can death give birth to wonder? (revised)
[NOTE: In preparing the following blog entry, I fell prey to a classic critical thinking error that goes by several names: “selective reporting,” “confirmation bias,” and “being an idiot.” Though the first several paragraphs are impeccably sound, the section on the Woodward paper is, unfortunately, complete rubbish. I say ‘unfortunately’ because it would have been fascinating if true. Ahh, but that’s how we monkeys always step in it, isn’t it now? I’ll leave the post up as a monument to my shortcomings and prepare another post about the specific way in which I misled myself.]
_______________
You’ve probably seen the studies confirming the low frequency of religious belief among scientists, and the fact that the most eminent scientists are the least likely to believe in a personal God. Very interesting, and not surprising. Uncertainty would have been profoundly maladaptive for most of our species history. The religious impulse is an understandable response to the human need to know, or at least to feel that you do. Once you find a (much) better way to achieve confidence in your conclusions, one of the main incentives for religiosity loses its appeal.
Psychologist James Leuba was apparently the first to ask scientists the belief question in a controlled context. In 1914, Leuba surveyed 1,000 randomly-selected scientists and found that 58 percent expressed disbelief in the existence of God. Among the 400 “greater” scientists in his sample, the figure was around 70 percent.1 Leuba repeated his survey in 1934 and found that the percentages had increased, with 67 percent of scientists overall and 85 percent of the “eminent” group expressing religious disbelief.2
The Larson and Witham study of 1998 returned to the “eminent” group, surveying members of the National Academy of Sciences and finding religious disbelief at 93 percent. All sorts of interesting stats within that study: NAS mathematicians are the most likely to believe (about 15 percent), while biologists were least likely (5.5 percent).
[Here’s where the nonsense begins. Avert your eyes.]
But I recently came across a related statistic about scientists that, given my own background, ranks as the single most thought-provoking stat I have ever seen.
As I’ve mentioned before, my dad died when I was thirteen. It was, and continues to be, the defining event in my life, the beginning of my deepest and most honest thinking about the world and my place in it. My grief was instantly matched by a profound sense of wonder and a consuming curiosity. It was the start of the intensive wondering and questioning that led me (among other things) to reject religious answers on the way to real ones.
Now I learn that the loss of a parent shows a robust correlation to an interest in science. [Not.] A study by behavioral scientist William Woodward was published in the July 1974 issue of Science Studies. The title, “Scientific Genius and Loss of a Parent,” hints at the statistic that caught my attention. About 5 percent of Americans lose a parent before the age of 18. Among eminent scientists, however, that number is higher. Much higher.
According to the study, 39.6 percent of top scientists experienced the death of a parent while growing up—eight times the average.
Let’s hope my kids can achieve the same thirst for knowledge some other way.
Many parents see the contemplation of death as a singular horror, something from which their children should be protected. If nothing else, this statistic suggests that an early encounter with the most profound fact of our existence can inspire a revolution in thought, a whole new orientation to the world — and perhaps a completely different path through it.
[More later.]
_____________________
1 Leuba, J. H. The Belief in God and Immortality: A Psychological, Anthropological and Statistical Study (Sherman, French & Co., Boston, 1916).
2 Leuba, J. H. Harper’s Magazine 169, 291-300 (1934).
3Larson, E. J. & Witham, L. Nature 386, 435-436 (1997).
4Woodward, William R. Scientific Genius and Loss of a Parent, in Science Studies, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Jul., 1974), pp. 265-277.
yakety yak
- March 04, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In death, My kids, Parenting, reviews, schools, values
5
By the time our children are of school age, we take their talk for granted. We have turned all our attention to their reading and writing, not realizing that talk is still the motor that drives their intellectual development.
–from Raising Lifelong Learners by Lucy Calkins
One of my favorite things about dadding this family is the five-way dinner conversation. Becca and I recently realized how rare it is that the five of us are NOT together for dinner — maybe half a dozen times a year, if that. I don’t think having dinner together is the magic bullet so many soc-sci pundits currently make it out to be — more likely a co-variable for some other good things — but it is, without a doubt, the best possible opportunity to talk. And boy do we.
As Lucy Calkins points out in her fabulous, simple, sensible book Raising Lifelong Learners,
Just sitting at the table to share a family dinner in no way guarantees shared conversation. Frequently the rule, unspoken or not, is that adults talk only to each other. Children are expected to carry on their own separate conversation or to just be quiet. It makes all the difference in the world if children and parents expect that conversations will be shared. This means that when I talk with my husband about my work at Teachers College, one of my sons will invariably interrupt with questions. “What do you mean the cost of benefits is going up? What are benefits?”
This happens in our family all the time, but it wasn’t until Calkins drew my attention to it that it registered as something special. Our family conversations are completely integrated, which gives the kids access to topics they’d otherwise never intersect. It surely helps them see themselves as more actively connected to the world around them. Sure, Becca and I have our private conversations, but we either remove ourselves from the throng or just raise a finger at the first question and say, “This is Mom and Dad’s time.” More often, though, they are welcome to listen in, and find themselves privy to many topics that adults might often think would be uninteresting to them.
