When good people say (really, really) bad things
The angel informs Abraham that Jehovah was only kidding.
Without [religion] you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things — that takes religion.
Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg
Weinberg’s quote misses the mark only slightly. Religion is one thing that causes good people to do evil things (see Abraham’s robotic “MUST…KILL…BOY” expression above if you doubt), but there are others. Patriotism can also achieve that, as well as fear. Sept. 11 combined all three quite nicely, and we reacted by doing evil. No surprise there.
I have a bit of a soft spot for well-meaning people who unwittingly do great harm. Just a bit. Their patron saint is surely Thomas Midgley. The Ohio inventor was a problem-solver. By keeping just one issue at a time in view, Midgley seemed able to find a solution to just about any problem. While working for GM in 1921, he discovered a way to get engines to stop knocking: add tetra-ethyl lead to the fuel. The side-effects of lead ingestion (things like insanity and rapid death) were recognized within the year, which presented GM with a serious problem: how to cover that up. Some problem-solver went to work on that one as well, and leaded gasoline remained in major production for another sixty-five years — time enough to embed toxic levels of lead in three generations of children, including me and most of you. Leaded gas is still the most common fuel on three continents.Midgley went on to apply himself to the problem of finding a nontoxic refrigerant. In 1930, that pesky problem bit the dust as well when he discovered chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs.
It’s been suggested that these two contributions qualify Thomas Midgley as the single most unfortunate organism ever to have lived on the planet.
But—and here’s the point—he meant well.
Meet Tony Kummer. Now I don’t know Tony, but I sure feel like I do. He reminds me (superficially) of one of my wife’s cousins by marriage—let’s call him Bill—a wonderful, loving guy who, like Tony, is in Baptist ministry and is a father of three in the Central Time Zone. I’ll bet Tony is just as fun-loving and well-meaning and good to the bone as Bill. He certainly seems devoted to changing the world for the better. You know, like Thomas Midgley was.
I try to keep up with parenting issues from all angles as they relate to religion, and last week, my Google Alert for the phrase “Christian parenting” brought me to Tony’s blog at “Gospel Driven Children’s Ministry.” Tony had gone through the Bible and pulled out “Bible Verses About Parents, Children, Mothers & Fathers.”
I scanned the column, unsurprised to find God (a.k.a. “male Bronze Age goatherds”) primarily interested in obedience—children exhibiting it, and parents enforcing it. But one especially caught my eye:
Exodus 21:15-17—Whoever strikes his father or his mother shall be put to death. Whoever steals a man and sells him, and anyone found in possession of him, shall be put to death. Whoever curses his father or his mother shall be put to death.
I don’t wish to give the impression that this was my first encounter with the OT, nor even with the Goatherds’ taste for killing naughty children. I’m far more scripturally literate than I sometimes wish. But I was taken aback by the fact that Tony, this smiling dad of three, simply pasted a clear instruction to kill children into a parenting column. That’s where Tony and cousin Bill decisively part company.
Why include this passage? Because, Tony later explained, “It is in the Bible and it is about children.” This and other insights were revealed in a fascinating exchange Tony had with a commenter on that blog—a mother representing the many thoughtful non-literalist Christians out there. She began like this:
Thank you for the excellent parenting tips! My daughter does hit me on occasion, so becoming aware of Exodus 21:15 was a great blessing. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Zing! Tony, to his great credit, recognized irony:
Rachel – Good point. We need to be careful about context and application. Thanks for your sense of humor.
Rachel, to her credit, did not accept that completely meaningless answer:
I know that’s the standard response, Tony, but I have no idea what “we need to be careful about context and application” means in this case. This isn’t intercropping or instructions on cleaning pots; Exodus 21:15 calls for the murder of children. There is no context in which child murder is or has ever been a moral act.
Despite my use of humor, a serious question underlies my comment: What is the purpose of including a clear exhortation to kill our children in a parenting column? Yet if you choose to remove it, what are the implications for a Bible-based morality?
This is the point when you start to feel sorry for the guy. An advocate of “Biblical sufficiency” (a Southern Baptist phrase meaning “the Bible is inerrant, and is necessary and sufficient to lead us into all truth”) has no recourse here. If Tony were a bad man, I would laugh him to scorn. But I strongly suspect he’s a good man saying bad things, which makes me squirm, and seems to makes Steven Weinberg’s point.
Here’s Tony at the zoo with his daughter (who, judging by her unsupported upright position, has not yet been disobedient):
Tony does his damndest to find his way to open air:
Rachel – I think you’re right about the context. And it is also a problem passage for people like me (who thinks God loves kids).
So why did I include it? It is in the Bible and it is about children. Honestly, I don’t have a good explanation for it. Maybe that is why I included it.
[Oh for crap’s sake, Tony! “Maybe I included it because I don’t have a good explanation for it”?? Sorry, sorry, mad at the system.]
He continues:
That chapter has more than one problem for the contemporary Christians. Like verse one about slavery and the whole eye for an eye thing.
It seems like there are at least two issues with this verse.
