Mama don’t take my heike crabs awaaaay
Ohhh, the pain. The pain. One of my cherished beliefs is under attack, and I’m doing what we monkeys do when that’s the case. Resisting. Bargaining. Denying.
There are two illustrations of selection — one natural, the other artificial — that I’ve always adored for their explanatory power and elegance.
One is the peppered moth. Peppered moths are light grey with dots of black and brown all over–perfect camouflage for the local light-colored tree bark in 18th century England. A few were completely black, but only a few, because they were easy for birds to spot and eat.
In the 19th century, factory smoke blackened the tree bark in the moths’ range. The black moths were now perfectly camouflaged and quickly became the favored phenotype, while the light grey became visibly delicious. The proportions switched — almost all of the moths in the forest were now black and only a few light grey.
Experiments were conducted to confirm the hypothesis in the mid 20th century. Errors subsequently discovered in those experiments led creationists to trumpet the supposed dethroning of the peppered moth as an illustration of natural selection. But subsequent, better-designed experiments have re-confirmed the original hypothesis to the satisfaction of the relevant experts.
In the book Moths (2002), Cambridge biologist Michael Majerus sums up the consensus in the field: “I believe that, without exception, it is our view that the case of melanism in the Peppered moth still stands as one of the best examples of evolution, by natural selection, in action.”
Sure enough, several other experts in both moths and industrial melanism have also written to reaffirm the peppered moth story as a robust exemplar of natural selection writ small.
Whew.
But there’s another selection story I adore — and that turn of phrase tells you all you need to know about my vulnerability on this one. It’s the story of the heikegani, a crab found in the waters of the Inland Sea in Japan near Dan-no-ura.
The sea was the site of a major battle in 1185 between Heike and Genji warriors. The Heike were trounced, and the survivors are said to have thrown themselves into the sea in disgrace.
In telling the story of the struggle, an epic called the Heike Monogatari refers to a species of crab in the Inland Sea as reincarnations of the Heike warriors defeated at the Battle of Dan-no-ura. And no wonder — the shell of the crab includes markings that evoke a scowling samurai warrior. And I don’t mean “evoke” like Ursa Major evokes a bear (psst, it doesn’t). I mean the crab looks like a scowling samurai warrior.
In the original Cosmos series, Carl Sagan offered the heike face as an example of artificial selection.1 Fisherman in the area have known the legend for eight centuries. During that time, if the nets pulled up a crab with markings resembling a human face, even mildly so, the fisherman — understandably loathe to disturb the spirit of the samurai — would throw it back. Crabs with less facelike markings would end up dipped in butter. The more facelike, the more likely it would be tossed back in with a girlish scream, free once more to fornicate with others of its uncanny ilk.
Eight hundred years of this and you’ll find yourself looking at some pretty scream-worthy samurai crabs.
What’s most awe-striking about this is the fact that unlike other examples of artificial selection — dog breeding for example — the selective pressure exerted by the fisherfolk is wholly unintentional, but still works. It combines random variation and decidedly nonrandom selection in a way that mimics natural selection incredibly well.
I happen at the moment to be putting the finishing touches on a new seminar (this one based on Raising Freethinkers) to be offered for the first time at UUC Atlanta on January 11. While polishing a section on helping kids understand evolution, I remembered that I didn’t just have moths to work with, I also had crabs. Ahem.
But in Googling for images, I came across the last thing I ever wanted to see: a sturdy, possibly even convincing attempt by a reputable scientist to debunk the hypothesis, claiming that the crabs are seldom kept and eaten regardless of markings, and that nearly identical markings are found on fossil crabs. And some other stuff.
Now the only worthy response to this news is Oooo, truth beckons, let’s follow this lively gent wherever and to whatever abysses he shall lead, lest we miss the chance to glimpse our precious reality more clearly!
Instead, I recoiled. Nooooooo, I thought. Bad man. Stranger danger.
I may have mentioned that I love the story, love the elegance of the hypothesis. I want it to be true. It is too beautiful to not be true.
I KNOW, I KNOW. Don’t lecture me, people. This is confessional literature here. These are the moments that make me empathize with religious folks who are disinclined to lift the veil on their own favorite bedtime stories. Once in a while, I feel their pain.
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1Though Sagan got it from a 1952 article by biologist Julian Huxley.
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Postscript: When Erin asked for “something new” as a bedtime story last night, I told her the tale of the heikegani, from battle to Cosmos. But when I reached the hypothesis, I did the right thing: “Some scientists think it looks like a face because…” The caveat made it no less cool to her.