So I love our dinner talk. You never know where it’ll start or go. One of the five of us will throw a topic in the air like a jump ball and all the rest leap at it. It’s fantastic. I just adore it. I’ve written before about breaking down walls between domains of knowledge for kids — like our family’s “open shelf policy” — and our dinner table is a good example. No separate adult and kid conversations. Everybody’s in, age 6 to 45.
In The Read-Aloud Handbook, Jim Trelease notes that the average American adult spends 6 hours a week shopping and 30 hours a week (!) watching television, but one-on-one conversation in homes between parents and their school-age kids averages less than ten minutes per parent per day.
Calkins points to oral language as the foundation of all literacy, and conversation in the home as the best possible catalyst for its development. Don’t look to school to develop it — as researcher Gordon Wells learned, kids engage in even less conversation with an adult in a given school day than at home, and what interactions there are tend to be narrow and scripted. Most of the time, teachers (for understandable reasons) are trying to get kids to STOP talking.
Last night it started with reggae. I decided we really need some around the house. Erin asked what it sounds like, and I did a few bars of Marley’s “Three Little Birds.” That led to Bob Marley, then to the Rastafari movement and the whole extremely weird Haile Selassie connection, which, if you don’t know about it, enjoy. Connor mentioned dreadlocks, then asked if Marley was still alive.
“No,” I said. “He died when he was 36.”
“What from?”
“Cancer,” I said, “sort of.” He really died of religion, but why go there.
“How can you sort of die of cancer!”
“Well…” Oh fine. “A cancer developed in his toe. He could have had the toe amputated and been fine. But Rastafarians believe you should never cut a part of your body away, or you give up eternal life. So he refused the surgery, and the cancer spread to his brain and liver and killed him.”
We chewed on that in silence for awhile, then Becca said something about an article she read yesterday about steroids in sports.
“That’s the drug that made that wrestler-guy kill his family, isn’t it?” Connor asked.
“Oh. Chris Benoit,” I said. Turns out it wasn’t actually steroids, though they thought that at first. Severely brain-damaged from years of concussions, Benoit killed his wife and son and hanged himself, not 40 miles from here. Becca explained that his head injuries from wrestling had made his brain stop working right, which made him do this terrible thing.
Now some might reasonably flinch at cancer, amputation, performance-enhancing drugs, murder, and suicide as dinnertime chat for children. It’s just as often puppies and butterflies, I promise. But on this particular night, we wandered into some unusually dark spaces. My kids will ride any conversational wave that comes along, and I think their worldview and points of reference will be all the more rich and diverse for it.
So where were we? Oh yeah — Chris Benoit going crazy and killing his family.
Suddenly, six-year-old Delaney’s eyes widened, and she burst out, “HEY! That’s just like that hero!!”
“What?” I said. “What hero?”
“The hero! In the myth! Hercules! The one who killed his wife and children because the goddess put madness in his mind.”
For ten full seconds I had no idea what she was talking about. Then I remembered: About a month ago, we read a strange episode in the life of Hercules, one I always forget about. Juno, queen of the gods and wife of Jupiter, always hated Hercules, the offspring of one of Jupiter’s affairs. So she placed a temporary madness in the mind of Hercules, during which he killed his family. He was horrified and spent the rest of his life in search of repentance.
I showered her with my amazement. She had made a connection between a Roman myth and current events — not the first time she’s made that sort of link.
I can’t wait to see what’s for supper tonight.
the days keep coming
Once again I’m humbled by a child. And this one’s not even mine.
One of the questions I get most often is how on Earth we can help our children to be “OK” with death. Or words to that effect. Like so many oft-repeated questions, it’s not quite the right one. It implies that I’m “OK” with death, for one thing, and I am NOT. It also implies that, when it comes to consideration of death, kids are in a more delicate position than adults.
Pfft!
An adult comforting a child about death is like a terminal cancer patient trying to make the guy next to him in the waiting room feel better about his restless legs syndrome. Prior to age eight, and often long afterwards, kids do not have a firm concept of the finality of death. And there’s the golden opportunity: get them pondering death while it’s a fuzzy shape on the horizon, before they really, truly get the purpose and inevitability of that swinging scythe.
But the traditional approach has been to shield kids from it during the very stage in which they could do some of their best and least fearful grappling. Then, once they’re old enough to grasp it more fully, they are blindsided by their first major encounter. Granny-in-a-box, perhaps. For me it was age thirteen, and my dad in the casket at 45 — the age I turned this morning, in fact.
Heh. I’m OK.
PBB contributor Kendyl Gibbons recommends emphasizing the continuity of life as one of her five affirmations in the face of death. The realization that life itself continues after the death of one person can be both comforting and something of a revelation for kids.