1. Does God have the right to make this kind of command?
2. What principle, if any, applies to Christian parents?
So he has progressed to the stage of shrugging his shoulders and tossing off empty rhetorical questions. Rachel—possibly feeling my same unease at Tony’s predicament—refuses to go in for the kill:
Thank you for that very honest answer. I struggle with these things very much and have never been the least bit satisfied with the explanations.
Tony replies with the “God-only-knows” curtsey:
Rachel – Thanks for raising the questions. A lot of times I just get used to not knowing the answers, so I stop thinking about it. I definitely welcome your questions and this conversation has helped me. At the end of the day we can only trust that God knew what he was doing when he inspired those verses.
Let me know if you make any progress on all this.
God knew what he was doing. So, then, you’re saying—go ahead and kill them? Am I getting this right? If not, what could you even possibly mean when you say God knew what he was doing when he told us to kill our children?
I’m confident that Tony Kummer and Adolf Eichmann have little else in common. But in this one disturbing instance, they are following the same corrupt line of reasoning. The only difference is that Eichmann’s orders were carried out. If millions of Christians suddenly began following Tony’s/God’s instructions, the two of them would also do well to head for Argentina. But Tony’s/God’s orders, one can only hope, have been ignored. I’ll bet Tony hopes so, too.
But WHY have they been ignored? If you say, in nearly the same breath, that everything in the Bible is the inerrant word of God, and that the Bible says to kill the disobedient child, and that Jesus himself said not to ignore “one jot nor one tittle” of Old Testament law—surely I’m not alone in finding Biblical literacy a genuine moral outrage.
Ah, but I needn’t have worried. Another commenter chimed in and cleared everything up:
I understand your confusion, Rachel, but think about where that path leads! If we can pick and choose among the Scriptures, our morality has no firm foundation.
What God has given us in Exodus and Deuteronomy is not a license to kill, but a tool for capturing the attention of our children. My children are wonderfully obedient to my husband and myself in part because I have shared these scriptures with them. They know that I was Gods instrument for bringing them into life and that he can also choose me as the instrument to send them back to him.
Children who know, with the certainty of faith, that God grants their parents the power to take their lives will never NEED to have their lives taken. That is the beauty of these commands.
What can I possibly add to that?
I know that only a tiny fraction of Christians believe we should really follow the Bible’s frequent orders to kill disobedient children, slanderers, astrologers, atheists, gays, gossips, family members with other religions, Sunday workers, drunks, gluttons, blasphemers, non-virginal brides, breakers of any commandment, and so on.1 That is my point. I am fully confident that Tony Kummer goes weeks at a time without killing anyone at all. But if he is like other literalists, he shares plenty of other scripturally-supported opinions that do genuine harm in the name of the Goatherds’ supposed authority. Tony Kummer’s body absorbed these ideas as a child, and now he’s working hard to see these toxic ideas embedded, like Midgley’s lead, in yet another generation of kids.
But enough about how we differ. We do apparently share the moral fiber to let our children live — even if, on occasion, they act like children. In recognition of our shared ground, I propose that we all join hands and declare our assent to three simple propositions:
1. Killing children, even disobedient ones, is a bad idea. (All in favor? Show of hands.)
2. Saying “killing children is a good idea” is a bad idea.
3. Declaring any book that says “killing children is a good idea” to be infallible, inerrant, or otherwise uniformly good…is a bad idea.
I’m so glad we had this chat.
1Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Matthew, Romans, i.e. both testaments. Personal favorite: Numbers 35:30–“If anyone kills a person, he shall be put to death.”
See also the work of Hannah Arendt.
BONUS: An actual Abraham and Isaac coloring page! (“Mommy, what color do you think I should use for the Daddy’s knife?”)
NOVA–Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 8-10 PM (on most PBS stations)
JUDGMENT DAY: INTELLIGENT DESIGN ON TRIAL
Q&A with Paula S. Apsell, Senior Executive Producer of NOVA
Q: This program tackles a contentious issue for many people, particularly for many devout Christians. Why did NOVA and Paul Allen’s Vulcan Productions, your coproducer, take it on?
Apsell: Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial is in many ways a hornet’s nest. And we had to think long and hard before we decided to take it on. I think the real reason that we made that decision is because evolution is the foundation of the biological sciences. As Theodosius Dobzhansky, one of the great biologists of the 20th century, once said, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”
In 2004, the Dover, Pennsylvania school board established a policy that science teachers would have to read a statement to biology students suggesting that there is an alternative to Darwin’s theory of evolution called intelligent design. Intelligent design, or ID, claims that certain features of life are too complex to have evolved naturally, and therefore must have been designed by an intelligent agent. The Dover high school science teachers refused to comply with the policy, refused to read the statement. And parents opposed to the school board’s actions filed a lawsuit in federal court.
The trial that followed was fascinating. It was like a primer, like a biology textbook. Some of the nation’s best biologists testified. When I began delving into the case, it was clear that both the trial and the issue were perfect subjects for NOVA.
Q: But why would a science series cover a court case?
Apsell: This is not just any case; it’s an historic case as well as a critical science lesson. Through six weeks of expert testimony, the case provided a crash course in modern evolutionary science, and it really hit home just how firmly established evolutionary theory is. The case also explored the very nature of science—how science is defined. Perhaps most importantly, the trial had great potential for altering science education and the public understanding of science.
