Introducing…Foundation Beyond Belief
Being a humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead. — Kurt Vonnegut
I don’t give as much as I’d like to the causes I care about. I consider myself a pretty generous guy, and when I give, I give generously. But I get to the end of each year and realize that I just haven’t given as much as I wish I had. Again.
Another thing: When religious folks give through religious charities and churches, it registers as an expression of their worldview. I want that too. I want my contributions to “count” as a visible expression of my secular humanism.
Then there’s this: Multiple solid surveys by philanthropic research organizations like Independent Sector and the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey1 show that churchgoers give a much greater percentage of their income to charitable causes than non-churchgoers like me. Arthur C. Brooks (author of Who Really Cares) is pretty sure he’s got my number: he says it’s “evidence of a gap in everyday virtue” (p. 40) between the religious and nonreligious.
I think he’s missing something obvious. If people in Group A are asked to pass a plate full of the generous donations of their friends and neighbors and either add to it or not, 52 times a year, while people in Group B have no such regular and public nudge — I’d say something other than virtue is in play.
I think the difference has much more to do with whether or not you have systematic opportunities for giving than some “gap in virtue.” I speak at Unitarian fellowships and Ethical Societies all the time, places brimming with friendly atheists. And when that offering plate passes by, I give, and so do they, knowing that these places will use it to do some good.
The offering plate is also passing through a million mainstream church pews every Sunday, giving the religious an easy and regular way to give and to combine their giving with others as a positive collective expression of their worldview.
I don’t agree with those who insist religious people give primarily out of fear or guilt. That may be in the mix, but most I know give because they are challenged and encouraged to do so, because generosity feels wonderful, and because the habit of giving turns giving into a habit.
I want to do better. It’s time for those of us who are otherwise engaged on Sunday mornings to have our own easy and regular means of giving, one that focuses and encourages humanistic generosity and demonstrates it to the world.
Welcome to Foundation Beyond Belief.
> what it is
Foundation Beyond Belief is a new charitable and educational foundation created (1) to focus, encourage and demonstrate humanistic generosity, and (2) to support a nationwide nonreligious parent education program.
The Foundation will highlight ten charitable organizations per quarter–one in each of ten areas (health, poverty, environment, education, human rights, and more). Members join the Foundation by signing up for a monthly automatic donation in the amount of their choice, then set up personal profiles to indicate how they would like their contribution distributed among the ten categories. Maybe you’d like to give 25 percent each to human rights, poverty, education, and the environment. We’ll distribute it accordingly. By year’s end, you will have helped support a dozen organizations in the areas you care most about.
The centerpiece of the Foundation will be a lively online community. Active members can join a social network and discussion forums centered on the ten categories of giving, upload videos, recruit new members, advocate for causes and help us choose the new beneficiaries each quarter. We’ll also create and host a multi-author blog of world-class contributors focused on the cause areas, as well as humanism, philanthropy, and the intersection of the two.
Carefully selected for impact and efficiency, the beneficiaries may be founded on any worldview so long as they do not engage in proselytizing. At the end of each quarter, 100 percent of the donations will be forwarded and a new slate of beneficiaries selected.
On the educational side, the Foundation will build the next stage in nonreligious parent education—a nationwide training program for parenting seminar leaders. We plan to have 30-40 people teaching nonreligious parenting seminars in cities across the country within a year.
We’ve begun assembling a stellar cast to guide the Foundation through its infancy. The Board of Directors includes Hemant Mehta (author, Friendly Atheist blogger, Secular Student Alliance board chair), Dr. Wayne Huey (ethicist, educator, author, former Georgia and U.S. High School Counselor of the Year), Trish Hotze Cowan (Sunday School Director, Ethical Society of St. Louis), and executive director Dale McGowan. (That’s me.)