Like most such revelations, we don’t often have to feed it to them. A wondering child will find his or her way to it. Regular MoL visitor Jim Lemire dropped me a reminder that the youngest kids are capable of grappling with death in a subtle and profound way. Here’s Jim’s son Jack, three-and-a-half, discovering the continuity of life all by himself:
You know, days do keep coming even after you die. We know people who have died and the days still keep coming. So after we die, the days will keep coming.
Don’t look to adults for anything half that profound.
___________________
(Thanks to Jack’s mom Linda B. for the original post!)
endings
An animated video of a kiwi with a dream nabbed “Most Adorable” last year in the YouTube Awards, along with 14 million views to date. As you’ll see, there’s quite a bit more profound going on here than mere adorability:
My kids all loved it. Connor watched it again and again, sorting out the implications of and emotions around the kiwi’s decision.
This morning, Erin asked to see it again, and I got her on the appropriate YouTube page. She watched it once, then clicked on one of the video responses that popped up. Suddenly she was clapping and woohooing.
“What happened?” I asked.
“THE KIWI LIVES!” she exulted. “He doesn’t die at the end! He LIVES!!”
I walked to the computer, puzzled. She replayed what she had just watched. Somebody had done a 15-second remake of the ending:
Most interesting of all are the YouTube comments on that one — mostly irate, convinced (as I am) that this revised ending robs the original of its poignancy and power. I agree, of course, but I LOVE what is revealed in that revision about the human inability to accept, or even think about, death.
In addition to death itself, the original raises issues about the right to die, the consequences of free will, the power of the creative spirit, the dangerous beauty of singleminded dreams, and much more. It’s incredibly rich and provocative. If instead you prefer a dose of denial with your entertainments, the revision’s for you. Or, if you prefer no remaining remnant of redeeming features, there’s this even more vapid rewrite:
the heartbreak of all-done
- January 09, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In death, My kids, Parenting, reviews
- 10
Last year a client asked me to look over a rhyming children’s book she’d written. It was cute as a bug, but something wasn’t quite right. I picked one page and read it over and over. At last it hit me: it had ambiguous feet.
As opposed to this…
Left foot, left foot, right foot, right.
Feet in the day
Feet in the night.
There’s only one way to read that — the way Dr. Seuss wanted you to. He was a master of metrical feet — repeating patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables — which opened up children’s literature in a way we take for granted now. He saved us from Dick and Jane. Seuss is so perfectly metered that you can’t say it wrong.
A federal judge inadvertently proved the point last September when he tried, and failed, to imitate Seuss in a ruling from the bench. The judge had received a hard-boiled egg in the mail from a prison inmate protesting his diet, then declined the inmate’s request for an injunction, as follows:
I do not like eggs in the file
I do not like them in any style.
I will not take them fried or boiled
I will not take them poached or broiled.
I will not take them soft or scrambled
Despite an argument well-rambled.No fan I am of the egg at hand.
Destroy that egg! Today! Today!
Today I say! Without delay!
He screws the pooch in the second line, inserting an extra syllable (“in”), then again in the transition from “scrambled” to “despite.” And the last stanza is pure embarrassment. Did this judge sleep through the day in law school when they covered iambic tetrameter?
The point! The point! The point! The point!
Could you, would you, like the point?
My youngest daughter is on a Seussian bender lately. We’ve been alternating The Lorax and Oh The Places You’ll Go! for weeks — two of his four greatest (the others are Horton Hears a Who and the Grinch. Spare me The Cat in the Hat.)
We were in the middle of Oh, The Places You’ll Go! last week:
You’ll look up and down streets. Look ’em over with care.
About some you will say, “I don’t choose to go there.”
With your head full of brains and your shoes full of feet,
you’re too smart to go down any not-so-good street.And you may not find any you’ll want to go down.
In that case, of course, you’ll head straight out of town.It’s opener there, in the wide open air.
Out there things can happen and frequently do
to people as brainy and footsy as you.
Erin (9): Is he still alive?
Dad: Who?
Erin: Dr. Seuss.
Dad: Oh. No, he died about fifteen years ago, I think. But he had a good long life first.
And when things start to happen,
don’t worry buy viagra pills online uk. Don’t stew.
Just go right along.
You’ll start happening too.OH! THE PLACES YOU’LL GO!
I suddenly became aware that Delaney (6) was very quietly sobbing.
Dad: Oh, sweetie, what’s the matter?
Delaney: Is anybody taking his place?
Dad: What do you mean, punkin?
Delaney: Is anybody taking Dr. Seuss’ place to write his books? (Begins a deep cry.) Because I love them so much, I don’t want him to be all-done!
I hugged her tightly and started giving every lame comfort I could muster — well, everything short of “I’m sure he’s in Heaven writing Revenge of the Lorax.”
I scanned the list of Seuss books on the back cover. “Hey, you know what?” I said. “We haven’t even read half of his books yet!”
Feeble, I know. So did she.
“But we will read them all!” she said. “And then there won’t be any more!” I had only moved the target, which didn’t solve the problem in the least.
