Of planets and pronouns
- March 25, 2009
- By Dale McGowan
- In My kids, Parenting, Science, wonder
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I’ve spent a lot of virtual ink taking to task the College of St. Catherine (a Catholic college for women on whose faculty I spent many years) for the hypocrisy that eventually made me pull up stakes and go solo. But I don’t often enough mention the positive things St. Kate’s gave me.
St. Kate’s is where my interest in critical thinking turned from hobby to academic specialization to lifelong enthusiasm. It inspired the satirical novel that launched my little writing career. And it made me a genuine feminist.
Which is good, because now I find myself raising two girls, doing what I can to keep limiting assumptions from calcifying around them.
That takes some doing. Kids gather assumptions about the world by the bucket, taking tiny samples, believing most of what they hear or see, spinning huge generalizations, and moving on. You can bemoan or huzzah this all you want, but it’s both a fact and inevitable. I touched on this in Parenting Beyond Belief:
Children have the daunting task of changing from helpless newborns into fully functioning adults in just over six thousand days. Think of that. A certain degree of gullibility necessarily follows. Children are believing machines, and for good reason: when we are children, the tendency to believe it when we are told that fire is dangerous, two and two are four, cliffs are not to be dangled from, and so on, helps us, in the words of Richard Dawkins, “to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and our ancestors” in order to accomplish the unthinkably complex feat of becoming adults. The immensity of the task requires children to be “suckers” for whatever it is adults tell them. It is our job as parents to be certain not to abuse this period of relative intellectual dependency and trust. (p. 181)
Kids soak up unintended messages as reliably as the intended ones, and they don’t always announce it when they’ve begun to form a pearl around the grain of a new assumption. Once in a while I become aware that something’s been ingested that I didn’t know about. Like gender roles.
My favorite of these surfaced in the pediatrician’s office with Erin (now 11, then 8), waiting to see Dr. Melissa Vincent, her doctor since birth.
“I like Dr. Vincent,” Erin said.
“Me too.”
Long pause.
“But I was wondering something,” she continued. ” Can boys be doctors, too?”
I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Erin’s desire for a career in or near medicine had a lot to do with the example of Dr. Vincent. Currently at the top of her list is cellular biologist, followed by family practice GP in a small but not too small town.
Her sister Delaney (7) wants to be a scientist but isn’t sure what kind. (I tell her the clock’s ticking. “You don’t wanna be one of those pathetic third graders still wandering through the curriculum trying to ‘find herself.'”)
One of Laney’s common openers is, “Do The Scientists know how/what/why…” I think this disembodied image of The Scientists is pretty close to my own early image of science. I decided to try to individualize it more for her as we engaged the questions:
“How did The Scientists figure out what’s in the middle of the Earth if nobody’s even been there?”
“I’ll bet it started with somebody wondering about it, then maybe asking about it, just like you do. Then he thought about the problem, and how you can learn about something you can’t see.”
(Dammit! Did you catch that? Shitshitshit.)
I had her close her eyes. “How can you learn about my face if you can’t see it?”
“I have no idea.”
“Sure you do.”
“I could peek,” she giggled.
“Cheaters rarely prosper. So you think maybe the scientist peeked at the earth’s core?”
“Dad, jeez. Oh wait, I have an idea!” She extended her hands and began exploring my face. “Pokey,” she said when she got to the beard. “You’re a porcupine!” said the blind man to the elephant.
(Or blind woman! Shitshitshit.)
Yesterday she asked if The Scientists have found any planets like Earth yet. Last summer I told her about the search and described the extremely cool inductive method used to find gas giants (Jupiter-plus sizes) by measuring tiny eccentric wobbles in their home stars — a method that has turned up 344 extrasolar planets in ten years.
Number of known planets outside our solar system 15 years ago: 0
At the time, Laney had signaled her agreement that this constituted one of the most paradigmatically significant discoveries in human history by declaring it “so awesome to think about” — but was sorry the method couldn’t locate smaller, rockier bits like Earth.
Now she was checking to see if we’re closer to finding fellow Earths. Thanks to a NOVA podcast I heard a few months ago, I knew we were.
I simplified it into a graspable narrative. “One of the scientists got a great idea. If a planet crosses in front of its star, that star would dim a tiny bit…you know, like a fly passing in front of a light bulb.”
She started to tremble with excitement, doing this weird hand-flapping thing that is endemic to our family. “Yeah? And??” Flap-flap-flap.
