Five little bits
1. Reminder: The deadline for the First Annual Parenting Beyond Belief Column Competition is TOMORROW (October 6). Your entry should tackle a subtopic within nonreligious parenting (as opposed to the topic on the whole) or a personal story from your own experience. Submissions should be attached in a Word document 600-800 words in length PLUS a bio of no more than 75 words, and emailed to column [at] parentingbeyondbelief dot com with the word COLUMN in the subject line.
2. Registration pages for the Austin seminar (Dec 13) and Chicago seminar (Jan 24) are now online.
3. Head-hanging moment of the week: A Christian blogger rightly blasted me for a misattribution in my post on the Book of Acts. I had taken a quote from theologian Bruce Metzger from a secondary source that apparently got it wrong. Metzger was quoting two other theologians disapprovingly, not expressing his own view on the unreliability of Acts. It frosts me when someone does that to the words of evolutionary biologists like Eldredge or Gould — then I turn around and do the same. Oh well, keeps me humble. I’m not perfect, just unforgiven.
But in an interesting way, my error supports my thesis. People cannot help introducing errors even within a single step of transmission and even when they are trying their damndest to get it right. So what chance of accuracy does any text have that has been through 80 generations of transcription, translation, and partisan transmission? Lemme see…carry the six…divide by the number of the beast…okay, here’s the answer.
4. Chest-thumping moment of the week: Question from Delaney last night before bed: “I know what evolution is, but how does it work? I mean, how does it make the changes happen?”
She’s not quite seven. Thumpa-thumpa-thump!
5. Raising Freethinkers, which doesn’t even release for another four months (hell, I’m not even done with the index) has, for the moment, entered the top 25 in Morals & Responsibility. A momentary bump that I’m sure will have dropped by the time you read this. At any rate, it’s the only unreleased title in the top 100, which is nice.
Dissent done right 2
- September 01, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In action, Atlanta, diversity, fear, Kerfuffles, My kids, Parenting
7
I knew my kids would feel violated, angry, and afraid. Their own attitudes toward dissent are being tested and formed. So we did what we do. We talked it through.
I told them our sign had been taken from the yard. (At this point we hadn’t found it again.) Erin’s reaction was utter disbelief.
“Really?” she said. “Really?”
“Yes.”
“Really? Cause sometimes you joke. Really?”
“Erin, jeez, yes, somebody took our sign!” Connor said. “It totally stinks!”
She looked at the floor. “Omigosh. I feel like I want to cry.” She looked up at me with a worried forehead. “So people in our neighborhood are mad at us?” I could see the scared siege mentality forming on her face.
“Now wait a minute. How many people took that sign? It was probably one person walking by last night. That’s not everybody.” I really wanted to nip the generalizing assumption in the bud and had an idea how I could. “You know who would really be mad about this? Mr. Ryan.” Ryan is a neighbor of ours, a wonderful, soft-spoken guy. “And he wants McCain to win. But he doesn’t want it by cheating.”
They agreed, and Erin’s face relaxed a bit.
“So what do you think we should do?” I asked. “Maybe we should just…you know…not have a sign?”
All three erupted in indignation at the thought of being silenced. Exxx-cellent. I checked the box for moral courage on my mental list.
“But if we put another one out, it might be taken again by this doofus. What should we do?”
They started brainstorming. Connor wanted to put a sign out again and stake it out all night from his window. Erin wanted to put a sign at the top of our 30-foot tree. Laney suggested putting Obama and McCain signs in our yard so everyone would be happy. Erin suggested getting 100 signs, “And every time he takes it, boop! We put another one out. Like The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins!”
They all laughed. Finally we decided to put it out every morning and take it in at dinnertime.
By the end we had achieved everything I was hoping for. They refused to be silenced; they were referring to one perp, not a silent army; they were using their own creativity to get around the problem; and they’d relaxed and moved on to other things. I’ll let you know how it goes.
_________________________________
Side note…
Becca continues to simmer about it. Last night she said, “I hate to say this, but can you picture Obama supporters doing something like that?” I resist this idea too. My knee jerks, and I say, “Oh, I’m sure Democrats do it, too.”
Then I Googled these four phrases and got these hit counts:
Obama sign vandalized“: 309 hits
“Obama sign stolen“: 105 hits
“McCain sign vandalized“: 6 hits
“McCain sign stolen“: 4 hits
…and two of the McCain hits are from my own blogs. Also interesting: nearly all of the other McCain hits were during primary season.
Discuss.
Dissent done right 1
- August 31, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In action, Atlanta, diversity, fear, Kerfuffles, morality, My kids, Parenting, values
- 12
More than just about any other single value, I want my kids to get the importance of dissent. I want them to be willing to voice a reasoned minority opinion and to encourage the same in others.
When we moved to the red-state South, I knew (blue to the core as we are) that at some point we’d end up taking our lumps from one majority or another. No big brous-haha so far, just some minor fish-out-of-water moments: Laney having the occasional Huxley-Wilberforce in the school cafeteria; Erin coming to terms with her evangelical cousins; Connor’s outrage when his (beloved) seventh grade Life Sciences teacher assured the class that evolution is “just one guy’s idea”; Becca, in her first week as a full-time Georgia teacher, having one of her first graders say, “Mrs. McGowan, are you a Christian? ’Cause I’m a Christian. Are you a Christian?”; and my early palpitations over imagined church-state issues. Peanuts, really.