Dover’s lawyers tried to argue that ID is science and, therefore, that teaching it does not violate the principle of the separation of church and state in the Establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution. At the end of the trial, Judge John Jones issued a 139-page verdict supporting the teaching of evolution and characterizing intelligent design as a religious idea with no place in the science classroom. It was a landmark decision, all the more so because Judge Jones was appointed by President Bush and nominated by Republican Senator Rick Santorum.
If the decision had gone the other way, it could have had dire consequences for science education in this country. We know that state boards of education in Kansas and Ohio were considering changing science standards and curriculums to accommodate intelligent design, and they since have decided against it in the wake of this verdict.
sacre bleu!
(I just love that gif.)
L’Actualité received over 100 letters and emails—far more than usual—after their November 1 cover story “Growing Up Without God,” which featured an interview with the editor/co-author of Parenting Beyond Belief, one Dale McGowan. Senior writer Louise Gendron gathered and translated a sampling of the comments for me. “Remember that angry people write in far more often than happy ones,” she said. “It is clear from the sales numbers for this issue that interest was very, very high.” The book itself topped out at #285 on Amazon Canada.
The previous post can give you an indication of the tone of the article. Here’s a sampler of reader responses:
I find this guy interesting. He helps us to feel more accepted.
Faith is god-given. Children raised without god will always lack a certain life-dimension. It makes me very sad to think of his children.
The media are very good at brainwashing us to push their way of thinking on us. The last century has shown the fruits of falling away from religion, such as atheistic communism. Happily, Europe kept its faith as a barrier against those enemies.
Atheism is very bad for Québec. It will make us disappear into the English-speaking majority.
I found this article very interesting – I am a mother, trying to explain the world reasonably to my children, and this is helpful.
I am very sad for Dr. McGowan.
Dr. McGowan as a devout nonbeliever has the same narrow faith as some fanatic priest. The big mistake is to be convinced of your own ideas and to stop thinking about them.
I am an atheist and I feel comfortable among the 360 million Buddhists in the world who are also atheists.
Very good article – my great grandparents were Catholic, and I am an atheist.
Very nice article – I am a father of two-year-old who asks why the sun sets. This is a very difficult question to answer in a way that a two-year-old will understand!
Very interesting article – it follows the same philosophy as “Spirituality without God” by Möller de la Rouvière.
I am writing from prison where I am serving time for killing someone. Say hello to Dr. McGowan from me. I don’t understand or have knowledge to sort out whether God exists, but I am open to all ways of thinking. I chose to believe in God because it works for me. My life was a fiasco, a complete mess, and religion helped me sort it out. But I keep thinking, and who knows about what I will believe tomorrow?
The title of McGowan’s book should have been “How to Fool Your Kids.”
I want my tax money devoted to ethics in schools. I will keep that money to go toward religious education.
I don’t want to spoil Dr. McGowan’s party, but I am a Catholic whose husband died two years ago, and I am still struggling to find a way to explain it to our two young children. It is not easy for people of faith to provide answers either.
I was an atheist, and though now outside of all churches, I am a believer.
Cancel my subscription!
I am very sad for all those kids that this man’s non-beliefs will spoil things for them. This man and his bullshit are going to do a lot of harm.
Dr McGowan is too self-confident. I think his knowledge of religion dates from the Stone Age.
That was absolutely fascinating. Another book should be developed for what to tell your teenagers as they reach more advanced levels of questioning.
Your article made me fall off my chair! Think about Pascal’s wisdom when he wrote, [Pascal quotation.]
To the Editor in Chief – who let pass this terrible article?
I am a believer who found this article completely fascinating! You should now allow a believer to answer it.
Dale McGowan makes me think of Dale Carnegie. He will be a millionnaire with his ideas!
Reason justified terrible crimes in the 20th century. [Chesterton quotation. Plato quotation. Kant quotation.]
Dr. McGowan provides very satisfying answers regarding war and suffering and death. What would he answer about the origin of life, the existence of beauty, and generosity? For those he has no answers.
This is crap. I’m fed up with you using my money to bury me in shit. Cancel my subscription.
There are no wars, no hatred, no problems in the world, Dr. McGowan. Everything is just wonderful in the world, so we apparently do not need religion. Isn’t that nice.
I am a teacher in Senegal Africa. I fell off my chair, astonished at your article about children with no religion. In my classroom of 72 kids, I have Muslims and Christians, and it is out of the question to teach each one their religion without a separate teacher for each. I am astonished to find that there are people who don’t believe and are parents!
I am happy to see that I am not the only one to think like that. My daughter now has a child of her own and has decided to raise him without religion, and I am very happy about it.
I taught ethics in public school and let me tell you: It is so much easier to do without the idea of god.
responses to “spare the rod”
I’ve received several messages from readers who join me in opposition to violent discipline but claim that the Bible’s use of “rod” has been misinterpreted by fundamentalists—that it is really something shepherds use to guide sheep, or to measure them, or to simply keep them in line, and that this is what is being advocated for children as well. That’s the approach of the (excellent) Christian parenting author Dr. William Sears. If that approach dissuades a few more people from spanking, that’s a good thing.