“But she realized we needed a much stronger telescope, one that…”
“SHE?” Laney interrupted. “The one who figured it out was a girl??” Flap-flap-flap!
“Uh…I think so, yeah!”
Now the fact is, there wasn’t any one person — there rarely is — and I have no idea whether those involved had knishes or putzes. But I knew she wouldn’t have blinked if I said “he,” which means I’d uncovered a potentially limiting assumption — hopefully before the pearl could form.
I went on to tell her about the Kepler telescope, launched earlier this month (to almost universal public disinterest) for the primary purpose of finding other Earths. She dubbed it “so awesome.” And maybe the Kepler, connected in Delaney’s mind to a woman of science, will become a useful grain of sand as she continues to form her own possibilities.
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NOVA podcast “Finding Other Earths” (4:44)
Glass houses
I’ve had several parents ask how best to deal with arrogance — especially in pre-teens, it seems — toward religious folks, especially extended family. “How do I keep my 13-year-old from sneering at other people for their beliefs when I frankly think they’re pretty darn sneerable myself?” That sort of thing.
It’s become such a common question that I included a story of mine in Raising Freethinkers–presumptuously inserting it into Jan’s otherwise excellent chapter titled “Secular Family, Religious World.” (Editorship has its privileges.)
In addition to clarifying the two different levels of respect about which I’ve blogged before — that ideas themselves have to earn respect, but people are inherently deserving of it — the best way to approach this is (if you’ll excuse the phrase) by inviting him who is without sin to cast the first stone.
I watch the odd bit of televangelism now and then. My son Connor (then 11) caught a few minutes of one program in which some outrageous thing was being foisted on a nodding throng. My boy reacted not to the idea itself, but by sneering at the people: “I just don’t understand how those stupid people can believe stupid things that make no sense!”
“Hmm, yeah.” I thought for a minute, then said, “Hey Con, could you go get me a Coke from the basement?”
“What?”
“A Coke. From the basement.”
“I…but…” he stammered. “Why?”
“I’m thirsty. Please.”
“But…I can’t go into the basement by myself.”
“Oh? Why not?”
“I…I just can’t!”
“Oh,” I said gently. “And…does that make sense?”
I quickly admitted to several irrational quirks of my own, like my completely over-the-top aversion to dead things (unless grilled), and my steadfast belief that M&Ms melt in your mouth but not in your hands, despite constant evidence to the contrary. There are surely many more quirks and irrationalities I carry around, but being me, it’s hard to see them. Just ask Becca what they are — then cancel your appointments for the day.
Connor and I then went after the idea in question as we always do, but he was able to do so from a less self-exalted and slightly more empathetic perch — one fallible human thinking hard and well about the errors to which we are all prone, not some glowing eminence smirking at the foibles of creatures in the mud beneath his feet.
We all have irrational beliefs and fears. Jumping at shadows and seeing faces in tortillas is a direct consequence of our deepest wiring — and all the new software in the world will never completely fix that mess. It’s a good and great thing to try, to pull yourself as far up out of the muck as you can, but it’s delusional to ever think you’ve completely escaped it, or to sneer too thoroughly at those silly fools you imagine you’ve left behind.
Now before I get a dozen furious emails, let me be absolutely clear. Reasoned critique is a great thing, and I encourage my kids to go after any and all ideas on their merits. But eye-rolling arrogance toward those who support a given idea is not reasoned critique — and religious discourse is filled with examples of people on all sides who allow dismissive arrogance to cloud their judgment. Start with arrogance, saying, “I can’t believe how stupid they are to believe xyz” and you have one foot on Ray Comfort’s banana peel. Start instead with a little humility, saying, “I may be wrong about this, but…” and you have a much better chance of actually getting things right.
We all live in glass houses, no matter how thoroughly we think we’ve attended to our own rationality. And that’s not entirely bad. It can keep us humble and, as a bonus, increases our chances of thinking well.
Closer and closer to No Big Deal
I start the parenting seminar with a slide intended to help us all relax about the place of secularism in the United States.
Most freethought blogs and periodicals give the impression that aggressive, fundamentalist evangelical Christianity is growing by leaps and bounds, threatening to capsize the frail craft of secular humanism any day now.
I suppose this keeps us manning the barricades instead of scratching ourselves and reaching for the remote. But the way I see myself in the culture affects the way I parent, so I need to know what’s really going on. If my worldview is being pushed to the margins, I might be forced to strike a dukes-up posture and teach my kids to do the same.
But if it isn’t true, I need to know that as well. It would allow me to be less fearful, more open, and more relaxed — and to encourage the same in my kids.