“Getting” belief
A final P.S. to the Santa discussion — The post I linked to last time (by philosopher and PBB contributor Stephen Law) just reminded me of another benefit of doing the Santa thing, one I’ve spoken of but may not have written about. Stephen puts it like so:
[Allowing kids to believe in Santa, etc.] gives them an appreciation of what it’s like to be a true believer. Even after the bubble of belief has burst, the memory of what it was like to inhabit it — to really believe — lingers on. The adult who never knew that is perhaps kind of missing out.
I think it even goes beyond missing out. I’ve found that adults who never “inhabited belief” of any kind often (not always) exhibit utter bafflement when it comes to religious belief. You can see this in countless blogs and essays and comment threads — I just can’t understand how anyone could believe abc, Why can’t they just wake up and realize xyz, ad infinitum. A natural lack of empathy ensues.
Bafflement is not good. It’s a kind of incomprehension. I don’t want my kids baffled by any major part of the world. If Stephen and I are right, Santa belief is an opportunity that can be drawn on for a lifetime — a source of empathy for those who willingly immerse themselves in belief even when the evidence against that belief is overwhelming. Not a bad thing at all, that empathy. In fact, it’s a precondition for dialogue.
Even if my kids never get religion, I at least want them to “get” religion — and being a true believer for a little while just may be the ticket.
Empathy symbol courtesy EmpathySymbol.com.
Santa Claus — The Ultimate Dry Run
By Dale McGowan
Excerpted from Parenting Beyond Belief
One of the questions that came up in the Austin Q&A was the Santa thing — and it’s so clearly in the air, from Friendly Atheist to Rational Moms, that I can’t even wait ’til Wednesday to chime in, because oh do I have an opinion. I threw in my two bits on pp. 87-90 of Parenting Beyond Belief, which I now offer virtually in the space below.
T’S HARD TO even consider the possibility that Santa isn’t real. Everyone seems to believe he is. As a kid, I heard his name in songs and stories and saw him in movies with very high production values. My mom and dad seemed to believe, batted down my doubts, told me he wanted me to be good and that he always knew if I wasn’t. And what wonderful gifts I received! Except when they were crappy, which I always figured was my fault somehow. All in all, despite the multiple incredible improbabilities involved in believing he was real, I believed – until the day I decided I cared enough about the truth to ask serious questions, at which point the whole façade fell to pieces. Fortunately the good things I had credited him with kept coming, but now I knew they came from the people around me, whom I could now properly thank.
Now go back and read that paragraph again, changing the ninth word from Santa to God.
Santa Claus, my secular friends, is the greatest gift a rational worldview ever had. Our culture has constructed a silly and temporary myth parallel to its silly and permanent one. They share a striking number of characteristics, yet the one is cast aside halfway through childhood. And a good thing, too: A middle-aged father looking mournfully up the chimbly along with his sobbing children on yet another giftless Christmas morning would be a sure candidate for a very soft room. This culturally pervasive myth is meant to be figured out, designed with an expiration date, after which consumption is universally frowned upon.
I’ll admit to having stumbled backward into the issue as a parent. My wife and I defaulted into raising our kids with the same myth we’d been raised in (I know, I know), considering it ever-so-harmless and fun. Neither of us had experienced the least trauma as kids when the jig was up. To the contrary: we both recall the heady feeling of at last being in on the secret to which so many others, including our younger siblings, were still oblivious. Ahh, the sweet, smug smell of superiority.
But as our son Connor began to exhibit the incipient inklings of Kringledoubt, it occurred to me that something powerful was going on. I began to see the Santa paradigm as an unmissable opportunity – the ultimate dry run for a developing inquiring mind.
My boy was eight years old when he started in with the classic interrogation: How does Santa get to all those houses in one night? How does he get in when we don’t have a chimney and all the windows are locked and the alarm system is on? Why does he use the same wrapping paper as Mom? All those cookies in one night – his LDL cholesterol must be through the roof!
This is the moment, at the threshold of the question, that the natural inquiry of a child can be primed or choked off. With questions of belief, you have three choices: feed the child a confirmation, feed the child a disconfirmation – or teach the child to fish.
The “Yes, Virginia” crowd will heap implausible nonsense on the poor child, dismissing her doubts with invocations of magic or mystery or the willful suspension of physical law. Only slightly less problematic is the second choice, the debunker who simply informs the child that, yes, Santa is a big fat fraud.
“Gee,” the child can say to either of them. “Thanks. I’ll let you know if I need any more authoritative pronouncements.”
I for one chose door number three.
