vive la différence
First, a bit of news: We’ve arrived in Atlanta and tentatively found our new home, and (following the Newsweek article) Parenting Beyond Belief hovered between 350 and 700 on Amazon — the top two hundredths of a percent — before cooling off a bit.
More on all that later. Right now I’ve a blogligation to fulfill. Several weeks back, a reader asked a great question: Why do I consider the line between “religious parenting” and “nonreligious parenting” to be meaningful? Isn’t the kind of parenting I advocate (unbounded questioning, a scientifically-informed, evidence-based worldview, questioning of authority, rejecting the notion of “sinful thoughts,” developing moral judgment instead of simple rule-following, etc. etc.) really just “good parenting”? Am I really saying that religious parents can’t do these things?
No, I’m not saying that — partly because I can’t.
Really. I can’t. It’s an absolute statement, you see — and twenty years immersed in the liberal arts, first as a student, then as a professor, left me completely incapable of making an absolute statement. (Well, not completely.) Go back and read my blog so far. I constantly use qualifiers like most, many, almost, and some because I am painfully aware that all generalizations are wrong.
Well…not all.
There is nothing that religious parents “can’t” do, nothing that is the exclusive purview of secular parenting — just as there is nothing that religious parents can achieve that I can’t.
So why make the distinction at all, then? Why describe something called “secular parenting” if it’s pretty much the same as good religious parenting?
Because though we can end up pursuing the same ends, they really aren’t the same. There is a profound difference in the context — the space in which religious parenting and secular parenting happen.
Both secular and religious parents can raise kids to value fearless questioning, require genuine evidence, question authority, and reject paralyzing ideas of “sin” and the demonization of doubt. But one of these worldviews encourages and supports those values, while the other discourages them. One lends itself to them; the other chafes against them.
(Psst: I’ll tell you which is which in a minute.)
Being a freethinking Christian is something like being a pro-choice Republican. Opposition to legalized abortion is one of the central, defining policy planks of the Republican Party platform. There are pro-choice Republicans, of course, but they surely recognize that their pro-choice position is at odds with their party’s ideology. They can still do it, of course, can still hold that dissenting position within a Republican identity, but when it comes to that issue, they’ll be swimming upstream, struggling against one of the defining values of their group.
Same with pro-war Quakers, acrophobic window washers, and Danny, the claustrophobic tunneler in The Great Escape. “Jeez, good luck with that” is about all I can think to say.
My hat’s off to any religious parent who encourages unrestrained doubt, applauds fearless questioning and rejects appeals to authority. Such religious parents are salmon swimming against one helluva mighty current. At the core of religious tradition and practice are the ideas that doubt is bad, that certain questions are not to be asked, and that church and scripture carry some degree of inherent authority. This varies among the denominations, of course, but some degree of these three will be present in virtually every flavor of the faith. (Five extra points for each weasel word or phrase you can find in that sentence.)
The great glory of secular parenting is that it embraces several key values that religion has traditionally suppressed and feared, allowing parents and children to turn away from that pointless, mind-juddering dissonance, to dance in the light of knowledge and to revel in questioning and doubting as the highest human callings, rivalled only by love.
Parenting Beyond Belief is about the ecstasy of parenting from a worldview that supports and encourages some of our most deeply-held values. That, then, is the difference. And vive la it.
As for those religious-parent salmon, swimming against the unhelpful currents of church tradition, heed this wisdom from the Book of Dory — just keep swimming, follow your conscience, and do what you can to help others see the light:
god’s burning love for me
The Minneapolis Star Tribune contacted me a few weeks back to see if I’d mind being featured in their “Believer” profile, a weekly sidebar in the Faith & Values section. Why not. They sent a few questions and gave me a 200-word limit. Here’s the result:
BELIEVER
Dale McGowan, 44, RobbinsdaleOccupation: Writer.
Identifies as: Secular humanist.
Favorite work of music
Piano Concerto in G Major, Maurice Ravel. The whole bittersweet human comedy is in that one amazing piece.What do you believe in?
