereby became the victims, accomplishing a hideous slander in the process.
Imagining an all-white college in the future searching for a namesake. They learn of this amazing man named Martin Luther King. Ah, but he won’t do, for obvious reasons. So they borrow his life story — right down to “I Have a Dream,” “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and the march in Selma — then rename him “Steve” and make him a white man who was gunned down by a black man.
The theft of Hypatia’s identity is precisely that grotesque.
A pagan woman murdered by Christians for her beliefs
was transformed into a Christian woman murdered by pagans
for her beliefs. The perpetrators thereby became the victims,
accomplishing a hideous slander in the process.
______________________________
I simply couldn’t sit on it. So when the time came to teach the final section of the critical thinking course I’d come to love, I included this question on the list of topic choices for the group research project: Did Saint Catherine of Alexandria exist?
The students were puzzled by the question. Not one had ever heard there was any possibility that their college was named for a nonexistent person. One group took the bait and dug in.
It took very little time for them to find out, Hypatia and all. In the process, they learned something I hadn’t known—that “Saint Catherine” was returned to the church calendar in 2002, not as a result of new evidence, but in recognition of her “usefulness as a symbol,” an iconic figure to emulate and to admire.
In the Q&A after the presentation, the class, to their considerable credit, erupted.
If it were openly acknowledged that the college is named for a fictional character, one student said – if we were all gathered together behind the wizard’s curtain – that would be different. Instead we are asked to invoke her concretely and call down her guardianship on our college, her blessings on us all, “where e’er we roam.”
And what does it say about humanity, another asked, that we have to create fictional characters to admire? Is it even good to require perfection, virginity and martyrdom before we can admire someone?
At the root of the discussion was a queasy feeling that either blithe incuriosity or willful patronizing was at work here, that the love of these stories had at some level mattered more than the truth. The truth certainly mattered to this roomful of minds – not whether something was “culturally true,” or “that-which-is-true-but-never-happened,” or any of the other good and valuable concepts of this type that ought to go find themselves another word, one that isn’t already busy defining something else. These students wanted to know the truth, definition 1, about the namesake of their college.
Finally, someone asked: “And what about Hypatia?”
Ah yes. What about Hypatia? What does fiction do to the reality it supplants? What about this actual flesh-and-blood woman of actual accomplishments, this three-dimensional heroine cast aside in favor of a cardboard cutout? Isn’t there something undeniably vile and anti-feminist about what the mythic Saint Catherine does to the no-kidding woman of substance Hypatia?
It was without a doubt my favorite moment as a professor, and bittersweet, since it was among my last.
But why include this story in a series on humor? Because of what I did next. My students’ enthusiasm for the truth and outrage at being patronized by the Catherine myth gave me an idea for a last satirical hurrah at the college that had made me a satirist.
____________________________
1Ecclesiastical History, Socrates Scholasticus, Christian historian (4th c.)
fearthought
I’m up to my eyebrows in background reading for the sequel to Parenting Beyond Belief (possible names: Still Parenting Beyond Belief; Parenting Beyonder Belief; and Parenting Beyond Belief: The Empire Strikes Back). Likely release date is around December ’08.
In addition to reading huge amounts of useful stuff, I’m doing a bit of reading on the other side of the fence: religious parenting books. Some are very good, like the work of Christian parenting author Dr. William Sears. Some are mixed, including (to my admitted surprise) James Dobson, who serves up some quite sound advice along with his nonsense. Then there’s complete lunacy and even unintentional self-parody, for which we turn to author and televangelist Joyce Meyer.
fearthought
Joyce Meyer
Here’s a passage from Meyer’s “Helping Your Kids Win the Battle in their Mind“:
Satan will look for your child’s weakest area and attack at that point. He will attempt to fill your child with worry, reasoning, fear, depression and discouraging negative thoughts.
Don’t laugh at what she’s placed between worry and fear in the devil’s toolkit unless you turn straight to tears. According to her website, Joyce Meyer (who lives, interestingly, about three miles from my parents) has television and radio programs in “over 200 countries” — a truly remarkable achievement on a planet with 195 countries. Slightly less amusing is the fact that she has sold over a million copies of a book for which this passage can serve as an encapsulation:
I once asked the Lord why so many people are confused and He said to me, ‘Tell them to stop trying to figure everything out, and they will stop being confused.’ I have found it to be absolutely true. Reasoning and confusion go together.
from Battlefield of the Mind, p. 99
Last year she issued a version of Battlefield of the Mind “For Teens,” which I’m reading at the moment.