The Foundation will launch in two stages. On October 1 we’ll unveil the pre-launch website, where members can begin setting up profiles and basic donations. On January 1, 2010, we will launch the full site, including the ten featured causes, all profile options, blog, social networking, and the means for members to select and change their preferred distributions.
We’re making no little plans here, and there’s the potential to do something pretty earthshaking. But this is a community thing, or it’s nothing. We’ll need your help.
> what you can do now
There are two ways to stay in the loop as we work toward the Foundation’s partial launch in October and full launch in January:
Facebook users: Click here to join the Foundation Beyond Belief group on Facebook Causes. No donation required — just keeping yourself in the loop.
Non-Facebookers: Click here to put your email on our mailing list.
Either way, sign up and we’ll keep you informed as it takes shape.
_________________
1And the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, and the American Community Survey of the U.S. Census…the list goes on. The facts themselves are not in doubt.
Humanism 2009 (2 of 4)
Part 2 of an address to Edmonds UU Church in Edmonds, WA, April 19, 2009.
As I’ve grown in my secular humanism, I’ve begun to value the second word more strongly than the first. And nothing illustrates the reason more vividly than the picture of all those hands racing skyward as Georgia kindergarteners enthusiastically embraced the idea of humanism—if only until dinnertime.
When they hear the definition, most people identify with it on some level. Think of the power in that.
The fault line down the middle of humanism runs right through the UU denomination. And that’s no surprise. When asked to choose one theological label in the Casebolt survey several years back, 46 percent of UUs chose “humanist.” It was by far the largest category of self-definition in this denomination. When given the option of identifying more than one label in the FACT survey of 2001, fully 91 percent of UUs chose “humanist” as one of their identities.
That’s a wonderful shared foundation on which to build.
Yet the fault line persists because we can’t seem to find our way past the first words— “secular” or “religious”— and their implications.
The irony here is that UUs are famously and proudly tolerant of diversity. You embrace and celebrate differences in race and ethnicity. You put other denominations to shame with your Welcoming Congregation Program for the GLBT community. Yet when it comes to being in community with other humanists, the fault line between the words “secular” and “religious” seems to yawn into an abyss.
It’s not just an issue for UUs. I recently spoke at one of the oldest Ethical Societies in the country and learned that two years ago they reached a level of such obsessive and destructive conflict over this issue that they called in a mediation team from the Alban Institute. On a scale of 1 to 5, their conflict was assessed at Level Five: “Intractable—no reconciliation possible.” One third of the Society walked away to form a new group. “We splintered like Protestants,” one person said. And the bitterness over the issue is still tangible.
Today I consider them one of the most successful humanist communities in the United States.
I know why secular humanists often have trouble accepting the idea of religious humanism, even when nontheistic, with its greater interest in ritual, in mystery, and in the notion of transcendence. I know why secular humanists flinch at the use of words like “holy,” “sacred,” “blessed,” “spiritual,” and “religion,” even when the user explains that they are divorced from their theistic origins — because I flinch too.
When I hear religious humanists ask why many secular humanists, especially the older generation, are so adamant in their renunciation of everything associated with religion, I hear echoes of other movements. I hear a young generation of African Americans chiding their parents and grandparents, asking “Why is everything about race with you?” I hear young women, whose mothers and grandmothers fought against an entrenched patriarchy for rights they now take for granted, who roll their eyes and ask, “Why is everything about gender with you?”
Many of us, especially those who grew up in earlier decades, have been wounded by traditional religion. I have met countless humanists who carry memories of betrayal, humiliation, terror, and psychological or physical abuse inflicted on them or their loved ones in the name of religion—often in childhood, when we are most vulnerable.
For these people, these most adamant secular humanists, words and rituals formerly associated with theistic religion carry genuinely painful associations. When other humanists who for whatever reason have been spared that wounding, or who bounced back more readily, insist that the seculars simply “get over” their aversion, that they simply recognize that religion can be redefined — it displays a very real lack of empathy.