The problem with the argument from scriptural misinterpretation is that the other side simply says, “No, you’ve misinterpreted,” and no real progress is made. It’s one of the main reasons scriptural arguments are ineffective: someone else simply says, “No, hate once meant love,” and we’re at a standoff.
Better to take a moment to establish how a given word is used in context than say what we’d prefer it to mean. In this case, the Bible does quite clearly advocate violence against children. Though there are rare exceptions (Psalm 23), the rod of the Bible seems quite clearly to be an instrument of smiting, beating, and whipping:
Exodus 21:20
And if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod…Exodus 17:5
…and thy rod, wherewith thou smotest the river, take in thine hand, and go.Numbers 20:11
…with his rod he smote the rock twice…2 Samuel 7:14
If he commit iniquity, I will chasten him with the rodJob 21:9
Their houses are safe from fear, neither is the rod of God upon them.Proverbs 13:24
He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.Proverbs 22:15
Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child; but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him.Proverbs 23:13-14
Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell.Proverbs 26:3
A whip for the horse, a bridle for the ass, and a rod for the fool’s back.Isaiah 9:4
For thou hast broken the yoke of his burden, and the staff of his shoulder, the rod of his oppressor…Isaiah 10:24
Be not afraid of the Assyrian: he shall smite thee with a rodIsaiah 14:29
Rejoice not thou, whole Palestina, because the rod of him that smote thee is brokenIsaiah 30:31
For through the voice of the LORD shall the Assyrian be beaten down, which smote with a rod.Lamentations 3:1
I am the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of his wrath.Ezekiel 7:11
Violence is risen up into a rod of wickednessMicah 5:1
they shall smite the judge of Israel with a rod upon the cheek.I Corinthians 4:21
What do you desire? Shall I come unto you with a rod, or in love and a spirit of gentleness?2 Corinthians 11:25
Thrice was I beaten with rods…
Now seriously: Is the Biblical rod for leading, or for beating?
The fact that in addition to slavery, misogyny, and lots of other unfortunate things, the Bible does indeed clearly advocate beating children gives us one less reason to accept this deeply-flawed book as any sort of post-medieval moral guide—and that realization can represent genuine moral progress.
Once we dismiss the Bible decisively as any sort of useful moral compass, we can shake the cobwebs from our heads and turn to the growing body of research that shows spanking to be both ineffective and the source of ten specific negative developmental outcomes.
Editorial misconduct
Here is a very nice article by a Christian parent who decided to stop spanking. The editor found it necessary to add this irritating caveat:
Editor’s Note: For many Christian parents, there may be no more contentious subject than spanking. Parents on both sides of the issue find themselves constantly needing to defend their choice to other parents. To make matters more confusing, Christian parenting experts have come down on each side of the conversation, often using the same passages of Scripture to make opposite points. But in the end, every family must prayerfully seek God’s leading as they decide which discipline methods are most effective in shaping the character of each of their children.
The following article reflects one couple’s decision to stop using spanking as a method of discipline. We recognize that other families will have other experiences and we invite you to share your ideas and opinions on this subject in our online chat area.
Note that (unlike the article itself), reason is kept out of the ethical picture. Consult the Bible. If that’s unclear, pray. It is far better to encourage and develop moral judgment than to simply jump from one questionable authority to another.
More on James Dobson
Excerpts from The New Dare to Discipline by James Dobson.
“My primary purpose … has been to record for posterity my understanding of the Judeo-Christian concept of parenting that has guided millions of mothers and fathers for centuries.” p. 18
“You have drawn a line in the dirt, and the child has deliberately flopped his bony little toe across it. Who is going to win? Who has the most courage? Who is in charge here? If you do not conclusively answer these questions for your strong-willed children, they will precipitate other battles designed to ask them again and again.” p. 21
“Spanking should be of sufficient magnitude to cause genuine tears.” p. 35
Dobson recommends painful squeezing of the trapezius muscle on the neck to obtain “instant obedience.” p. 36
Dobson recommends using switches and paddles to hit children. p. 64
Dobson recommends starting whipping at age 15-18 months, and adds “there is no magical time at the end of childhood when spanking becomes ineffective.” p. 65
Dobson advises parents to hit toddlers when the toddler “hits his friends.” p. 66
If a child cries more than a few minutes after being spanked, hit the child again. p. 70
[Thanks to Dogemperor for this research.]
Sample of warnings by SOME churches telling parents they MUST spank
Corporal punishment instruction pamphlet issued by Bethel Christian Academy in El Sobrante CA includes the lovely paragraph “Parents who do not practice corporal punishment are depriving their children of the only method God says produces wisdom, and risk directly opposing God’s will.”
spare the rod (and spare me the rest)
[Originally appeared as “Reason vs. the Rod” in the Institute for Humanist Studies Parenting Pages’ Parenting Beyond Belief column, Oct. 17, 2007.]
Nothing focuses the mind like scrutiny. I can get pretty flabby in my thinking when I’m just bouncing ideas against the inside of my skull like Steve McQueen’s baseball in The Great Escape. I’m always a genius in the solitary confinement of my head. But the moment I have to explain myself publicly, I put my ideas on a quick and painful diet.