My opening slide shows the percentage of religious identification in the U.S. as determined by the gorgeously detailed American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS). ARIS has taken the pulse of American religious identity three times: in 1990, in 2001, and in 2008, these latest results released just days ago.
The data in ARIS and other polls show a clear trend toward a much healthier pluralism in the U.S. Among the fascinating data: From 1990 to 2008…
Christian identification has shown a steady decline, from 89 to 75 percent of the US — including drops in 46 states; Evangelicals make up an ever-growing percentage of the water in the hold of the Protestant ship (if you get my metaphor); Nonreligious identification has increased from 8 percent in 1990 to 15 percent in 2008, including growth in all 50 states; Non-Christian religions have grown from 3 to 9 percent, including growth in 44 states; The percentage of Americans who claim Jewish identity is stable, even as those who call themselves “religiously Jewish” has declined by 13 percent — meaning more are (like the congregation I addressed this past weekend) nontheistic but “culturally Jewish”; The percentage of respondents who, when asked about their religious identity, say “none of your damn business,” has increased in 49 states.
I don’t wanna take over the culture — it’s too much work. But I do want to live in a country where the self-identified nonreligious have a place at the cultural table and religious disbelief is No Big Deal.
And according to our best data, we’re well on our way.
Conservatively project ARIS forward to 2024 — the year my youngest graduates from college — and the US should be about two-thirds Christian and one-third something else. That’s a much healthier mix than the 90-10 split of 1990. And if we follow European trends, it’ll go a helluva lot faster than that. A Harris poll in 2006 put theistic belief in Germany, the United Kingdom, and France at 41, 35, and 27 percent respectively.
All of which means our kids are likely to be living in a culture that’s ever so much more balanced and diverse than we did. Fancy that.
(Click here for an almost unbearably cool interactive map at USAToday. Be sure to click on alllll the tabs: “View by change” and “View by year,” as well as all of the worldviews. Now tell me that’s not fun.)
Best Practices 5: Encourage religious literacy
hortly after the release of Parenting Beyond Belief, I mentioned on the PBB Discussion Forum that I think religious literacy is an important thing for our kids (and ourselves) to have. Many agreed, as did most of the contributors to the book, but I received an email from one parent who asked,
Why should I fill my kids’ heads with all that mumbo-jumbo?
Here are my four reasons that religious literacy (knowledge of religion, as opposed to belief in it) is crucial:
1. To understand the world. A huge percentage of the news includes a religious component. Add the fact that 90 percent of our fellow humans express themselves through religion and it becomes clear that ignorance of religion cuts our children off from understanding what is happening in the world around them—and why.
2. To be empowered. In the U.S. presidential election of 2004, candidate Howard Dean identified Job as his favorite book of the New Testament. That Job is actually in the Old Testament was a trivial thing to most of us, but to a huge whack of the religious electorate, Dean had revealed a forehead-smacking level of ignorance about the central narrative of their lives. For those people, Dean was instantly discounted, irrelevant. Because we want our kids’ voices heard in the many issues with a religious component, it’s important for them to have knowledge of that component.
3. To make an informed decision. I really, truly, genuinely want my kids to make up their own minds about religion, and I trust them to do so. Any nonreligious parent who boasts of a willingness to allow their kids to make their own choices but never exposes them to religion or religious ideas is being dishonest. For kids to make a truly informed judgment about it, they must have access to it.
4. To avoid the “teen epiphany.” Here’s the big one. Struggles with identity, confidence, and countless other issues are a given part of the teen years. Sometimes these struggles generate a genuine personal crisis, at which point religious peers often pose a single question: “Don’t you know about Jesus?” If your child says, “No,” the peer will come back incredulously with, “YOU don’t know JESUS? Omigosh, Jesus is The Answer!” Boom, we have an emotional hijacking. And such hijackings don’t end up in moderate Methodism. This is the moment when nonreligious teens fly all the way across the spectrum to evangelical fundamentalism.
A little knowledge about religion allows the teen to say, “Yeah, I know about Jesus”—and to know that reliable answers to personal problems are better found elsewhere.
So should you take your kids to a mainstream, bible-believing church? Hardly. They shouldn’t get to age 18 without seeing the inside of a church, or you risk creating forbidden fruit. Take them once in a while just to see what it’s all about and to see that there’s no magical land of unicorns and faeries behind those doors. But know that churchgoing generally has squat to do with religious literacy.