You can tell it’s intended for teens because of the cool dripping paint on the front cover, and the use of words like “wanna” and “gonna” and phrases like “where your head is at” (which teenagers use all the time, along with “groovy” and “hang ten.” If nothing else, Joyce is clearly hep to the jive.) My favorite sentence: “If you’re like most teens, you’ve probably seen the movie The Karate Kid.” Karate Kid was released in 1984, several years before today’s teenagers were born.
Fewer giggles were forthcoming from passages like this:
I was totally confused about everything, and I didn’t know why. One thing that added to my confusion was too much reasoning.
That’s right: it comes back again and again in her advice, in millions of books and throughout her broadcasting empire. Don’t even start thinking. Most troubling of all is the desperate attempt to make kids fear their own thoughts, right at the age they are supposed to be challenging and questioning in order to become autonomous adults:
Ask yourself, continually, “WWJT?” [What Would Jesus Think?] Remember, if He wouldn’t think about something, you shouldn’t either….By keeping continual watch over your thoughts, you can ensure that no damaging enemy thoughts creep into your mind.
I will defend to the death her right to put these opinions out there, and the rights of her millions of devoted readers to read it and to think it is something other than sad, ignorant, unethical, fearful sheepmaking. I’m just all the more motivated to put out a message precisely opposed to Meyer’s fearthought, one that advocates building up critical thinking and moral judgment in tandem, then inviting ideas into your head without fear that one of them will somehow jump you when you’re not looking.
Now I just need a word for the opposite of fearthought. I’m sure one will occur to me.
Freethought
This excerpt from a post of mine last June (“Rubbernecking at Evil”) shows how different are the planets Joyce Meyer and I occupy — even beyond the number of countries. Compare the bolded passage below with Joyce Meyer’s advice:
About a year ago, [my daughter Erin, then 8] went through a brief period of self-recrimination, literally dissolving into tears at bedtime, but uncharacteristically unwilling to discuss it. The morning after one such nighttime session, we were lying on the trampoline together, looking at the sky, and I asked if she would tell me what was troubling her. “Did you do something you feel bad about, or hurt somebody’s feelings at school?” I asked. “There’s always a way to fix that, you know.”
“No,” she said. “It isn’t something I did.”
“Something somebody else did? Did somebody hurt your feelings?”
“No.” A long silence. I watched the clouds for awhile, knowing it would come.
At last she spoke. “It isn’t anything I did. It’s something…I thought.”
I turned to look at her. She was crying again.
“Something you thought? What is it, B?”
“I don’t want to say.”
“That’s OK, you don’t have to say. But what’s the problem with thinking this thing?”
“It’s more than one thing.” She looked at me with a worried forehead. “It’s bad thoughts. I think about saying things or doing things that are bad. Like…”
I waited.
“Like bad words. That’s one thing.”
“You want to say bad words?”
“NO!!” she said, horrified. “I don’t at ALL!! But I can’t get my brain to stop thinking about this word I heard somebody say at school. It’s a really nasty word and I don’t like it. But it keeps popping into my brain, no matter what I do, and it makes me feel really, really bad!!”
She cried harder, and I hugged her. “Listen to me, B. You are never bad just for thinking about something. Never.”
“What? But…If it’s bad to say a bad word, then it’s bad to think it!”
“But how can you decide whether it’s bad if you don’t even let yourself think it?”
She stopped crying in a single wet inhale, and furrowed her brow. “Then…It’s OK to think bad things?”
“Yes. It is. It’s fine. Erin, you can’t stop your brain from thinking – especially a huge brain like yours. And you’ll make yourself crazy if you even try.”
“That’s what I’m doing! I’m making myself crazy!”
“Well don’t. Listen to me now.” We went forehead to forehead. “It is never bad to think something. You have permission to think about everything in the world. What comes after thinking is deciding whether to keep that thought or to throw it away. That’s called your judgment. A lot of times it’s wrong to act on certain thoughts, but it is never, ever wrong to let yourself think them.” I pointed to her head. “That’s your courtroom in there, and you’re the judge.”