This natural universe is all there is. We are all made of the same material as the stars, but unlike most of the stuff in the universe, we have the astonishing good fortune to be conscious for a short while. We should never stop dancing and singing in the face of that magnificent luck. We are cosmically insignificant, inconceivably unimportant — except to each other, to whom we should therefore be unspeakably precious.Describe something your values have helped you navigate.
I’ve spent 30 years reflecting on my father’s death. Now that I’ve reached his final age, a naturalistic understanding of death has led me to fear it less. I’ll never experience death, since my death, by definition, will be the absence of me. I won’t be there — so what’s to fear? Our identities spring entirely from a constantly recomposed electrochemical symphony playing in our heads. Asking where my “self” goes when that electrochemical symphony ends is like asking where the music goes when an orchestra stops playing. We are living music. How wonderful is that?
Only two Baptists called to save me, followed by weeks of silence. I thought I was out of the woods — until today, when I received this letter:
Dear Dale,
I’m sending these booklets to you so that you know God loves you. When you die, you don’t die like a dog. You will go on forever!
I’m 74, & received Christ into my life at age 11. I’ve never regretted it for a minute.
Love, & Rejoicing in the Lord Jesus,
Virginia H—
Enclosed were two signs of God’s burning love for me: a Jack Chick tract, including this panel:
…and a second pamphlet:
She sent them, she said, so I could know God loves me.
If that’s God’s idea of love, Virginia…well, he can frankly go love himself.
Jerry Falwell and the absent dancers
To philosophize is to learn how to die.
Michel de Montaigne
Oh relax. I’m not going to impugn the recently departed Jerry Falwell. Christopher Hitchens is taking care of that, God bless ‘im. I will grant, for reasons unclear to me, the traditional period of immunity enjoyed by the newly demised. It was Falwell’s death that got me thinking, but this post isn’t really about him. It’s death itself I’m on about, not the corpse-of-the-moment. Death and the absence of dancers.
But first, that immunity thing.
My first experience of the weird immunity we grant to the recently dead was at my dad’s funeral. I was thirteen and he was forty-five, my age next year. I loved my dad. He was a good guy.
Still, the eulogies offered by Dad’s friends and colleagues struck me as…weird.
I remember one colleague of his saying, “Dave didn’t have an enemy in the world.” “He was always thinking of others, never a thought for himself,” said another. “Everyone loved him.” “He loved his family more than any man I’ve ever known.”
Okay. I guess.
Like I said, he was a good guy. But this was my first experience of the genuine canonization of the dead that is socially mandated. Although my dad was funny and smart and hardworking and endlessly curious, he also lost his temper frequently and even sprained his thumb once. Oh, while beating me, I left that part out. I had been a shit to my younger brother, again, and Dad had come off a 60-hour week, and he couldn’t find it in himself to not sprain his thumb on me.
In addition to occasionally thrashing us, he wrote poetry and read Cyrano de Bergerac and smoked like a chimney and ate like a bison. He also taught me everything he knew about astronomy and yelled at my mom. A lot. And he sang with her. A lot. A mixed bag, like the rest of us.
Why do we need to pretend someone was a perfect saint in order to remember him fondly? And why the particular need to deny the mixed bag just because someone is recently dead?
Purgatory. That’s why.
In the medieval church, the recently dead were believed to stop in Purgatory before being dispatched to heaven or hell. It was during this layover that incoming prayers were tallied up and the person’s life assessed. Even marginally bad thoughts might tip the balance southward, so if you had anything bad to say, it was crucial to hold your tongue while all the hanging chads were counted. You know, if you can’t say anything nice, keep it inside, where God can’t hear it. Like saying “bless you” after a sneeze, the post-mortem immunity is a habit based in antique superstitions.
Well, whatever the reason, we can’t say anything bad about Jerry Falwell for a little while, because this terrible, tragic, unexpected thing happened to him: his body stopped working. And that was awfully sad.
Which gets me at last to the missing dancers.
President Bush issued a statement of condolence: Laura and I are deeply saddened by the death of Jerry Falwell, a man who cherished faith, family, and freedom. Various religious leaders have “mourned” Falwell’s passing or “grieved” his loss. Great rivers of tears will certainly be loosed at his funeral.
You see where I’m headed. Stick with me anyway. I want a credible answer.