“Some people believe the sleigh is magic,” I said. “Does that sound right to you?” Initially, boy howdy, did it ever. He wanted to believe, and so was willing to swallow any explanation, no matter how implausible or how tentatively offered. “Some people say it isn’t literally a single night,” I once said, naughtily priming the pump for later inquiries. But little by little, the questions got tougher, and he started to answer that second part – Does that sound right to you? – a bit more agnostically.
I avoided both lying and setting myself up as a godlike authority, determined as I was to let him sort this one out himself. And when at last, at the age of nine, in the snowy parking lot of the Target store, to the sound of a Salvation Army bellringer, he asked me point blank if Santa was real – I demurred, just a bit, one last time.
“What do you think?” I said.
“Well…I think all the moms and dads are Santa.” He smiled at me. “Am I right?”
I smiled back. It was the first time he’d asked me directly, and I told him he was right.
“So,” I asked, “how do you feel about that?”
He shrugged. “That’s fine. Actually, it’s good. The world kind of… I don’t know…makes sense again.”
That’s my boy. He wasn’t betrayed, he wasn’t angry, he wasn’t bereft of hope. He was relieved. It reminded me of the feeling I had when at last I realized God was fictional. The world actually made sense again.
And when Connor started asking skeptical questions about God, I didn’t debunk it for him by fiat. I told him what various people believe and asked if that sounded right to him. It all rang a bell, of course. He’d been through the ultimate dry run.
By allowing our children to participate in the Santa myth and find their own way out of it through skeptical inquiry, we give them a priceless opportunity to see a mass cultural illusion first from the inside, then from the outside. A very casual line of post-Santa questioning can lead kids to recognize how completely we all can snow ourselves if the enticements are attractive enough. Such a lesson, viewed from the top of the hill after exiting a belief system under their own power, can gird kids against the best efforts of the evangelists – and far better than secondhand knowledge could ever hope to do.
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A related post from Krismas 2007
For Tom Flynn’s counterpoint to this position, see pp. 85-87 of Parenting Beyond Belief.
Santa’s liddle helpurz
“Dad?”
“Lane, when it’s just you and me in the room, you don’t have to say ‘Dad?’ You can just start talking.”
“Okay.”
“…”
“Dad?”
“Yes, Laney.”
“I need a box.”
“What do you need a box for?”
“It’s kind of a secret.”
“Oh. Okay, how big does it need to be?”
“Big enough for an elf.”
****
Not all elves are created equal. I managed to get the elfish proportions nailed down with a few more questions. Whatever she was up to did not involve elves on the scale of Will Ferrell, nor Elrond, nor Dobby, nor even Hermey the Dentist. Holding her hands out in front of her, Delaney (7) indicated an elf closer to pixie size—maybe four inches tall.
“He’ll come to our house if we build a place for him to sleep!” she said, barely able to contain herself.
“Huh. What kind of elf are we talking about?”
“A Santa elf, hello.”
“I didn’t know they came into people’s houses.”
“Well did you ever build a little place for him?”
I admitted I had not.
“Well then of course he never came.”
It was all making perfect sense. I helped her find a box and she spent the evening decorating it, right down to a bed of fabric swatches.
“They like snacks, I have to leave him snacks!”
“How do you know all this stuff?”
“Sheri told me. He visited her house, and he left notes!”
“They can write?”
“Dad! Of course they can write, jeez.” Sometimes my ignorance overwhelms us both. She put a tiny pretzel in the house along with a pen and a pad of Post-Its, then went to bed shivering with excitement.
****
“Laney Laney! He came! He came!” It was her sister Erin (10), leaning a little too excitedly over the elf house early the next morning.
“He bit the pretzel! He left a note!”
The evidence was irrefutable. The pretzel had indeed been gnawed, and a Post-It on the wall of the box said TANKS SO MUTCH.
Laney was beside herself with glee. She wolfed breakfast and bolted out the door to compare notes with an equally-excited Sheri at the bus stop.
The Southeast is awash in elf legends this time of year. I wrote about a slightly different tradition last year, one in which stuffed elves come to life in the night and move about doing mischief before ending up in some unlikely spot, as if caught in the act of living.
Erin’s complicity this year is pretty interesting; just last year she went all Mythbusters on Laney’s elfish fantasies:
ERIN: They do not.
DELANEY: They do so.
ERIN: Laney, there’s no way they come alive.
DELANEY: I know they come alive, Erin!
I walked in.
DAD: Morning, burlies!
GIRLS: Hi Daddy.
DAD: What’s the topic?