But this knife cuts both ways, of course. When secular humanists accuse religious humanists of being “soft in the head,” or “irrational,” or “hooked on fuzzy-wuzzy mumbo-jumbo”—those are all exact quotes—they fail to recognize that God’s empty throne does not negate the many human needs that religion has traditionally served. Thinking hard about what those needs are is among the key challenges for humanism today.
[N.B. The following section is especially relevant to the Charles Blow column “Defecting to Faith.”]
One persistent delusion I hear from secular humanists is that people go to church for God. If we could just break through their belief in God, they say, they’ll walk away from church. It isn’t true, and we need to grasp this, once and for all, if humanist communities of all kinds are to bring people in the door and keep them there. If we don’t have what they are looking for, they will walk right out again.
I mentioned this disconnect to a gentleman in a freethought meeting last year and he scoffed. “Sorry,” he said. “If eternal life and pretty fables are what they need, we’re fresh out.” He didn’t seem inclined to question his assumption that that is what people need—that that is why people go to church. In fact, I’m convinced the revolving door on humanist communities of all kinds isn’t about the absence of God but the absence of something much more human and much more humanistic.
In a recent Gallup poll, only 27 percent of churchgoing respondents mentioned God or worship when giving their primary reason for attending church. They go to be a part of a loving community, for a sense of belonging, to be inspired and supported, to be involved in social justice and good works. One friend told me she goes so she can be surrounded by friendly people once a week. Simple as that. Yet the secular humanists who founded and who continue to run many freethought groups around the country continue to harp and harp on theology and epistemology, then wonder why few come and even fewer stay.
BONUS: Look, you’re already at the computer. Take two more minutes and read this fantastic (and brief) post at the Lucky Atheist. THIS is exactly what I mean by transcendence of the everyday!
Six bits
Wrote to Laurie Goodstein at the New York Times to thank her for the terrific piece she wrote about atheism in America for Monday’s edition. She replied, letting me know that she knows me and my work. That never fails to surprise me, even when my mother says it, not that she has. Laurie apparently considered interviewing me for the piece and hopes to do so for another down the road. We’ll just see if I’m available.
Three years after Penn Jillette and I locked horns over one noun and its conjunction in his PBB essay, it apparently still cheeses him off. He has now posted a YouTube video — part of a new video series called “Penn Says” — in which he flogs this even further (at 1:07-2:45). Again, for the record: aside from spelling out an abbreviation, here’s the only edit I made to Penn’s piece. It’s on p. 32 of Parenting Beyond Belief (*flip flip flip*):
We don’t have any friends who are
christards orinto any kind of faith-based hooey…
That’s all, folks. I deleted a gratuitous slur. Everything else is precisely as he wrote it. And we discussed it before I submitted the manuscript, and (though seriously miffed) he agreed to allow it.
I never bring this up unprovoked (apparently I never even blogged it until now), but Michael Dukakis taught me two things about life: (1) If someone takes a picture of you in a tank, FIRE!” and (2) Don’t allow slander to go unanswered.
I’m fine with Penn keeping this one alive. That way I can keep refuting this idea that juvenile namecalling is a necessary or useful way for atheists to engage the world.
Now there’s one spot in the video where Penn and I agree completely:
“I should be agreeing with Christians and Muslims because they’re right about something as opposed to agreeing with atheists because they’re wrong.”
Exactly right, Penn. That’s why you don’t broadbrush them all as “christards.” Because sometimes they’re not. The defense rests.
Raising Freethinkers is apparently now available in the Kindle format on Amazon! Not sure why PBB isn’t, but it may be coming soon. If it does, I’ll be the last to know. (In other news: Darth Vader is Luke’s father!)
Subscription is now open for the PBB Channel on YouTube. Just a placeholder video for now. On June 15 I’ll begin posting short videos based largely on the PBB Seminar.
