Nice Guys Finish–an interview with Hemant Mehta
The annual convention of the Atheist Alliance International (AAI) is coming up at the end of September in Washington, DC. Included on the be-still-my-heart roster of speakers are Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Julia Sweeney, Daniel Dennett, and Eugenie Scott.
Oh, and me.
I’ll be the one in bobby sox and a poodle skirt screaming, “SAM!! Over HERE, Sam!! I have ALL your records!! I know all the lyrics to End of Faith, listen, listen: ‘The young man boards the bus as it leaves the terminal. He wears an overcoat. Beneath his overcoat, he is wearing a…’ OMIGOSH, HE BLEW ME A KISS!!” (Faint.)
But it’s another AAI convention that’s on my mind at the moment — Kansas City ’06, where I sat listening to an articulate and thoughtful twentysomething lad at the podium as he suggested atheists ought to show a friendlier face to the religious world than we often do.
He made the case that intentional ridicule and insult directed at religious folks are especially counterproductive. Included among his examples was the “Smut for Smut” campaign at the University of Texas San Antonio, in which atheist students offered to trade pornography for Bibles.
“BULLSHIT!” screamed a sixty-ish audience member near me. The speaker continued, so the guy in the audience stood and yelled again. “THAT’S BULLSHIT! Those people have courage, they’re out there fighting for your rights, and you ought to be honoring their courage!! For you to stand up there and…”
You get the idea. A kind of atheist “Support Our Troops” thing.
The speaker, seemingly unrattled, simply expressed his reasons again, while Mr. Bullshit sat, shook his head side to side, and bitched to his tablemates.
It was a powerful moment, a genuine clash between different visions of atheist activism. Both seek to move atheism out of the margins, but only one sees force of one kind or another as the way to get there.
Mr. Bullshit isn’t alone in thinking that a two-by-four between the eyes of religious folks is a good tool for advancing freethought. But neither is the speaker alone in thinking otherwise.
A few weeks ago I received a heartfelt email from a gentleman who saw the Newsweek article about PBB and wanted to express his hope that it did not focus on combating religion:
What I fear is that the momentum there appears to be today [in the popularity of freethought books] will hit an impassable wall of resistance because most people will still see Atheists and Agnostics as negative-oriented “spoilers”….I just don’t think we’re going to win this ideological war with criticism, argument, attack, and anger….I believe the only way Atheists and Agnostics will ever grow as a group is by offering people a joyful, wonderful alternative to religion….And in our own lives we should lead by example of how fulfilling one’s life can be without God.
Sadly, I can’t seem to find people who want to take this approach. I do not believe we can get [out of the margins] by attacking religion and people’s belief in God. Nor can we get there by assuming that Believers are usually stupid, ignorant, or brainwashed. I believe we can get there by offering an alternative that is as viable as religion and belief in God. I believe we can also coexist with Believers.
I gently suggested that, if he couldn’t find others taking that approach, he should look a little harder. There are scads of people out there working toward exactly the vision he advocates. I offered, as a shining example, this guy:
In addition to being the aforementioned speaker in Kansas City, Hemant Mehta is the author of The Friendly Atheist, one of the sharpest, wittiest, and most informative blogs on the block; author of I Sold My Soul on Ebay, a thought-provoking and fresh look at religious belief through a nonbeliever’s eyes; chair of the board of directors of the Secular Student Alliance; and one of the foremost advocates of nice-guy atheism. He was kind enough to take a moment to answer a few prying questions.
Q
Why so friendly?A
Most religious people I know aren’t doing the things atheists are so opposed to… They’re not pushing an anti-evolution agenda. They’re not trying to stop gay marriage or impede embryonic stem-cell research. But they do pray and they do have faith in God. I wholeheartedly accept that they are wrong in their beliefs, but they’re not the major problem.I think we can reach out to those people and get them on our side. We need to do that. They already are on our side about most social issues and they believe in separation of church and state. Those concerns are much more important to me than their belief in the supernatural.
And the way to reach out to those people is to be friendly and to explain who I am, why I’m an atheist, and why that’s ok. It doesn’t mean I agree with their beliefs or that I am conceding anything to them.
Hemant is one of those rare people with whom I seem to agree constantly. You know the type? Read his blog and see if you don’t find yourself nodding like a damn bobblehead.
Q
I know some non-religious folks (UUs, mostly, come to think of it) with a sort of “universal friendliness” toward religion and religious ideas. You seem to strike a more careful balance, discerning between those things that deserve respect and those that deserve critique. How do you strike that balance?A
If their beliefs are personal and they’re not hurting anyone else, I’m not too worried about it. Sure, I can debate with the people and try to convince them that they’re wrong, but it’s not going to do much good. Even if you “win” the argument, you haven’t accomplished much.On the other hand, when supernatural beliefs start causing harm, we have a problem. I’m referring to terrorists who act in the name of God, “psychics” who con vulnerable (and gullible) people out of their money, or certain Christian leaders whose clout helps bad legislation to get passed. Those people deserve to be criticized. Their faulty thinking and ignorance — due to their faith — is hurting others. By calling out their beliefs, we’re helping others who may be victims of their actions.
Q
Atheist meetings of all kinds, from local chapters to national conventions, are often far too self-congratulatory for me. I’d like to see the same critical balance struck when we look in the mirror. What is the biggest whack in the head (or two or three) you’d like to give to atheists as a group?A
Here’s a story for you. There was recently a poll on the website for Larry King Live, asking people about their religion affiliation. Initially, “Christians” were in the lead and “atheists” were in second. Some websites, mine included, encouraged atheists to submit a vote in the poll. A day later, the number of atheists was *overwhelming* — apparently, we were over 70% of the population.Obviously, that’s not a scientifically accurate poll. But as one astute commenter mentioned on my blog, the results showed that we can get atheists to work together when it comes to irrelevant stuff, like this poll. When it comes to “rallying the troops” during election time or supporting national organizations who can speak on behalf of atheists on a large stage, we’re pathetic. I wish we could get our act together and convince other atheists that by ourselves, we’re not going to be able to accomplish much. We won’t be respected or accepted. But by supporting common causes and like-minded organizations, we could change that.
It’d also be nice if atheists would work harder at pointing out the benefits of a Godless worldview (as opposed to a religious one) and how you don’t need religion to be a good, moral, happy person. Instead, we just find joy in telling religious people how stupid they are. It gets us nowhere. But it does create more enemies.
Q
And how about the other side — I mentioned the heckler in Kansas City. Do you get much of that kind of flak from atheists who think you’re too accommodating of religion?A
The flak I get isn’t as bad as the Heckler 🙂 There are some atheists who think I’m too easy on religion. We may hold the same (non-)beliefs, and I’d say we also have the same passion for atheism, but like I said, I don’t think we’re focusing our energies where we should be, and they disagree.One thing I do want to point out: I get very *little* mail from Christians who tell me I’m going to Hell. That was very surprising to me. Not all Christians love what I wrote in the book, but most of them write very civil emails. I was told by other atheists to expect a barrage of angry Christian letters, but it never happened. Most Christians that write me resonated with the tone of the book.