ERIN: Laney thinks the elves really come alive.
DELANEY, pleadingly: They do! I know it!
ERIN: How do you “know” it, Laney?
DELANEY: Because. I just do.
ERIN: What’s your evidence?
DELANEY: Because it moves!
ERIN: Couldn’t somebody have moved it? Like the Mom or Dad?
DELANEY: But [cousin] Melanie’s elf was up in the chandelier! Moms and Dads can’t reach that high.
ERIN: Oh, but the elf can climb that high?
(Pause.)
DELANEY: They fly.
ERIN: Oh jeez, Laney.
DELANEY: Plus all the kids on the bus believe they come alive! And all the kids in my class! (Looks at me, eyebrows raised.) That’s a lot of kids.
This year Erin’s taking genuine delight in Laney’s delight, setting up elaborate proofs of each night’s visitation — proofs further confirmed by Sheri’s daily testimonies.
One morning last week, after the bus pulled away, another good friend and neighbor, mother of a kindergartner, waved me over.
“I have a kind of…unusual question for you,” she said. Given my speciality, it turned out to be an entirely usual question.
“I wondered what you guys think about the whole Santa thing,” she said. “And…well, also these elves. I mean, I know you don’t have religious faith, but I was interested to know what your take is on all that stuff. I sometimes worry that it distracts from the real reason for Christmas. But I don’t know if I’m making too big a deal of it.”
How very lovely to be asked for such an opinion by a Christian friend. I told her that “the whole Santa thing” is a point of contention among many secular humanists as well — a nice symmetrical irony if you ask me — but that I come down firmly on the side of relaxing and letting kids enjoy these things for the limited time they will choose to, in part because it gives them a chance to think their way out.
“We know for a fact that three or four years from now, they won’t still believe in elves, probably not even in Santa Claus,” I said. “They’ll stop believing it as soon as the desire to figure it out is stronger than the desire to believe in it. That’s when they sort the things they no longer believe in from the things they continue to believe. That’s a good thinking exercise. I wouldn’t want to deprive them of that or of the fun they’re having now.”
Some secular folks are especially horrified by the image of the little neighbor girls, each deceived by her own family, running to the bus stop to reinforce each other’s delusions. I can’t roll my eyes fast or high enough at such handwringing. Far worse, I think, are the parents who insist on shielding their kids from all nonsense. Isn’t it better for them to run into a little harmless nonsense right here and now than to grow up in a hermetically-sealed clean room of Truth? Just when and how do we expect them to learn to think their way around the messy real world if we raise them in a nonsense-free zone of their parents’ careful construction?
More on that Wednesday, when I’ll also say a bit about the great time I just had in Austin and update you on my sad little attempt at bridgebuilding.
REVELATION (bookin’ through the bible 13)
Thomas Jefferson considered it “merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherences of our own nightly dreams.” Robert Ingersoll called it “the insanest of all books.” Even Martin Luther, who knows a thing or two about being offensive, found it “offensive.” And though some modern theologians call it the “least important” book in the Bible, the Googlemind has a rather higher opinion of its significance:
Google hits for various canonical books:
— “Book of Luke” or “Gospel of Luke”: 414,000 hits
— “Book of Matthew” or “Gospel of Matthew”: 517,000
— “Book of Genesis”: 685,000
— “Book of Love”: 827,000
— “Book of Records”: 893,000
— “Book of Revelation”: 1.14 million
So whether or not it’s theologically “important,” the Book of Revelation clearly has our attention.
I Googled the phrase “The Book of Revelation is the most” to see what word comes next. Some favorites:
controversial–mysterious–troubling–important–detailed–thoroughly literary–dynamic, powerful, awesome, devastating–dispensational–thoroughly Jewish–puzzling, cryptic, frightening–misinterpreted–unusual–beautifully orchestrated symphony–extreme–hard to understand–fascinating–beautiful, majestic–bewildering–hopeful–comforting…
…book in the Bible. And now that Barack Obama has been proven to be the Antichrist — the Beast having chosen to reveal himself through the Illinois Lottery — we’d better take a look at the book that has warned us about him lo these many years.
A brief synopsis, for those of you who haven’t (yet) had the pleasure of devouring Left Behind:
John of Patmos had himself a “vision.” It starts with Christ appearing with eyes of flame, feet of bronze and a sword coming out of his mouth. He explains to John (in an understandably sword-muffled fashion) that he, John, should watch carefully so he can describe the vision to the churches.