Got a phone call from New York Times columnist Charles Blow, a fascinating guy who among other things is largely responsible for the increasingly creative use of graphics to tell stories in the Times (flash charts, word concordances, interactive maps, etc). He’s at work on a story about a Pew study released Monday about changes in religious affiliation. He called to get my reaction to one finding, captured in this paragraph:
At the same time that the ranks of the unaffiliated have grown, the Landscape Survey also revealed that the unaffiliated have one of the lowest retention rates of any of the major religious groups, with most people who were raised unaffiliated now belonging to one religion or another. Those who leave the ranks of the unaffiliated cite several reasons for joining a faith, such as the attraction of religious services and styles of worship (74%), having been spiritually unfulfilled while unaffiliated (51%) or feeling called by God (55%).
I told him I wasn’t surprised by the finding. The group that does the least indoctrinating will naturally end up with the lowest “retention,” and that’s fine. A wide range of outcomes is an indication that kids raised nonreligiously are more likely to think for themselves. They find their way to a wide variety of identities, including a number of liberal religious expressions that are compatible with 95 percent of the secular worldview. Nothing wrong with that. And some will find their way back to the worldview of their youth, just as lapsed Catholics often do.
I also offered my opinion that kids raised in complete isolation from/ignorance of religious ideas or experience are the most likely to end up emotionally hijacked by fundamentalism — just as fundamentalist kids who are taught to despise and fear all things secular often end up the most virulent atheists I know. Interesting, these symmetries.
Kids raised in nonreligious homes often head for church as they grow up because churches offer community and connectedness and transcendence of the everyday — things that organized humanism has ignored for too long and is now finally, finally attempting to address. They’re doing it through family programming, community-building, good works, and engagement with emotion as much as intellect. The more we offer what humans need, the more humans we’ll attract and retain. Until then, we don’t deserve ’em.
There’s something else coming — something terribly big and exciting, in my humble, and I can’t tell you yet. Nope, not a third book, nor Raising Freethinkers: The Movie. And I’m not pregnant. It is both legal and ethical. I daresay you’re gonna like it (except for you in the green shirt, who will shake your fist at the darkening sky, then meet a tall stranger). I can’t tell you what it is until I leap a few tall buildings to get it on track. Leapt the first one Tuesday. Should have the rest of them leapt in time for a June 1 announcement.
At that point I will need your help. Every one of you, even greensleeves over there. Until then, feel free to wonder what the heck.
Meaning and nonforeverness
Young Pastor: You speak blasphemy, sir!
Man in the Yellow Suit: Fluently.
————-
What we Tucks have, you can’t call it living. We just… are. We’re like rocks, stuck at the side of a stream.
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Immortality isn’t everything the preachers crack it up to be.Quotes from the film version of TUCK EVERLASTING
Back from the Hawkeye State, where I had the temerity to hold a seminar two blocks from the University of Iowa homecoming game. Went well, as did the next day in Des Moines. Met more fabulous folks including Jaime and Brian Sabel and Becky Mason of Iowa Secularists and our very own blogreader Ei! Plus some nice Amish ladies at the airport.
Driving through corn and a lovely plague of black butterflies on the way to Iowa City, I found myself thinking about a question from an earlier seminar — Cincinnati, maybe. A young man introduced himself as a quite recent deconvert from fundamentalism and told me he’d been struggling with the problem of meaning in the absence of eternal life. If we live for a while and then cease to be, what exactly is the point?
The meaning thing is a legitimate problem. I’ve written before about the ways in which we discover meaning, but that’s down here on the local level of our experience. He was asking the larger philosophical question about the Point of It All. And that’s a much more interesting problem.
Thing is, I don’t remotely see how immortality solves it.
If I live to be eighty instead of forty, is my life more intrinsically meaningful? I think most would agree it is not. How about 200 years, or 500? Ten thousand? These are changes in quantity that don’t seem to affect the M&P question at all. No matter how long you live, right up to eternity, the basic M&P question remains in place. In fact, the excellent novel and movie Tuck Everlasting convincingly makes the opposite claim — that immortality actually robs life of its meaning.
