Wondering and questioning, Part II
Meet my boy, Connor.
Connor is nearly twelve, wickedly smart and funny, endlessly creative and thoughtful and kind. I’ve had more outright conversational joy from Connor in the nine years since he started talking than from most of the rest of our species. Combined.
He wants to be an engineer. Sometimes he shares with me his plans for reversing global warming. Once he shared an idea for exceeding the speed of light—and I still can’t figure out why it wouldn’t work, at least in theory. Last week he sketched an ingenious idea for an inexhaustible light bulb. (I know why that one won’t work, but importantly, kept my pie-hole shut.) At the age of seven, he proposed a device that could identify which person in a packed elevator had farted. A panel in the floor would then light up under the perpetrator.
(We were alone in an elevator when he came up with that one, of course—and when the door opened and admitted an elderly lady, we vibrated with swallowed laughter, imagining the floor lighting up beneath her.)
But sometimes—much of the time—the topic is philosophical. Connor wonders about consciousness, death, ethics, time, and the idea of gods. One of his favorite riffs is to marvel at the fact that he was born at all, which brings us to one of the central differences, imho, between the religious and secular worldviews.
Let’s begin with a song, one that captures a large whack of my own worldview—so much, in fact, that it is one of our favorite lullabies:
It’s inherently humbling, that scientifically-informed worldview. Instead of being specially made in the image of the creator of the universe, given dominion over the world and all that’s in it, and having God’s only son take our form to come to Earth and die so we could live forever, it turns out we’re one transitory species among millions, an unimaginably small blink in time on an unimaginably small dot in space—trousered apes who will disappear into complete non-existence upon the death of our bodies.
But remember, when you’re feeling very small and insecure, how amazingly unlikely was your birth. And it was this thread that my son and I riffed on the other day, picking up an inexhaustible thread.
It started with boxer shorts.
Connor needed boxer shorts immediately. I’ll spare you the reason, a familiar hash of peer pressure and arbitrary norms and middle school locker rooms. I ran him to the mall and we bought a few pairs. On the way home, I suddenly flashed on something from long ago. I turned and mentioned to Connor that he owed his existence to (among many other things) boxer shorts. What follows is, I submit, a definitively secular exchange of wonder.
Boxer shorts? This was news to the boy. Not the general idea of owing his existence to countless small happenstances, mind you. He has long enjoyed the knowledge that several hundred things could have prevented his parents from meeting, from finding each other attractive, from dating, from marrying, and from staying married long enough to spring off. He understands that one particular sperm and one particular egg had to meet for him to ever exist. And he vibrates with dawning excitement as he extends these had-tos back through the generations, back to his Confederate great-great-great grandfather who was felled by a Yankee bullet through the neck at nineteen and bled profusely—almost, but not quite, enough to erase the great-great-great grandson he would one day have. Connor has worked his way back through a million generations of humans and prehumans to imagine two ratlike creatures rocking the casbah at the precise moment the asteroid slammed into Chicxulub 65 million years ago, further clinching the existence of their great-great-great etc grandson. (Oooh, baby, one rat says to the other. Did you feel that too?)
But boxer shorts—that was a new one. He demanded to know what I was talking about.
We’ve already done the sex talk (went very well, thank you). So now I told him that the sperm can get sluggish if they are too warm, that briefs hold the testicles against a man’s warm body, and that four months after his mom and I started trying to create him, without luck, I saw this article that suggested switching to boxer shorts, and boom…
His eyes were wide. “You got pregnant.”
“Well Mom did, technically, but I…”
He clutched his head. “Oh my GOSH! What the freakin’ heck!” (His current favorite pseudo-swear.) He seemed to get it. He turned toward me with an electric look, the look of a person who just missed getting hit by a train. “What if you saw that article a month EARLIER?”
Oh yeah, he gets it. “Or later.” We’d added another casual causal coincidence to the march of time—his father stumbling over some random magazine article…at GreatClips, I think it was, while I waited for a haircut…
“WHAT IF SHE FINISHED THE OTHER HAIRCUT BEFORE YOU SAW THE…?”
Boy does he get it.
I have several religious friends who think that God fixes these things for us. He put the mag there, you see, and kept the haircut going until I could read it. We each have one ideal mate, and God works things out so we meet, fall in love, have the children we’re supposed to have when we’re supposed to have them. Setting aside the revolting idea that God wanted an abused woman to marry her abuser, etc etc, we still end up with a world that makes me yawn, a world with a good measure of the wonder stripped out. In that world, we are Jehovah’s chesspieces, moving in preordained patterns, how exceptionally tedious. Tedious in a holy way, I mean.