In addition to “paleontologist, archaeologist, and marine biologist,” Laney wants to be a writer. I seized on this, telling her she could be the next Dr. Seuss. She liked that idea quite a bit, and we finished the book. The next day she was at work on a story called “What Do I Sound Like?” about a girl who didn’t know her own voice because she had never spoken.
My instinct whenever one of my kids cries — espcially that deep, sincere, wounded cry — is to get them happy again. This once entailed nothing more than putting something on my head — anything would do — at which point laughter would replace tears. It’s a bit harder once they’re older and, instead of skinned knees, they are saddened by the limitations imposed by mortality on the people they love.
But is “getting them happy again” the right goal?
I’m often asked in interviews how I help my children accept death without the afterlife. Accept it?! Hell, I don’t accept it! People who “accept” death tend to fly planes into buildings. To think that I can or even should blunt that sadness too much is a suspect idea. Yet too often, I try.
Death is immensely sad, even as it makes life more precious. It’s supposed to be. So I shouldn’t be too quick to put something on my head or dream up a consolation every time my kids encounter the sadness of mortality. Sometimes it’s good to let them think about what it means that Dr. Seuss is all-done, and to cry that deep, sincere, heartbreaking cry.
the unconditional love of reality
…CONNOR AT THE WORLD OF COKE (…after the Tasting Room)
A Christian friend once asked me what it is about religion that most irritates me. It was big of her to ask, and I did my best to answer. I said something about religion so often actively standing in the way of things that are important to me — knowledge of human origins, for example, important medical advances, effective contraception, women’s rights…the simple ability to think without fear. I gave a pragmatic answer — and the wrong one.
Not that those things aren’t important. They’re all crowded up near the top of my list of motivators. But in the years since I gave that answer, I’ve realized there’s something much deeper, much more fundamentally galling and outrageous that religion too often represents for me — something that constitutes one of the main reasons I hope my kids remain unseduced by any brand of theism that endorses it.
What I want them to reject, most of all, is the conditional love of reality.
I’ve talked to countless Christians about their religious faith over the years. I have often been moved and challenged by what their expressed faith has done for them. But the doctrine of conditional love of reality simply mystifies, offends, and frankly infuriates me.
Conditional love is at play whenever a healthy, well-fed, well-educated person looks me in the eye and says, Without God, life would be hopeless, pointless, devoid of meaning and beauty. Conditional love is present whenever a believer expresses “sadness” for me or my kids, or wonders how on Earth any given nonbeliever drags herself through the bothersome task of existing.
Whenever I hear someone say, “I am happy because…” or “Life is only bearable if…”, I want to take a white riding glove, strike them across the face, and challenge them to a duel in the name of reality.
The universe is an astonishing, thrilling place to be. There’s no adequate way to express the good fortune of being conscious, even for a brief moment, in the midst of it. My amazement at the universe and gratitude for being awake in it is unconditional. I’m thrilled if there is a god, and I’m thrilled if there isn’t.
Unconscious nonexistence is our natural condition. Through most of the history of the universe, that’s where we’ll be. THIS is the freak moment, right now, the moment you’d remember for the next several billion years — if you could. You’re a bunch of very lucky stuff, and so am I. That we each get to live at all is so mind-blowingly improbable that we should never stop laughing and dancing and singing about it.
Richard Dawkins expressed this gorgeously in my favorite passage from my favorite of his books, Unweaving the Rainbow:
After sleeping through a hundred million centuries, we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.
I want my kids to feel that same unconditional love of being alive, conscious, and wondering. Like the passionate love of anything, an unconditional love of reality breeds a voracious hunger to experience it directly, to embrace it, whatever form it may take. Children with that exciting combination of love and hunger will not stand for anything that gets in the way of that clarity. If religious ideas seem to illuminate reality, kids with that combination will embrace those ideas. If instead such ideas seem to obscure reality, kids with that love and hunger will bat the damn things aside.
And when people ask, as they often do, whether I will be “okay with it” if my kids eventually choose a religious identity, my glib answer is “99 and three-quarters percent guaranteed!” That unlikely 1/4 percent covers the scenario in which they come home from college one day with the news that they’ve embraced a worldview that says they are wretched sinners in need of continual forgiveness, that hatred pleases God, that reason is the tool of Satan, and/or that life without X is an intolerable drag — and that they’d be raising my grandkids to see the world through the same hateful, fearful lens.
Woohoo! is not, I’m afraid, quite a manageable response for me in that scenario. Yes, it would be their decision, yes, I would still love their socks off — and no, I wouldn’t be “okay with it.” More than anything, I’d weep for the loss of their unconditional joie de vivre.
But since we’re raising them to be thoughtful, ethical, and unconditionally smitten with their own conscious existence, I’ll bet you a dollar that whatever worldview they ultimately align themselves with — religious or otherwise — will be a thoughtful, ethical, and unconditionally joyful one. Check back with me in 20 years, and for the fastest possible service, please form a line on the left and have your dollars ready.