In his (fabulous) book Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—And Doesn’t, Stephen Prothero points out that faithfully churchgoing Americans are incredibly ignorant of even the most basic tenets of their own belief systems, not to mention others. Europeans, on the other hand, are religiously knowledgeable and rarely darken the door of a church.
Coincidence? I don’t think so. Most European countries have mandated religious education and decidedly secular populations. Unless they attend a UU or Ethical Society, U.S. kids have almost no religious education. Faith is most easily sustained in ignorance. Learning about religion leads to thinking about religion—and you know what happens then.
Mainstream churchgoing also exposes kids to a single religious perspective. That’s not literacy—in fact, it usually amounts to indoctrination.
So how do you get religiously literate kids?
1. Talk, talk, talk. All literacy begins with oral language. Toss tidbits of religious knowledge into your everyday conversations. If you drive by a mosque and your four-year-old points out the pretty gold dome, take the opportunity: “Isn’t that pretty? It’s a kind of church called a mosque. People who go there pray five times every day, and they all face a city far away when they do it.” No need to get into the Five Pillars of Islam. A few months later, you see a woman on the street wearing a hijab and connect it to previous knowledge: “Remember the mosque, the church with that gold dome? That’s what some people wear who go to that church.”
As kids mature, include more complex information—good, bad, and ugly. No discussion of Martin Luther King, Jr. is complete without noting that he was a Baptist minister, and that his religion was important to him. You can’t grasp 9/11 without understanding Islamic afterlife beliefs. And the founding of our country is reframed by noting that the majority of the founders were religious skeptics of one stripe or another. Talk about the religious components of events in the news, from the stem cell debate to global warming to terrorism to nonviolence advocacy.
2. Read myths of many traditions. Myths make terrific bedtime stories. Start with creation myths from around the world, then move into the many rich mythic traditions—Greek, Roman, Norse, Hopi, Inuit, Zulu, Indian, and more. And don’t forget the Judeo-Christian stories. Placing them side by side with other traditions removes the pedestal and underlines what they have in common.
3. Attend church on occasion with trusted relatives. Keeping kids entirely separated from the experience of church can make them think something magical happens there. If your children are invited by friends, say yes—and go along. The conversations afterward can be some of the most productive in your entire religious education plan.
4. Movies. One of the most effective and enjoyable ways to expose your kids to religious ideas is through movies. For the youngest, this might include Prince of Egypt, Little Buddha, Kirikou and the Sorceress, and Fiddler on the Roof. By middle school it’s Jason and the Argonauts, Gandhi, Bruce Almighty, and Kundun. High schoolers can see and enjoy Seven Years in Tibet, Romero, Schindler’s List, Jesus Camp, Dogma, and Inherit the Wind. This list alone touches eight different religious systems (seven more than they’ll get in a mainstream Sunday School) and both the positive and negative influences of religion in history (one more than you get in Sunday School).
Special gem: Don’t forget Jesus Christ Superstar, a subversive and thought-provoking retelling of the last days of Christ. There are no miracles; the story ends with the crucifixion, not the resurrection; and Judas is the hero, urging Jesus not to forget about the poor as the ministry becomes a personality cult.
Best Practices 4: Teach engaged coexistence
strology survived Copernicus.
That’s my simple response whenever someone suggests to me that science will eventually put religion out of business.
By all rights, astrology should have been forced out of business in 1543. Among other things, astrology is founded on the necessary condition of an Earth-centered universe. Medieval treatises on astrology include sentences like “As the orb of the World is center’d in the celestial spheres, so then is it reasonable to conclude that…” So long as the other planets orbited Earth and the constellations of the Zodiac were arrayed in reference to an Earthly center, the idea that constellations determined our personalities and controlled our destinies had at least a snowball’s chance of respectability.
But after the publication of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus in 1543 — followed by two centuries of theological arm-wrestling — Earth was decisively removed from cosmic center court. At this point, astrology, shorn of its most essential assumption, should have followed geocentrism into obscurity. The fact that it did not — that it has endured several centuries goofily unaware that new knowledge has rendered it null and void — is enough to make it ridiculous.
Yet the Harris poll shows Americans’ belief in astrology going up, not down (25% in 2005, 29% in 2007, 31% in 2008).
If astrology’s coffin needed any more nails, Hubble provided them in 1924 when he first discovered the true size of the universe and distance between stars — at which point the “constellations of the Zodiac” and all other apparent celestial patterns were seen to be associated only incidentally from our accidental vantage point. In fact, they are separated by millions of light years from each other not only in two dimensions but in the third as well. One star that appears to be snuggling another is often millions of light years behind it, just as the moon, which often appears to be right next to my thumb is actually, amazingly, not.