Since the release of Parenting Beyond Belief, I’ve had to tone up my thoughts on parenting a bit. How can children be good without reference to a god, how can we explain death without heaven—these questions I can answer in my sleep. According to my wife, I often do.
More challenging are the essential questions. What is the essence of secular parenting? How is it fundamentally different from religious parenting? Those are the questions I love the most. They are instant liposuction for my head.
Secular parenting is not motivated primarily by disbelief in God. My religious doubts sprang from thinking for myself, not the other way around, so it’s freethought, not atheism, that’s down there at the root. When someone asks for the foundations of my parenting, I paraphrase the Bertrand Russell quote that begins my book: Good parenting is inspired by love and guided by knowledge. In other words, next to the love of my children, my parenting philosophy is motivated primarily by confidence in reason.
But I’ve wondered lately if my more practical parenting decisions aren’t rooted just as solidly in my confidence in reason. On reflection, they are indeed.
Take one example: I don’t spank my kids. This is interesting to me because religious fundamentalists spank in earnest, citing the biblical injunction “Spare the rod, spoil the child.”
There’s something doubly funny about the invocation of that scripture. Funny Thing #1 is that it isn’t scripture. Funny Thing #2 is its actual source—a bawdy poem by Samuel Butler intended to skewer the fundamentalists of his time, the English Puritans:
What med’cine else can cure the fits
Of lovers when they lose their wits?
Love is a boy by poets styl’d;
Then spare the rod, and spoil the child.
Samuel Butler, Hudibras, Part II (1664)
He’s lampooning the Puritan obsession with sexual abstinence as the cure for passion, using “the rod” in this case as a wickedly funny double entendre, and making sly reference to an actual passage from Proverbs: He that spares his rod hates his son: but he that loves him disciplines him promptly (Proverbs 13:24).
I never tire of hearing sex-averse fundamentalists quoting from a bawdy satire that was aimed at them—and invoking a penis in the bargain. It’s almost as much fun as watching my homophobic aunts happily shouting along with the refrain to “YMCA” as if it’s a song about recreation facilities. But as tempting as it is to refrain from spanking just because fundamentalists spank, I have a better reason. That’s right: confidence in reason.
Let me here confess that I have spanked my kids. It was seldom and long ago, before I had my parental wings. I’m still ashamed to admit it. Every time it represented a failure in my own parenting. Most of all, it demonstrated a twofold failure in my confidence in reason.
Every time a parent raises a hand to a child, that parent is saying you cannot be reasoned with. In the process, the child learns that force is an acceptable substitute for reason, and that Mom and Dad have more confidence in the former than in the latter.
I try to correct behaviors by asking them to recognize and name the problem themselves. Replace “Don’t pull the dog’s ears” with “Why might pulling the dog’s ears be a bad idea?” and you’ve required them to reason, not just to obey. Good practice.
“Every time a parent raises a hand to a child,
that parent is saying you cannot be reasoned with.
In the process, the child learns that force is an acceptable
substitute for reason, and that Mom and Dad have more
confidence in the former than in the latter.”
_______________________________
The second failure is equally damning. Spanking doesn’t work. In fact, it makes things worse. The research—a.k.a. “systematic reason”—is compelling. A meta-analysis of 88 corporal punishment studies compiled by Elizabeth Thompson Gershoff at Columbia University found that ten negative outcomes are strongly correlated with spanking, including a damaged parent-child relationship, increased antisocial and aggressive behaviors, and the increased likelihood that the spanked child will physically abuse her/his own children.
The study revealed just one positive correlation: immediate compliance. That’s all. So if you need your kids to behave in the moment but don’t care much about the rest of the moments in their lives—hey, don’t spare the rod!
Max Ernst, The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child
before Three Witnesses (1926)
Many people think a no-spanking policy is just plain soft on crime. And if spanking were the only way to achieve good behavior, I might just have to spank. I have very little tolerance for kids who are out of control, whether yours or mine. (Just so you know.) Fortunately, many other things get their attention equally well or better, without the nasty side effects. A discipline plan that is both inspired by love and guided by knowledge finds the most loving option that works. Spanking fails on both counts.
Instead, keep a mental list of your kids’ favorite privileges—staying up late, reading time before bed, Xbox, freedom, dessert, whatever. If they really are privileges rather than rights—don’t withhold rights—they can be made contingent on good behavior. Choose well, and the selective granting and withholding of privileges will work better than spanking. Given a choice between a quick spanking or early bedtime for a week—heck, my kids would surely hand me the rod and clench. Too bad—the quick fix is not an option.
The key to any discipline plan, of course, is follow-through. If kids learn that your threats are idle, all is lost.
I hope it’s obvious that all this negative reinforcement should be peppered—no, marinated, overwhelmed—with loving, affirmative, positive reinforcements. Catch them doing well and being good frequently enough, and the need for consequences will plummet. It stands to reason.
In the long run, if our ultimate goal is creating autonomous adults, we should not raise children who are merely disciplined but children who are self-disciplined. So if your parenting, like mine, is proudly grounded in reason, skip the spankings. We all have an investment in a future less saddled by aggression, abuse, and all the other antisocial maladies to which spanking is known to contribute. Reason with them first and foremost. Provide positive reinforcement. And when all that fails—and yes, it sometimes does—dip into the rich assortment of effective non-corporal consequences. Withhold privileges when necessary. Give time-outs, a focused expression of disapproval too often underrated.