Some suggest that religion solves the problem by means other than everlasting life. Our purpose is to do God’s will, and so on. Aside from how deeply dissatisfying this ant-farm model of meaning should be to any thinking person, it only transfers the question up one level: What is the purpose of God, and why, in the grandest scheme, is this hobby of his worth the time spent cleaning our cage?
Meaning is a legitimate human puzzle. The question is whether this abstracted, higher-level meaninglessness troubles you or not. Unlike death, I don’t find ultimate meaninglessness too arresting a thought, though I have seriously struggled at times with local, personal, self-discovered meaning. As I wrote last year (You put your whole self in, 6/5/07):
I don’t imagine other animals have “meaning crises,” but our cortical freakishness makes us feel that we need more than just the lucky fact of being — makes us imagine these enormous, fatal holes and cracks in our meaning and purpose.
Hence the use of God as meaning-spackle.
When I was a kid, my purposometer (purr-puh-SAH-mit-ter), was always in the 90s on a scale of 100. Didn’t even have to try. I knew what I was here for: getting good grades, playing the clarinet, getting Muriel Ruffino to kiss me (Editor’s note: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, booyah!), getting into college, getting various other girls to kiss and etc. me (mission roughly 17% accomplished). And so on.
Much like your need for a pancreas, you never even know you have the need for meaning and purpose until it begins to fail — which mine did, in no uncertain terms, as I sat black-robed and square-hatted in a folding chair on a Berkeley lawn, not hearing the words of some famous anthropologist standing before me and 150 other black-robed, square-hatted, non-hearing 22-year-olds.
For the first time in my life, I had no earthly idea what was next. It was my first genuine core-shaking crisis of meaning and purpose.
But for reasons I’m not sure about, that larger question — call it cosmic M&P — has never pecked too hard at my consciousness. The best I can do is acknowledge that it is legit and note that religion doesn’t cure it.
Those who aren’t as incurious as I can always imagine themselves in Yahweh’s ant farm — or engage, along with Viktor Frankl and others, in a truly difficult and probably worthwhile bit of philosophical work.
Lemme know how it goes.
Finks ahoy!
There’s plenty of nonsensical meme creation on the Internet (just so you know). One of my least favorites is what I’ll call the Fictional Narrative Cartoon (FNC, or ‘Fink’). Follow these steps to write a Fink of your own:
1. Select a life stance you have never held or attempted to understand.
2. Achieve a Vulcan mind-meld with people of that perspective. When that fails, simply pick a set of unflattering assumptions off the top of your head about what the world “must” look like from that perspective.
3. Weave a fictional monologue or dialogue to describe the world through the eyes of this worldview. Include acts of puppy smooshing for maximum effect.
4. Post!
I’ve seen atheists do this to religious folks and vice versa. It tends not to be a true Fink if the person once shared the worldview — the atheist who was once a genuine theist, or the theist who was once a genuine atheist. In those cases, the risk of nonfiction sneaking in is too great. The true Fictional Narrative Cartoon must spring entirely from willful ignorance.
My Google alert for “atheist parents” brings Christian FNCs about nonreligious parenting into my inbox once in a while. The gods of cyber-serendipity smiled on me yesterday, delivering a Fink about an atheist dad talking to his child about death just days after I had posted a nonfiction narrative of the same thing.
The blogger, a Christian father of seven, begins by describing his approach as a Christian parent talking to his children about death:
Have you ever had a surprise party thrown in your honor? You walk through the door and the lights come on and the horns blow, close friends cheer as ribbons and balloons are thrown into the air? Have you ever watched as an athlete’s name is announced and he runs from the dressing room tunnel and onto the field as 60 or 70 thousand people cheer his arrival?…When my kids ask about death, these are some of the analogies that I use…
What a difference it must be for atheist parents, especially for those who want to be honest with their child.