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.
Thomas Midgley
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.
Tony Kummer
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?”)
L’Actualité Q&A: “Growing Up Without God”
As noted in an earlier post, I was interviewed for the cover story (“Grandir sans Dieu,” or “Growing Up Without God”) of the November 1 issue of L’Actualité, the largest French-language magazine in Canada with over one million readers. Because the interview was by phone and subsequently translated into French, I’m not in possession of an English transcript of the article itself. But I was asked to prepare a Q&A for their website based on questions by secular parents (below). It is very similar in tone and approach to the main article. Later this week I’ll post a sampling of reader responses.
A Brief Guide for Non-Religious Parents
prepared by Dale McGowan, author of
Parenting Beyond Belief: On Raising Ethical, Caring Kids without Religion
“How can I explain death to my child without heaven?” “How can I help my daughter understand why we chose not to baptize her?” Parenting without religious affiliation presents its own unique challenges. Author Dale McGowan answers questions submitted to L’Actualité by secular parents.
Q
How can we help a grieving child who has lost a relative or a pet?
A
It’s important first and foremost to validate the child’s grief—to let the child know that it’s okay to feel sad, and that the sadness shows that the one who is lost was loved very deeply. Reassure the child that the loved one feels no pain or sadness himself, that he continues to live in our memories, and that life continues all around us, even after each person dies. Thinking about the continuity of life and the nature of death can provoke deep reflection and meaningful insights. Our task as parents should not be to completely deny death’s sting but to soften it with genuine understanding while reassuring the child that we are present to help them through their grief.
Q
My child says, “Grandma died. Does it mean Mom is going to die too? What will happen to me, then?” How can I respond?
A
It is often wrongly assumed that religion makes death entirely palatable. A moment’s reflection shows that this is not true. Even religious funerals are marked by intense sadness, and even religious people dread their own death and do their best to avoid it.
Yes—everything that lives eventually dies, in part to make way for more life. Coming to terms with our mortality is a lifelong challenge, and we will always have a natural, adaptive fear of death. But children raised without supernatural beliefs will have a head start in coming to terms with mortality. It will seem more natural and acceptable to them in the long run than to a person who had to overcome an acquired belief in an afterlife.
There are many ways to improve our acceptance of death. One of the best is to imagine one’s self a century before birth, and to realize that our situation in death will be precisely the same. Asking the child if he was scared before he was born is likely to elicit laughter. “Of course not,” he’ll say—“I wasn’t anywhere!” Exactly—and the same is true when someone has died. We simply go back to being as we were. And death has indeed lost some of its sting.
Q
How do I explain that Uncle Joe believes in God and goes to church but Dad doesn’t believe and doesn’t go?
A
The acceptance and celebration of difference is a vital part of freethought parenting. Make it clear that you find such differences not only acceptable but quite lovely. How boring the world would be if we were all the same! This is also a good time to dismiss the grotesque and silly idea that one of them might be damned eternally for an opinion. Point out that if God exists, he is not at all likely to be concerned with honest differences of opinion. He is much more likely to want Dad and Uncle Joe to treat each other with kindness and generosity than to match each others’ abstract philosophies.
Q
My daughter asks, “Yasmina goes to the mosque, Kim goes to the pagoda. How do I know which God is the good one?”
A
The idea that a child must make up her mind about such a complex and abstract question is quite ridiculous—yet this is the position of many religions and many denominations. I once received a card in the mail from a friend. Pictured on the front was her three-year-old daughter Samantha holding a silver heart in her outstretched hands. “Today,” said the card, in beautiful script, “Samantha gave her heart to Jesus.” At the age of three!
Childhood is a time to explore ideas, not to declare allegiances to them. I believe the only honest and rational way to approach the question of religious identification is to keep children open and undeclared until they are old enough to decide on their own—no earlier than age twelve or thirteen. Teach children to think critically and well, then allow all ideas, religious and otherwise, to wash over them.
The most important thing for children to know is that this question can and should wait, as long as necessary, until they are old enough to decide on their own. Invite your daughter to attend services with Yasmina or Kim, or better still, with both. And let her know that she can change her mind about religious questions a hundred times if she wants. This puts to rest the idea that some divine penalty might await one opinion or another.
Q
My child wants to know what people do in church and why they go. How should I answer this?
A
“Let’s go and find out!” is a very good answer. Take him to a nearby service, or better yet, to services in several different denominations. Shielding a child from exposure to religion can give the impression that you are afraid of it, giving religion the tantalizing aura of forbidden fruit.
Why people go is a far more complex question. Churchgoers often say they go to be close to God or to worship. But I think the most telling answers come from those who no longer attend church when they are asked what they miss. “God” is rarely the answer. Human fellowship is most often cited, as well as the opportunity for quiet reflection and introspection. These are the answers I give my kids when they ask why people attend—then I ask if there are ways we can achieve those same things without going to church.