Meditating instead on how amazingly unlikely was your birth—well, if you haven’t done it, please be my guest. It’s hard to take existence quite so much for granted once you realize how very, very, very close you came to missing the dance entirely.
Wondering and questioning, Part I
My greatest thrill as a secular parent is watching my kids follow their intellectual curiosity wherever it leads. My job is to run ahead down the corridor, flinging wide as many doors as possible—or much better yet, to stay the hell out of the way.
I’m convinced that the reckless, ecstatic wondering I’ve seen in my kids owes a lot to secular parenting. Religion, in addition to inspiring a certain degree and type of wonder, tends also to place real limits on the inquiring mind. Some things are sacred, after all, or otherwise unquestionable, or at least inappropriate, or too complicated to explain, or beyond the poor grasp of our human minds, too unseemly, too shocking, too sad, too unthinkable. You can hear one portcullis after another slamming shut.
There are no unthinkable thoughts in our home, no unaskable questions, no unbearable hypotheses. Not one. How can you decide whether something is right, I tell my kids, if you won’t even let yourself think it first? As a result of this simple policy, my kids are growing up with minds that race through fields of possibility, unhindered by the dark barricades of someone else’s fears.
It leads to some pretty strange places, like the time Erin, then eight, declared that she was SO glad we’re white.
I stifled my natural reaction
and asked why. Turns out she had listened carefully on MLK Day, realized what a raw deal blacks have had, and was honestly grateful that she didn’t have to endure it herself.
There was a time when my daughter Delaney came up with a new theological hypothesis every week or so. Once, at age four, she declared that Jesus made all the good things in the world and that God made all the bad and scary things.
The next five words out of the mouths of many religious parents would be No no no no no—in that order—followed by a dose of theological castor oil to set the child straight. Very few would let the day end with their child still entertaining the notion that God is the source of all evil. Some secular parents do little better for the child’s independence of thought when they take the opportunity to say No no no no no—God isn’t real. I’ve always preferred to praise the independent thought and let the child run like mad with it.
Cool, I said to Delaney. I never thought of it like that.
The next week, she promulgated a revised encyclical: God, she said, makes all the things for grownups, and Jesus makes the things for kids. My favorite example: God made the deep end of the pool, and Jesus made the shallow end, for her.
I hugged her. “So God for me and Jesus for you, eh?”
“I guess so,” she said. “I don’t know for sure. I’m still thinking about it.”
She’s parroting one of my constant parental invocations there—the need to keep thinking, to never close one’s self off to further information.
Earlier this year on the way home from school, she told me about a chat she’d had that day with Mrs. W, the teacher at her Lutheran preschool. “I told Mrs. W I think God is just pretend, but I said I’m still thinking about it…And I asked if she thinks God is pretend.”
I looked at her in the rearview mirror, munching on the tart apple I’d for once remembered to bring for her snack, so beautifully innocent of the fact that she had stood with her little toes at the edge of an age-old crevasse, shouting a courageous and ancient question to her teacher on the far rim. My daughter, you see, hasn’t heard that there are unaskable questions.
“What did Mrs. W say?”
“She said no,” Laney said, matter-of-factly. “She said, ‘I think God is very real.’ ”
“Uh huh. Then what did you say?”
“I said, ‘That’s okay…as long as you’re still thinking about it, too.’”
Two years later, I still look at that sentence with awe. That’s okay, she said—because it would never occur to her that people must all believe the same—and then the call to continuous freethought, the caveat against the closed process.
How many people of religious faith ever hear that their faith is okay only if it remains open to disconfirmation? Whatever that number is, if I can keep my kids blissfully ignorant of the “rules,” it will go up.
Coming out
Something rare and humbling happened to me in 2002. I had a novel released that January, Calling Bernadette’s Bluff, which got some quite lovely reviews and was well-received by both of its readers.
(No, that wasn’t the rare and humbling thing. Good reviews aren’t humbling; they make you feel like this.)
The novel explores the gradual frustrations of a tired secular humanist professor at a Catholic college, his eventual (pathetic) coming out and the hilarity that ensues. But the most incredible thing happened about four months after the book’s release. The phone rang. It was my mom.