According to the stated beliefs of Jerry Falwell and virtually every person who is “mourning” what happened to him, he has shed his earthly vessel and become a glorified being in the very presence of the Living Lord and Creator. He is in Heaven. This is the big time, the radiant confirmation of all his cherished hopes, the fulfillment of the promises of the scriptures to which he devoted his life, a happiness beyond anything mere words can devise.
And the proper response to this, apparently, is to be “deeply saddened.”
This question hit me for the first time not at my dad’s funeral, but at a funeral I attended for the mother of a friend one year earlier when I was twelve. The distraught sobs of the congregation and the soothing promises of the minister that she was “with Jesus, smiling down upon us, happy and free of pain” provided such a stark contrast that it suddenly hit me — they don’t believe him!
I hesitate to say such a thing. Having been confidently informed that I, a nonbeliever, really do believe in God, way way down deep, I shudder to make confident claims about what other people believe. I make this claim out of true bafflement at what else can explain the evidence. It’s the only credible explanation I can find for the day-and-night contrast between what Christians say happens at death and how they behave upon hearing someone has died. They pray like mad that a sick person’s glorious transfiguration will be put off, then weep and gnash their teeth when the person finally attains it. So I’m stuck with one hypothesis — that they wish with all their hearts to believe it and actual believe they believe it, but do not believe it.
If they did, wouldn’t they be singing and dancing and shouting praise-choruses to the sky? The funerals of children should be occasions for particular celebration — Little Suzy’s passed up the whole vale of tears and gone straight to Jesus! Instead, the loss of a child is seen as the greatest of all tragedies. Why? Where are the dancers? Shouldn’t the phrase “I’m glad Falwell’s dead” draw something other than shocked outrage? Shouldn’t a true believer who really loved him and wanted the best for him say, “I’m glad he’s dead, too!” — not as a mumbled coda, that’s common enough, but as a statement of certain joy?
The image of Snoopy dancing on a grave beneath Jerry Falwell’s name looks like the prelude to a stinging critique. You may well have assumed as much when you saw it. But shouldn’t it look like the polar opposite — like an elated confirmation of what Falwell believed to be true? Shouldn’t a Christian look at that and say, “At last, the atheist gets it!”
My wife claims that funereal tears are for the survivors, not for the departed person, and of course that’s a part of it. But why then, when a believer hears of a death — especially an untimely one — do they gasp and say things like, “Oh, that poor, poor girl”? Shouldn’t it at least be seriously mixed?
Imagine, for example, a Tutsi mother in Rwanda at the time of the genocide. The UN is pulling back as machete-wielding Hutus approach the village. After much tearful pleading, a UN peacekeeper agrees to take the woman’s four-year-old child to safety in another country. She is unlikely to ever see him again. If she survives, she will miss him terribly. But her tears would be undeniably mixed with profound joy that her son has a chance at happiness and safety. You can picture a relieved smile beaming through her tear-streaked face as the truck pulls away.
If I truly believed in heaven as advertised, that would have to describe my face at the funeral of a loved one. Right? He made it out to happiness and safety. Next time you’re at a funeral, see if you can spot even one such face.
Coming to grips with mortality is the greatest of all challenges for a conscious being. It’s a life’s work. When someone asks how on Earth I can bear the idea that my death will be the end, I want to look the person in the eyes and say, “Yes, it’s very hard…isn’t it.” I’ve never tried that, but I dream of doing that just right, just once, and connecting with the honest knowledge of mortality we all carry inside ourselves.
I’m not one of those secularists who pretend that our mortality is no big deal. It’s a very big deal. I don’t especially like it. But I’m a big boy, I can handle it — especially since I never bought into its denial, and so had no childish illusions of immortality to abandon.
And neither will my kids, I’ll wager. They know about the heaven hypothesis, and they know the oblivion hypothesis, and like their dad, they’ll spend a lifetime working it out and coming to grips with the fact that, no matter what comes next, this life ends. I hope also to instill a passionate love of reality so they’ll work to understand and accept what is rather than what goes down most easily. Heaven sells itself, for the most part. My job is to help them, and myself, find the genuine comforts in the naturalistic model. There are many, and I’ll yammer about those soon.
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.)
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.
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.