John is taken before the throne of God where he sees twenty-four chosen ones and four Creatures covered with eyes, giving glory to God. Seven seals on seven scrolls are opened by a lamb. As each is opened, various things are loosed on the world—war, plague, death, earthquakes, and (my personal favorite) really outrageous food prices.
Sun black, moon red, stars fall, sky disappears, mountains flung, 144,000 people are marked with the seal of God.
As the lamb opens the seventh seal, everyone takes a thirty-minute break. Thank you, unions.
Seven trumpets sound, bloody hail and fire, sea turns to blood. Locusts that look like horses with lion’s teeth and sting like scorpions fly out of the abyss and for five months sting anyone who do not have the seal of God on his or her forehead. One third of humankind is killed.
John eats a scroll, and a war breaks out in heaven. A dragon is defeated. Seven vials of wrath opened. An angel tells birds to feast upon dead human bodies. The beast and the false prophet are cast alive into a lake of fire. The rest are killed with the sword of Jesus. A thousand years pass, God sends Satan to deceive us all, and whoever isn’t found in the Book of Life is cast into the Lake of Fire as the rest ascend to glory.
The End.
Imagine if you will my shock and surprise upon learning that John’s home island of Patmos has been the Mediterranean’s premiere source of hallucinogenic mushrooms for thousands of years.1
For many years I wondered not so much at how anyone could believe such unhinged ravings, but why they would even want to—why such a blood-soaked festival of flying monsters and burning flesh appeals to anyone. And it does, you know. The End of It All is not simply accepted by fundamentalists—it is yearned for.
William Miller, founder of the Adventist movement, predicted that the end of the world would come on October 22, 1844. When it didn’t, his followers referred to it not as “The Day of Phew!”, but as “The Great Disappointment.”2
When yet another, later prediction maddeningly passed, the first one had to be renamed The First Great Disappointment. Sometimes life just isn’t fair.
Many denominations, including Sarah Palin’s Assemblies of God, capture the yearning for the end perfectly by calling the coming end of the world “the blessed hope.” And she almost got the nuclear codes.
But I’ve come to empathize with the yearning to some degree, even if I don’t share it. It isn’t just about the triumph over death—it’s the triumph over injustice and evil. No matter how bad and unfair things seem, says John of Patmos through his shroomy haze, the wicked will one day pay in the most horrible way possible, and you’ll get to watch.
Compared to most of humanity, I’m a shar-pei sitting in the warm, fat lap of obscene privilege. I have never been the impotent victim of genuine injustice. I have recourse when I’m wronged, and I’m rarely seriously wronged. But to be a slave in the 17th century, or an impoverished Irish peasant in the 19th, or a Sudanese villager in the midst of civil war, to be shit upon relentlessly, to live in fear of an oppressor and to know you will die unvindicated for whatever happens to you—to live like that, imbued with our innate sense of fairness and to see none of it—I can see how Ultimate Fiery Justice would exert an irresistible pull. I’ve even seen the need for ultimate justice ( “Without it, Hitler would never pay!”) offered as the reason to believe.
I have considerably less empathy for those who define evil so misguidedly that the burning flesh they dream of smelling is not that of a slaveowner or warlord, but of the gay, the Jew, and the atheist. Not that I don’t know where they got such a grotesque and immoral definition of evil (HINT: See 1000-page preamble to Revelation).
Perhaps the most revealing moral question we could ever ask is whose shoes you’d like to see disappearing under the surface of that eternal lake of fire, with the prize going to those who say “none of the above.”
Okay, there it is. I had predicted the Bookin’ Through the Bible series would end last February (a date now known as The First Great Disappointment), but I proved infinitely distractable. Maybe that’s God’s problem as well—Armageddon’s on the calendar, but it just keeps getting pushed back.
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1“Magic mushrooms hit the God spot” (Australian Broadcasting Corp)
22000 years of end-of-the-world predictions
UK Channel 4 documentary on the continuing worldwide spread of end-times beliefs
(Click on the bible study series link in the sidebar to thumb through the rest of the series.)
Tray tables up! Flights of nonsense landing in Texas schools
The next act in the long and ugly creationist end-game will take place in Texas. After the previous two acts, my confidence is high.
One of my dearest hopes for the next generation is that they get a real shot at understanding evolution. My own teenage understanding of the theory was fuzzy around the edges, since we touched on it for all of about eight minutes in high school. I didn’t encounter it again until Anthro 1 at Berkeley–at which point it dazzled me so much I changed my major from psych to physical anthropology.