Q
My daughter (10) said she wants to become a nun, then cried, “I know you won’t let me!” I don’t want this, but how can I discourage her without making her even more determined?
A
The very first problem here is your daughter’s belief that you won’t “let” her. Make it clear that the choice is entirely hers—even if the idea makes you ill. It will indeed be her choice, of course, once she is old enough, and any perceived opposition on your part can make it appear romantic and rebellious, at which point we’ve created forbidden fruit once again.
Your daughter’s desire to take vows is most likely based on a limited understanding of what such a choice entails. There have been anecdotal reports of an increased interest in becoming a nun among girls who have read the children’s book series or seen the movie Madeline. I’m sure The Sound of Music had the same effect in its day!
Such an obsession will most likely pass in time. But if it does continue, contact your local religious convent for a very detailed description of the actual routine and requirements of the life of a nun—which of course has little in common with Mlle. Clavell or Sister Maria. (For an adult-level insight, see Karen Armstrong’s memoirs Through the Narrow Gate: A Memoir of Life In And Out of the Convent and The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness.) Sit your daughter down and walk her through it, just as you would with any profession. The odds are—much to the chagrin of contemporary religious communities—that the negatives will far outweigh any positives. In the (extremely) unlikely event that she maintains her desire throughout her teens, the decision must be hers. The most important thing now is that you let her know that you trust her to make her own decisions in the long run—and mean it.
Q
My son (7) has asked if there will be “an end of times,” and wonders what will happen then. How can I talk to him about such a thing?
A
The answer is “yes,” the world will end—but the best approach to such a topic varies by age. We know that the world will not go on forever, but a child needs to know that it will be here as long as we need it, and well beyond. (No need to add the admitted complications of global warming or errant asteroids!)
Establishing the timescale is crucial. A twelve-year-old might do well enough with “five billion years,” but younger children need to know that the Earth’s end is so far away that they need not worry about it. This is not something that will happen in our lifetime, or in the lifetimes of our grandchildren, or our great-great-great grandchildren. Tell them the sun is in the middle of its life, and that it will continue to warm the Earth and make life possible for as many years in the future as it has in the past.
This has a decided advantage over the idea of the Second Coming and Judgment Day, which many churches excitedly promise will occur within our lifetimes. How terrifying such a prospect must be to the young mind!
Once its remoteness is well enough established, the details of our planet’s actual demise—imagining so permanent a thing as the Earth coming to an end!—can be a source of genuine fascination and wonder for many children.
Q
“All my friends were baptized, why not me?”
A
Whenever a child declares that “all my friends” do something, the first task is to affirm the impression—“It sometimes seems like everyone else, doesn’t it?”—but gently challenge the assumption, which is almost never true. Not everyone else has a pony, not everyone else goes to church, and not everyone else gets baptized.
The second task is to discuss what baptism means, and whether it is appropriate. I see baptism as a mark of ownership placed on the individual by the denomination, the first level of exclusive declaration of a specific belief system—something I believe children should never be required to do. To avoid an intolerant response to friends at school, it is important to add that many good people believe differently.
Invite the child to express his own opinion. I tell my kids it’s okay to change their minds back and forth about religion a hundred times if they want, an invitation that puts them at ease. Baptism, confirmation, and the rest of the doctrinal rituals gradually withdraw whatever permission there is to change one’s mind. Ask your child if he is ready to stop thinking for himself about religion. If you’ve done a good job of instilling the spirit of restless, unbounded questioning, the very idea will repel him, and baptism will lose its appeal.
Q
My son was not baptized but wants to participate in First Communion with his peers. How should I respond?
A
Despite the fact that the Catholic Church calls the eighth year the “age of reason,” a seven- or eight-year-old child is much too young to make a reasoned commitment to a specific religion. A case can be made that this ritual is simply an attempt by the Church to claim ownership of the individual.
Explain to the child that First Communion is a statement of what you believe about the sacrament itself. Ask if he thinks the communion wafer and wine turn into the actual body and blood of Jesus in his mouth. When he says no (as he generally will, with a look of shocked disgust), gently gain his agreement that it would be dishonest to go through the ritual—then compliment him for valuing honesty.
If the ritual is still attractive to him, why not design a brief ritual of your own that celebrates his demonstrated commitment to honesty? Make it a party, with a brief ceremony, food, music, and friends and family in attendance.
Q
Should a secular family participate in the Santa Claus myth?
A
I think there is no harm and even a potential benefit. Our culture has constructed this silly temporary myth in parallel to our silly permanent one. Both involve a magical being who knows our thoughts, rewards good behavior and punishes bad behavior. The process of thinking one’s own way out of Santa belief can serve as an important “trial run” for thinking one’s way out of religious belief.
Have fun with the fantasy when the child is young. Then, when the child’s skeptical questions begin to emerge (“How does Santa go to all those houses in one night?”), answer in a way that encourages continued thought and allows for mixed opinion (“Some people say…”). And when at last the child looks you in the eye and asks point-blank if Santa is real, answer honestly and praise her for figuring it out!
Q
“Why are there religious wars? I thought religion was all about love.”
A
First, praise the child for such a thoughtful question. Your answer should note that religious teachings include messages of love and of hate, peace and war, tolerance and bigotry. When two religions each believe that God has promised them the same piece of land, for example, the dark side quickly shows itself. War is not only inevitable but often unending, because to compromise is to show a “lack of faith in God’s promise.”
Explain that people have done great and noble things in the name of religious faith, as well as monstrous and evil things, by choosing among the conflicting ideas in their scriptures. The most troubling feature of most religions is the failure to acknowledge and control those life-destroying messages that exist alongside the life-affirming ones.
Q
“Why does Fatouma have to wear a hijab? And why is Auntie Daisie so angry about it?”
A
A very complex topic! Explain that Fatouma belongs to a culture with different ideas about a woman’s body and how to show it to others. Note that many people think the hijab teaches women to feel ashamed or “owned” by their husbands, while others (including many Islamic women) consider it a proud display of cultural identity and a sign of personal control. Don’t hesitate to offer your own opinion as well.
Auntie Daisie may be angry if she is a conservative Christian who dislikes the public display of another religion or culture, or she may be a feminist who feels the women are being oppressed. Have your daughter ask Auntie Daisie for her reasons, then invite your daughter to talk to Fatouma to see how she feels about wearing it. Children are wonderfully uninhibited about discussing such things—an openness we quickly and sadly lose as we grow older.
Q
“Was Jesus a real person?”
A
Recent work by some biblical scholars (including the Canadian Earl Doherty) has cast some doubt on the existence of Jesus even as a historical personage. This research is fascinating and may be of interest to children in their teens. For younger kids, it is sufficient to say that most people think that Jesus was a real person, but we really can’t be sure. You might add that if he did exist—aside from a little cruelty to pigs and figs—he seems to have been a very decent man and an insightful teacher who would be appalled at much of what has been done in his name.
finding nemo…belly up
- October 31, 2007
- By Dale McGowan
- In death, My kids
- 17
There’ve been three deaths in our immediate family in the past 48 hours. Wait, lemme go downstairs and check.
Okay, four.
Squishy, Squirmy, Stripey, and now–uh, another one–were found one at a time, white-eyed and motionless, in our new aquarium. They were tiger barbs. Now they’re not.
Yes yes, we took all appropriate steps in setting the thing up. I’ve had many aquaria in my life, enough to know precisely why these fish died: They died because fish are dying machines.
I tried to prepare the kids for this before we even walked out the door of Cheap Flushable Pets Warehouse. “I want you to know something,” I said. “Aquarium fish have a habit of dying. Often. And for no apparent reason. I just want you to be ready for that.”
But they were too busy cooing new names to the little terminal creatures through the walls of their plastic-bag ICUs to hear Daddy Cassandra moaning about the future.
“You’ll be my Squishy-wishy!” Erin cooed to her bag. “And you’re Stripey!”
The future arrived the next morning when I switched on the aquarium light and found Squishy stuck to the filter intake.
The girls feet were on the stairs. I panicked, grabbed the net, scooped the sushi, darted into the bathroom.
Flooooosh.
I emerged nonchalantly. “Morning girls!”
Erin looked at me suspiciously. “Why do you have that?”
I looked down at the net in my hand. “This?” I quickly realized that all possible cover stories for emerging from a bathroom with a dripping net are far worse than the truth. “Sweetie, I’m sorry, but one of your fish died during the night.”
“Which one?” She walked to the tank calmly and peered in. “Oh. Squishy is gone.”
“I’m sorry. Are you okay?”
“Yeah. It’s okay. I still have four.” It was a “5 for $5” deal on tiger barbs.
By the time she returned from school, another fish had swum the tunnel of light — another of her tigers.
By dinnertime, a third. “What the heck!” she said, mostly angry that the Fish Reaper was swinging his filleting scythe so selectively at her herd. Laney’s and Connor’s fish, all non-tigers, were still happily playing Who’s Behind the Bamboo, oblivious to the carnage around them.
“Can I touch it?” she said, staring at the sad little thing.
“Sure you can.” My kids’ ease with such things amazes me. Dead things have always called up a deep terror in me. And I’ve seen plenty: in addition to countless childhood pets, there was my father (aneurysm), grandfather (can’t recall), a restaurant patron (heart), a sheep in Scotland (drowned), and a man on a train platform in Vienna. I’ve always been shaken by the realization that such a thin line exists between life and death — that you are here, and then, often without warning, you are nowhere. The man in Vienna, like me, was preparing to board a train to Munich. Moments before, he probably had quite the same plans as mine. Instead, he cancelled every remaining appointment he had by crumpling to the platform, dead.
I scooped up Stripey and held the net out toward Erin. My nine-year-old self would have…well, he wouldn’t have asked to touch it in the first place. But if somehow he had, nine-year-old Dale would have poked it with one fingertip, then fled to the bathroom to scrub that fingertip raw. To get the death off. I hate dead things.