The next morning she woke up excitedly and gave me a high-speed hug. Once she had permission to think the bad word, she said, it just went away. She was genuinely relieved.
Imagine if instead I had saddled her with traditional ideas of mind-policing, the insane practice of paralyzing guilt for what you cannot control – your very thoughts. Instead, I taught her what freethought really means.
I’m more than a little proud of myself for managing to say the right thing. That’s always a minor miracle. I don’t blog about the three hundred or so times in-between that I say the wrong thing.
In the year since that day, Erin has several times mentioned that moment, sitting on the trampoline, as the single best thing I ever did for her. As with most such moments, I had no idea at the time that I was giving her anything beyond the moment itself. I just wanted her to stop crying, to stop beating up on herself. But in the process, it seems, I genuinely set her free.
JOHN (bookin’ through the bible 7)
John 3:16 Guy, a.k.a. Rollen Stewart
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THE GOSPEL of JOHN
If we’re trying to make historical sense of the Bible — and many, many people persist in the effort — the differences between the three “synoptic” gospels and the Gospel of John is a problem best not pondered too much. “John’s testimony is so different from that of the synoptic gospels,” wrote Tim Callahan in Secret Origins of the Bible, “that if his is accepted, theirs must be discarded.” But once you accept the folkloric nature of the Gospels, you can discard all of them as any kind of historical record and just enjoy the variations as evidence of oral handling and glean the occasional meaningful message from it. Liberal Christians do exactly that.
I’ve already confessed a certain affection for Luke. Part of it is familiarity, certainly, but it also includes a really attractive mythic narrative. But the Fourth Gospel, the Gospel of John, the crazy aunt in the Christian attic, is the one that really grabs me by the bollocks:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
In him was life, and that life was the light of men.
The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.
The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.
That’s the way to start a book about a god, not with a rambling genealogy or by banging on about vague prophecies! Religious moderates are often embarrassed by the weirdness of John, while Born-Agains, anti-Semites and rainbow-wigged endzone dwellers find their raisons d’etre in it. Yes, John has inspired more than its share of grief and ongoing lunacy. But considered as literature, as folklore, I find myself thoroughly grabbed by its metaphors (2:19 Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up) and its brutal, vivid directness:
6:53 Jesus said to them, I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him.
No wonder “from that time many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him”! And in verse 6:66, no less! If you want passing, veiled references, go back to the synoptics. John makes the gristle of Christ squeak between your teeth.
My favorite gospel story, and the favorite of religious moderates everywhere, is John 8:4-11:
The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say? They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.
They are asking this of the man who affirmed every “jot and tittle” of the Law of Moses, remember, including Lev 20:10. John describes the scene with this wonderful small detail:
But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger, as if he had not heard them.
We’re in the midst of one of the greatest Bible moments here, a wholly uncharacteristic one. It’s more of a Buddha moment, really, and a marvelous piece of scene setting. It’s not the only one in John—“Jesus wept” (11:35) is another. In most of the gospels Christ is drawn with the wooden two-dimensionality of a grade school nativity play. But here, in John, he pops to life.
When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her. And again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.
At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there.
Jesus straightened up and asked her, Woman, where are they? Has no-one condemned you?
No-one, sir, she said.
Then neither do I condemn you, Jesus declared. Go now and leave your life of sin.
The pace, the detail, the dialogue—none of it would be out of place in a modern novel. And unlike most of the Bible, there’s some genuine, original wisdom in it.
Gospel Hero No. 1: Judas
I’ll close by acknowledging two genuine heroes in John. In both cases, their heroism is interestingly set against the intransigence or cynicism of Jesus. The first is Judas in John 12:3-8:
Mary took a pint of pure spikenard ointment, an expensive perfume; she poured it on Jesus’ feet and wiped his feet with her hair. And the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.
But one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, who was later to betray him, objected, Why wasn’t this perfume sold and the money given to the poor? It was worth a year’s wages.
He did not say this because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief; as keeper of the money bag, he used to help himself to what was put into it.