And am I ever glad I did, because understanding evolution changes everything. It is not just true but transformative and elegant and exquisitely, lastingly wonder-inducing. And the wonder is increasingly evident the deeper you dig — as opposed to religious wonder, which pales with each stroke of the spade. Yes, I want kids to understand evolution because it’s true, but I also want to gift them with the giddy perspective it brings, both humbling and exalting in its implications. It is indeed the “best idea anyone ever had,” but also the most astonishingly wonder-full.
When I fight to keep evolution in the schools and creationism out, it’s that wonder that I’m fighting for as much as fact. The fact that ignorance and cowardice among parents and educators keeps our kids from learning much about the Coolest Thing We Know simply breaks my heart.
That’s why I’m so excited to hear that creationists are busily reviewing state science standards in Texas.
(Wha??)
You heard me. When I read about this on Pharyngula, I squealed with girlish glee. Here’s why: When lunacy flies too far below the radar, the good guys slumber, the middle shrugs, and untold damage is done. But once in a while it flies high enough and caws loud enough to wake enough of us up to do something serious about it. That’s why I’m a big fan of those flights of nonsense.
It happens in politics as well. A recent such flight was piloted by the ghastly Michele Bachmann, a fascist (and I don’t use that word lightly) from my former state who won a seat in Congress in 2006 despite my objections. She’s been a dangerous nut for two years but only came to the country’s attention when she went on Hardball recently to call for a McCarthyesque rooting out of “anti-Americanism” in Congress:
Bachmann’s no more dangerous this week than last — she’s simply visible. As a partial result, the most admired Republican in the country endorsed the man she slandered. And as a direct result, three quarters of a million dollars poured in to her opponent’s campaign.
Another example: Would the left ever have gotten its act together if John McCain had selected a sensible running mate?
So we really shouldn’t gnash our teeth too much when nonsense flies high. Pass out the peanuts and encourage them to enjoy the in-flight movie while you spread some foam (or not) on the runway.
Evolution education has benefited tremendously from such high-visibility nonsense in recent years. The Dover trial was a lopsided victory for evolution, and the judge, a Bush appointee, wrote the most devastatingly powerful and scornful evisceration of “intelligent design” in the history of the issue. (If you haven’t seen the NOVA program about the trial, oh my word, people, click here.)
Without that high-flying attempt by the creationists, a crucial moment of progress couldn’t have occurred.
Then there’s Kansas, where the state Board of Education’s attempt to throttle evolution education ended with evolution more firmly ensconced in the curriculum standards than before and every last one of the creationist board members out of a job. Again, progress not in spite of, but because of, overt lunacy.
Now the flight is landing in Texas, where the Texas Board of Education (itself stocked with two creationists for every science-literate member) has named a six-person committee to review science standards — three science-literates and three high-profile creationist activists. The committee is headed by a seventh member, Don McLeroy, a creationist dentist (of all things).
See where this is going?
So why should parents outside of Texas care? Here’s why, from the Texas Freedom Network:
Publishers will use the new standards to create new textbooks. Because Texas is such a large market for textbook sales, publishers typically craft their textbooks for this state and then sell those books to other schools across the country. So the results of this curriculum process could have consequences for far more than just the 4.6 million children in Texas public schools.
Unsurprisingly, the National Center for Science Education is on it. They’re the good folks who coordinated the brilliant victory in Dover.
So be glad the lunacy is flying high where we can see it — but don’t be complacent, especially y’all in Texas. If nothing else, get yourselves informed before the board election by listening closely to this incredibly clear message from a well-informed Texas gentleman whose resemblance to Satan is almost certainly coincidental:
“What happened in Kansas and in Dover, Pennsylvania is about to happen here in Texas, too,” he says. Well I certainly hope so. It won’t be easy or smooth. The fable purveyors will do some damage along the way. But I’ve never been more confident in our ability to win in the end.
The Devil Goes Down to Georgia
I read to Delaney’s first grade class yesterday. She had prepped me for my visit like a military operation, reminding me at least five times of the exact time and S.O.P.
“There’s a chair you sit in, and I’ll sit right by you,” she said. “You have to bring three stories, but don’t be sad if we don’t get to all three.”
I promised to hold it together.
She nodded, then ran upstairs to rummage through her books. Five minutes later she was downstairs, beaming.
“First, you’ll read this one,” she said, handing me Rosie’s Fiddle, a great version of a classic folktale. “Then Crictor, the Boa Constrictor, and then”–she held up a finger, eyes closed– “IF there’s time…you’ll read Pete’s a Pizza.”
“Ooh, good ones,” I said, only really meaning it about Rosie’s Fiddle. The other two are nothing much, but Rosie’s Fiddle is the kind of story that can keep a roomful of six-year-olds perched at attention on the edge of their buns.