She had finished reading my book.
Oh here we go, I thought. “And?”
She told me how much she’d liked it (and believe me, she’d tell the truth, damn her), then said: “I’m a secular humanist.”
“You…you’re…you are?”
“I didn’t have the name for it before, but…yeah. That’s what I am.”
I was floored. I hadn’t known, you see. We hadn’t discussed religion much growing up (which gave me the space to think for myself), but we did go to church regularly. I had assumed she was some sort of indemnity Christian at least, a Pascal’s Wagerer if nothing else. But no. I had to wait forty years and write a humanist novel before I could find out my mother shared my beliefs.
It was a stunning feeling for a child to have that impact on a parent. Usually goes the other way.
In the preface of PBB I describe similar scenes in book clubs I’ve spoken to about my novel. At some point in the discussion, someone will inevitably say, “Hey, you know what — I guess I’m a secular humanist, too.” And everyone says, “LIN-da!! Really?!” — not the least in judgment or condemnation, but in genuine surprise.
Then someone else chimes in “Actually, me too,” (“MAR-garet!!”), then someone else. It is electric. Everyone assumes everyone else is a believer — including those who aren’t themselves. The result of the uncloseting is a deepening of relationships as we realize how much richer is the diversity among even our closest friends.
One of the most moving and fascinating aspects of the launch of PBB has been hearing stories of self-revelations, including people who reveal to friends and family for the first time that they don’t believe when they forward an email announcement about PBB. Such revelations are almost always followed by an outpouring of supportive replies — not 100%, of course, but always more than we think will be the case.
I was touched to read a blog entry by PBB contributor Shannon Cherry in which she (somewhat nervously) came out to her readers at the same time she announced her co-authorship of the book. Her beliefs had been unknown to many in her life even though her husband Matt runs an international humanist foundation and think tank. If Shannon Cherry was partially closeted, who among us is completely out?
Another contributor, Pete Wernick, is an internationally-renowned bluegrass banjo player (listen here!) and…secular humanist. The bluegrass world is apparently extremely evangelical, so Pete, despite being a very active humanist, had kept his two identities separate. Until now. After much thought and worry, Pete sent out a broadcast email to his bluegrass circle of friends announcing his beliefs and his participation in the book.
The result? An outpouring of supportive replies — and, I’m sure, some silence. That’s OK. The cathartic honesty is worth a little uncomfortable silence.
The goal is a world in which someone can answer belief questions with the nontheistic label of choice and elicit nothing more than you’d get from saying, “Presbyterian.” A long way to go, yes, but we’re on our way.
Resisting the eraser, Part II
There are two pieces in Parenting Beyond Belief — an essay by Annie Laurie Gaylor and a silly song lyric of my own — that are devoted to the introduction of great figures who were religious doubters of one stripe or another. I included these because it’s important for kids to know that not everyone believes — that in fact, some of the greatest minds of every generation were doubters. And it’s important to do it overtly because of that busy, busy eraser.
I feel particularly strongly about this because I grew up oblivious to the fact that I was not alone in my doubts, as most of us do. Even in college I had not discovered any significant presence of articulate disbelief in our cultural history. And it really made me doubt my own doubts. How could I disbelieve when all of my greatest intellectual heroes believed? I’d heard it said the Founding Fathers were Christians – when in fact very few were. I had heard that Charles Darwin found no contradiction between evolutionary theory and Christian belief, when in fact he did. (He made that clear in his autobiography – though those pages were removed from the first edition by his wife, with the best of misguided motives.) I assumed that Einstein’s references to God were literal reflections of a personal faith, only later discovering his several irritated denials of that claim.
I was in my thirties before I discovered, in the works of AN Wilson, how many of the greatest intellectual and moral minds of every generation were freethinkers of one stripe or another – Seneca, Diderot, Voltaire, Jefferson, Lincoln, Susan B Anthony, Thomas Edison, Einstein, Freud, Twain, Hume, H.L. Mencken, Simone de Beauvoir, Bertrand Russell. They had all written eloquently of their doubts and their reasons. But those writings had not reached me, despite every possible predilection on my part to receive them.