Why hello there, John. Editorialize much? Methinks he protests too much about Judas’ motives. Even if the dialogue is pure fiction, a graduate lit seminar would credit the character of Judas here and distrust the petty narrative voice. Judas didn’t say the money should have stayed in “the money bag.” He specifically suggested the 300 dinarii—a year’s wages for a laborer—should have been spent, but on the poor instead of on a luxury. And the character of Jesus responds with unworthy cynicism:
Leave her alone, Jesus replied. It was intended that she should save this perfume for the day of my burial. You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me.
Webber and Rice side with me on this interpretation in Superstar. Judas is the conscience and hero of the film:
Christ redeems himself (now there’s a turn of phrase) in 13:34 with a brand-new commandment, and a cracking good one:
A new commandment I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this will all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love one to another.
Gospel Hero No. 2: Thomas
I’ll close with my other gospel hero, Thomas, who thought to ask for a bit of simple evidence before believing:
Now Thomas (called Didymus), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, We have seen the Lord! But he said to them, Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it.
A week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, Peace be with you! Then he said to Thomas, Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.
The Incredulity of St. Thomas (1601) by Caravaggio 
Thomas said to him, My Lord and my God!
Then Jesus told him, Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.
Oh really. I haven’t seen Joseph Smith’s golden tablets either. Shall I believe in them? Why not? How about the Mohammedan revelations? David Koresh, Jom Jones? This is the elephant in the church: When you say “Have faith,” which unevidenced claim shall I believe? The one I was born into? The one that gets to me first? The one with the loudest proponents or the worst threats? Perhaps the one with the least evidence? The story of Thomas would have been perfect if it ended 23 words earlier.
You can’t really blame Jesus for missing the point of the Thomas story. He was dead on his feet, after all. I’ll stick with Thomas, a biblical hero well worth introducing to my kids.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: John 3:16 Guy, a.k.a. Rollen Stewart, is currently serving three consecutive
life sentences for kidnapping and for threatening to shoot down planes in preparation
for the Rapture. No reflection on other fans of the Gospel of John or others with rainbow
hair, of course. But it IS a reflection on believers in the Rapture.]
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Next week: EXODUS, with a special guest blogger!
laughing matters 3: the bible gal
I taught at a Catholic women’s college in Minnesota for 15 years. Half of my courseload was an interdisciplinary seminar in writing and critical thinking.
Teaching critical thinking at a Catholic college is strange, but only half as strange as it seems. Every official college document, from the Mission Statement to the Catholic Identity Statement, trumpeted the vital importance of critical thinking, open intellectual inquiry, the vigorous exchange of opposing views, etc. So critical thinking was alive and well in writing. Just not in practice. Issues of religion, race, and gender, among many others, had accepted, unchallenged orthodoxies. Unorthodoxy was killed off in one way or another, usually with suffocating silence.
My head eventually began to hurt from the dissonance. To relieve the pressure, I turned to humor, writing the satirical novel Calling Bernadette’s Bluff, the utterly fictional story of a secular humanist male faculty member at the utterly fictional College of St. Bernadette, a Catholic women’s college in Minnesota. It’s still selling the occasional copy after five years, which is nice, and reviews were good. Most of all, it saved me a blown cerebral artery by allowing me to get some things said. And by doing so humorously, I got the same reprieve as Erasmus from the (direct) wrath of the Powers that Were. For a while.
A few months after publication, a couple of students asked if I would like to form a student humanist group on campus, “like the one in your book.”
Like the one in the book? I thought. Surely not.
I reminded them that things in the book went seriously unwell for the group in question, and for the college itself. They shrugged. So we did it. And things went badly.
How they went badly is a good story in itself, eventually involving locked doors, bad press for the college, the first student protest in the school’s history (against the censorious college president), hate mail for me, equal measures of faculty courage and cowardice, and a tenure standoff with the college deans. But that’s another story. This series is about humor and critical thinking.
My tenure committee
In the service of my children’s addictions to food and clothing, I hung around for as long as I could, then gave notice in May ’05 that I would leave in May ’06. My resignation was gratefully accepted by the president. Many faculty colleagues expressed genuine and eloquent grief over my decision, something that warms me to this day.
I had to decide how to disengage with the place I’d worked most of my adult life. I felt tremendous bitterness at the hypocrisy and cowardice at several levels. But instead of giving in to that, I decided to say goodbye with a humor.