He’s right — it is certainly different. And yes, it’s a much greater challenge than contemplating death as a stadium full of angels doing the Wave. Unfortunately he doesn’t stop with what he knows, but begins to construct a Fink:
“Dad [says the child of the atheist], what happens when we die?”
“Well, nothing really. We come from nothing and we go to nothing. Either your mom and I or someone else will put you into the ground and cover you with dirt and the person that we knew as YOU will just totally and completely cease to exist.”
“But how can I just come to an end? What if I only live until I’m five years old? I won’t get to do anything important.”
“My dear boy. Five years or five hundred years, it doesn’t really matter because none of it counts, not ultimately anyhow. Humans are part of a dying species in a dying universe. You’re an accident little buddy. An absolute accident to which we gave a name. Don’t get me wrong. We love you, and perhaps some day you can even manipulate some other people to love you too. But apart from that you’re pretty much on your own.”
“But what are we here for? Is there any meaning or purpose to all this?”
“Use your brain son. How can there be meaning and purpose to something that’s an accident?…Reality is, you come from nothing and you’re headed to nothing, just emptiness, a void. That’s all there is son. That’s not a bad thing son. It just is. The fact is, our life has no meaning, no context and absolutely no purpose save the purpose that you pretend to give it. Pretty cool huh?”
“But daddy, shouldn’t I at least try to be a good person?”
“Oh my precious little munchkin. Good and bad are just subjective words that some people use to describe things that they like or don’t like…All I know is, live good, live bad, live for yourself, live for others, none of it matters because the end of the good and the end of the bad, the end of people, pigs and insects is exactly the same, we rot away and become a different form of matter. Now, why don’t you run along. I’ve got some useless and pointless things to do.”
“But dad, that’s absurd! How do you expect me to be happy if life has no meaning, context or purpose” If that’s the way things are, why did you make me in the fist place?”
“Well, sweetpea, now you’re starting to ask what’s beginning to feel like a lot of questions. First of all, I couldn’t not make you. My genes compel me to reproduce. I squirt my semen here and there and everywhere…”
You get the idea.
I was once at a family gathering where the subject turned to gays and lesbians. I chimed in that homosexual sex is disgusting. They all nodded, mildly surprised.
“You know something else that’s disgusting?” I added. “Heterosexual sex.” Reduce the sexual act to the physical slapping of flesh and it doesn’t matter who is involved — it’s disgusting. Gay rights opponents recoil at the idea of gay sex because they strip it of the emotional component that transforms their own rutting into something entirely else.
Reducing a nonreligious parent’s description of death to the slapping of dirt on a coffin achieves the same brand of reductionist nonsense. The Fink starts and stays with sterile facts, never granting the atheist parent the human faculties of compassion or love except as a laugh line. I do think we die, for real, and that love and understanding can help us live with this difficult fact quite beautifully and well — even without invoking balloons and confetti.
The best thing about the growing nonreligious parenting movement is that we no longer need be content with Finks about nonreligious parenting. We’re living the nonfiction versions. Which points to the most important difference between this blogger’s take on the atheist parent-child conversation and mine.
Mine actually happened.
[Link to the fictional conversation]
[Link to the nonfictional conversation]
Welcome to the World on PBS
The PBS series Religion & Ethics Newsweekly ran a nice segment on August 15 about the nonreligious baby naming ceremony I co-hosted at last September’s convention of Atheist Alliance International. The guests of honor were Lyra and Sophia Cherry, two-year-old twin daughters of Shannon and Matt Cherry (director of the Institute for Humanist Studies at the time). Several prominent freethinkers participated, including Richard Dawkins.
The ceremony itself was very well conceived, with readings, gifts, music, rich symbolism, a choked-up dad, and the pledging of mentors for each of the girls.
Matt wrote a lovely and thoughtful column about the event for On Faith, a site sponsored by the Washington Post and Newsweek. (Read the column here, and if you find yourself enveloped in a warm feeling about humanity when you finish it, do not go on to read the extremely depressing comment thread.)