One of the other ways believers mask disbelief is by taking every passing use of the word ‘God’ as proof that the speaker believed in God. Albert Einstein said, “God would not play dice with the universe.” He was immediately and jubilantly proclaimed a Christian, which irritated him so much that he wrote this answer in 1954: “It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”
Kurt Vonnegut did not believe in God (and expressed it clearly), but once said that “The only proof I need of the existence of God is music.” He meant this as an ironic tribute to music, not as a statement of belief in God, but it was leapt upon so effectively that National Public Radio – NPR! – ended its tribute to him last week with that quote. Why? Because that’s what we do: We mask disbelief in the appearance of belief. A giddy listener quickly posted a claim that Vonnegut, in his last years, was “arguing with his own atheism.”
Vonnegut foreshadowed this in 1992 when he began his eulogy for (atheist/humanist) Isaac Asimov with, “Well, Isaac is up in heaven now…” But he wasn’t erasing — he was being funny. And by all accounts, it slew the gathered throng.
UU humanist and minister Kenneth Phifer said, “Humanism teaches us that it is immoral to wait for God to act for us.” In context, what he was saying is this: Whether or not there is a God, passivity is immoral. But many leapt on the statement as proof that this prominent nontheistic humanist believes in God. You can just hear the squeak, squeak of the eraser, trying desperately to make us all the same.
Here’s Kenneth Phifer trying to be abundantly clear:
“I am a humanist. The humanism I espouse is materialist, naturalistic, religious, rational, responsible and inclusive. I hold with the conviction of humanism that the scientific method is the best means we have discovered for advancing truth…I have faith in that part of humanism which sees the human being as the highest form of life, an end not a means, the creator of moral values, the maker of history… It is the human race that has invented religious communities in order to share the burden of our aloneness as individuals…
He continues: “Religion is a human enterprise. It is the human race that has created religions out of that unique self-awareness that drives us to ask questions about our origins and our destiny.”
Materialist. Naturalistic. Humans as creators of moral values, religion as a human enterprise. It is the human race that has created religions. Phifer calls himself a religious humanist, but it seems pretty clear that he is not a theistic one. He supports the coming together of humanity to do and be good as the fullest expression of religion. It’s an important difference.
A systematic cultural suppression of the rich heritage of religious doubt keeps that heritage out of view. Thus is doubt rendered unthinkable by the stripping of its intellectual tradition. Once I discovered that tradition in AN Wilson’s work (and in The Humanist Anthology, edited by James Herrick, a PBB contributor), I literally wept at times as I read the courageous works of these great thinkers of the past, many giving voice to their honest convictions at a far greater risk than any I will ever encounter. In the span of a few weeks, I went from isolation to the company of giants.
I embarked on an ecstatic engagement with the words and lives of these men and women, taking their intellectual and moral courage as my own inspiration.
Just like gays and lesbians, women, ethnic minorities and others, we have to resist our erasure every bit as insistently as the hand of the mainstream culture pushes that eraser forward.
Parenting “as if”
What’ll it be tonight? It’s been an impressive 24 hours. Maybe I should tell y’all about the book climbing into the top 0.1% on Amazon — pretty good for a book without an audience — or the quintupling of traffic to the website. Or maybe I should blog about the secular Tin Foil Hatter who has launched a classic and baseless MSTT attack on one of the book’s contributors, saying s/he discredits the project because said contributor once knew someone who stood next to someone who thought an unrigorous thought. Get a hobby.
Then there’s the flurry of frantic emails from the publisher (very good folks, by the way), fretting because I claimed on the PBB website that Unitarians are “majority nontheistic” while the UUA website claims it’s only 19 percent. YIKES! You have to change that, you didn’t send the study guide to the UUs already, did you?? (In fact, the UUA says 19 percent are atheists and 46 percent are humanists. 19+46 = 65% = majority.) Once again we get our undies in a bunch over nothing much. (And a good thing, too, since they seem not to have noticed I said the same thing in the book…)
Forget all that. I’d rather tell you about Delaney:
This is my five -year-old Delaney, a.k.a. Linky, and I love her so much it hurts.
Linky came to me at my usual station (hunched over the laptop) and threw her arms around me. “I’m so proud of your book, Daddy.”
Oh, for meltin’ out loud. “Aren’t you a sweetie! Thanks, butterbutt.”
“I wrote a book too.” And she showed me The Bigist Pumkin Anybode Saw — nine stapled pages of instant classic. I read it aloud, oohed and aahed, told her I was even prouder of hers.
“Thanks, she said. “And I’m gonna take your book and my book to show to my class tomorrow.”