I approached the editors of the faculty e-newsletter with the idea of a mock advice column called “Ask the Bible Gal.” After some knee-clacking, they consented to run it. I decided to use it to gently skewer hypocrisies on campus and in religion generally.
You may recognize the influence of a famous Internet satire in the first installment:
ASK THE BIBLE GAL
A Lighthouse in the WildernessDear Bible Gal:
I have a colleague who teaches a Weekend College class on Sunday, thereby working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states that she must be put to death — but am I morally obligated to do it myself?
Mystified in MinneapolisDear Mystified:
Excellent question! If the college administration doesn’t take care of it, then yes, I guess it’s up to you to lend a hand. Just don’t do it on the Sabbath, or you’d be working too! Thanks for writing, and be sure to let me know how it goes!
BG
The next week had this follow-up:
Dear Bible Gal:
Longtime reader, first-time correspondent. I’m writing on behalf of “Mystified in Minneapolis,” a colleague of mine who wrote recently for advice on dealing with a Sabbath-breaker. She took your advice, and – well, let’s just say there’s one less Sabbath-breaker this Sunday, praise God!
“Mystified” would have written to you herself, but at the post-retribution party (you’ll get a kick out of this), somebody pointed out that she had in turn violated the Sixth Commandment against killing! Oh, you should have seen her face, she turned as red as a tomato! We all had a good laugh, then killed her, of course (Leviticus 24:17, “If anyone takes the life of a human being, he must be put to death”) – and boy then did we have a problem, since we had to kill the killers…
We want to do this “by the Book,” so here’s the question: what should the last person do? – Stumped in St. Paul
Dear Stumped:
There’s a scriptural solution to every problem. In this case, WWSD: what would Saul do? (1 Sam 31:4). Problem solved! Let me know how it…oops. Never mind :-)! BG
(Saul kills himself.) A dozen faculty members whispered their approval of the satires in passing on campus. Others glared. I felt a little less pressure in my head each week:
Dear Bible Gal:
Each August, I am appalled anew by a festival of sin at the Minnesota State Fair. In case you don’t know about it, images are graven into blocks of butter, a clear violation of the Second Commandment and an encouragement to every type of unholy transgression. I’ve enclosed photos of this past year’s outrage. Can’t these people read?? It’s further proof that we need the Commandments posted in public schools for easy reference. – No Margarine for Error
Shades of MoobyDear Margarine:
May I gently suggest that you read the Commandment before casting stones about unholy oleo! The Second Commandment forbids not just graven images but the making of “any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above or in the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth.” Any likeness, dear, which means your little snapshot constitutes a first-class ticket to the Ninth Circle! Why, the film The Ten Commandments was itself one gigantic violation! Cecil B. DeMille’s skull is surely the drinking-gourd of Lucifer even as we speak.
As for me, I pray to see the Second Commandment posted in art classes, for the much-needed boost it would give to Abstract Expressionism. – BG
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Dear Bible Gal:
I am a Bible-believing high school senior and feminist, in search of a Bible-believing feminist college. How thrilled I was to hear about the College of St. Catherine, a place that knows the greatest source of empowerment for women is the truth of Scripture!
At least that’s what I thought St. Kate’s was. My faith in that school crumbled on a recent campus visit, when I learned that women actually teach there, despite the admonition of 1 Timothy 2:12 (“Do not permit a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence”). How on earth can a college claim to empower women if it doesn’t even follow the Holy Word of God?! – Real Feminists Aren’t Timothy-Leery
Dear Real Feminist:
You truly dodged a bullet, dear! That darned place has a long history of disregarding all of the powerful feminist Scriptures. I’ve heard they don’t even require women to be silent in church – as if the Apostle Paul didn’t know what was best for women’s empowerment! You want real scriptural feminism? Go to St. Thomas, girlfriend! – BG
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Dear Bible Gal:
At last, after eleven years, our church expansion is completed! Last week the Building Committee voted to inscribe the last words of Christ over the entrance to our new educational wing and coffee shop. But at the meeting, someone pointed out that the Gospels – well, I wouldn’t say they contradict each other, of course, since that’s not possible, but they seem to render the true words in three different ways – in Matthew (“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”), Luke (“Father, unto thy hands I commend my spirit”), and John (“It is finished”). Is one of these truths more, you know, true than the others? – Stumped by a Cross Word Puzzle
Dear Cross Word:
Eleven years for one building project! I’d suggest you go with John! – BG
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Dear Bible Gal:
Last Easter weekend my husband and I stayed in the basement suites at the Days Inn in Charleston, South Carolina as part of their WWJD Easter package – “three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Mt 12:40), just like our Lord! We checked in on Good Friday and “arose” on Easter Sunday. Get it?