And don’t forget the power of simply expressing your disappointment. Your approval means more to them than you may think.
_____________________
RESOURCES
Why Spanking Doesn’t Work (book)
Project NoSpank
For a look at the dark side, check out Darth Dobson’s take on spanking, including this immortal line: “[If spanking doesn’t seem to work,] the spanking may be too gentle. If it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t motivate a child to avoid the consequence next time.”
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What if she comes anyway?
Her name was first spoken in hushed tones among children all over America [over] twenty years ago. Even in Sweden folklorists reported Bloody Mary’s fame. Children of all races and classes told of the hideous demon conjured by chanting her name before a mirror in a pitch-dark room. And when she crashes through the glass, she mutilates children before killing them. Bloody Mary is depicted in Miami kids’ drawings with a red rosary that, the secret stories say, she uses as a weapon, striking children across the face.
from “Myths Over Miami” by Lynda Edwards in the Miami New Times, Sept. 1997
“Dad?”
“Yeah, B?” It was Erin, my nine-year-old, nicknamed “The B.”
“Can you come into the bathroom with me?”
“Why, you need to talk about something?” Our family has an odd habit: one person sits on the edge of the tub and chats up the person on the commode. A gift from my wife’s side.
“No…I’m scared to go in there.”
“It’s the middle of the day, B.”
“I know, but…Daddy, just come in with me.”
“Not ’til you tell me what you’re afraid of.”
She hesitated — then said, “The mirror.”
“What about the mirror?”
She leaned in and whispered, “Bloody Mary.”
I resisted the urge to say, No thanks, I’ll have a Tanqueray and tonic. I knew just what she meant. I was a kid too, you know.
“Desirée at school says if you turn off the lights and turn around three times in front of the mirror with your eyes closed and say Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, then open your eyes — a woman all covered in blood will be looking at you from in the mirror!”
A quiver-chill went through me. I was a kid again. I remember exactly how it felt to hear such ghastly things whispered by a true believer. Their wide-eyed conviction always did a fine job of convincing me as well. But in my day, Bloody Mary came crashing through the glass at you — a detail Erin didn’t seem to need to hear.
“So just go in, leave the light on, and don’t spin around or say the name, B.” I knew how hopelessly lame a thing that was to say. What if she comes anyway? Once the concept is in your head, why, the very thought of Bloody Mary might conjure her up. She might appear just because she knows I know! And she knows I know she knows I know!
“Okay, I’ll go with you. But you know what I’m gonna do.”
“NO DADDY!”
We went eye to eye. “Sweetie, tell me the truth. Do you think Bloody Mary is real, or just a story?”
She looked away. “Just a story.”
“So why be afraid of a story?” Again, I know. Lame! Yes, it’s true, it’s just a story — but ultimately, in our human hearts and reptile brains, such a defense against fear is hopelessly lame.
Her forehead puckered into a plead. “But Daddy, even if she’s just a story — what if she comes anyway?”
See? I remember.
I walked into the bathroom myself and pulled the curtains. She followed, timidly, cupping her hand by her eyes to avoid the vanity mirror. “You don’t have to come in if you don’t want to, B,” I said. She sat on the lid of the toilet, whimpering. I turned out the lights. Nooooohohohoho, she began to moan, with a bit of fourth-grade melodrama.
I walked to the mirror and began to turn. Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary! I opened my eyes. “See?” I knocked on the mirror. “Helloooooo! Hey lady! Look B, nobody’s home!”
Erin peeled her hands from her eyes and squealed with delight. “I’m gonna do it!”
She walked slowly to the mirror, trembling with anticipation. Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary…Bloody Mary! She peeked through her fingers.
“Eeeeeheeheeheehee!” she squealed delightedly, jumped up and down, hugged me. But if you believe she was cured — if you think Daddy’s words were really enough to slay the dragon — then you were never a kid. Maybe we said her name too fast, you see, or too slow, or or or maybe we didn’t believe in her enough. Maybe she just can’t be tricked by skeptical dads into showing herself. Erin didn’t say any of these things, but I know she was thinking them. And sure enough, the very next day, Erin was requiring bodyguards in the bathroom again.
I haven’t tried to talk her out of it. To paraphrase Swift, you can’t reason someone out of something they weren’t reasoned into in the first place. For a while, it’s even a little bit fun to believe such a thing is possible. And thinking I could talk her out of it anyway would be denying an inescapable fact: that when I pulled my own hands from my eyes in that darkened bathroom and saw the mirror, the rationalist dropped back and hid behind me, just for a tiny fraction of a second, as my little boy heart raced at the question that never quite completely goes away:
What if she comes anyway?
[For one of the most hair-raising and powerful essays I’ve ever read, see the full text of Lynda Edwards’ gripping 1997 piece on the Bloody Mary story as told among the homeless children of Miami — complete with illustrations.]
for your viewing pleasure
CONNOR ATOP BRAILES HILL, OXFORDSHIRE, OCTOBER 2004
Two new feature pages have been added here at The Meming of Life:
1. TEN WONDERFULL THINGS
I’ve grappled with the problem of how best to present links of interest. Blogrolls are fine, but short ones are incomplete and long ones make my eyes cross.
My solution is TEN WONDERFULL THINGS, an ever-evolving list of links to (always only) ten wonder-full things that relate in some way to the topics explored in the Meming of Life: parenting, the secular life, wonder, fun, sex, death, questions, kids, philosophy, humor, Atlanta, science, England, books, monkeys…things like that. No particular order. Visit often as the list slowly morphs.
2. I’M *SO* GLAD YOU ASKED
Wondering and questioning are the heart and soul of secular parenting. I’M *SO* GLAD YOU ASKED is a blog within a blog listing some of the questions and hypotheses my kids — Connor (now 12), Erin (now 9), and Delaney (now 5) — have come out with over the years. Though this page is primarily a personal family record, I’ve obviously invited visitors in, so I’ll try not to include the kind of cutesy-wootsey questions only a parent could love. I’m including it in the blogworks here because the questioning environment we build for our children is among the most important influences on their intellectual development. I’m endlessly fascinated by these questions and always thinking about how best to encourage them.
So no, in case the title led you to believe this was an FAQ, it is not. These Q’s are not frequently asked. Each tends to appear only once, giving us just that one chance to get it right, one chance to react in a way that nurtures and encourages the next question, and the next.
These are not dimly-remembered paraphrases. Each was written down within three minutes of being said. 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.
Click on the links in the upper left of the blog’s home page.
a brush with relevance
(Being the first in a series of reports on the 2007 convention of the Atheist Alliance International in Washington DC.)
I don’t have many genuine heroes. Carl Sagan set the bar pretty high when I was thirteen. Since then I’ve generally required a combination of intelligence, lucidity, and courage from applicants to my private Valhalla. Huxley’s there, and Voltaire. Emma Goldman. Gandhi.
I’ve been fortunate enough to meet several of the living members of my pantheon, like Dawkins and Harris, but my path had remained uncrossed with one — until yesterday morning.
Dr. Eugenie Scott, Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), spoke to the convention, laying out the recent history of the fight to keep evolution education alive and undiluted in American schools. It’s a helluva fight, and the main focus of NCSE’s brilliant and tireless work.
So impressed have I been with NCSE that I donated a portion of the (sad, small) proceeds of my 2002 novel to the organization.
Imagine my delight when I heard a voice behind me at the breakfast bar wondering where the tray of food had gone—and turned to see Dr. Scott herself, momentarily free of the buzzing hoard that typically attends Spheres like Eugenie at these events. (I’ll explain the geometric reference later this week.)
I explained that another tray was on the way, then thrust out my hand. Just wanted to thank you for your work, Dr. Scott, said I.
Eugenie Scott looked at my name badge and her eyes widened. “Oh my goodness, hello Dr. McGowan!” she said. “I’m so glad to meet you!”
“You…you know who I am?” I was flabbergasted.
“Yes yes, you wrote that wonderful book a few years back!”
Holy crap. We stepped out of line to chat. I mentioned parts of her presentation that had especially impressed me, especially around the historic Dover case a couple of years ago. Instead of saying thangyavurrymush and beating a retreat like the other luminaries, she began, eyes sparkling, to give me an insider tour of the case—everything from the tactics of the creationists to the coming together of the legal team and the incredible amount of behind-the-scenes work that goes into a case of this stature. I could not have been more fascinated. After a series of exchanges with Richard and others best measured in nanoseconds, I was overwhelmed that I rated this kind of attention.
She even flatteringly assumed I was genetically literate, making a passing reference to “the transposition of the second allele in chimpanzees and humans.” Thanks in part to my BA in physical anthropology, I understood each and every one of those words. I imagine the phrase itself has meaning as well.
After more than ten minutes of this, I began to worry that I was monopolizing time that she could have spent giving wedgies to passing creationists. “Please,” I said, “I don’t want to keep you from breakfast,” a new tray of which had by now arrived. “No no, that’s fine,” she said, “too many carbs anyway”—and continued the loveliest conversation I’d had in the entire convention. We talked about our shared opinion that atheists are the world’s worst “salesmen,” about the need to build coalitions with the non-crazy majority among religious folks, and the satisfaction of fighting for truth and justice.
At last I said, “Well, it’s been such a pleasure to meet you! Keep up the brilliant work.”
“My pleasure,” she said. “So good to meet you.”
“Enjoy the rest of the convention,” I added and turned to go.
“You too, Chris.”
…
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Aha.
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Heh.
Dr. Chris McGowan is a paleontologist and author of the book In the Beginning: A Scientist Shows Why the Creationists are Wrong.
Dr. Dale McGowan, alas, is neither.
outfoxing the buddha
THE LEGEND OF THE THREE WATERFALLS
1,000 years ago, on a moonlit night, a priest dreamed that Buddha told him where to find three springs with magical powers. This gave the priest much happiness.
Later, when the sun was shining, Buddha turned these springs into three wonderful waterfalls surrounded by trees. Each waterfall confers a different blessing on one who drinks of its waters. One confers health, another wisdom, and the third, love. But no one knows which waterfall brings which blessing.