Q
You know, I heard the same dire warning and got the same civil result. I think we pay so much attention to the nuts that we begin to expect that of all religious folks. Okay, another question. Give me two visions of the future, 50 years down the pike—one pessimistic, the other optimistic. You’re in your late seventies, I’ve been dead for 49 years, the Hilton Administration is in its third term. What’s the religious state of affairs in the U.S.?A
Pessimistic vision: You’re dying in a year, and I’m supposed to be pessimistic?! 🙂Okay—the world in this state wouldn’t be very different from where it is now. Our government may not officially be a theocracy, but the Christian Right has the power to make decisions for all of us. We’ve made no progress in obtaining rights for all people. Scientific research in the field of biology is all but halted because we can’t get federal funding for the most promising research there is. And I wouldn’t be surprised if abortion was made illegal.
Optimistic vision: Religion’s not going to go away, but ideally, in 50 years, I could see a country with a higher percentage of atheists (from ~15% now to possibly 30% in the future). We would have more seats in local and national government. We’ve helped acquire rights for all people and passed legislation that helps all people, religious or not. We’re not interfering with the private decisions of Americans, as long as they’re not stopping anyone else from living their own lives as they wish. And when a person says publicly, “I’m an atheist,” no one flinches. I think that’s entirely within reason. But it won’t happen if atheists continue acting the way we have been for so long.
Q
One more: how’s I Sold My Soul on Ebay doing?A
It’s going well… I have yet to see exact numbers (in terms of sales) but there is a lot of response from people who have read the book. Many bloggers and mainstream media have written about it, and there are still some projects stemming from the book in the works. It has also helped me transition into writing my blog, which I probably would not have started without the eBay auction. At many atheist conventions I’ve gone to since the auction, more people have heard about my website than the book! And I think that’s wonderful; it just speaks to the message I’m trying to convey, that we could achieve more success with a “friendlier” image.
Helluva guy, don’t you think?
One of the trickiest bits to negotiate in raising kids without religion is engendering the right attitudes about religion and religious people. Some aspects of religious belief deserve a helluva lot of loud and direct critique. I want them to learn to do that fearlessly, like Harris and Dawkins. But other aspects and actions deserve loud and direct applause. I want them to learn that as well [LIKE DAWKINS AND HARRIS. More on that later]. Discernment is called for. While never hesitating to criticize religious malignancies, we should bend over backwards to catch religious folks being and doing good if we ever expect them to notice us being and doing good. It stands to reason.
I feel a coinage coming on: Let’s call that hemantic discernment.
No marginalized group in history has gained a place at the table by telling the majority it is too stupid to live, or by closing its eyes and telling the majority you better damn well be gone before I count to ten. Imagine the dead end that gay rights would have encountered if the movement spoke of working toward a world with no heterosexuals. Imagine the grinding halt to civil rights legislation if black Americans insisted that white be recognized as inferior to black. By instead seeking nothing more or less than a shared place at the table, these movements moved. Until we realize the same thing and extend a far friendlier hand to the more reasonable representatives of the (most likely shocked and surprised) religious majority, we will be deservedly stuck on the margins.
Don’t worry. People like Hemant just might manage to save us from ourselves.
this ain’t your grandpappy’s Atlanta
I spent the first Sunday morning in our new Atlanta home heaving worldly possessions from our PODS (Portable On Demand Storage, highly recommended) container to the garage in 95-degree heat. At 10 o’clock I caught the eye of a neighbor mowing his lawn. He nodded and smiled. I nodded and smiled. Not in church, eh? we said telepathically. That’s right, we each responded. Two sweaty joggers bobbed by, presumably not church-bound.
Nod.
Nod.
Standing in line at the post office last week, I counted accents. I heard 28 people speak long enough to take a reasonable guess. Several distinct New Yorkers (including one behind the counter), a Bostonian, a possible New Jerseyite, at least three Midwesterners, an English woman, an Indian couple, and two women from California. Others were hard to place but definitely un-Southern.
So how many of the 28 had even a trace of a Southern accent? Three.
Our realtor is from Indiana. Our neighbors on the left are from California. Across the street is Michigan, and next to her, upstate New York. The guy who fixed our phone cable is from Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
I’m beginning to see why Southerners call Atlanta the “New York of the South.” It ain’t just the skyscrapers — it’s the New Yorkers. We’re in North Fulton County, an area exploding with newbies from everywhere but here, many brought in by the Fortune 500 companies based in town.
And we’re in an area more diverse than the one we left in Minneapolis. Our immediate neighborhood includes families from Indonesia, Taiwan and Pakistan. The populations at my kids’ schools are 40% non-white.
This is goooood.
It’s not that Northern is better than Southern, non-white better than white, or non-religious better than religious. It’s sameness that’s the enemy. I REALLY don’t want my kids growing up surrounded by people who look and think and act just like they do. As a teenager, I remember barfing inwardly at the phrase “Celebrate Diversity!” — until I spent some time surrounded by conforming sameness and watched all of the grotesque pathologies that bubble out of that. I’m a white liberal nonbeliever, but I know better than to want my kids growing up in an area that’s all-white (been there), all-liberal (done that), or all non-believer (don’t even wish for it). I want a mix.
And here in the northern stretch of Atlanta, as a result of the infusion of difference in the past 20 years, my kids are going to grow up in a much more diverse and cosmopolitan place than I sometimes feared in the weeks leading up to the move, laying awake in a cold sweat, staring at a ceiling that kept turning into the Stars and Bars and imagining the new neighbors as some combination of this
…and this
Though these guys are surely around, they’re a helluva lot rarer than the worst of my sleepless Minnesota nights would have had me believe. Isn’t that usually the case? Don’t I usually find that late nights are the worst time to measure reality? So when will I finally learn to tell my insomniac fears, once and for all, to bugger off?
By clicking on the lights one at a time, I guess. All that to say: now that I’ve seen Atlanta with the lights on, I like it.
The distiller’s art
Distillation’s been on my mind lately — the art of condensing something ungraspably large into a graspable essence. I mentioned Carl Sagan’s Cosmic Calendar a few weeks ago, a distillation of universal history that instantly focused my understanding of just how recent we are — and how small we are, and how deep and silly our delusions of bigness are.
Distilling space
Here’s another distillation of a sort:
This image, called the Hubble Deep Field, must be the greatest picture of all time, a deep space image by the Hubble Telescope. How much sky does this represent? Imagine a dime held 75 feet away. The portion of the sky that dime would cover is the portion represented here. And it’s a patch of sky that appears essentially empty when viewed by ordinary telescopes. Most of the dots of light are not stars but galaxies. And this is one infinitesimal dot of space.
The Hubble Deep Field is my laptop background, and I sometimes find myself staring at it for ten minutes at a whack. It rivals Voyager’s famous “pale blue dot” photo and the first glimpse of Earthrise from the Moon for the granting of instant and lasting perspective for those who are awake:
You are here: The tiny dot is Earth viewed from Voyager II.
The 1968 paradigm rattler.
I love the particular headrush you get from this kind of distilled reality, the epiphany (sorry, it’s the best word) that can be achieved by snapshots capturing essences otherwise too large to grasp. In a single glance, I GET it.
Distilling time
Here’s another one:
That won’t mean anything to you normals, but having spent 25 years studying or teaching music theory, it’s something that makes me swoon. Music is notoriously tricky to get your hands on. Visual art is form and color arrayed across space, so you can snap on the rubber glove and it’ll hold still for the examination. Music, by contrast, is sound arrayed across time. Time is its body, so you can’t get it to hold still without killing it.
“If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works,” said Douglas Adams, “the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat.”
An Austrian music theorist named Heinrich Schenker developed a method for reducing a complex and ever-moving piece of music into a graspable snapshot. The chart above is a Beethoven string quartet movement of nearly 400 measures reduced to its essence. Foreground, middleground, and background, harmony and melody, it’s all there.
And–it’s not all there. Schenker didn’t intend this to replace music, but to give a little window of understanding, another way to GET it. I love to listen to Beethoven quartets, and I love to understand them as well. Then listening while understanding — don’t get me started.
Sagan’s Cosmic Calendar, mentioned above, is another time distiller, of course.
Distilling thoughts
Books are another tough nut to crack. By the time you get to the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, or The God Delusion, or Left Behind #13 — Kingdom Come, the sense of what a given book was “about” can reasonably vary from person to person. A friend reads Dawkins and hears a constant stream of invective. I read Dawkins and hear a constant stream of reasoned argument. No point saying one of us is definitively right or wrong. But there is one kind of snapshot distillation that I think sheds some interesting light — the concordance.
One type of concordance is a list of all the words appearing in a given book. Not the same as an index, which is a list of all concepts, whether or not they appear verbatim in the book. Somewhat subjective, the index. A concordance simply counts and reports. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, for example, includes a long concordance that is misnamed “Index.” In it, you can find the apparent only significant use of the word “maggot-pie” — by Shakespeare, who else — and learn that the great quotesmiths have preferred to go on about love (586 times) more than hate (72 times). That’s nice.
But there’s another kind of concordance, one that can grant a bit of that snapshot distillation I’m on about. This kind records the most frequent words in a book.
If you hate “reductionism” — I myself happen to have a lifelong schoolboy crush on it, dotting its ‘i’s with little hearts as I write its name a thousand times on my three-ring binder — but if you hate it, you’ll hate concordances. They don’t reveal everything about a book, of course. If a concordance says the word MEAN appears 632 times in a book, does that indicate an obsession with hostility, or with significance, or with mathematical averages? And even if it is about hostility, is the book fer it or agin it? Maybe “mean” is always preceded by the phrase please don’t be.
The Hubble photo doesn’t tell us everything about the universe, either. It just gives us an insight, a new way of seeing it. Same with the concordance.
(Okay, the casual readers have long since gone. As a reward for the rest of you, here comes the point.)
I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but for the past several months, Amazon.com has been sprouting new features like a house afire. My favorite new feature is, of course, the concordance. The 100 most common words in a given book are arrayed in a 10×10 block with font sizes varying by frequency. Huge-fonted words appear a lot, medium-fonted words etc. You get a fairly powerful sense of content, approach, and tone at a glance. I daresay I could show you concordances for books by Benedict XVI and Lenny Bruce and you’d know which was which — and which you’d rather read. (No no, don’t tell me, I’m keen to guess.)
Here, for example, is a concordance for one of my favorite recent books. Just looking at those hundred words makes me want to read it a fourth time.
The Point
Below are concordances for two parenting books, with the 100 most common words in order of frequency (in batches of ten for easier reading). One is about raising kids using biblical principles; the other is about raising kids without religion. See if you can tell which is which, and whether the concordances reveal anything about content, approach, and tone:
BOOK A
1-10: children—parents—god—child—love—own—husband—family—lord—word
11-20: wife—teach—heart—sin—christ—father—need—life—things—even
21-30: kids—should—man—must—son—proverbs—parenting—mother—does—scripture
31-40: kind—wisdom—evil—first—church—shall—may—home—fear—authority
41-50: marriage—obey—christian—ephesians—law—work—right—come—principle—means
51-60: take—truth—wives—woman—time—true—good—himself—solomon—give
61-70: live—men—let—paul—role—society—duty—honor—commandment
71-80: obedience—responsibility—teaching—against—gospel—know—therefore—verse—discipline—people
81-90: submit—something—themselves—jesus—want—women—wrong—world—day—think
91-100: instruction—faith—always—attitude—command—ing—certainly—spiritual—genesis—now
BOOK B
1-10: children—god—parents—religious—time—people—child—good—things—life
11-20: family—religion—world—think—believe—secular—know—even—beliefs—may
21-30: years—questions—own—right—kids—human—death—reason—first—school
31-40: idea—need—day—should—ing—moral—see—live—want—new
41-50: book—help—now—find—say—take—work—answer—others—something
51-60: church—come—wonder—bob—values—age—friends—get—go—little
61-70: does—without—long—often—true—thinking—feel—stories—must—love
71-80: exist—part—give—important—really—animals—two—great—kind—might
81-90: humanist—best—look—seems—still—atheist—few—thought—mean—mind
91-100:kobir—different—though—meaning—experience—problem—always—fact—adults—ceremony
Book A is
Book B is
The first observation is among the most interesting: that these two books, though different in many, many ways, have the same top three words. Even more interesting is that the secular parenting book mentions God more often. Not entirely surprising if you think about it. The top four words in Quitting Smoking for Dummies are SMOKING, SMOKE, TOBACCO, and CIGARETTES.
Next we notice a few surprises, like the fact that the concordance program promotes the suffix ‘ing’ to the status of a word, and that a dialogue in my book ends us up with the speakers’ names — Bob and Kobir — at #54 and #91, respectively.
Right, right…the point
One of the first things I noticed in comparing the two is the relative importance of obedience. What the Bible Says About Parenting uses the word OBEY 66 times and OBEDIENCE 49 times, while the same words appear only six and four times (respectively) in Parenting Beyond Belief — even though PBB is almost exactly twice as long. As a percentage of text, these words appear twenty-two times more frequently in the religious parenting book than in the non-religious one. I find that revealing, though not exactly surprising. I want my kids to know how to obey, sure, but it’s sixth or seventh on the list of my hopes for them (as I’ve written elsewhere). Seems a tad higher on the list for What the Bible.
What about parenting books in-between? I looked at two current mainstream bestsellers, Parenting From the Inside Out and I Was a Really Good Mom Before I Had Kids — neither of which includes OBEY or OBEDIENCE in its concordance. Religion and obedience seem particular stablemates.
I’m dismayed, but again unsurprised, that love is #5 in WTB and #69 in PBB. To tell the truth, I’m relieved it’s in our top 100 at all. Freethinkers love no less, of course, but we spend most of our time talking about truth and generally let love take care of itself. Religious folks often do the opposite, talking of endless love and letting truth tag along if it can keep up. And lo and behold, THINK is #14 for us and #89 for them. Also high in our list are the lovely words QUESTIONS (#22) and IDEA (#31) — neither of which appears in the other list.
The presence of words like HUSBAND, WIFE, SON, MOTHER, and FATHER high in the WTB list might indicate that role divisions are important. None of these appear in the PBB hit parade, which I think indicates less emphasis on divided roles. Perhaps I’m reading too much into these things. (READER: No no, I think you’re onto something!)
The presence of EPHESIANS on the WTB list makes some sense, since the end of Ephesians lists several familial duties — ‘Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord,’ (5:22) ‘Husbands, love your wives’ (5:25). But the fact that EPHESIANS appears 64 times just baffled me — until I remembered one of the most chilling verses in the NT:
Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. Honor your father and mother — which is the first commandment with a promise — that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth (Eph 6:1-3).
The conditional phrase “that you may enjoy long life” is no metaphor: It refers directly to Deuteronomy 21:18-21:
If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them; Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city…and they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice…And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die.
(For those who insist the OT is no longer in force, that it was replaced by a “new covenant” in the NT, Jesus wants a word with you. Now.)
Neither Ephesians nor Deuteronomy appears in the PBB top 100. Phew. We write about how to talk to kids about death (#27), but these guys threaten them with it. Okay okay, not directly…but by quoting the hell out of Ephesians, some (not all) religious folks show their enthusiasm for ultimate punishments in no uncertain terms.
I could go on and on, pointing out the high frequency of words like SIN, DUTY, EVIL, FEAR, AUTHORITY, DISCIPLINE, COMMAND, COMMANDMENT, SUBMIT, LAW, and INSTRUCTION in WTB, and the absence of any of those in PBB’s top 100, and the wholly different brands of parenting implicit in such observations. I could. But it seems equally important to point out that not all religious parenting books share the numbingly authoritarian quality that the concordance of What the Bible Says About Parenting seems to bespeak. In fact, I’d like to show you another Christian parenting book that has almost NONE of the sad and disheartening earmarks of WTB, James Dobson, and the rest of that ilk. But I’m sleepy. Next time, then.
(Here’s the link to PBB’s Amazon concordance, btw.)
choosing your battles
I’m all Southern now. For proof, see last post, in which God and football are mentioned in the same breath.
Somebody emailed me to ask why exactly I’m not girding for battle over the inclusion of God as one of the four team values for my son’s public football league. Let’s suppose for a moment it was a serious question. When it comes to religious incursions into public life, how do you decide when to fight and when to let it be?
Since I edited Parenting Beyond Belief, I’ve heard stories of church-state violations that would make your fries curl: public school marquees with Bible verses, a public kindergarten teacher showing the bible-based Veggie Tales and reading from In God We Trust — Stories of Faith in American History, even a values assessment in a public high school that gave kids a lower values score if they didn’t attend church or believe in a “higher power.”
Like the aforementioned curly fries, some of these are small issues, some are medium — and some are SuperSize. To sort them out, it’s a good idea to think about why church-state separation exists. It does not exist to “avoid offending atheists.” Ed Buckner put it this way in Parenting Beyond Belief:
Many people do oppose separation of religion and public education, of course, but most do so because they lack good understanding of the principle and its purpose. The most common misunderstanding is that separation is designed to protect religious minorities, especially atheists, from being offended. Offending people without good reason isn’t ever a good idea, but that isn’t the point of separation. Separation is necessary to protect everyone’s religious liberty.
THAT is what separation is for. If I tell you I’m in favor of putting God back in schools, half of my relatives would cheer — until I announce that it’s Chac-Xib-Chac, the Mayan god of blood sacrifice, who will be worshipped, and the Mayan creation story that’ll be taught as true.
Suddenly I’m no fun at all.
Likewise, if I said our prayers would be specifically Catholic — that we would pray to Mother Mary and invoke the name of Benedict XVI each morning, for example — there’d be Protestants laying bricks in the principal’s office.
Nobody understood this better than Southern Baptists at their founding. They were a tiny minority then, you see, and didn’t want some majority vision of God forced on their kids. Here’s Dr. Ed again:
The Southern Baptist Conference understood the point so well that it included separation of church and state as one of its founding principles. The Southern Baptists adopted, in their “Baptist Faith and Message,” these words: “The church should not resort to the civil power to carry on its work….The state has no right to impose penalties for religious opinions of any kind. The state has no right to impose taxes for the support of any form of religion.” Only by consistently denying agents of government, including public school teachers, the right to make decisions about religion is our religious liberty secure.
But now that they’ve made it into the mainstream, why, they can’t quite remember what all the separationist fuss was about.
If I heard that a teacher at my kids’ school was advocating atheism — saying specifically that God does not exist, for example, and telling the kids they should believe the same — I’d be the very first parent demanding his or her head. Secular schools are not the same as “atheistic” schools. They are neutral on religious questions — and that, you careful readers of the Constitution will know, is the American Way.
Anyway, back to my boy’s football thing. Stu Tanquist (whose essay title I stole for this entry) offered a list of considerations in Parenting Beyond Belief:
When considering whether or not to challenge religious intrusion in our lives, there are many factors to consider:
• Is your child concerned about the consequences?
• Could your child be negatively impacted by the challenge? Might he or she be ostracized at school by teachers or students?
• If successful, how significant would the change be? Would it positively benefit other families and children?
• Could you and your family be negatively impacted?
• What are your chances of success?
• How much time and resources are required?
• Do you risk damaging existing relationships?
• Is this likely to be a short-term or long-term fix?
• Is legal action necessary?
• Are there other parents or organizations that could assist you?
• Are you bored? Do you really need the spice this will add to your life?
• Would it feel rewarding both to you and your child if you succeeded?
This list isn’t designed to spit out the “right” answer; it simply raises the right issues. “Damage to existing relationships” is unfortunate, but in some cases might be outweighed by “positive benefit [to] other families and children.” Read his chapter and you’ll see how Stu geared his own responses, sitch by sitch, as his daughter encountered religious incursions in her public education.
The most important point Stu makes is the importance of considering the child’s wishes. Pushing a point your child doesn’t want pushed might do far more damage to your parent-child relationship than the issue is worth.
In the end, the football thing was a no-brainer. Compared to the likely consequences — especially for the new kid — it just doesn’t matter enough. God is just being presented as a value — inappropriately so, yes, but the effect is mild. My boy isn’t being forced to pledge individual belief in God, as he was (repeatedly) in Scouts. And he’s less impressionable now, better able to think for himself, so I’m not concerned about him being unduly influenced by an admired figure like his coach.
There are certainly cases in which I would stand up — and have. This just isn’t one of them. I’d be interested to hear what you think about Stu’s list — if there’s anything you’d add or subtract, for example — and whether you’ve come up against separation issues and how you handled them.
the iWord
[Creepy cover image from The Manipulated Mind:
Brainwashing, Conditioning and Indoctrination by Denise Winn.]
There’s a smart and funny dad-blog across the pond (no no, the other pond — veer left and go long) at the Sydney Morning Herald called “Who’s Your Daddy.” Author Sacha Molitorisz blogged about parenting and religious issues in WYD the same week as my SMH interview about PBB.
(Okay…pulling back from the abyss of acronyms…)
How religious Sacha is himself I dunno — but with advice like this, who cares:
Both Jo and I want to give [our daughter] Edie the best education possible, and both of us want her to learn about religion and spirituality. Ultimately, we want her to make up her own mind about her beliefs, but we want her to do so from a position of knowledge, not ignorance. Ideally, we’d love her to know a little about Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and more.
The question is: Which school is going to give Edie a balanced education about the world’s religions? In fact, is there such a school? Jo went to a Catholic high school, where she learnt, predictably enough, about Catholicism. I went to a secular public school, where I learnt nothing at all about religion. Perhaps the best Jo and I can hope for, rather than a school with a comprehensive spiritual syllabus, is a school that teaches some religion, and is unbiased in its lessons.
Edie’s a lucky kid. She’s growing up with a far-better-than-average chance to think for herself when it comes to religion, since she has parents who know that broad-based religious literacy without indoctrination is an indispensible part of that.
Sacha did get me a bit tetchy with this passage:
McGowan says that in his family there are no taboo subjects when it comes to spirituality. As he says, “My goal is to keep [my kids] open and off-balance until they are old enough to start deciding on their own position”….McGowan’s position raises an irony that’s often unspoken. People such as McGowan think they’re being completely impartial and inclusive in their approach to religious instruction. But the child of an atheist is being just as indoctrinated as the child of a devoutly religious person….One dad’s atheism will probably influence his child as profoundly as another dad’s Greek Orthodoxy – and a child will ultimately either absorb that spirituality or react against it.
I’d have nodded uncontrollably at that passage if Sacha had modified a single sentence:
But the child of an atheist is at no less risk of being indoctrinated than the child of a devoutly religious person…
The difference between the two phrasings is huge. The first is unintentionally cynical. It implies that there’s just no way to raise a child without indoctrination. Yet Sacha’s description of his own plans for Edie’s religious instruction sounds remarkably free of the iWord.
His plans also sound remarkably similar to mine.
What Sacha is recognizing is the inevitability of influencing our kids. There’s no use denying that, nor would I want to. I hope to influence my kids positively by what I do and say. And I wince in recognition of the dark side of influence when my less attractive mannerisms, words, opinions, and attitudes begin surfacing in the kids. Nothing quite as horrifying as seeing yourself through the glass of your children, darkly. Likewise, there’s little as thrilling as seeing positive seeds you’ve planted — patience, empathy, gratitude, honesty — bearing lovely fruit in a moment that could have gone either way.
Influence is sometimes passive and sometimes a matter of intentional teaching. In those moments of active instruction (“Don’t throw your gum wrapper out the window!”), we try to follow up with reasons (“What if everybody did that?”) to help the kids develop independent moral judgment. The first sentence only proscribed a single act. The second invoked a universal principle that can be applied again and again. That’s influence at its best: Teach a man to fish, and all that.
My kids know — and are surely influenced by — my religious views. But I go to great lengths to counter that undue influence, keeping them off-balance while they’re young so they won’t be ossified before they can make up their adult minds:
“Dad? Did Jesus really come alive after he was dead?”
“I don’t think so. I think that’s just a made-up story so we feel better about death. But talk to Grandma Barbara. I know she thinks it really happened. And then you can make up your own mind and even change your mind back and forth about a hundred times if you want.”
That’s influence without indoctrination.
Indoctrination is another ball of cheese entirely. Princeton’s WordNet hits it right on the head, in my humble:
INDOCTRINATION (n.) Teaching someone to accept doctrines uncritically.
Here’s one of my own:
INDOCTRINATION (n.) The pre-chewing of someone else’s intellectual food.
“Because I/God/the Pope/Scripture said so” is the frame in which indoctrination is most often hung. Non-religious parents should be less likely to parent by indoctrination, if only because they’ve seen the iWord from the outside. Yet many fall into it anyway. Silly monkeys. Take a lesson from Sacha, who has recognized the iWord from inside religion.
At the heart of indoctrination is the distrust of reason. The indoctrinator simply can’t entrust so important a thing as [insert doctrine here] to the process of independent reasoning.
But freethought parenting should have confidence in reason at its foundation. We ought to know that either reason leads to our conclusions or our conclusions ain’t worth the neurons they’re written on. Teach kids to think independently and well, then trust them to do so. And part of that education is encouraging them to resist indoctrination of all kinds — even if it’s coming from Mom and Dad.
[N.B. Wikipedia also has a very thoughtful entry on indoctrination.]
vive la différence
First, a bit of news: We’ve arrived in Atlanta and tentatively found our new home, and (following the Newsweek article) Parenting Beyond Belief hovered between 350 and 700 on Amazon — the top two hundredths of a percent — before cooling off a bit.
More on all that later. Right now I’ve a blogligation to fulfill. Several weeks back, a reader asked a great question: Why do I consider the line between “religious parenting” and “nonreligious parenting” to be meaningful? Isn’t the kind of parenting I advocate (unbounded questioning, a scientifically-informed, evidence-based worldview, questioning of authority, rejecting the notion of “sinful thoughts,” developing moral judgment instead of simple rule-following, etc. etc.) really just “good parenting”? Am I really saying that religious parents can’t do these things?
No, I’m not saying that — partly because I can’t.
Really. I can’t. It’s an absolute statement, you see — and twenty years immersed in the liberal arts, first as a student, then as a professor, left me completely incapable of making an absolute statement. (Well, not completely.) Go back and read my blog so far. I constantly use qualifiers like most, many, almost, and some because I am painfully aware that all generalizations are wrong.
Well…not all.
There is nothing that religious parents “can’t” do, nothing that is the exclusive purview of secular parenting — just as there is nothing that religious parents can achieve that I can’t.
So why make the distinction at all, then? Why describe something called “secular parenting” if it’s pretty much the same as good religious parenting?
Because though we can end up pursuing the same ends, they really aren’t the same. There is a profound difference in the context — the space in which religious parenting and secular parenting happen.
Both secular and religious parents can raise kids to value fearless questioning, require genuine evidence, question authority, and reject paralyzing ideas of “sin” and the demonization of doubt. But one of these worldviews encourages and supports those values, while the other discourages them. One lends itself to them; the other chafes against them.
(Psst: I’ll tell you which is which in a minute.)
Being a freethinking Christian is something like being a pro-choice Republican. Opposition to legalized abortion is one of the central, defining policy planks of the Republican Party platform. There are pro-choice Republicans, of course, but they surely recognize that their pro-choice position is at odds with their party’s ideology. They can still do it, of course, can still hold that dissenting position within a Republican identity, but when it comes to that issue, they’ll be swimming upstream, struggling against one of the defining values of their group.
Same with pro-war Quakers, acrophobic window washers, and Danny, the claustrophobic tunneler in The Great Escape. “Jeez, good luck with that” is about all I can think to say.
My hat’s off to any religious parent who encourages unrestrained doubt, applauds fearless questioning and rejects appeals to authority. Such religious parents are salmon swimming against one helluva mighty current. At the core of religious tradition and practice are the ideas that doubt is bad, that certain questions are not to be asked, and that church and scripture carry some degree of inherent authority. This varies among the denominations, of course, but some degree of these three will be present in virtually every flavor of the faith. (Five extra points for each weasel word or phrase you can find in that sentence.)
The great glory of secular parenting is that it embraces several key values that religion has traditionally suppressed and feared, allowing parents and children to turn away from that pointless, mind-juddering dissonance, to dance in the light of knowledge and to revel in questioning and doubting as the highest human callings, rivalled only by love.
Parenting Beyond Belief is about the ecstasy of parenting from a worldview that supports and encourages some of our most deeply-held values. That, then, is the difference. And vive la it.
As for those religious-parent salmon, swimming against the unhelpful currents of church tradition, heed this wisdom from the Book of Dory — just keep swimming, follow your conscience, and do what you can to help others see the light:
Kids’ behavior baffles secular dad
Help me out with this one.
My kids have been showing a pattern of behavior lately. Well, truthfully, it’s nothing new. They’ve been this way for years. But it’s only lately that I’ve come to recognize it as a pattern, and I just can’t figure out where it comes from.
My worldview is completely nontheistic, so as you know I choose my morals at random every Monday morning and teach my kids to do the same. Connor chooses his each week from a fancy wheel-of-fortune gizmo. Erin uses a dartboard. I guess I’m old-fashioned: I draw my morals out of a hat.
Which is why this pattern of behavior in my kids has me scratching my head.
Let me start with my oldest. Connor, 11, can’t stand to see an animal hurt, even spiders, even insects. When a bat got into his grandmother’s house, evangelical Grandma wanted to get a tennis racket and whack it straight to Jesus. But Connor (then eight) insisted on catch-and-release — and, to our astonishment, managed it himself.
This was easy enough to explain. “Be kind to other living things” must have come up when he’d spun the wheel that week. It’s right there between “trip blind people” and “pee in the lemonade when nobody’s looking.”
He has three jars for his money. No, not JOY (Jesus, Others, Yourself), but SOY (Savings, Others, Yourself). But here’s the weird thing: He splits his allowance evenly among the jars. I first noticed this shortly after we’d seen a homeless man under a bridge on Regent’s Canal in London. Connor was deeply affected by this. He wrote a poem about that man and we talked at length about how fortunate we are. The very next week I noticed that the money in the jar for “others” was even with the one for himself. I just can’t figure out why. Even when his spending jar is tapped out, it never occurs to him to go into the one reserved for others. To date, he has saved several acres of rainforest and sent food to hurricane victims with that jar.
It gets weirder. He wanted a MySpace page. We looked into it a bit and decided, ah, no — especially when we learned that he would have to lie about his age to register. I had chosen “don’t lie” from the hat that week, so the MySpace page was out of the question. He agreed, grudgingly, so I’m guessing “don’t lie” had come up on his wheel that week as well. A funny coincidence.
When we offered instead to allow Connor to set up his own website, he leapt at the chance. I thought he might include game links, photos of himself, maybe a blog about football or Green Day, and some sketches of his inventions. But no. Instead, he immediately hit on the idea of a website that would feature one worthy cause per month, with articles and links about that cause. Connor will write to celebrities each month, encouraging them to donate money through the site to that cause. The top donor each month will be interviewed by Connor for the site.
“How much of the money will you keep for yourself?” I asked.
He looked at me, puzzled. “None. Why?”
“Why? Jeez, I dunno,” I said sheepishly. “I can’t remember where I put my list.”
See the pattern? Don’t kill, don’t lie, take care of others — it seems, in some odd way I can’t place, to be a non-random list.
I consulted friends of various worldviews — a Buddhist, a Jew, a Humanist, a Utilitarian, a Christian, a Jain — and learned that there is a name for this pattern. They all called it “goodness.” Somehow, inexplicably, even in the absence of belief in a god, my son happens to have selected values that add up to something known as “goodness.”
I just can’t figure why that would be.
He doesn’t go to church or Sunday School and does not believe God is watching him. He thinks The Ten Commandments is a thrash metal group. Yet he gravitates toward behaviors that are undeniably — lemme see, what would the adjective be? — “goodnessful.”
His sisters seem headed down the same path — showing “kindness,” expressing “empathy” for those less fortunate, hating “injustice,” planning a life of “service to others.” Stuff like that. One begins to suspect that our family’s random, blind process of moral selection is in fact…non-random.
Now I must admit, they aren’t consistent in this pattern. Last Saturday, Connor lay in wait for his sisters at the edge of the porch roof with cold water balloons and pelted them mercilessly, even when they asked him to stop. We called him inside and asked how he would feel if someone did that to him. Later he apologized to the girls. Grudgingly. We insisted on it. Not sure why, but we did.
Yesterday was Monday morning, and my curiosity about the pattern began to overwhelm me. I tiptoed to Connor’s door and quietly peeked into the room while he was spinning the wheel for the week. It slowed to a stop on “Steal and cheat.” He looked around — fortunately he didn’t see me — and then did something I simply can’t explain. He shook his head and spun the wheel again and again, until it landed on “Treat others as you would like to be treated.”
That one he wrote on his list for the week.
Any ideas for how to restore moral chaos to our home will be gratefully received.
Jerry Falwell and the absent dancers
To philosophize is to learn how to die.
Michel de Montaigne
Oh relax. I’m not going to impugn the recently departed Jerry Falwell. Christopher Hitchens is taking care of that, God bless ‘im. I will grant, for reasons unclear to me, the traditional period of immunity enjoyed by the newly demised. It was Falwell’s death that got me thinking, but this post isn’t really about him. It’s death itself I’m on about, not the corpse-of-the-moment. Death and the absence of dancers.
But first, that immunity thing.
My first experience of the weird immunity we grant to the recently dead was at my dad’s funeral. I was thirteen and he was forty-five, my age next year. I loved my dad. He was a good guy.
Still, the eulogies offered by Dad’s friends and colleagues struck me as…weird.
I remember one colleague of his saying, “Dave didn’t have an enemy in the world.” “He was always thinking of others, never a thought for himself,” said another. “Everyone loved him.” “He loved his family more than any man I’ve ever known.”
Okay. I guess.
Like I said, he was a good guy. But this was my first experience of the genuine canonization of the dead that is socially mandated. Although my dad was funny and smart and hardworking and endlessly curious, he also lost his temper frequently and even sprained his thumb once. Oh, while beating me, I left that part out. I had been a shit to my younger brother, again, and Dad had come off a 60-hour week, and he couldn’t find it in himself to not sprain his thumb on me.
In addition to occasionally thrashing us, he wrote poetry and read Cyrano de Bergerac and smoked like a chimney and ate like a bison. He also taught me everything he knew about astronomy and yelled at my mom. A lot. And he sang with her. A lot. A mixed bag, like the rest of us.
Why do we need to pretend someone was a perfect saint in order to remember him fondly? And why the particular need to deny the mixed bag just because someone is recently dead?
Purgatory. That’s why.
In the medieval church, the recently dead were believed to stop in Purgatory before being dispatched to heaven or hell. It was during this layover that incoming prayers were tallied up and the person’s life assessed. Even marginally bad thoughts might tip the balance southward, so if you had anything bad to say, it was crucial to hold your tongue while all the hanging chads were counted. You know, if you can’t say anything nice, keep it inside, where God can’t hear it. Like saying “bless you” after a sneeze, the post-mortem immunity is a habit based in antique superstitions.
Well, whatever the reason, we can’t say anything bad about Jerry Falwell for a little while, because this terrible, tragic, unexpected thing happened to him: his body stopped working. And that was awfully sad.
Which gets me at last to the missing dancers.
President Bush issued a statement of condolence: Laura and I are deeply saddened by the death of Jerry Falwell, a man who cherished faith, family, and freedom. Various religious leaders have “mourned” Falwell’s passing or “grieved” his loss. Great rivers of tears will certainly be loosed at his funeral.
You see where I’m headed. Stick with me anyway. I want a credible answer.
According to the stated beliefs of Jerry Falwell and virtually every person who is “mourning” what happened to him, he has shed his earthly vessel and become a glorified being in the very presence of the Living Lord and Creator. He is in Heaven. This is the big time, the radiant confirmation of all his cherished hopes, the fulfillment of the promises of the scriptures to which he devoted his life, a happiness beyond anything mere words can devise.
And the proper response to this, apparently, is to be “deeply saddened.”
This question hit me for the first time not at my dad’s funeral, but at a funeral I attended for the mother of a friend one year earlier when I was twelve. The distraught sobs of the congregation and the soothing promises of the minister that she was “with Jesus, smiling down upon us, happy and free of pain” provided such a stark contrast that it suddenly hit me — they don’t believe him!
I hesitate to say such a thing. Having been confidently informed that I, a nonbeliever, really do believe in God, way way down deep, I shudder to make confident claims about what other people believe. I make this claim out of true bafflement at what else can explain the evidence. It’s the only credible explanation I can find for the day-and-night contrast between what Christians say happens at death and how they behave upon hearing someone has died. They pray like mad that a sick person’s glorious transfiguration will be put off, then weep and gnash their teeth when the person finally attains it. So I’m stuck with one hypothesis — that they wish with all their hearts to believe it and actual believe they believe it, but do not believe it.
If they did, wouldn’t they be singing and dancing and shouting praise-choruses to the sky? The funerals of children should be occasions for particular celebration — Little Suzy’s passed up the whole vale of tears and gone straight to Jesus! Instead, the loss of a child is seen as the greatest of all tragedies. Why? Where are the dancers? Shouldn’t the phrase “I’m glad Falwell’s dead” draw something other than shocked outrage? Shouldn’t a true believer who really loved him and wanted the best for him say, “I’m glad he’s dead, too!” — not as a mumbled coda, that’s common enough, but as a statement of certain joy?
The image of Snoopy dancing on a grave beneath Jerry Falwell’s name looks like the prelude to a stinging critique. You may well have assumed as much when you saw it. But shouldn’t it look like the polar opposite — like an elated confirmation of what Falwell believed to be true? Shouldn’t a Christian look at that and say, “At last, the atheist gets it!”
My wife claims that funereal tears are for the survivors, not for the departed person, and of course that’s a part of it. But why then, when a believer hears of a death — especially an untimely one — do they gasp and say things like, “Oh, that poor, poor girl”? Shouldn’t it at least be seriously mixed?
Imagine, for example, a Tutsi mother in Rwanda at the time of the genocide. The UN is pulling back as machete-wielding Hutus approach the village. After much tearful pleading, a UN peacekeeper agrees to take the woman’s four-year-old child to safety in another country. She is unlikely to ever see him again. If she survives, she will miss him terribly. But her tears would be undeniably mixed with profound joy that her son has a chance at happiness and safety. You can picture a relieved smile beaming through her tear-streaked face as the truck pulls away.
If I truly believed in heaven as advertised, that would have to describe my face at the funeral of a loved one. Right? He made it out to happiness and safety. Next time you’re at a funeral, see if you can spot even one such face.
Coming to grips with mortality is the greatest of all challenges for a conscious being. It’s a life’s work. When someone asks how on Earth I can bear the idea that my death will be the end, I want to look the person in the eyes and say, “Yes, it’s very hard…isn’t it.” I’ve never tried that, but I dream of doing that just right, just once, and connecting with the honest knowledge of mortality we all carry inside ourselves.
I’m not one of those secularists who pretend that our mortality is no big deal. It’s a very big deal. I don’t especially like it. But I’m a big boy, I can handle it — especially since I never bought into its denial, and so had no childish illusions of immortality to abandon.
And neither will my kids, I’ll wager. They know about the heaven hypothesis, and they know the oblivion hypothesis, and like their dad, they’ll spend a lifetime working it out and coming to grips with the fact that, no matter what comes next, this life ends. I hope also to instill a passionate love of reality so they’ll work to understand and accept what is rather than what goes down most easily. Heaven sells itself, for the most part. My job is to help them, and myself, find the genuine comforts in the naturalistic model. There are many, and I’ll yammer about those soon.
Of babies and bathwater, Part II
God is like the shepherd seeking the sheep, He is like the woman seeking the coin, and He is like the father seeking the son.
— from some websiteGod is love. Love is blind. Stevie Wonder is blind. Therefore, Stevie Wonder is God.
— Immanuel KantAtheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
— James Randi, or someone else
How we do love analogies, especially when they get us where we wanted to go anyway. But we’re often so blinded by the cleverness or beauty — or by its confirmation of our opinions — that we forget to wonder whether a given analogy makes a lick of sense.
Is life really helpfully analogous to a box of chocolates? Is love really like oxygen? or a heatwave? or a red, red rose? Does a given analogy actually shed light on its subject, helping us to understand it better — like Sagan’s Calendar — or does it obscure, by doing an amazing impersonation of reason without actually bothering to be reasonable?
Once in a while, poor analogies cross over from merely lame to destructively seductive. Not invading Iraq would be just like appeasing Hitler. Ooh, wouldn’t want to do that again.
If you let gays marry, people will start marrying their appliances. Yikes. I don’t even support civil unions between humans and toaster-ovens. I’m sorry, some things are just wrong. Thanks for the tip.
Destructively seductive in a different but no less insidous way is theologian William Paley’s “watchmaker” analogy, offered in 1802 as proof of the existence of God. If you look at a watch, goes the, uh, reasoning, you can easily tell that it was designed and created by a watchmaker. Similarly, if you look at a given natural phenomenon, you can easily tell that it was made by an intelligent designer.
For five full seconds, this analogy has the force of an inspired illumination of fact. It’s in the sixth and seventh seconds, thanks to Darwin, that it begins to fall apart. Fortunately for “Intelligent Design,” six continuous seconds of thinking is a lot to ask of monkeys.
I forgive Paley for his bad analogy. I’m sure I too would have nodded vigorously in 1802, fully 57 years before Darwin issued his resounding nuh-uhhhh. Less forgivable are those who, having failed to notice advances in knowledge since 1802, continue propagating this vacuous meme today under the banner of “intelligent design.” The analogy, it turns out, is a bad one. It illuminates nothing but the wishes of some that it actually accomplish what it sets out to do.
The stamp collecting analogy, on the other hand — ZING! — actually captures something worth thinking about. I would say that though, wouldn’t I.
There’s one bad analogy that got me started on this tangent, one I hear too often when I’m offering this or that critique of religious belief or practice. I’ve even developed the ability to see it coming, to see it making its way from the neocortex of my conversational partner, through Broca’s area, down to the larynx and up the pie-shaft. As I finish whatever I’m droning on about, I can see it balanced eagerly on the tip of the other person’s tongue, like a diver standing with toes curled over the edge of an analogy.
And then, at last, the moment we’ve been waiting for.
Well, s/he will intone, one must be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Before I continue, let me make clear my sober opposition to throwing babies out with bathwater.
This useful phrase first popped up in a 1512 satire by a German monk named Thomas Murner. To “throw the baby out with the bath water” (or “Das kind mit dem badwasser schitten,” as Murner put it, for some reason) is to rid one’s self of a bad thing while destroying in the process whatever good there was as well.
I stare first at the diving board protruding from my friend’s face, still juddering, then at the surface of our conversation, still rippling from the impact of the analogy (which had rudely pulled its knees up into a cannonball just before entering the water). I am abashed. That poor baby. How could I even have considered doing so wretched a thing?
It always takes me a moment to realize that I hadn’t.
The baby, in the current analogy, is all that is good and noble and life-affirming in religion, like frequent instructions to not kill or lie or hate. The bathwater is all that is ignoble and life-destroying in religion — like frequent instructions to kill and lie and hate. My conversational partner rarely offers a middle path, because religious sytems lack procedures for compromise. Real change is accomplished only by calving off denominations (which is why the current estimate of Christian denominations on Earth is 33,000). Within a given church, it is silently implied that one must take the bad with the good, all or nothing, or risk losing the good entirely.
Hogwash.
There is something between throwing out the baby and letting it marinate endlessly in the cold and filthy water. My intention is to do what any parent does: discern which is the baby and which the bathwater, then lift the baby gently from the water, dry her off, dress her in warm jimmies, feed her, nuzzle her, and sing her to sleep.
My single greatest complaint with religion is not that it contains both good and bad, but that it has no procedure for separating one from the other. My highest praise for science is not that it is devoid of bad consequences but that it comes complete with ways to discern, that it is founded on a method for separating wheat from chaff — that it tries, however haltingly and imperfectly, to perfect itself.
The next time someone invokes babies and bathwater, stop the conversation, define the baby — and reach for a clean, dry towel.
(No babies were harmed in the writing of this blog.)
Keeping the ‘Hell’ away from my kids
No God and no religion can survive ridicule. Mark Twain
.
.
.
.
Meet my 9-year-old middleborn, Erin, a.k.a. “the B”:
Oh, she’d KILL me. Heh. Lemme try again:
.
.
.
.
Yep, that’s the same kid — a radiant flower one moment and a complete bassoon the next. She’s a typical middle child, a pleaser and a peacemaker, a moralist and a goofbag. I adore her socks off, not least because I’m a middler (and therefore all those things) myself.
So my stomach sank yesterday when she came home from school with the news that her three best friends all agree she’s going to burn in hell.
Holy horseshit! I thought, mentally springing to the Bat Cave and firing up the Mach 5. Or whatever. I simply can’t bear to see my kids hurt, nor Becca, my wife. I just can’t take it. I have made Becca cry precisely three times in seventeen years, and it unhinges me so thoroughly that I will apologize for my very existence if only she will STOP.
Same with the kids. I’m not talking about fall-down-go-boom tears, now. Those mostly irritate me, since the child usually did something (shall we say) ill-advised just beforehand. But tears of genuine emotional pain — those are something else entirely. You know, like the tears that would result from the unanimous judgment of your three best friends that you are destined for the Lake of Fire.
And though all three kids’ wounded tears slay me, none are harder for me to take than the tears of the B when her heart’s been broken. I swear, the very first boyfriend to break her heart will live just long enough to see his own little cardiac balloon quivering in my outthrust fist.
(Sorry, that was massively heterosexist. Feel free to reread with “girlfriend…her own little cardiac balloon quivering etc.” See, I’m cool.)
So I knelt before the B to get the full story. “Sweetie, what’d they say that for?”
“They were talking about church and stuff, and they asked if I believe in God and go to church. And I said no, I don’t believe in God, and I don’t go to church. And then their eyes got really big and they said, ‘Oooh, you’re gonna burn in Hell.'”
I waited for the first teardrop to appear, flexing my hand in preparation for holding three quivering little hearts at once.
“I’m so sorry they said that, B. How did that make you feel?”
Instead of tears, she shrugged. “It was pretty mean. But also silly.”
I looked at her in amazement. It is silly, of course, a profoundly stupid and childish idea, but how did she come to that so directly? It took me years and years to shift Hell from terrifying to terrifying but unlikely to silly.
And then I remembered. Of course. She’s been inoculated.
If I had hidden the idea of Hell from my daughter all these years, protecting her from the very concept, the sudden invocation of the flames by her friends could have burned a fear into her that would take some serious undoing. But we’ve talked about religious ideas for years. I’ve always made my opinions clear, but I go to great lengths to let her know that other good people think differently. “Dad, did Jesus really come alive after he was dead?” “I don’t think he did, no. I think that’s just a made-up story to make people feel better about death. But talk to Grandma Barbara, I know she thinks it really happened. Then you can make up your own mind, and even change your mind back and forth about it a hundred times if you want.” That’s the usual approach.
But there are exceptions to this evenhanded treatment, and one of them is Hell. Hell gets no hearing from me. I will not allow my children to be terrorized by anyone with the sick fantasy of an afterlife of eternal punishment, especially one meted out for honest doubts. If ever there was a religious idea with human fingerprints all over it, Hell is it. So I’ve always told my children that Hell is not only fiction, it’s also…
That’s right. She was using my exact word. Silly.
Even if there is a God, I’ve told them repeatedly, he’s not going to care if you guess wrong about him. That sounds like a human king, not the all-wise creator of the universe. He might care about how good you are, or even respect your honest doubts more than the dishonest belief of people who are just trying to avoid Hell. But in any case, the idea that any god worth his salt would create a Hell to punish his children is just plain silly.
Just as we inoculate our kids against diseases by putting small amounts of the bad stuff into their arms to build resistance, we have to inoculate them against toxic ideas that can paralyze their abilities to think freely. Specifically invite fearless doubt and they can live without medieval ignorance and fear trailing them through their one and only life. Tell them about Hell, then don’t just ‘disagree’ with it: laugh it to smithereens.