Resisting the eraser, Part II
There are two pieces in Parenting Beyond Belief — an essay by Annie Laurie Gaylor and a silly song lyric of my own — that are devoted to the introduction of great figures who were religious doubters of one stripe or another. I included these because it’s important for kids to know that not everyone believes — that in fact, some of the greatest minds of every generation were doubters. And it’s important to do it overtly because of that busy, busy eraser.
I feel particularly strongly about this because I grew up oblivious to the fact that I was not alone in my doubts, as most of us do. Even in college I had not discovered any significant presence of articulate disbelief in our cultural history. And it really made me doubt my own doubts. How could I disbelieve when all of my greatest intellectual heroes believed? I’d heard it said the Founding Fathers were Christians – when in fact very few were. I had heard that Charles Darwin found no contradiction between evolutionary theory and Christian belief, when in fact he did. (He made that clear in his autobiography – though those pages were removed from the first edition by his wife, with the best of misguided motives.) I assumed that Einstein’s references to God were literal reflections of a personal faith, only later discovering his several irritated denials of that claim.
I was in my thirties before I discovered, in the works of AN Wilson, how many of the greatest intellectual and moral minds of every generation were freethinkers of one stripe or another – Seneca, Diderot, Voltaire, Jefferson, Lincoln, Susan B Anthony, Thomas Edison, Einstein, Freud, Twain, Hume, H.L. Mencken, Simone de Beauvoir, Bertrand Russell. They had all written eloquently of their doubts and their reasons. But those writings had not reached me, despite every possible predilection on my part to receive them.
One of the other ways believers mask disbelief is by taking every passing use of the word ‘God’ as proof that the speaker believed in God. Albert Einstein said, “God would not play dice with the universe.” He was immediately and jubilantly proclaimed a Christian, which irritated him so much that he wrote this answer in 1954: “It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”
Kurt Vonnegut did not believe in God (and expressed it clearly), but once said that “The only proof I need of the existence of God is music.” He meant this as an ironic tribute to music, not as a statement of belief in God, but it was leapt upon so effectively that National Public Radio – NPR! – ended its tribute to him last week with that quote. Why? Because that’s what we do: We mask disbelief in the appearance of belief. A giddy listener quickly posted a claim that Vonnegut, in his last years, was “arguing with his own atheism.”
Vonnegut foreshadowed this in 1992 when he began his eulogy for (atheist/humanist) Isaac Asimov with, “Well, Isaac is up in heaven now…” But he wasn’t erasing — he was being funny. And by all accounts, it slew the gathered throng.
UU humanist and minister Kenneth Phifer said, “Humanism teaches us that it is immoral to wait for God to act for us.” In context, what he was saying is this: Whether or not there is a God, passivity is immoral. But many leapt on the statement as proof that this prominent nontheistic humanist believes in God. You can just hear the squeak, squeak of the eraser, trying desperately to make us all the same.
Here’s Kenneth Phifer trying to be abundantly clear:
“I am a humanist. The humanism I espouse is materialist, naturalistic, religious, rational, responsible and inclusive. I hold with the conviction of humanism that the scientific method is the best means we have discovered for advancing truth…I have faith in that part of humanism which sees the human being as the highest form of life, an end not a means, the creator of moral values, the maker of history… It is the human race that has invented religious communities in order to share the burden of our aloneness as individuals…
He continues: “Religion is a human enterprise. It is the human race that has created religions out of that unique self-awareness that drives us to ask questions about our origins and our destiny.”
Materialist. Naturalistic. Humans as creators of moral values, religion as a human enterprise. It is the human race that has created religions. Phifer calls himself a religious humanist, but it seems pretty clear that he is not a theistic one. He supports the coming together of humanity to do and be good as the fullest expression of religion. It’s an important difference.
A systematic cultural suppression of the rich heritage of religious doubt keeps that heritage out of view. Thus is doubt rendered unthinkable by the stripping of its intellectual tradition. Once I discovered that tradition in AN Wilson’s work (and in The Humanist Anthology, edited by James Herrick, a PBB contributor), I literally wept at times as I read the courageous works of these great thinkers of the past, many giving voice to their honest convictions at a far greater risk than any I will ever encounter. In the span of a few weeks, I went from isolation to the company of giants.