Yet the thing shows no signs of vanishing any time soon.
So when even so bright a light as Richard Dawkins says that the discovery of a Grand Unified Theory would “deal an overdue death blow to religion and other juvenile superstitions,” I say, with the utmost respect and admiration, pfft.
The confident demise of religion has been predicted at least since Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Several scientific commentators during the 20th century predicted the demise of religion in 25, 50, or 100 years. I think they’ve all failed to realize that precious few religious believers are assiduously poring over facts to be sure their worldview still holds water. They stick with it because it is such a dynamite cure for what ails them (adjective meant in all possible ways).
Add to that the fact that a large part of humanity will always lack access to knowledge and security, not to mention the simple awareness of any Grand Unified Theory we might discover, and I feel confident that religion will continue, forever, to plug the hole. Religion will always be with us.
I do think religion will gradually become less influential in the developed world and (on the whole) less fanatical and intolerant, thanks in part to increased access to knowledge and security. Despite the loud evangelicals, that’s already well underway. But new religious movements pop up at an estimated rate of two or three per day in developing countries. In the developed world, the thing continues to (ironically) evolve to keep pace with both our ever- and our never-changing itches.
For the record, I’d prefer this not be the case. Since it is the case, I do what I can to hasten the evolution of religious expression and practice toward the less fanatical and intolerant. It’s a process that is already going full steam in Europe, by the way (at least as far as Euro-Judeo-Christianity goes. For more on Euro-Islam, see Sam Harris).
When it comes to parenting, I’m raising kids for what I call “engaged coexistence” with other world views. It rejects both the “Everbuddy’s gwine tuh hail ceptin’ me an my dawg” attitude of the fundamentalists and the “I hold all religions in deep respect as multiple manifestations of the True” of the New Age.
The trick is to sort out the word respect.
Respect for individuals and respect for their ideas are quite different and must be separated.
People are inherently deserving of respect as human beings, and no one can be faulted for shutting you out if you declare disrespect for their very personhood. Ideas are another matter. I feel too much respect for the word “respect” to grant it automatically to all ideas.
Even if I disagree with it, I can respect an opinion if it is founded on something meaningful, like rational argument or careful, repeatable observation. The other person may have interpreted the information differently, but I can still respect the way she’s going about it. Suppose on the other hand that someone says Elvis and JFK are working at a laundromat in Fargo and offers a dream or tea leaves or a palm reading as evidence. It would render the word “respect” meaningless to say I respect that opinion. I both disagree with it and withhold my respect for it. And that’s okay. No need to degrade the other person. I know all sorts of lovely, respectable people who hold a silly belief or two—including myself, no doubt—and wouldn’t think of judging them, or me, less worthy of respect as human beings.
Ideas are another thing entirely. It’s not only wrong to grant respect to all ideas, it can be downright dangerous. So I teach my kids to work toward a better, saner world by challenging all ideas AND inviting the same challenge of their own, explicitly, out loud, no matter what worldview they adopt.
That’s engaged coexistence. We recognize that we’re going to be sharing this apartment for the long haul and work together to keep each other’s feet off the furniture.
[CORRECTION: This post initially claimed that the New York Times has an astrology column. It has no such thing. I regret the error.]
Evolution for breakfast
One of the tropes in my seminars is the suggestion that big ideas are best consumed in little bites over many years. The old “how-do-you-eat-an-elephant” joke is right on the money. Religious education works best this way. No big lectures, no Bible marathons required. A toe-dip a day for 18 years will get you wetter than a whole catechectical bath. Best of all, you don’t get all pruney.
Same with evolution. When we lived in Minneapolis, our family used to take walks through an area called the Quaking Bog in Theodore Wirth Park. I spotted a fawn once and waved the kids over with the universal handsigns for “Come-quickly-and-quietly” and “You-call-that-quiet?” What followed went something like this:
DAD: Look, look. See the deer? You can just barely see it against the leaves.
ERIN (about 8 then): It’s almost invisible.
DELANEY (about 4): Whoa. If I was an aminal that ate deers, I’d never see them. I’d just starve.
DAD: Unless there was a bright pink one.
They laughed. The deer bolted.
CONNOR (10): Oh, good job, girls!
DAD: Okay, pink and slow. I think I’d eat nothing but slow, pink deer.