The operation commenced at 1330 hours.
“If Rosie O’Grady ever smiled,” I read dramatically, “no one but her chickens had ever seen it. She was as lean and hard as a November wind…”
The story goes on to describe the solitary Rosie playing the fiddle on her porch at night.
Folks said Rosie could fiddle the flowers out of their buds. They said she could fiddle the stones out of the ground. Folks said Rosie O’Grady could outfiddle the Devil himself. And that was a dangerous thing to say.
Oh…shit.
I flashed forward through the story in my mind, a version of Aarne-Thompson taletype 1155-1169 (Mortal Outwits the Devil). The tale has taken many forms through the years, but once a Russian folktale put a violin in Lucifer’s hand, the fiddling faceoff became the preferred choice, from Stravinsky’s L’histoire du Soldat to The Devil Went Down to Georgia. And Rosie’s Fiddle.
“What’s the Devil?” one kid piped up.
Shitshitshit. I looked at Mr. H, Laney’s magnificently gifted and cool teacher, whose smile was unperturbed.
“It’s a kind of a monster,” offered another kid.
“No,” said a third, “the Devil is the one who curses you if you do something bad.”
Aw shit. Stupidly, this hadn’t even crossed my mind when Laney selected the book.
I turned the page to reveal a drawing of the Devil, horns and tail and dapper red suit, standing at Rosie’s gate with a golden fiddle. They exchange pleasantries, then he gets down to bidness. “I hear tell you can out-fiddle the Devil himself,” I said with a growling Georgia accent, for some reason.
Soon the inevitable challenge is made, and Rosie mulls it over:
Now Rosie wasn’t any fool. She knew what the Devil would ask for if she lost: it was her soul she’d be fiddlin’ for. But Rosie had a hankering for the Devil’s shiny, bright fiddle.
I see all of this as great folklore. But I also knew that if I’d walked into my daughter’s classroom and heard another parent reading a parable of the Devil casting about for human souls, I’d have laid a poached egg.
The kids were riveted — it is quite a compelling story — and Mr. H didn’t seem the least bit troubled. But I was glad to pick up the second book, leaving the world of Faust and Charlie Daniels in favor of a safe, dull story about a pet snake — pausing for only a moment to remember whether the damn snake offers anybody an apple.
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]
Looking back…and it’s about time (2 of 2)
Guest column by Becca McGowan
I don’t think there is a God; but I wish there was one.
There it is. I said it.
I had never actually said this to anyone until my seven-year-old daughter asked me point-blank, “Mom, do you believe in God?” It had been easy to avoid a concrete answer up to that point because virtually all religious conversations in our home were between Dale and the kids. I was content to listen during family discussions and participate only in the easy parts: Everybody believes different things…the bible is filled with stories that teach people…we should learn about other people’s beliefs…we should keep asking questions so we can decide what we think…those were the easy parts. I told myself that I was still thinking about it.
The problem is that deep down, I had already decided. And I had decided that God was not real. God was created from the human desire to explain what we didn’t understand. God was an always-supportive father figure, able to get us through difficult times when human fathers were insufficient. I now believed what I had only toyed with in Mr. Tresize’s high school mythology class: A thousand years from now, people will look back on our times and say, “Look, back then the Christian myth held that there was one God and that his son became man…”
But wait a minute! This can’t be! Did I actually say this out loud to my daughter?! I am a GOOD person. I am a KIND person. I help OTHERS. As I left for school each day as a little girl, my mother always said, “Remember, you are a Christian young lady.” That’s who I AM!
Now, here I was, a mother, encouraging my children to keep asking questions, keep reading, keep talking with others. I want my children to think and learn. Then, I tell them, decide for yourself.
But had I ever asked questions about religion? Had I ever read about religion or talked with others? Had I actually decided for myself? No. I became a church-attending Christian as a way to rebel against my stepfather. I hadn’t thought about it for a day in my life.
Flash back eight years, driving home from church in our minivan, when Dale said to me, “I just can’t go to church anymore.” I was devastated.
I continued to attend church on my own for a couple of years. I also began reading Karen Armstrong’s In the Beginning. And I began to think about why I believed. The more I read and talked and debated, the more I realized that my belief was based on my label as a “Christian young lady.” My belief was based on uniting with my mother against my stepfather.
I now consider myself a secular humanist, someone who believes that there is no supernatural power and that as humans, we have to rely on one another for support, encouragement and love. Looking at religious ideas and asking questions, thinking and talking and then finally coming to the realization that I was a secular humanist—that was not the difficult part. Breaking away from the expectations and dysfunctions of my family of origin has proven to be the real and ongoing challenge.
__________________
BECCA McGOWAN is a first grade teacher. She holds a BA in Psychology from UC Berkeley and a graduate teaching certificate from UCLA. She lives with her husband Dale and three children in Atlanta, Georgia.
the legend of squishsquish
“Can I read you something from my Monster Museum book?”
I said sure, not knowing that we were launching a mini-obsession that so far has lasted a week. Delaney (6) flipped to the back of the book, which offers a short “bio” of each monster mentioned in the bad kiddie poetry that fills the rest of the book.
“‘BIGFOOT,’” she read. “‘Called Squishsquish in North America…’ Squishsquish?”
“Oh. Sasquatch.”
“You know about Bigfoot?” she asked, mighty impressed.
“A little,” I said. “Keep going. I want to hear.”
“‘Called Sasquatch in North America and Yeti in Asia. A huge, hairy, shy creature. Bigfoot prefers mountains, valleys, and cool weather. Many people claim to have seen and even photographed Squish…Squishkatch or Yeti or his footprints, but so far, no one has had a conversation with him.’ Haha! That’s funny.”
Each biographical entry has a little cartoon picture of the beast in question, with the exception of Bigfoot. We apparently know what a banshee looks like, and The Blob, and a poltergeist. But when it comes to Bigfoot, they simply put a question mark. I’m willing to bet it was the question mark that drew her attention to Bigfoot.
“If people took pictures,” she asked, “why is there a question mark?”
“I don’t know.”
“So is he real?”
“Some people think so, and some people think it’s a fake. Wanna see the pictures?”
We Googled up a few choice photos. Delaney gasped, launching into an enthralled monologue as I took furtive notes:
“It would be so interesting if Bigfoot was real. I really wonder if he is. It would be so cool if he was real! But maybe the picture is somebody in a gorilla suit. And maybe somebody went out with a big footprint maker and made footprints in the woods. Or maybe it’s real. But I’ll bet if he is real, he’s nice.”
“Why?”
“Because if he was mean, he’d be attacking people, and then we’d know he exists! But…there can’t be a person that big in a costume, so it seems like he has to be real somehow. Even the tallest person isn’t that tall.”
“So do you think it’s probably real, or probably not?”
She paused and thunk. “I’m not sure. I’m really, really not sure. I’ll bet scientists are trying to figure out. It’s just so cool to think about. It makes you curious.”
Yesterday she had a friend over—the pseudonymous Kaylee of a long-ago post—and dove right into the quest as I quietly transcribed the conversation on my laptop:
DELANEY: Have you ever heard of Bigfoot?
KAYLEE: No. What’s Bigfoot?
D: You have got to see this. You have got to see this. [Types BIGFOOT into Google.] Look, there it is. It’s called Bigfoot, but some people say Squishsquish.
K: What is it?!
D, with didactic precision: Some people say it’s like a gorilla man who lives in the forest. But you don’t have to worry. He wouldn’t be in any forest near us. Some people think it’s not even real.
K: So that’s Bigfoot??
D: Well it’s a picture.
K: So Bigfoot is real!
D: Nope, we don’t know that for sure. (Reads from website.) “An appeal to protect Bigfoot as an in-danger species has also been made to the U.S. Congress.”
K, (reading ahead): Look, it says right here, “Bigfoot is not real.” So he’s not real.
D: But we don’t know for sure. That’s just what the person says who has that website. That doesn’t make it for sure.
[Laney switches to image search, pulling up a full page of yetis.]
K: I hope it isn’t real. That would be so scary.
D: I hope it is. It would be so cool!
K: (looking at one photo): Does he only live in snow?
D: No look, there are pictures with no snow. It seems like he would hibernate. I wonder what he would eat.
K: Probably people.
D: I just wonder everything about him. Doesn’t it just make you so curious?
K: No. It makes me freaky.
I have a favorite particular moment in that dialogue–I’ll let you guess. But my favorite thing overall is Laney’s Saganistic approach to knowledge. Just as Carl Sagan wanted more than anything for intelligent life to exist elsewhere in the universe, Laney really wants Bigfoot to be real. It would, in both cases, be “so cool.” But that has no effect on her belief, or his, that the beloved possibility is real. Neither can see much joy or point in pretending that a wish makes it so. Both are happy to wait for the much greater thrill of knowledge, of the discovery that something wonderful turns out to be not just cool, but true.