What I really hate, I think, is the reminder that one day I’ll end up Stuck To The Filter myself.
But Erin didn’t poke it and run. “Oh, Stripey,” she said as she picked it up with two fingers and laid it in her other palm. She stroked its side. “He’s so soft.” Laney joined her. Then Erin walked to the bathroom, said goodbye, and flushed.
I promised we’d pop on over to Aqua Hospice tomorrow. And if she points at another tiger barb, I’ll just reach into the tank, squish it, and hand the guy a buck.
far above the world
- September 16, 2007
- By Dale McGowan
- In death, My kids, Parenting, Science, wonder
- 23
I’m on about bedtime again— but this time it’s the soundtrack.
My mother sung me to sleep for most of my childhood, and I love her for it. In hopes that my own children will profess love for me in their eventual blogs, I sing to them every night as well. And for no other reason.
At an average of two songs per child per night, that’s nearly 20,000 songs so far. Easily bored as I am, the repertoire doesn’t stand still for long: Stardust, Yesterday, Danny Boy, Kentucky Babe, Long and Winding Road, Witchdoctor, Cat’s Cradle, Unchained Melody, Stand By Me, Blackbird, Michelle, The Christmas Song, Lady in Red (not that one), Imagine, Close to You, Mean Mister Mustard, Everything’s All Right (from Superstar, with Judas’ angry outburst included), Happy Together, The Galaxy Song, Our Love is Here to Stay…you know, stuff like that.
A few nights ago, an old friend floated into my head, unbidden—and I began to sing a song that once reached further into my imagination than perhaps any other before or since:
Ground Control to Major Tom…
Ground Control to Major Tom…
Take your protein pills and put your helmet on…
“What…in…the…world?!” Erin’s head was off the pillow. I could feel the puzzled glare cutting through the dark.
(“10”) Ground Control (“9”) to Major Tom (“8”)…(“7”)
(“6”) Commencing countdown, engines on…(“3”)
(“2”) Check ignition, and may God’s love be with you…
“This is weird,” said Delaney.
“This is TOTALLY weird,” said Erin, leaning forward on her elbow.
“This is…”
THIS IS GROUND CONTROL TO MAJOR TOM
YOU’VE REALLY MADE THE GRADE
AND THE PAPERS WANT TO KNOW WHOSE SHIRTS YOU WEAR
NOW IT’S TIME TO LEAVE THE CAPSULE IF YOU DARE
I was only slightly older than Delaney when Neil Armstrong celebrated my wedding anniversary by landing on the moon 22 years in advance, to the day. It was the same year David Bowie gave us Major Tom. I watched the moon landing with my parents, who tried very hard to impress the significance on me. I was a complete NASAholic by age eight.
As I built model after model of the lunar module and command module and watched telecasts of one Apollo crew after another in grainy black-and-white, I recall being both awed and miffed at the astronauts—awed because I wanted so much to be in their boots, and miffed because they were all business. Houston this and Houston that. Engaging the forward boosters, Houston. Switching on the doohickey, Houston. Even in elementary school, it occurred to me that there should be a little more evidence of personal transformation. I wanted to hear them say Ooooooooooooo, in a fully uncrewcutted, unprofessional way. Holy cow, I wanted. I’m in outer space.
Eventually we got golfing on the moon and some zero-G hijinks. That’s fine. But that’s not transformation. I wanted evidence that they were moved by their experience, that they would never be the same after seeing Earth from space. They wrote about it years later when I was in college, but it was in high school that a Bowie song I’d never heard before finally said what I’d waited to hear. Take it, Major Tom:
Here am I sitting in a tin can
Far above the world
Planet Earth is blue, and there’s nothing I can doThough I’m past 100,000 miles
I’m feeling very still
And I think my spaceship knows which way to go
Tell my wife I love her very much, she knows.
For three days now we’ve listened to Bowie’s version rather than my own at bedtime, complete with those epic Mellotron strings, and debated what exactly happens in those final stanzas. The girls demand to know: Is he okay? What happened? Does he come back?
Ground Control to Major Tom
Your circuit’s dead, there’s something wrong
Can you hear me Major Tom?
Can you hear me Major Tom?
Can you hear me Major Tom?
Can youHere am I floating ’round my tin can,
Far above the Moon,
Planet Earth is blue
And there’s nothing I can do.
“Omigosh,” said Connor after one hearing. “He killed himself.”
“No he did not!” I was indignant, partly because it had never occurred to me.
“Yes he did. ‘Tell my wife I love her very much’—and then his circuit goes dead? Come on, Dad.”
I’d heard the song a thousand times. Yes, I thought he might not have made it, but it never once occurred to me that he’d done himself in. Huh.
It makes sense. He was moved, all right. He was so transformed by the experience that he liberated himself from Ground Control, unhooked his tether, and went careening, blissfully, beyond the moon.
Okay then. Be careful what you wish for.