“…”
Instead of an ellipsis, the proper response of any good father would have been “Of course, my precious little Blossom Bottom! I’m so glad you’re so proud!” But…well, there are complications. Stuff to dance around. You know, grown up things to consider…
I’ll cut to the chase. Here’s a picture of her preschool:
Okay, I couldn’t get a picture of her actual school, but you get the idea. She goes to preschool at our local Lutheran church. Why? Because the program is the best pre-K in town, the teachers are wonderful, and she gets a basic low-key introduction to religious literacy without a hint of damnation. All of my kids have gone there, then into public schools. Please direct all MSTT concerns to your local proctologist at his place of employment.
During my ellipsis (if you’ll forgive a presumptious and ultimately shameful comparison), I flashed on the most heartbreaking passage in Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail:
When you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people…then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.
My little girl is proud of my work, and there’s nothing at all wrong with my work or her pride in it — yet I know that the potential exists for bigotry and ignorance in the next layer to set “ominous clouds” in my own daughter’s “little mental sky” when she flashes a secular parenting book in a church school classroom. It isn’t right, it isn’t just, but there it is. I looked at her beaming face and knew that she was aware only of what made sense, not of the nonsense that demands to be danced around.
After what was actually only a second or two, I decided to opt for parenting “as if”: Act as if the world were sane and reasonable, and see if it just might rise to the invitation.
I gave her a tight hug. “Well if you aren’t the best! Of course you can do that. I’m just so flattered for my book to be there with yours.” And we set my book and her book in her plastic bucket for show and tell.
I picked her up from school the next day and she ran out, elated. This is good, because that’s what she always does. “Hey, how was show and tell?” I asked.
“Great!”
“What did you say about the books?”
“I said, ‘My daddy wrote a book, and it’s about raising great children without religion.’ My teacher was so surprised!”
“Oh, uh…oh yeah? How was she surprised?”
“She didn’t know it was already out. She said is was really great.”
Now see? Once again I gave the next layer too little credit. “What about The Bigist Pumkin?”
She smiled. “They said that one was great too. Did you bring a snack?”
And so, thanks to some slow, aching progress over the centuries, instead of preparing for a mob with pitchforks, we were dealing with the fact that, once again, I forgot to bring her snack.
Giving kids permission to gamble with Pascal
One of my favorite interview questions is this: What is the one things you hope to give your kids by raising them without religion? The answer is freedom from fear.
No, not all fears, ya tyke — but several of the most parasitic and life-destroying. Scratch the smiling surface of a good many people with strong religious convictions and you’ll find stark raving terror. Many (not all, dammit, never all) are convinced that only the grace of God, moment to moment, protects us all from catastrophe.
A relative of mine clipped out a prayer and taped it to his/her fridge. It begins: O Lord, please give me the strength to face another day… Even though said fridge is in a comfortable upper middle class home in the suburbs, it keeps my relative bowed and feeling somehow spared, like an abused wife. Husband or wife, I mean. Life, it says, is unbearable. Only God spares us from its horrors, and the horrors beyond.
My kids will have their share of fears, but I’d like to help them see life as an amazing privilege, not as a source of terror from which we must be saved.
When a believer tells me that he simply can’t bear the thought of a world without God, or that without God we would all crack open each others’ heads and feast on the goo inside — I get a glimpse of his terror, his absolute distrust of himself and of the rest of humanity. This person genuinely believes that we’re all felons-in-waiting, just itching for the Cop to look away for one second so we can stick a shank in the ribs of the next guy.
This is my cue to inch away from this person, and by all means to stop challenging his beliefs, since I’m the next guy. Yikes.
But this post isn’t about all the reasons that idea is silly — they are countless, and several essays in PBB (Mercer and Koepsell among them) go into it just fine. This post is about why that’s sad — and why I’m so eager to help my kids avoid those particular shackles.
Imagine you’re sitting in class, struggling with a single true/false question on the paper in front of you. The teacher stands behind you with a loaded gun. Picture Snape, if you wish. True or false? he asks. Mark your answer carefully. Oh, and one more thing. Choose ‘true’ and there’s no penalty, even if you’re wrong. But if you choose ‘false’ and you’re wrong — I’ll shoot you in the head. Concentrate, now…
It’s Pascal’s Wager — one of the more cynical things ever uttered by a smart person. Once that gun is cocked, getting it right is no longer the issue, is it? Instead of thinking about the question, you’re focused rather tightly on not getting shot.