(*Munch*) That’s one bite of evolution. No need to hammer it home with big hairy terminology. No need to connect every dot on the spot. Just take a bite. Mmmm, Daaarwin.
In the previous post I wrote about the possibility of artificial selection at work on heike crabs in Japan. Fishermen toss back crabs with somewhat facelike markings on their shells, leading over the course of hundreds of generations to ever-more-facelike shell markings. I told Erin the story of the heike that night at bedtime.
(*Munch*)
This morning as the girls ate breakfast, I opened the bottle of their chewable vitamins. “I want an orange one,” said Erin.
“I’m well aware.”
“Me too,” said Laney.
“I know what color you want, girls, you tell me every morning.” I tapped two vitamins into my hand. Both purple. I poured out a bunch more. All purple. “Pfft. Of course,” I said, showing the handful of purple vitamins.
Erin chuckled. “That’s because we ask for orange every day.”
It hit me like a brick. “Hey, Erin! It’s just like the heike crabs!”
“The wha…oh, the crabs in Japan! Omigosh, it is!” Just as the fisherfolk selected and rejected crab phenotypes, we had selected and rejected vitamin “phenotypes” until purple ruled the bottle.
(*Munch*) Mmmm.
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A frankly incredible annotated list of books about evolution for kids at CHARLIE’S PLAYHOUSE
Thunderstruck
Just back from a lovely trip to the Ethical Society of St. Louis where I spoke to a wonderful crowd who laughed at all of my jokes and asked some very good questions. Can’t ask for much more than that. Many thanks to my warm and welcoming hosts, including Trish Cowan and the fabulously-named Kate Lovelady. And to my dear mom and stepdad, who gave me a bed and cookies.
(Thanks also to Dan Klarmann of the blog Dangerous Intersection who blogged about the event and snapped the hilariously ministerial photo of me at right.)
In the Q&A after the talk, one participant asked why I don’t call myself an agnostic instead of an atheist. It’s a perennial question. I answered that I am an atheist and an agnostic and a secular humanist and a freethinker. They are not exclusive of each other; each simply emphasizes something different.
Though I’m sure they exist, I have never yet met an atheist delusional enough to say he or she knows God does not exist. Atheism simply means “I don’t think God exists.” It is a statement of belief, based on the evidence as we see it, not one of certainty. But agnostic is too often misunderstood as a 50-50, “dunno, don’t care” position. That not really an agnostic, it’s an apatheist. I said that I am a teapot agnostic, then explained what that is.
In addition to giving us the teapot, Bertrand Russell tackled the issue of labels with his usual clarity:
I never know whether I should say [I am] “Agnostic” or whether I should say “Atheist”. It is a very difficult question and I daresay that some of you have been troubled by it. As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one prove that there is not a God.
On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.
None of us would seriously consider the possibility that all the gods of Homer really exist, and yet if you were to set to work to give a logical demonstration that Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, and the rest of them did not exist you would find it an awful job. You could not get such proof.
Therefore, in regard to the Olympic gods, speaking to a purely philosophical audience, I would say that I am an Agnostic. But speaking popularly, I think that all of us would say in regard to those gods that we were Atheists. In regard to the Christian God, I should, I think, take exactly the same line.1
As I flew home that night, I was treated to a God’s-eye view of a thunderstorm over Kentucky and Tennessee. It was a good 500 miles wide. The cloud layer, maybe 1,000 feet below us, was completely invisible for 20 seconds at a time, until a pulse of lightning would illuminate a thunderhead from within, spreading across the folds and billows just long enough for the shape to remain on my retina. Then again, ten miles away, and again, right beneath us. Fantastic.
Yet I never saw another person on the plane so much as glancing out the windows.
We just stop seeing how remarkable the world is. Most days I’m as guilty as the next person. I opened my Harvard talk with a bit of this:
We’re all half asleep most of the time. We lose track of how astonishing our situation is because it’s always been this way. Here we are, sitting in an auditorium, I’m the speaker, you’re the audience, sitting attentively. How can we go through this charade? How can we pretend that things are normal? If we were awake, we should all be completely distracted by our own existence: Oh my gosh. Look at this…I’m this combination of mind and body, half my mom, half my dad, made of star material, my thoughts all coming out of a blob of electrochemical jelly in my head, 60,000 miles of blood vessels, and I’m related to redwoods and butterflies and blue whales… But we don’t, because we’ve never NOT been these things.
Douglas Adams captured this perfectly when he said, “The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”
Parents have no such excuse. We haven’t always been parents, so there’s presumably this prior frame of reference to compare to—the period before we created life. And then we created the life, and felt wondrous for a while, but a little later we’re fixing it breakfast and tying its shoes as if it wandered down the street and in the door. There are three people running around our house who emerged from my wife. Think of that. But how awake am I to that fact on a daily basis? Not very.
I do think it would help if we named things according to their real significance. My wife could say to our son, “Hey! Organism-that-was-created-in-my-body-by-a-process-I-barely-understand! Flush the potty when you’re done!”
“Okay, okay, My-portal-into-the-world, jeez!”
Whenever I see a good lightning storm, I picture a classified ad on another planet:
SETTLERS NEEDED to colonize third planet in Sol system. Advantages include temperate conditions and plentiful resources. Challenges include tendency of planet’s atmosphere to discharge one-billion-volt columns of energy toward ground in random patterns approximately 100 times per second. Include two references.
Still a damn nice place.
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1from Russell, Bertrand, “Am I an Atheist or an Agnostic? A Plea for Tolerance in the Face of New Dogmas” (1947)
Follow the bouncing meme!
As y’all know, on December 6, a number of nonreligious parents gathered at Harvard’s Fong Auditorium to get some ideas about raising kids without religion. Greg Epstein also led a discussion about how best to form a more lasting community to serve the needs of nonreligious parents in the Boston/Cambridge area.
Washington Post reporter Robin Shulman spent the day with us and wrote an article about it for the December 21 edition of the Post. Aside from one previously-noted misquote and one eyerollingly cheap shot ( “someone sneezed, and there was a long silence — no one said “Bless you” or even ‘Salud’ or ‘Santé'” ), it was a lovely and fair piece.
Early in the article, Robin used the word “congregation” to describe the intended parenting community. It wasn’t her word choice but that of Greg Epstein, who favors staking a shared claim in such language rather than retreating allergically from it. It was that single word that set off a memetic devolution of the article’s message.
It started at the Post. Reporters rarely write their own headlines. Whoever wrote this one apparently saw an opening in the word “congregation” and wrote the following head:
Humanist Parents Seek Communion Outside Church
Like “congregation,” communion has a general meaning and several specific ones. In the general sense ( “a joining together of minds or spirits”), the headline is perfectly accurate. But comments on the article, in blogs, and elsewhere show that many readers read the specific meaning ( “A Christian sacrament commemorating the Last Supper of Christ”) and went ballistic. And well they might, since the reference to “church” does indeed narrow the meaning.
Equally interesting is the syndicated life of the meme. Robin’s unchanged article appears today (Dec 28) in newspapers and online columns around the U.S. Sometimes the headline is unchanged (as in the Loveland, Colorado Reporter-Herald, for example), but more often, the copy editor or columnist in question has his/her way with the meme, often revealing his/her own biases or intentionally stirring the pot.
Here’s a sampler of headlines currently running across the U.S., including some less wobbly than the Post headline…
Humanists Want Community, Too
(Atlanta Examiner)
(No surprise that one of the simplest, most accurate headlines of all was hat-tipped from the Friendly Atheist.)Humanists look to form parenting group with no religious elements
Organizers of a Boston seminar wanted to reach out to parents looking for guidance
(Wichita Eagle)Humanist families find guidance, rituals without religion
(Santa Fe New Mexican)
…some with the same wobbly c-words…
Humanist parents seek communion, support
(Canton Repository)Humanist parents consider their own congregation
(Winston-Salem Journal)
…some that I’m sure must mean something, but who knows what…
Parents seek life without religion
(The Tennessean)
…and some that are just plain silly or willfully ignorant:
Atheists trying to replicate church
(Reformed Chicks Blabbing at Beliefnet)Teaching Children How to Go to Hell
(Covenant News)
For those of us trying our best to articulate a clear and consistent message about what humanism is and isn’t, the key to a peaceful inner life is truly giving up the illusion of control — making peace, once and for all, with the perpetual mutilation of our carefully-crafted memes.
Add that to my resolutions.
“Getting” belief
A final P.S. to the Santa discussion — The post I linked to last time (by philosopher and PBB contributor Stephen Law) just reminded me of another benefit of doing the Santa thing, one I’ve spoken of but may not have written about. Stephen puts it like so:
[Allowing kids to believe in Santa, etc.] gives them an appreciation of what it’s like to be a true believer. Even after the bubble of belief has burst, the memory of what it was like to inhabit it — to really believe — lingers on. The adult who never knew that is perhaps kind of missing out.