If you are greedy and drink from all three, you will receive no blessing at all.
* * *
“So,” I asked Connor, my twelve-year old. “Suppose you want one of these blessings really bad. Let’s say health. What do you do?”
He smiled — he loves puzzles — and sank down into himself for a full minute.
At last he emerged. “Okay, I’ve got it.”
“Hit me.”
“Bring a friend who is sick. Have him drink from two of the waterfalls.” He flashed his braces at me. “If he gets healthy, drink from the same two waterfalls. If he doesn’t, drink from the other one.”
Clever boy!
Connor in Upper Brailes, Oxfordshire, UK
October 2004
getting concrete: international day of peace
Regular readers of THE MEMING OF LIFE may begin to catch an unmistakable whiff of the concrete in upcoming posts. Don’t worry — I’ll continue to spatter the blog with incontestable pablum like “death is scary” and “thinking for yourself is good.” But I think it’s time to assert a few positions as well.
I don’t believe a secular, freethinking worldview leads to any and all possible conclusions with equal ease. I think a stated confidence in reason leads more decisively to some conclusions than to others. We will surely differ on what those conclusions are — Christopher Hitchens, for example, might dispute large whacks of this post — but he and I would presumably agree on the terms of the debate, which is the first requirement for sensible discourse.
There is a balance to be struck. If I tell my kids, “Hey, just think for yourself! Whatever you come up with is peachy,” that is indeed moral relativism. If I say, “Think for yourself, as long as you reach my conclusions,” that’s indoctrination wrapped in hypocrisy, a là Catholic intellectual tradition. (See? I’m not always nice.)
If instead I say, “Think for yourself — then be prepared to support your conclusions and to change them if necessary,” I’ve struck just the needed balance.
So freethought isn’t about declaring all conclusions equally valid — it’s about differing intelligently. Let me then begin my plunge into the concrete:
1. If war is necessary and effective, then war it is! Woohoo!
Aside from the gratuitous ‘woohoo,’ that should be fairly uncontroversial. Here’s a corollary:
2. War is rarely necessary and rarely effective.
Let’s define necessary as “something essential; something that cannot be done without,” and effective as “something that accomplishes its stated objectives.” I believe war fails to meet both of these criteria. It is unnecessary, because there are most often alternatives that have been proven to work brilliantly, and it is ineffective because it most often exacerbates the very problems it seeks to solve.
Some stats to consider:
One in seven countries are currently at war.
More than half of war deaths are civilians.There are now over 250,000 child soldiers worldwide.
Children account for two-thirds of those killed in violent conflict since 1990.An increasing percentage of world conflicts involve poor nations (formerly one third, now one half).
The average civil war drains $54 billion from a nation’s economy.25 million people are currently displaced by war.
Mortality among displaced persons is over 80 times that of the non-displaced.Half of all countries emerging from violent conflict relapse into violence within five years.
SOURCE: UN Development Programme Human Development Report, 2005
Yes, stopping Hitler was a splendid idea. Unfortunately, our public discourse now evokes WWII as the justification for all wars instead of recognizing it as one of the very few necessary wars in our history.
Time for a final assertion:
3. Except in the rare cases when war is necessary and effective, peace is preferable to war.
Seems reasonable. And one of the many voices in agreement with this final assertion is the long and noble tradition of Catholic peace activism. (See? Discernment.)
So why do I bring this up today? Because — though you wouldn’t know it from the yawning inattention of the media — today is the 25th annual International Day of Peace, an observance created by the UN in 1982 “to devote a specific time to concentrate the efforts of the United Nations and its Member States, as well as of the whole of mankind [sic], to promoting the ideals of peace and to giving positive evidence of their commitment to peace in all viable ways… (The International Day of Peace) should be devoted to commemorating and strengthening the ideals of peace both within and among all nations and peoples.” (from General Assembly Resolution UN/A/RES/36/67)
Not only do the stats and history seem to support the futility of war, but the foundation of secular ethics is this: in the absence divine safety net, we are all we’ve got, so we ought to try very hard to take care of each other. If war generally fails to accomplish its objectives while impoverishing and killing millions of us, secular ethics ought to oppose it — except in the profoundly rare cases when there really is no alternative. When it comes to this standard, most of our national violence is far more analogous to the Mexican-American War than to the fight against Hitler.
So today, the flag of the United Nations is flying in front of our house, and the preference for peace was the topic of conversation at the breakfast table. Connor plans to use some of the money in his “others” jar to buy a Peace Bond from Nonviolent Peaceforce. I will donate a day’s wages to NP’s Work a Day for Peace program, which runs through October 2, the International Day of Nonviolence.
I’ll post about nonviolent action on that day. For today, talk to your kids about your preference for peace, the futility of violence, the situation of child victims of war — and the fact that all of these opinions flow quite naturally from a secular worldview. Donate to Nonviolent Peaceforce, Doctors without Borders, UNICEF, or another organization that’s out there doing the heavy lifting for humanity.
(Watch Ken Burns’ powerful new seven-part documentary THE WAR beginning this Sunday September 23 on PBS. He lays out precisely the case that is needed: that WWII was “the necessary war,” and that its misuse and mythologizing is leading us to disaster. Catch a long preview here.)