Now we’ve had our first somewhat chilling incident—not over religion, but politics.
Becca and I support Barack Obama. Thursday night, after his convention speech, we put an Obama yard sign under the tree in our Atlanta front yard. By Saturday morning it was gone. An hour after noticing it missing, we found it chucked in the street several houses down.
I’ve spent enough time dissenting from majorities to know what it gets you, so it didn’t ruffle me. But Becca, bless her Anne Frankness, is always thrown when people aren’t good at heart, or fair, or tolerant. I love her for being repeatedly surprised by that.
I also know that the occasional kook is rarely representative of the majority. I used to think pointing this out was about being nice, but eventually came to realize that recognizing that fact changes my world.
We hosted an Obama house party last month and put flyers in 200 neighborhood mailboxes. Fourteen people came. Six other neighbors mentioned it approvingly at the pool or the bus stop, including some who differ politically. And we received two scrawled notes in our mailbox informing us that Obama is a Muslim, that “the terrorists want him to win,” and that “you are helping to destroy the foundation of this country.”
It’s easy to generalize the nastiness in your mind, until every silent house on your street seems to harbor a family that wants you strung up. But then we remembered that the tally I just described was ten thumbs up for every thumb down. And as Louise Gendron (senior writer for L’Actualité) reminded me last year, angry people are at least three times more likely to make their POV known than happy or indifferent people. If she gets three angry letters for every one happy letter after an article runs, she assumes the reader response was about even.
By that logic, perhaps 3-4 percent of the folks in our neighborhood are likely suspects for the angry notes. But our limbic response pictures the reverse, and two pissy letters become the tip of a 96 percent iceberg of hate.
I found myself falling into the same dark assumptions during my dissenting year at the Catholic college where I taught. I naturally began to assume that every silent person I passed on campus was wishing me hives. I found out later that the opposite was true: the majority were either indifferent or were silently cheering me on. (Note to self: DON’T SILENTLY CHEER PEOPLE ON. DO IT OUT LOUD. Knowing how much support I had would have changed everything.)
I was also extremely depressed at the time by the angry criticism I had received for my activism (which, btw, I will write about soon). It took (philosophy professor and later PBB contributor) Amy Hilden to point out the obvious to me–that the goal is not to avoid making people angry, but to make the right people angry for the right reasons. If everybody loves you, you probably aren’t doing anything of real significance.
So I had expected the minority opinion in our front yard to provoke somebody into doing something stupid and rude. And I knew that the silent majority, even those who disagree with us politically, would not condone that stupidity. But I also knew my kids would feel violated, angry, and afraid. Their own attitudes toward dissent are being tested and formed.
So we did what we do. We talked it through.
is nothing sacred? epilogue
I recently offered my thoughts on the difference between pointless and pointful challenges to sacredness:
Why does the David Mills video I’ve denounced strike me instantly as a profoundly stupid gesture, while [Webster Cook’s removal of a communion wafer from a mass] strikes me just as instantly as an interesting and thought-provoking transgression?
The reason, I think, is that the act of crossing the church threshold with that wafer (whether he intended this or not) is a kind of Gandhian gesture. Doing something so seemingly innocuous and eliciting an explosive, violent, even homicidal response is precisely the way Gandhi drew attention to cruel policies and actions of the British Raj, the way black patrons in the deep South asserted their right to sit on a bar stool, while whites (enforcing a kind of sacred tradition) went ballistic….
Mills’ feces-and-obscenity-strewn video, on the other hand, had offense not as a byproduct but as its intentional essence. Of Cook, one can say, “he just walked out the door with a wafer,” and the contrast with the fireworks that followed is clear. But saying, with sing-song innocence, that Mills was “just smearing dogshit on a book while swearing, gah,” doesn’t achieve quite the same clarity. Even though it shares the act of questioning the sacred, it’s much less interesting and much less defensible.
When PZ Myers of the science blog Pharyngula made known his intention to desecrate a communion wafer, I held my breath a tad, wondering which way it would go. Would he do something stupid or something thought-provoking? Pointless or pointful?
Now Myers has made his gesture — and I couldn’t be more thrilled:
This fascinates me even more than Wafergate because it is so achingly close to the Mills’ video on the surface, yet light years away in substance.
Had Myers theatrically smashed a pile of communion wafers with a hammer while laughing hysterically, he’d have undercut his own point that it is just a “frackin’ cracker.” Instead, he made use of that old and brilliant insight that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference.
So he quite simply threw it out, along with the coffee grounds.
Granted, he put a nail through it, a subtle and ironic comic touch that I’m doomed to love. But the real brilliance is in the background. Myers has also thrown out pages of the Koran and The God Delusion. He isn’t allowing anything to be held sacred. ALL ideas must be exposed to disrespect, disconfirmation, and disinterest. The good ones can take the abuse, and the bad ones, to quote Twain, will be “[blown] to rags and atoms at a blast.” If instead we shield a set of beliefs or ideas from scrutiny or attack, the bad bits survive along with the good.
Myers is also making the important point that these are NOT ideas in the garbage — they are paper and wheat, which must not be confused with the things they represent any more than a flag should be revered in lieu of the principles for which it stands.
Toss in a wink at Ray Comfort’s banana argument against atheism and the whole tableau simply rocks with meaning, power, humor and intelligence. And pointfulness.
Myers’ post is long, but please take a few minutes to read it. I can’t recommend it highly enough for its provision of context and just plain smarts. The final paragraph drives it all home:
Nothing must be held sacred. Question everything. God is not great, Jesus is not your lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet. You are all human beings who must make your way through your life by thinking and learning, and you have the job of advancing humanities’ knowledge by winnowing out the errors of past generations and finding deeper understanding of reality. You will not find wisdom in rituals and sacraments and dogma, which build only self-satisfied ignorance, but you can find truth by looking at your world with fresh eyes and a questioning mind.
When it comes to challenging sacredness, if I can get my kids to grasp the difference between Mills and Myers, I’ll count myself proud.
is nothing sacred?
‘Body Of Christ’ Snatched From Church, Held Hostage By UCF Student
I smiled. I just love The Onion. Then I realized this was an actual news headline about an actual event. On Earth.
I hadn’t planned on writing about this. I’m trying to maintain a semblance of focus in this blog. But then the student’s father began defending his son in comment threads on Catholic blogs, and I had my parenting angle. Which I’ll get to. First, though, for the three of you who don’t know what I’m on about — the story that ran below that headline:
Church officials say UCF Student Senator Webster Cook was disruptive and disrespectful when he attended Mass held on campus Sunday June 29. It was during that Mass where Cook admits he obtained the Eucharist.
The Eucharist is a small bread wafer blessed by a priest. According to Catholics, the wafer becomes the Body of Christ once blessed and is to be consumed immediately after a minister passes it out to churchgoers.
Cook claims he planned to consume it, but first wanted to show it to a fellow student senator he brought to Mass who was curious about the Catholic faith.
“When I received the Eucharist, my intention was to bring it back to my seat to show him,” Cook said. “I took about three steps from the woman distributing the Eucharist and someone grabbed the inside of my elbow and blocked the path in front of me. At that point I put it in my mouth so they’d leave me alone and I went back to my seat and I removed it from my mouth.”
A church leader was watching, confronted Cook and tried to recover the sacred bread. Cook said she crossed the line and that’s why he brought it home with him.
“She came up behind me, grabbed my wrist with her right hand, with her left hand grabbed my fingers and was trying to pry them open to get the Eucharist out of my hand,” Cook said, adding she wouldn’t immediately take her hands off him despite several requests.
Cook is upset more than $40,000 in student fees have been allocated to support religious organizations on campus for the 2008-2009 school year, according to student government records. He denied he is holding the Eucharist hostage to protest that support.
Regardless of the reason, the Diocese says its main concern is to get the Eucharist back so it can be taken care of properly and with respect. Cook has been keeping the Eucharist stored in a plastic bag since last Sunday.
“It is hurtful,” said Father Migeul [sic] Gonzalez with the Diocese. “Imagine if they kidnapped somebody and you make a plea for that individual to please return that loved one to the family.”
The Diocese is dispatching a nun to UCF’s campus to oversee the next mass, protect the Eucharist and in hopes Cook will return it.
You will no doubt be shocked to learn that the student has received several death threats. As a result of that exalted terrorism, he has now returned the Divine Saltine.
Despite the fact that almost everyone in the story is acting like a baboon, this is not just a toss-off piece of silliness to me. It taps fascinating issues around the intersection of sacredness, tradition, tolerance, the media, force, academia, healthy snacking, and free expression. Most such stories are merely about baboons, but this one I simply can’t get out of my head.
Question #1: Why does the David Mills video I’ve denounced strike me instantly as a profoundly stupid gesture, while this strikes me just as instantly as an interesting and thought-provoking transgression?
The reason, I think, is that the act of crossing the church threshold with that wafer (whether he intended this or not) is a kind of Gandhian gesture. Doing something so seemingly innocuous and eliciting an explosive, violent, even homicidal response is precisely the way Gandhi drew attention to cruel policies and actions of the British Raj, the way black patrons in the deep South asserted their right to sit on a bar stool, while whites (enforcing a kind of sacred tradition) went ballistic.
No, the analogy is not perfect. Cook was not defending a right. But he did similarly draw attention to an element of belief (crackers are different once a priest’s hand has waved over them) that can tip quite suddenly into dangerous lunacy at the slightest provocation. Isn’t that a point worth making?
Mills’ feces-and-obscenity-strewn video, on the other hand, had offense not as a byproduct but as its intentional essence. Of Cook, one can say, “he just walked out the door with a wafer,” and the contrast with the fireworks that followed is clear. But saying, with sing-song innocence, that Mills was “just smearing dogshit on a book while swearing, gah,” doesn’t achieve quite the same clarity. Even though it shares the act of questioning the sacred, it’s much less interesting and much less defensible.
Question #2: Is nothing sacred?
Becca and I debated this at length. She said that all declarations of sacredness should be respected and left alone. I countered by saying the very idea of sacredness is worth discussing, and that the best way to draw attention to something of this kind — like an unjust law — is by violating it and allowing the results to play out. Should we “respect and leave alone” the opposing, irreconcilable claims of sacredness that keep the Middle East aflame? The sacred idea that men should have dominion over women? The list goes on.
But the question remains: Should anything be held “sacred”? I think the answer is yes and no, because the word “sacred” has two different major meanings.
Sacred is used to denote specialness, to mark something as awe-inspiring, worthy of veneration or deserving of respect. In this first sense, the nonreligious tend to hold many things sacred — life, integrity, knowledge, love, a sense of purpose, freedom of conscience, and much more. One might even hold sacred our right and duty to reject the second meaning of sacred: something inviolable, unquestionable, immune from challenge.
This second definition of sacredness is much like the concept of hell — it exists primarily as a thoughtstopper. As such, it has no place in a home energized by freethought. One of the most sacred (def. 1) principles of freethought is that no question is unaskable, no authority unquestionable.
Which bring me to Question #3, the parenting angle. If this were my son, and he had undertaken this as a kind of civil disobedience, would I be proud?
Immensely. Intensely. Uncontainably. It’s Kohlberg’s sixth stage of moral development, and it makes me weak in the knees.
Encouraging reckless inquiry in your kids means laughing the second definition of “sacred” straight out the door. Given that understanding of the dual meaning of sacredness, it should now make sense that I consider it a sacred duty to hold nothing sacred.
the certainty myth
There is a criticism of atheism that never ceases to flummox and irritate me. Atheists are fools, goes the line, because you can’t be 100% certain God doesn’t exist.
Here are a few definitions of atheist that most people would agree with:
– Someone who denies the existence of God (WordNet)
– One who believes that there is no God (Webster’s New 20th Century)
– Somebody who does not believe in God or deities (Encarta Dictionary)
Nowhere is reference made to “Someone who claims to know there is no God.” There’s nothing about certainty. The atheist says, “You believe God exists, eh? Hm. Not me.” It’s quite simple. Elegantly so.
I’ve never met an atheist who was quite dense enough to claim certain knowledge of the nonexistence of God. Aside from the difficulty in proving a negative (i.e. I would also be unable to say for certain that there’s no teapot orbiting Jupiter), certainty itself is a bogus concept. The best we can do is increase or decrease our confidence in a proposition.
I don’t think God exists, and theists think he does. Why, in that equation, are atheists tagged as arrogant asserters of certainty, while theists get a pass? I don’t get it.
I saw this most recently, and depressingly, when a Google alert of mine popped an old blog entry by Dilbert creator Scott Adams into my inbox. It includes this passage:
This brings me to atheists. In order to be certain that God doesn’t exist, you have to possess a godlike mental capacity –- the ability to be 100% certain. A human can’t be 100% certain about anything. Our brains aren’t that reliable. Therefore, to be a true atheist, you have to believe you are the very thing that you argue doesn’t exist: God.
Chuckle. I guess.
Adams is an agnostic himself, and I assume and hope he’s just riffing for laughs. Surely he knows that his beliefs are identical to almost any given atheist. Surely. Well, I’m not so sure. Many people hold this incredibly daft assumption, and few apply it to theists, as if belief is the default and atheism an assertion.
And I know where the problem started.
The problem, ironically, was started by my hero, Thomas Huxley. Prior to his coining of the word “agnostic,” it was probably understood that atheists were people who simply said, “I don’t believe in God.” Huxley wasn’t somewhere in the muddy, shrugging middle, 51-49 for-or-against belief. He had a very strong conviction that God did not exist. But it wasn’t certain, and he wanted to underline this, so he created the word “agnostic” (Latin for “not knowing”) to name what should damn well be true of the entire human race. None of us knows…but surely it’s OK to say what you think the deal is.
Thanks to our monkey tendencies, though, the upshot of Huxley’s clarifying coinage was greater confusion. Agnosticism was instantly assumed to mean “don’t know, don’t care,” and the myth of atheism as an assertion of absolute certainty was reinforced by contrast to the new term. Neither is accurate (as Russell will show shortly). They are really two different ways of saying the same thing: I think God is pretend. Agnosticism simply leans on the word “think,” and atheism leans on “pretend.”
Bertrand Russell himself was conflicted on this point, and referred to himself as an atheist or an agnostic depending on the audience:
I never know whether I should say “Agnostic” or whether I should say “Atheist”. It is a very difficult question and I daresay that some of you have been troubled by it. As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.
None of us would seriously consider the possibility that all the gods of Homer really exist, and yet if you were to set to work to give a logical demonstration that Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, and the rest of them did not exist you would find it an awful job. You could not get such proof.
Therefore, in regard to the Olympic gods, speaking to a purely philosophical audience, I would say that I am an Agnostic. But speaking popularly, I think that all of us would say in regard to those gods that we were Atheists. In regard to the Christian God, I should, I think, take exactly the same line.
from “Am I an Atheist or an Agnostic?” in A Plea for Tolerance in the Face of New Dogmas (1947)
Unfortunately, in the essay “What is an Agnostic?”, Russell gives this unhelpful backhand, even though it is written for an entirely popular audience:
An atheist, like a Christian, holds that we can know whether or not there is a God. The Christian holds that we can know there is a God; the atheist, that we can know there is not.
*Sigh.*
I, like every atheist I know, am an atheist and an agnostic and a humanist and a freethinker. Each has a different emphasis; all are compatible. Questions?
the interfaith alliance
I don’t usually wax too political in this space, but there’s an activist organization I’m getting all hot and sweaty for lately. It’s The Interfaith Alliance (TIA), a coalition of 185,000 members from over 75 different religious and nonreligious perspectives founded in 1994 “to challenge the radical religious right” by protecting religious pluralism and the separation of church and state. They’ve had it with the use of religion as a tool of political manipulation and division. They think it’s bad for the church AND the state.
I have a collective crush on these people.
The president of TIA is Rev. Dr. Welton Gaddy, Pastor for Preaching and Worship at Northminster Baptist Church in Monroe, Louisiana and host of the program State of Belief on Air America Radio.
Gaddy is a Baptist who remembers that church-state separation was woven into the founding of his denomination and remembers why. He is awesome. He is a force of nature. (And I’m not only saying that because he declared himself “so impressed” with my “important work” when he interviewed me on December 22. Goodness, I’ve forgotten about that completely.)
It was TIA that pointed out last week, in a way both brilliant and hard to refute, that “if a potential employer asked you questions about your religious beliefs in a job interview, it wouldn’t only be offensive, it would be illegal.” Yet one interviewer after another in the presidential campaign asks questions about personal religious convictions. And what is a campaign if not an extended job interview?
Asking how a candidate thinks religion and government should intersect — well, that’s a terrific question, and one that’s rarely asked. Instead, we get a litany of questions that violate the Constitutional guarantee that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States” (Article VI, section 3), in spirit if nothing else.
This week had TIA drawing attention to an effort by Focus on the Family to put the “National Day of Prayer” (seven days away) squarely in the hands of evangelicals:
The National Day of Prayer Task Force requires volunteer coordinators to sign a pledge stating: “I commit that NDP activities I serve with will be conducted solely by Christians while those with differing beliefs are welcome to attend.” The coordinators must also sign a statement of faith that includes the following language: “I believe that the Holy Bible is the inerrant Word of The Living God. I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the only One by which I can obtain salvation and have an ongoing relationship with God.” This clearly aligns a government-sponsored event with a particular Christian denomination, in violation of the basic provisions of the First Amendment to the Constitution.
And so it always goes. When religion and politics mix, “religion” will inevitably become a single narrow expression of religion. In the case of the U.S., that’s evangelical Protestantism.
Anyway, I could go on all day about the great work of The Interfaith Alliance, but I’ll let you chase links on your own if you wish.
The questions about religion that TIA thinks candidates should answer
The campaign for a more inclusive Nat’l Day of Prayer (if we must have one at all, *sigh*), led by a Jewish group of First Amendment defenders called…wait for it…Jews on First! Oh, how I love it!
laughing matters 3: the bible gal
I taught at a Catholic women’s college in Minnesota for 15 years. Half of my courseload was an interdisciplinary seminar in writing and critical thinking.
Teaching critical thinking at a Catholic college is strange, but only half as strange as it seems. Every official college document, from the Mission Statement to the Catholic Identity Statement, trumpeted the vital importance of critical thinking, open intellectual inquiry, the vigorous exchange of opposing views, etc. So critical thinking was alive and well in writing. Just not in practice. Issues of religion, race, and gender, among many others, had accepted, unchallenged orthodoxies. Unorthodoxy was killed off in one way or another, usually with suffocating silence.
My head eventually began to hurt from the dissonance. To relieve the pressure, I turned to humor, writing the satirical novel Calling Bernadette’s Bluff, the utterly fictional story of a secular humanist male faculty member at the utterly fictional College of St. Bernadette, a Catholic women’s college in Minnesota. It’s still selling the occasional copy after five years, which is nice, and reviews were good. Most of all, it saved me a blown cerebral artery by allowing me to get some things said. And by doing so humorously, I got the same reprieve as Erasmus from the (direct) wrath of the Powers that Were. For a while.
A few months after publication, a couple of students asked if I would like to form a student humanist group on campus, “like the one in your book.”
Like the one in the book? I thought. Surely not.
I reminded them that things in the book went seriously unwell for the group in question, and for the college itself. They shrugged. So we did it. And things went badly.
How they went badly is a good story in itself, eventually involving locked doors, bad press for the college, the first student protest in the school’s history (against the censorious college president), hate mail for me, equal measures of faculty courage and cowardice, and a tenure standoff with the college deans. But that’s another story. This series is about humor and critical thinking.
My tenure committee
In the service of my children’s addictions to food and clothing, I hung around for as long as I could, then gave notice in May ’05 that I would leave in May ’06. My resignation was gratefully accepted by the president. Many faculty colleagues expressed genuine and eloquent grief over my decision, something that warms me to this day.
I had to decide how to disengage with the place I’d worked most of my adult life. I felt tremendous bitterness at the hypocrisy and cowardice at several levels. But instead of giving in to that, I decided to say goodbye with a humor.
I approached the editors of the faculty e-newsletter with the idea of a mock advice column called “Ask the Bible Gal.” After some knee-clacking, they consented to run it. I decided to use it to gently skewer hypocrisies on campus and in religion generally.
You may recognize the influence of a famous Internet satire in the first installment:
ASK THE BIBLE GAL
A Lighthouse in the WildernessDear Bible Gal:
I have a colleague who teaches a Weekend College class on Sunday, thereby working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states that she must be put to death — but am I morally obligated to do it myself?
Mystified in MinneapolisDear Mystified:
Excellent question! If the college administration doesn’t take care of it, then yes, I guess it’s up to you to lend a hand. Just don’t do it on the Sabbath, or you’d be working too! Thanks for writing, and be sure to let me know how it goes!
BG
The next week had this follow-up:
Dear Bible Gal:
Longtime reader, first-time correspondent. I’m writing on behalf of “Mystified in Minneapolis,” a colleague of mine who wrote recently for advice on dealing with a Sabbath-breaker. She took your advice, and – well, let’s just say there’s one less Sabbath-breaker this Sunday, praise God!
“Mystified” would have written to you herself, but at the post-retribution party (you’ll get a kick out of this), somebody pointed out that she had in turn violated the Sixth Commandment against killing! Oh, you should have seen her face, she turned as red as a tomato! We all had a good laugh, then killed her, of course (Leviticus 24:17, “If anyone takes the life of a human being, he must be put to death”) – and boy then did we have a problem, since we had to kill the killers…
We want to do this “by the Book,” so here’s the question: what should the last person do? – Stumped in St. Paul
Dear Stumped:
There’s a scriptural solution to every problem. In this case, WWSD: what would Saul do? (1 Sam 31:4). Problem solved! Let me know how it…oops. Never mind :-)! BG
(Saul kills himself.) A dozen faculty members whispered their approval of the satires in passing on campus. Others glared. I felt a little less pressure in my head each week:
Dear Bible Gal:
Each August, I am appalled anew by a festival of sin at the Minnesota State Fair. In case you don’t know about it, images are graven into blocks of butter, a clear violation of the Second Commandment and an encouragement to every type of unholy transgression. I’ve enclosed photos of this past year’s outrage. Can’t these people read?? It’s further proof that we need the Commandments posted in public schools for easy reference. – No Margarine for Error
Shades of MoobyDear Margarine:
May I gently suggest that you read the Commandment before casting stones about unholy oleo! The Second Commandment forbids not just graven images but the making of “any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above or in the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth.” Any likeness, dear, which means your little snapshot constitutes a first-class ticket to the Ninth Circle! Why, the film The Ten Commandments was itself one gigantic violation! Cecil B. DeMille’s skull is surely the drinking-gourd of Lucifer even as we speak.
As for me, I pray to see the Second Commandment posted in art classes, for the much-needed boost it would give to Abstract Expressionism. – BG
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Dear Bible Gal:
I am a Bible-believing high school senior and feminist, in search of a Bible-believing feminist college. How thrilled I was to hear about the College of St. Catherine, a place that knows the greatest source of empowerment for women is the truth of Scripture!
At least that’s what I thought St. Kate’s was. My faith in that school crumbled on a recent campus visit, when I learned that women actually teach there, despite the admonition of 1 Timothy 2:12 (“Do not permit a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence”). How on earth can a college claim to empower women if it doesn’t even follow the Holy Word of God?! – Real Feminists Aren’t Timothy-Leery
Dear Real Feminist:
You truly dodged a bullet, dear! That darned place has a long history of disregarding all of the powerful feminist Scriptures. I’ve heard they don’t even require women to be silent in church – as if the Apostle Paul didn’t know what was best for women’s empowerment! You want real scriptural feminism? Go to St. Thomas, girlfriend! – BG
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Dear Bible Gal:
At last, after eleven years, our church expansion is completed! Last week the Building Committee voted to inscribe the last words of Christ over the entrance to our new educational wing and coffee shop. But at the meeting, someone pointed out that the Gospels – well, I wouldn’t say they contradict each other, of course, since that’s not possible, but they seem to render the true words in three different ways – in Matthew (“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”), Luke (“Father, unto thy hands I commend my spirit”), and John (“It is finished”). Is one of these truths more, you know, true than the others? – Stumped by a Cross Word Puzzle
Dear Cross Word:
Eleven years for one building project! I’d suggest you go with John! – BG
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Dear Bible Gal:
Last Easter weekend my husband and I stayed in the basement suites at the Days Inn in Charleston, South Carolina as part of their WWJD Easter package – “three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Mt 12:40), just like our Lord! We checked in on Good Friday and “arose” on Easter Sunday. Get it?
My husband – apparently using secular math – blasphemously suggested at the front desk that we should have been charged for only two nights! Obviously he was wrong: Friday afternoon through Sunday morning must equal “three days and three nights” – or else Christ Himself misspoke in the Scriptures! Aack!
Easter’s approaching again, and we’re Carolina-bound. I don’t want him to embarrass me again. Please help me to help him see his error! – Counting the Days Inn
Dear Counting:
Your husband is getting caught in that literalist trap! When the Lord said “three days and three nights,” He was speaking of a metaphorical three days and three nights. I hope that clears things up, and further hope you were charged in allegorical dollars. – BG
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And on it went, for a year. By the time I left, I felt fine.
Many on the faculty apparently had the least desirable reaction of all, the same one they had to all controversy—they wished all the icky conflicting views would just go away, wished for the return to the silent, smiling denial of dissonance that had driven me first crazy, then away.
Perhaps that silent, uncommented dissonance returned after I left, I dunno. But I can’t help hoping that the genie, once out of her bottle, has continued flying around that place, knocking things over and crapping on the carpets.
laughing matters 1: humor and critical thinking
Your [human] race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon—laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution—these can lift at a colossal humbug push it a little weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand. You are always fussing and fighting with your other weapons. Do you ever use that one? No; you leave it lying rusting. As a race, do you ever use it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage.
Satan, in The Mysterious Stranger by MARK TWAIN
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I keep thinking I know what my next post will be, then something else pops up on radar. In this case, it’s a satire currently meming its way around the Internet — an extremely subtle, mildly delicious satire about atheist parents responding indignantly to a movie trailer for the next Narnia movie. Too subtle by half, apparently; the satire is now being reported in blogs as if it were actual news — reported, in other words, by people who failed to get the joke.
So I want to lapse into the pathetic mode of the former professor and post some thoughts on humor as it relates to critical thinking. We’ll pretend I’m on-topic because both humor and critical thinking are precious values in our family, because my favorite humor targets sacred cows, and because it was inspired by a satire about atheist parents. It’ll probably end up five or six posts long, or seven, once a week, in-between the Bible study posts and random others. And here we go.
I am in the fourth decade of a hot, sweaty, nasty intellexual affair with satire.
When our family lived in England in 2004, she was the one I looked for in the bookshops of London and Oxford and Hay-on-Wye. She tickles me through the earbuds of my iPod on our long walks together. If I promise not to mention her age (about 2500 years next July), she leaves me alone about my BMI and MPB. She waits by my bedside, and for thirty minutes every night, we get it on.
(Don’t worry. My wife is generally gettin’ just as busy with Khaled Hosseini or Gabriel Garcia Marquez.)
Satire is not just entertainment. It’s also a weapon for social change, and a damned effective and rightly feared weapon at that. Yet we tend too often to leave it lying in the drawer, unfired.
In The Rise of Rationalism in Western Europe, historian W.E.H. Lecky described the role of humor in a change in attitudes in England of the 1600s. For centuries, the English had engaged in witchburning to enforce this or that religious orthodoxy or express this or that superstitious fear.
In the 1650s, witchcraft trials and executions in Britain reached a fever pitch under the Puritan Commonwealth. But by the 1660s they’d stopped completely.
Why the sudden abandonment of something that was nearly universal and unquestioned just ten years earlier? According to Lecky, the agent of change was laughter.
Though the Puritans didn’t invent the practice, they were the most enthusiastic witchburners in English history and so became closely associated with it. When Cromwell died, all of the dour Puritan ideologies quickly fell out of favor. The monarchy was restored, theatres that were burned down were rebuilt, and dancing went from forbidden to being something you do in the street while drunk.
Overnight, the sanctimonious Puritans became the objects of ridicule. Every pub seemed to have a resident funnyman who could get the other patrons rolling on the floor with his imitation of the nasal Puritan manner of speech and the stiff-backed, rump-in-the-air Puritan gait.
And, by its close association with Puritanism, witch burning immediately went from obvious social necessity to ridiculous folly. Once it became laughable, it was over.
For centuries, words were thought to have magical powers. Pre-Islamic Arabs put satirists at the vanguard of military attacks, hurling epithets and ridicule at the enemy. Apparently this was also done in the medieval period:
In 1509 Erasmus wrote The Praise of Folly, in which the goddess Folly gives a speech in praise of all that the human race does to serve and promote her cause. After getting the reader chuckling at judges and tradesmen and fishwives for a hundred pages, he gradually turns to the church, taking the largest and longest swipes at the clergy. He was an Augustinian monk at the time, which deflected charges of impiety. Many historians believe only his personal friendship with Pope Julius II and his ability to hide in the skirts of satire stood between him and execution. A work of sober rational argument would have been his death warrant.
But Europe got the message. The Praise of Folly hit the continent like a firestorm. Many see it as one of the final nudges for the Reformation, which began eight years later. If true, that puts satire at the center of one of the most earthshaking challenges to the status quo in Western history.
Two centuries later it was Voltaire, railing against intolerance, tyranny and superstition. It’s hard to argue for anyone exerting a greater influence on the rise of rationalism and the promotion of critical thinking over superstition. And lo and behold, he chose satire as one of his primary vehicles. His best-known bust is the only one I know carved with a smirk.
Horace Walpole, an otherwise forgettable English aristocrat, said, “This world is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel.” And sure enough, throughout history, there’s evidence of thinkers laughing and laughers thinking, each side of that coin calling on the other to facilitate our slow crawl out of the swamp of ignorance and injustice that is our apparent human birthright.
Humor is a form of nonviolent protest, a socially acceptable way to challenge power. Over and over it has been a catalyst to social change. Yet we spend half our time dismissing it as mere entertainment and the other half deriding it as unseemly and disrespectful, especially when the humor is perceived as ridicule. Then it becomes the one thing you dare not do in critical discourse.
Six years ago, I began posting sober critical arguments against religious belief on my office door at the Catholic college where I was then employed. Each Monday for eighteen months I posted new critiques and invited replies. Nothing.
Then one day I posted a satire from The Onion targeting self-contradictory Vatican statements. The headline captured the essential predicament of Catholic salvation doctrine:
Pope Calls for Greater Understanding Between Catholics, Hellbound
VATICAN CITY — In an address before over 250,000 followers assembled outside St. Peter’s Basilica, Pope John Paul II reaffirmed his commitment to global religious unity, calling upon the world’s Roman Catholics to “build a bridge of earthly friendship” between themselves and the eternally damned.
“We have been aloof too long,” the Pope told the throng of well-wishers who crowded into Vatican Square. “For too many years, otherwise pious, observant Catholics have not made enough of an effort to reach out to nonbelievers, reasoning that, since they would have no contact with them in the next life, there was little point in getting to know them in this one.”
And so on. It remains one of the most brilliantly constructed satires I have ever seen. And less than 24 hours after I posted it, I had an outraged note from a campus theologian.
Why did he yawn at serious arguments but protest at humor? Because Catholicism has a long history of success at batting away rational argument with polysyllabic nonsense posing as rational argument. But, as Erasmus and Voltaire both demonstrated, they’re powerless when someone points and chuckles.
No God and no religion can survive ridicule.
MARK TWAIN
Happy Birthday, Earth Kids! (Sorry Uncle Sam’s missing the party, but they wouldn’t let us kill you)
On November 20, 1989, the UN General Assembly adopted into international law the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), one of the most important and progressive documents since the invention of kids. Children born on that day finished childhood today — happy birthday, kids! — having grown up under the most comprehensive set of child protections in human history.
The CRC laid out a set of universal rights for children. Governments of countries that have ratified the CRC are required to report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child periodically to be examined on their progress with regards to child rights in their country as specified in the Convention. In the course of eighteen years, the CRC has revolutionized child welfare around the world.
The language is simple and clear: The best interests of children must be the primary concern in making decisions that affect them. Children have the right to be protected from being hurt and mistreated, physically or mentally. They have the right to a free primary education. They should be protected from all forms of sexual exploitation, abuse, abduction, sale and trafficking. Governments must do everything they can to protect and care for children affected by war, and children under 15 should not be forced or recruited to take part in a war or join the armed forces. Stuff like that.
190 UN member countries have ratified the convention either partly or completely. Only two countries on Earth have not: Somalia and the United States.
At the time of the Convention, Somalia was riven by civil war, which may explain their failure to ratify. But what about the U.S.? Why can’t the U.S. sign a simple and effective human rights guarantee for children that is universally acceptable to the rest of the (non-Somali) world, from England to Syria to Iraq to Japan? Because American religious and political conservatives of the time saw a winning issue and organized opposition that continues to this day.
Yes, dear reader, I’m winding up a small rant. Please turn down the volume on your computer.
U.S. religious and political conservatives in the early 90s led by Pat Buchanan torpedoed our ratification of the CRC by organizing a storm of fear and ignorance. Article 14 of the Convention, Buchanan said, would forbid religious parents from raising their kids in their family faith tradition.
Here’s Article 14 in full:
1. States Parties shall respect the right of the child to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.
2. States Parties shall respect the rights and duties of the parents and, when applicable, legal guardians, to provide direction to the child in the exercise of his or her right in a manner consistent with the evolving capacities of the child.
3. Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs may be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety, order, health or morals, or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others.
Freedom of thought. Freedom of conscience. Freedom of religion. I should have known Satan was in on this!
The Vatican ratified the convention, for crying out loud, as did Saudi Arabia, Iran, and a number of other explicitly religious countries. None of them saw any threat of losing their religion, and there’ve been precious few children ripped from the arms of their devout parents by UN peacekeepers. But American conservatives are unrivaled when it comes to manipulating our fears. As a result, the U.S. stands head and shoulders above the rest of the world in our ability to fearfully wet ourselves over nothing.
The other problem for religious and political conservatives was Article 37a:
(a) No child shall be subjected to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Neither capital punishment nor life imprisonment without possibility of release shall be imposed for offences committed by persons below eighteen years of age.
Those bastards wanted to take away our national right to execute children! Why, they can pry the lethal injection syringe out of my cold dead hands. If pot-smoking hippie cultures like Saudi Arabia and Iran want to give their kids permission to run wild, that’s their business. Our civilization depends on our ability to kill and imprison children.
(*Sigh*)
Look, I know I’m sounding shrill. I hate that, I really do. I’d much rather provide light entertainment, but this kind of thing makes me feel like the top of my head is coming apart, and I don’t know how else to react. I’m exhausted from embarrassment over our collective decisions and actions as a nation. It just goes on and on. And when the international community is trying like mad to improve things for the next generation and the most privileged country on Earth can’t bother to join in…surely it matters enough to shout about.
Anyway, Happy Birthday to the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Thanks for the invitation. I wish like hell we could have been there.
UNICEF information page about the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child
Full text of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child
A paper on religious conservatives’ objections to the CRC
U.S. organizations endorsing the CRC, including many religious groups
What individuals can do to encourage U.S. and Somali ratification of the Convention