I think it even goes beyond missing out. I’ve found that adults who never “inhabited belief” of any kind often (not always) exhibit utter bafflement when it comes to religious belief. You can see this in countless blogs and essays and comment threads — I just can’t understand how anyone could believe abc, Why can’t they just wake up and realize xyz, ad infinitum. A natural lack of empathy ensues.
Bafflement is not good. It’s a kind of incomprehension. I don’t want my kids baffled by any major part of the world. If Stephen and I are right, Santa belief is an opportunity that can be drawn on for a lifetime — a source of empathy for those who willingly immerse themselves in belief even when the evidence against that belief is overwhelming. Not a bad thing at all, that empathy. In fact, it’s a precondition for dialogue.
Even if my kids never get religion, I at least want them to “get” religion — and being a true believer for a little while just may be the ticket.
Empathy symbol courtesy EmpathySymbol.com.
Pants-on-fire parenting
Give me the fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself.
Economist VILFREDO PARETO, referring to the errors of Kepler
_______________________________
In 1847, around the time Pareto was conceived, an obstetrician by the name of Ignaz Semmelweis noticed that pregnant women in his hospital were much more likely to die if their babies were delivered by doctors than by midwives. He then noticed that doctors whose patients died had usually come straight from autopsies. Semmelweis asked the doctors to humor him by washing their hands before delivering a baby. Maternal mortality in the hospital dropped below two percent.
It took another generation for the medical establishment to accept germ theory as fact — but once they did, the average human lifespan in Europe nearly doubled overnight.
Fast forward to the early 21st century, where we’ve overlearned the message. Thanks to air filters, airtight homes, and antibacterial everything, our environments have been so thoroughly scrubbed that our systems are losing the ability to deal with the germs and irritants that abound in the world outside our doors.
Among other things, the result has been a spike in serious childhood allergies and infections. According to an NPR story on studies supporting this conclusion, “An emphasis on hygiene means we are no longer exposing children to enough bacteria to help trigger their natural immune systems.”
With the best of intentions, we so thoroughly protect our children from an admittedly bad thing that we do them a disservice.
See where I’m headed?
I think the same idea applies in many areas of parenting — among them the careful scrubbing of all exposure to “nonsense” from our children’s lives. I’ve heard the assertion that “we must never lie to our children” from many nonreligious parents, always intoned in the kind of hushed voice usually reserved for sacred pronouncements.
Actually, I think it’s terribly important to lie to our children.
(N.B. That tongue-in-cheek sentence appeared in the initial draft of Raising Freethinkers until my editor protested that what I advocate isn’t really lying. Spoilsport. So I changed it to this:) Though I don’t advocate outright lying, the playful fib can work wonders for the development of critical thinking.
Many nonreligious parents, in the admirable name of high integrity, set themselves up as infallible authorities. And since (like it or not) we are the first and most potent authority figures in our kids’ lives, turning ourselves into benevolent oracles of truth can teach our kids to passively receive the pronouncements of authority. I would rather, in a low-key and fun fashion, encourage them to constantly take whatever I say and run it through the baloney meter. To that end, I sprinkle our conversations with fruitful errors, bursting with their own corrections.
When my youngest asked, “How far away is the Sun?”, I said, “Twenty feet,” precisely so she would look at me and say, “Dad, you dork!!” When my kids ask what’s for dinner, I say “Monkey lungs, go wash up.” When the fifth grader doing her homework asks what seven times seven is, I say 47, because she should (a) know that on her own by now, and, equally important (b) know the wrong answer when she hears it.
Yes, I make sure they end up with the right answer when it matters, and no, I don’t do this all the time. They’d kill me. But pulling our kids’ legs once in a while is more than just fun and games. For one thing, if every word from my mouth was a reliable pearl of factuality, they would get the unhelpful message that Authority Always Tells the Truth.
Now don’t instantly whip over to the cartoon extreme of Dad lying about whether a car is coming as we cross the street ( “All clear!! Heh heh heh.”) I’m talking about fibs of the harmless-but-useful variety — and yes, I firmly include Santa in that.
Knowing that Dad sometimes talks nonsense can prepare them to expect and challenge the occasional bit of nonsense, intentional or otherwise, from peers, ministers, and presidents. The result in our household is this: When I answer a question, my kids don’t swallow it without a thought. They take a moment to think about whether the answer makes sense. By seeing to it that their childhood includes nonsense, I’m building their immune systems for a lifetime swimming in the stuff.
An interesting and related post on lying by philosopher (and PBB contributor) Stephen Law