My husband – apparently using secular math – blasphemously suggested at the front desk that we should have been charged for only two nights! Obviously he was wrong: Friday afternoon through Sunday morning must equal “three days and three nights” – or else Christ Himself misspoke in the Scriptures! Aack!
Easter’s approaching again, and we’re Carolina-bound. I don’t want him to embarrass me again. Please help me to help him see his error! – Counting the Days Inn
Dear Counting:
Your husband is getting caught in that literalist trap! When the Lord said “three days and three nights,” He was speaking of a metaphorical three days and three nights. I hope that clears things up, and further hope you were charged in allegorical dollars. – BG
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And on it went, for a year. By the time I left, I felt fine.
Many on the faculty apparently had the least desirable reaction of all, the same one they had to all controversy—they wished all the icky conflicting views would just go away, wished for the return to the silent, smiling denial of dissonance that had driven me first crazy, then away.
Perhaps that silent, uncommented dissonance returned after I left, I dunno. But I can’t help hoping that the genie, once out of her bottle, has continued flying around that place, knocking things over and crapping on the carpets.
santatheology
One of my essays in Parenting Beyond Belief (“The Ultimate Dry Run,” p. 87) argued that the Santa myth, in addition to being a hugely enjoyable and harmless fantasy, can serve as a dry run for thinking one’s way out of religious belief.
It’s hard to even consider the possibility that Santa isn’t real. Everyone seems to believe he is. As a kid, I heard his name in songs and stories and saw him in movies with very high production values. My mom and dad seemed to believe, batted down my doubts, told me he wanted me to be good and that he always knew if I wasn’t. And what wonderful gifts I received! Except when they were crappy, which I always figured was my fault somehow. All in all, despite the multiple incredible improbabilities involved in believing he was real, I believed – until the day I decided I cared enough about the truth to ask serious questions, at which point the whole façade fell to pieces. Fortunately the good things I had credited him with continued coming, but now I knew they came from the people around me, whom I could now properly thank.
Now go back and read that paragraph again, changing the ninth word from Santa to God.
Santa Claus, my secular friends, is the greatest gift a rational worldview ever had. Our culture has constructed a silly and temporary myth parallel to its silly and permanent one. They share a striking number of characteristics, yet the one is cast aside halfway through childhood.
I offer as further evidence the following conversation between my son Connor — 12 years old and well post-Santa — and his sister Delaney, six, whose Santa-belief Connor has apparently decided must be kept alive at all costs. The setting is Grandma’s house on Krismas Eve for the Opening of the Early Presents:
GRANDMA: Oh, look, here’s another one: “To Delaney, from Santa!”
DELANEY: EEEEEE, he he hee! (*rustle rustle*) Omigosh, new PJs!! With puppy dogs!!
GRANDMA: Now, if they don’t fit, we can exchange them. I have the receipt.
DELANEY, with accusing eyebrows: What do you mean, you have the receipt? How could you have the receipt?
GRANDMA: Oh, I mean…well, Santa leaves the receipts with the gifts.
DELANEY, eyebrows still deployed: Uh huh.
CONNOR: Laney, be careful. If you don’t believe in Santa even for one minute, you’ll get coal in your stocking.
DELANEY: I don’t think so.
CONNOR: Well, you better not doubt him anyway, just in case it’s true!
DELANEY: I think Santa would care more that I was good than if I believe in him.
Holy cow. Didja catch all that? The whole history of religious discourse in 15 seconds. Reread it, changing Santa to God and get coal in your stocking to burn in Hell. For the finishing touch, replace Connor with Blaise Pascal and Delaney with Voltaire.
(P.S. The boy and I had a small chat after this. We don’t ban much in our house, but thoughtstoppers are definitely out. The Doctrine of Coal is as verboten as any other idea designed to squash honest doubts.)