The brief PBS video segment is here. Don’t blink and you’ll see and hear someone the script calls “UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1.” Hey Ma, c’est moi!
More on secular celebrations, including the complete script of the Cherry event, is here.
On waking the heck up
To be awake is to be alive. I have never met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?
From Walden by Henry David Thoreau
I was interviewed Tuesday for the satellite radio program “About Our Kids,” a production of Doctor Radio and the NYU Child Study Center, on the topic of Children and Spirituality. Also on the program was the editor of Beliefnet, whom I irritated only once that I could tell. Heh.
“Spirituality” has wildly different meanings to different people. When a Christian friend asked several years ago how we achieved spirituality in our home without religion, I asked if she would first define the term as she understood it.
“Well…spirituality,” she said. “You know—having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and accepting him into your life as Lord and Savior.”
Erp. Yes, doing that without religion would be a neat trick.
So when the interviewer asked me if children need spirituality, I said sure, but offered a more helpful definition—one that doesn’t exclude 91 percent of the people who have ever lived. Spirituality is about being awake. It’s the attempt to transcend the mundane, sleepwalking experience of life we all fall into, to tap into the wonder of being a conscious and grateful thing in the midst of an astonishing universe. It doesn’t require religion. Religion can, in fact, and often does, blunt our awareness by substituting false (and dare I say inferior) wonders for real ones. It’s a fine joke on ourselves that most of what we call spirituality is actually about putting ourselves to sleep.
For maximum clarity, instead of “spiritual but not religious,” those so inclined could say “not religious–just awake.”
I didn’t say all that on the program, of course. That’s just between you, me, and the Internet. But I did offer as an example my children’s fascination with personal improbability – thinking about the billions of things that had to go just so for them to exist – and contrasted it with predestinationism, the idea that God works it all out for us, something most orthodox traditions embrace in one way or another. Personal improbability has transported my kids out of the everyday more than anything else so far.
Evolution is another. Taking a walk in woods over which you have been granted dominion is one kind of spirituality, I guess. But I find walking among squirrels, mosses, and redwoods that are my literal relatives to be a bit more foundation-rattling.
Another world-shaker is mortality itself, about which another small series soon. Mortality is often presented as a problem for the nonreligious, but in terms of rocking my world, it’s more of a solution. Spirituality is about transforming your perspective, transcending the everyday, right? One of my most profound ongoing “spiritual” influences is the lifelong contemplation of my life’s limits, the fact that it won’t go on forever. That fact grabs me by the collar and lifts me out of traffic more effectively than any religious idea I’ve ever heard. A different spiritual meat, to be sure, but no less powerful.
The program will air Friday August 8, 8-10am Eastern Time (US) on SIRIUS Satellite Channel 114—or listen online at Doctor Radio.
[BONUS QUESTION: Did you yawn when you saw the baby?]
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.
hopeful music
Last night a memory bobbed to the surface of Delaney’s brain — something I’d said in passing a good two years ago when she was four.
“Remember that music that’s been playing for my whole life?” she asked at bedtime. “I wonder if it’s still playing.”
“Huh? Oh…that! Yes, it is!” I retold the story, thrilled that she finds it as cool as I do:
“There was a composer who lived a long life and died not too long ago. His name was John Cage. His music wasn’t like anyone else’s because he didn’t just want to entertain people. He wanted them to think and wonder and even laugh. Mostly he wanted them to think about music in a new way.
“He wrote one piece I especially like. Wanna hear it?”
“Sure.”
I sat in silence for thirty seconds. “Okay, that was it. Well, just part of it.”
She looked puzzled. “Just…being quiet?”
“Well…was it really quiet?” I asked.
“No! I heard Max [the guinea pig] making little noises. And the ceiling fan going whoosh whoosh.”