I embarked on an ecstatic engagement with the words and lives of these men and women, taking their intellectual and moral courage as my own inspiration.
Just like gays and lesbians, women, ethnic minorities and others, we have to resist our erasure every bit as insistently as the hand of the mainstream culture pushes that eraser forward.
Parenting “as if”
What’ll it be tonight? It’s been an impressive 24 hours. Maybe I should tell y’all about the book climbing into the top 0.1% on Amazon — pretty good for a book without an audience — or the quintupling of traffic to the website. Or maybe I should blog about the secular Tin Foil Hatter who has launched a classic and baseless MSTT attack on one of the book’s contributors, saying s/he discredits the project because said contributor once knew someone who stood next to someone who thought an unrigorous thought. Get a hobby.
Then there’s the flurry of frantic emails from the publisher (very good folks, by the way), fretting because I claimed on the PBB website that Unitarians are “majority nontheistic” while the UUA website claims it’s only 19 percent. YIKES! You have to change that, you didn’t send the study guide to the UUs already, did you?? (In fact, the UUA says 19 percent are atheists and 46 percent are humanists. 19+46 = 65% = majority.) Once again we get our undies in a bunch over nothing much. (And a good thing, too, since they seem not to have noticed I said the same thing in the book…)
Forget all that. I’d rather tell you about Delaney:
This is my five -year-old Delaney, a.k.a. Linky, and I love her so much it hurts.
Linky came to me at my usual station (hunched over the laptop) and threw her arms around me. “I’m so proud of your book, Daddy.”
Oh, for meltin’ out loud. “Aren’t you a sweetie! Thanks, butterbutt.”
“I wrote a book too.” And she showed me The Bigist Pumkin Anybode Saw — nine stapled pages of instant classic. I read it aloud, oohed and aahed, told her I was even prouder of hers.
“Thanks, she said. “And I’m gonna take your book and my book to show to my class tomorrow.”
“…”
Instead of an ellipsis, the proper response of any good father would have been “Of course, my precious little Blossom Bottom! I’m so glad you’re so proud!” But…well, there are complications. Stuff to dance around. You know, grown up things to consider…
I’ll cut to the chase. Here’s a picture of her preschool:
Okay, I couldn’t get a picture of her actual school, but you get the idea. She goes to preschool at our local Lutheran church. Why? Because the program is the best pre-K in town, the teachers are wonderful, and she gets a basic low-key introduction to religious literacy without a hint of damnation. All of my kids have gone there, then into public schools. Please direct all MSTT concerns to your local proctologist at his place of employment.
During my ellipsis (if you’ll forgive a presumptious and ultimately shameful comparison), I flashed on the most heartbreaking passage in Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail:
When you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people…then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.
My little girl is proud of my work, and there’s nothing at all wrong with my work or her pride in it — yet I know that the potential exists for bigotry and ignorance in the next layer to set “ominous clouds” in my own daughter’s “little mental sky” when she flashes a secular parenting book in a church school classroom. It isn’t right, it isn’t just, but there it is. I looked at her beaming face and knew that she was aware only of what made sense, not of the nonsense that demands to be danced around.
After what was actually only a second or two, I decided to opt for parenting “as if”: Act as if the world were sane and reasonable, and see if it just might rise to the invitation.
I gave her a tight hug. “Well if you aren’t the best! Of course you can do that. I’m just so flattered for my book to be there with yours.” And we set my book and her book in her plastic bucket for show and tell.
I picked her up from school the next day and she ran out, elated. This is good, because that’s what she always does. “Hey, how was show and tell?” I asked.
“Great!”
“What did you say about the books?”
“I said, ‘My daddy wrote a book, and it’s about raising great children without religion.’ My teacher was so surprised!”
“Oh, uh…oh yeah? How was she surprised?”
“She didn’t know it was already out. She said is was really great.”
Now see? Once again I gave the next layer too little credit. “What about The Bigist Pumkin?”
She smiled. “They said that one was great too. Did you bring a snack?”
And so, thanks to some slow, aching progress over the centuries, instead of preparing for a mob with pitchforks, we were dealing with the fact that, once again, I forgot to bring her snack.