The one message I try to instill in my kids above all others is not that God is pretend, but that even if God exists, it is silly to think that the most important thing to him would be your belief in his existence. Honestly, can you imagine anything more petty, more outrageously egotistical — more human? So I tell my kids this: If there is a God, he’s not gonna care if you guess wrong about him.
I had to discover that one on my own, and it took many, many years. Too many. Once I did discover that simple and obvious fact, the freedom from fear allowed me to actually think. At which point I had a chance to get it right.
Which gets me to the real point of the post. I value the freedom to think for myself above just about anything else (other than the love of a good woman and about six other things, shut up). I get (as my Baptist/Episcopal mother-in-law would say) pissed to the tits when someone tries to force me to accept the prefiltered product of their own thinking. As I edited PBB, I kept this cardinal value in the forefront of my mind. I had one central goal for content editing: that every statement in the book should be reasonable. I didn’t say I would agree with every statement in the book — I don’t, by the way — but unless I’ve missed something, I am prepared to defend the reasonableness of every jot and tittle that made it in.
Not every j&t made it in, you see. I worked with several of the contributors to revise or remove statements I considered to be unreasonable or insufficiently grounded. And all of the writers, with one exception (oh DROP it WILL you PLEASE), were extraordinarily generous and willing to collaborate to that end.
Some of the essays are harsher than I’d choose to be. I think some are too forgiving of certain religious ideas. Some give way too much credit to atheists as a group. Others I just flat disagree with. But if I had edited those elements out, there goes your chance to think for yourself. If you read something with which you disagree, be sure to be glad for the chance to do so.
We’re used to being fed a single predigested POV. If that’s what you were expecting in this book, there’s just one thing I can say: You’re welcome.
Unholier than thou
Okay, I’m ready. Becca tells me to watch what I say, so I’ll type with my eyes open.
One of the less helpful notions in orthodox religious thought is the idea that there is a very small circle in which we may dance.
Some of the sillier extremes of this are the various sects who try to live by the literal dictates of Leviticus. Never mix two kinds of thread in the same garment. Never plant two different crops in the same field. Wash your pots just so, don’t touch a menstruating woman, etc etc etc. So very many ways to bring down God’s fist.
For later sects, it became simpler but more insidious, since it moved inside your head: don’t lust, don’t covet, and most of all, don’t doubt. But the message was the same: every moment of your life, you are one false move away from the abyss.
Hard to enjoy being a conscious thing when consciousness dreams up this kind of self-paralyzing crap.
One of the frankly hilarious features of the freethought world is our tendency to reproduce this irritating feature of religion in our own way by twisting ourselves in knots just as Gordian, just as asphyxiating, defining ever-smaller circles around ourselves and spurning those outside the circle as insufficiently pure.
Let’s call this syndrome “unholier-than-thou” (UTT).
Do you have UTT? Some symptoms to watch for:
1. Insisting that anyone who does not share your taste for slurs and epithets against religious believers is “gutless.”
2. Arguing endlessly about labels (atheist vs. humanist, humanist vs. secular humanist, atheist vs. nontheist, disbeliever vs. nonbeliever vs. nonreligious, ad infinitum). Insisting that any one label is obviously right or obviously wrong is a classic sign of UTT. Seek professional help.
3. Attempting to banish another person from the (un)sacred circle by claiming s/he has a connection to some form of thought or way of life less rigorously rational and secularly pure than one’s own. The secular equivalent of screaming WIIIIITCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
As you may have guessed, I’ve dealt with all three of these so far regarding Parenting Beyond Belief. I will surely hear more of it in the months ahead. Here’s my carefully-considered response to all of them, once again quoting Python:
If you want freethought to be forever marginalized, forever a minuscule percentage of humanity, by all means, continue with your petty proscriptions. And if you want your kids to grow up with the same fear of the fatal misstep, teach them that there’s a very narrow path to secular salvation.
Myself, I have other plans. I want to normalize disbelief, to make it something that regular, non-zealot types can consider. That means setting up a big tent. Get used to people who do disbelief in a different way from you. Stick your loyalty oaths and litmus tests and pet labels where it’ll take a sigmoidoscopy to find them.
There. I feel ever so much better.
(Damn Duncan Crary, by the way, for realizing, before I did, that ‘unholier than thou’ is much, much better than ‘more secular than thou.’)
So…who’s your Russ?
Let me introducing you to Russ:
Russ is a theology prof and a dear friend of mine who represents for me all that is good and noble in the faithful. He is a force for good in the world, a kind, gentle and admirable man. If all believers were like Russ, I’d be thrilled. They’re not, of course, but neither is he unique. And whenever I find myself ready to make a categorical statement about the faithful, Russ’s face pops up before me — and he usually looks plenty hurt, because he himself rarely deserves what I’m serving up.
Russ complicates my life in a good way. I’m convinced he’s got it factually wrong, and that he, like most moderate believers, does too little to acknowledge the genuine harm that religion does, but he is a deeply good guy. As a result of knowing Russ, and dozens like him, I avoid generalizations. I cannot oppose an idea just because it is Christian. I’m forced to actually look at it and think about it, to assess it on its merits, because it may be just as good as Russ. I still make critiques — boy howdy, do I — but they are smarter, more accurate, and more on-target because of Russ. I paint just as vividly, but with a narrower brush. That’s a very good thing.
Russes work both ways — all ways. A Russ is someone you know and love who is on the opposite side of any line of difference. The Cheneys got themselves a Russ when their daughter came out as a lesbian. Those Christians who might be angry at the inclusion of a PBB review in their favorite parenting magazine would be opposing something without thinking, just because it is associated with disbelief. I’d guess they don’t have a Russ on that issue, someone they know who would make it tougher to hate and fear nonbelievers indiscriminately. They need to know a good, decent atheist. Fortunately there are millions of them. Of us, I mean.
And they probably already do know some, of course — but the irony is that the very same hatred and fear that can be cured by knowing each other keeps us from revealing ourselves. And on spins the wheel. Once you know a “gay Russ,” why, it’s a hell of a lot harder to hate and fear gays. Same with a black Russ or an Iraqi Russ. Slurs and stereotypes start sticking in the throat. This is why it’s so important for members of marginalized groups to be out.
One of the purposes of the book is to normalize disbelief so that, in the future, everyone will have an atheist Russ in their lives. At which point a book on secular parenting might get about the same reception as one on vegetarian parenting. Parenting Beyond Beef, perhaps.
I’m the humanist/atheist Russ in the lives of many Christians I know. I complicate things for them. My face floats before them and they put away the broad brush. So, nonbelievers: Do you have a Russ? And believers, how about you? I’m available. We won’t always agree, but who needs that? If we can just keep each other’s humanity in sight, we’ll do fine.
Too hot the buzz?
After working for months to generate excitement about the book, the buzz is now beginning to freak me out. Just a bit. Expectations are so high across the board, it’s slightly terrifying. What will the other monkeys say when they discover it’s nothing but word scrambles and sudoku?
I give a portion of my book profits to various good and noble causes. For Calling Bernadette’s Bluff it was the National Center for Science Education and Doctors Without Borders. I’ve decided a portion of PBB profits will go to the most amazing organization I’ve ever been involved with: Nonviolent Peaceforce, an NGO that trains unarmed civilian peacekeeping teams and sends them to conflict zones around the world — currently Sri Lanka and Mindanao (Philippines), soon Colombia and Uganda. They work with local groups to build and sustain nonviolent strategies for conflict resolution. I’m their US communications coordinator at the moment, just an interim position, and I don’t want to tell them until I leave in May, so please don’t put it on the Internet or anything…
Just heard from the book’s publicist at Amacom that they’re having a very tough time getting parenting magazines to review the book. One editor after another claims s/he’s really really interested in the idea him or herself, but too concerned that a review would anger Christian subscribers into cancelling their subscriptions.
I couldn’t help thinking of a time, not too long ago, when periodicals would reject stories by or about African Americans for fear of angering white readers. I can just hear the editors at the time saying, “I think it’s a fine idea myself, but…” Saying such a thing today would be considered outrageous, but it’s still fine and dandy to accept or even promote bigotry against nonbelievers.
One invited contributor — thankfully only one — declined the offer to participate for the same reason. She is an agnostic, but also a prominent author of books for children, and said she simply couldn’t risk the potential backlash from religious parents. “I don’t need the controversy,” she said. He or she.
Now: It seems important to note that they’d surely be hearing from only a small minority of their religious readers. Most religious folks are just as sane and tolerant as you and I. I say this with confidence, having known countless Christians who are among the finest people I am likely to meet. And I use just one of them to shame myself whenever I pull out the broad brush. But that’s fodder for another post.