“That’s the idea. This composer wanted us to hear all the sounds around us and to think of it as music that’s playing all the time. So he wrote a piece of silence to make us hear all the stuff we usually ignore.”
“That’s so cool.”
Many of you will have heard of this piece, which is called 4’33” and consists of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. It can be performed, Cage said, on any instrument or combination of instruments and in any number of movements. But that’s not the piece she was asking about. “And he wrote another piece for organ called ‘As Slow as Possible.'”
“That’s the one!”
“And then some people decided to play it really slow — so slow it would last for 639 years. They found a little church in the middle of Germany that wasn’t used anymore, and they built a special organ just to play this one piece of music.
“It started playing seven years ago on September 5th, 2001. But the music starts with a rest — a silence in music — so the first thing you heard was nothing! For seventeen months!”
“Haha! Weird!”
“And right in the middle of that silence — you were born.”
“Awesome,” she whispered.
She was right. Somehow, juxtaposing her birth and that silence was awesome. Even better: The bellows sprung to life on that day in September, and pumped away for twenty months as the only sound in the church. Once again, music without music.
“Then one day in the middle of the winter, when you were one and a half, the first notes started to play. Hundreds of people gathered in the little church to hear the notes start. Most of the time, though, the notes are playing with no one there. Little weights hold down the keys. Then every two years or so, it’s time for the notes to change again, and people come from around the world to hear it.”
“And it’s still playing right now?”
“Yep, it’s playing right now. And here’s the thing: It will be playing on the moment you graduate from high school and when you graduate from college. It will be playing when you get your first job, when you get married, and when your kids are born.
“The music that started the year you were born will still be playing at the end of your life. It will be playing when your grandchildren are born and when they die, and their grandchildren, and their grandchildren, and on and on, for 639 years.”
“Awesome!”
“Just think how different the world will be then.”
“I wonder if they will be different creatures from us then [one of her favorite ponders]. Like we used to be different animals a long time ago.”
“Fun to think about, eh?” I kissed her on the head and she drifted off.
The Cage project will strike some people as bizarre or silly. There was a time it would have hit me that way, back when I thought 20th century art and music was one big con game. But the more I think about the slowest piece of all time, the more it moves me.
The church is in Halberstadt, Germany. Suppose someone had started playing a piece of music in Halberstadt 639 years ago, in 1369. The Ming dynasty in China was one year old. Europe continued to reel in disorder one generation after the Black Death. The music would have ushered in the dawning of the Renaissance, the voyages and outrages of the New World explorers, and the scientific and artistic revolutions of the 16th century.
Luther’s Reformation and the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries would have raged around it. It would have been playing as the town itself changed hands from Prussia to Napoleon’s Westphalia and back to Prussia before becoming part of Saxony, then Germany, playing as Allied bombs fell in 1945, as the town was closed into communist East Germany and as it was returned to the heart of reunified Germany.
Would that piece have found its way to the last barline?
Starting a piece of music implies an intention to finish it. So starting a 639-year piece is, among other things, an extraordinary statement of human hope. it implies that we may still be here in 639 years, and that the intervening generations, with all their own changing concerns and values and ordeals, will nonetheless pick up the baton and run with the project we have begun. It is, in other words, a perfect metaphor for human life itself.
The aesthetics of the piece, as with so much of the music of Cage, are immaterial. It’s the idea that moves me. To hear the chord currently being played is to connect yourself to the recent past and the distant future in a way never before quite possible. That’s part of the reason that every time the chord changes, hundreds of people come from around the world to hear it happen.
The last chord change was in May of 2006, the month I resigned my college professorship. The next change is this Saturday, July 5, 2008.
Thanks to the hopeful gesture of even beginning such a thing, I can picture it finishing. So long as we can keep from killing each other, cooking the planet, or blowing up Halberstadt with technologies still undreamt — and if Jesus can hold off a little longer on his glorious return — then maybe, just maybe, our optimism will have been justified.
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: