Humanist Parents Seek Communion Outside Church (Wash Post)
By Robin Shulman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 21, 2008; Page A10
BOSTON — They are not religious, so they don’t go to church. But they are searching for values and rituals with which to raise their children, as well as a community of like-minded people to offer support.
Dozens of parents came together on a recent Saturday to participate in a seminar on humanist parenting and to meet others interested in organizing a kind of nonreligious congregation, complete with regular family activities and ceremonies for births and deaths.
“It’s exciting to know that we could be meeting people who we might perhaps raise children with,” said Tony Proctor, 39, who owns a wealth management company and attended the seminar at Harvard University with his wife, Andrea, 35, a stay-at-home mother.
Humanism is both a formal movement and an informal identification of people who promote values of reason, compassion and human dignity. Although most humanists are atheists, atheism is defined by what is absent — belief in God — and humanists emphasize a positive philosophy of ethical living for the human good.
The seminar’s organizers wanted to reach out to people like the Proctors — first-time parents scrambling for guidance as they improvise how to raise their daughter without the religion of their childhood.
“I’m often told that when people have kids, they go back to religion,” said John Figdor, a humanist master’s of divinity student who helped organize the seminar. “Are we really not tending our own people?”
Across the country, religious observance hits a low for people in their mid-20s and steadily increases after that, “in conjunction with marriage and children,” said Tom Smith, of the General Social Survey at the University of Chicago, which has polled people about religious affiliation and practice for decades.
Religious congregations are good at supporting parenting, said Gregory Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard who organized the seminar. Although most humanists may not believe in God, he said, they do believe in sharing their lives with others who share their values.
“Why throw the baby out with the bath water?” Epstein asked.
Most Americans are religious and believe in God, but a growing number of people have no religious affiliation. In 1990, 8 percent of respondents in the General Social Survey said they identified with no religion. In 2006, the last year for which statistics are available, the figure had doubled to 16 percent.
In recent years, the chaplaincy at Harvard has hosted humanist speakers such as novelist Salman Rushdie, evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen and U.S. Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.). Student interest is booming. But something happens when those students graduate, marry and become parents.
For the Proctors, especially for Andrea, who grew up in a Catholic household, arriving at the seminar took a lifetime of questioning.
Growing up, she attended church each Sunday, took Communion and was confirmed. She became disenchanted after a sex scandal at her parish was poorly handled, she said. Then in college, she was “exposed to a lot of different beliefs in religions and science. It causes you to question.”
Tony grew up fascinated by his neighbors’ ability to find community at church, which he sometimes attended with them. “Every Sunday they would go to church and see friends. That was a neat thing,” he said.
The Proctors found themselves making decisions about religion when they had a daughter last year. Andrea said her parents asked, “Of course you’re going to baptize her, right?” She answered, “Actually, no.”
Instead, Andrea did a Google search for someone who might perform a nonreligious ceremony to mark Sienna’s entry into the world and found Epstein, the Harvard humanist chaplain.
Epstein officiated at the ceremony, while both sets of grandparents spoke about their hopes and dreams for the child, Andrea said. The Proctors named “guide parents” instead of godparents.
By the time they got to the Harvard seminar more than a year later, they were ready to organize a larger community of families like themselves.
A room full of concertedly nonreligious people has its idiosyncrasies. At the seminar, someone sneezed, and there was a long silence — no one said “Bless you” or even “Salud” or “Santé.”
For sale were T-shirts saying “98% Chimpanzee” or showing a tadpole with the words “Meet Your Ancestor.” There were also children’s games from Charlie’s Playhouse, a Darwinian toy company, illustrating the process of evolution.
A recent study found that many Americans associate atheists with negative traits, including criminal behavior and rampant materialism.
People often ask, “How do you expect to raise your children to be good people without religion?” said Dale McGowan, the seminar leader and author of “Parenting Beyond Belief.” He suggested the retort might be something like, “How do you expect to raise your children to be moral people without allowing them to think for themselves?”1 He advocates exposing children to many religious traditions without imposing any.
At the seminar, Andrea Proctor was thrilled to meet another mother who would like to start a group of parents and children meeting weekly or biweekly.
“We just put a huge pool in our back yard,” Tony Proctor said. “We might have to start humanist barbecue pool parties.”
(Read and comment online. Caution: Many of the comments, as usual, are tending toward the vicious at the moment, so have some eggnog before you read them.)
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1Robin did a nice job on this article, but this is not quite what I said. The quote above assumes that all religious parents do not allow their kids to think for themselves, a false and ridiculous assumption. For the record, my suggested reply to the question, “How are you going to raise your kids to be moral without religion?” was this: “Calmly reply, ‘Why, by avoiding moral indoctrination, of course, which research has shown to be the least effective way to encourage moral development. And what’s your plan?'” Oh well. I’m a silly, oversensitive monkey to even point it out.
Santa Claus — The Ultimate Dry Run
By Dale McGowan
Excerpted from Parenting Beyond Belief
One of the questions that came up in the Austin Q&A was the Santa thing — and it’s so clearly in the air, from Friendly Atheist to Rational Moms, that I can’t even wait ’til Wednesday to chime in, because oh do I have an opinion. I threw in my two bits on pp. 87-90 of Parenting Beyond Belief, which I now offer virtually in the space below.
T’S HARD TO even consider the possibility that Santa isn’t real. Everyone seems to believe he is. As a kid, I heard his name in songs and stories and saw him in movies with very high production values. My mom and dad seemed to believe, batted down my doubts, told me he wanted me to be good and that he always knew if I wasn’t. And what wonderful gifts I received! Except when they were crappy, which I always figured was my fault somehow. All in all, despite the multiple incredible improbabilities involved in believing he was real, I believed – until the day I decided I cared enough about the truth to ask serious questions, at which point the whole façade fell to pieces. Fortunately the good things I had credited him with kept coming, but now I knew they came from the people around me, whom I could now properly thank.
Now go back and read that paragraph again, changing the ninth word from Santa to God.
Santa Claus, my secular friends, is the greatest gift a rational worldview ever had. Our culture has constructed a silly and temporary myth parallel to its silly and permanent one. They share a striking number of characteristics, yet the one is cast aside halfway through childhood. And a good thing, too: A middle-aged father looking mournfully up the chimbly along with his sobbing children on yet another giftless Christmas morning would be a sure candidate for a very soft room. This culturally pervasive myth is meant to be figured out, designed with an expiration date, after which consumption is universally frowned upon.
I’ll admit to having stumbled backward into the issue as a parent. My wife and I defaulted into raising our kids with the same myth we’d been raised in (I know, I know), considering it ever-so-harmless and fun. Neither of us had experienced the least trauma as kids when the jig was up. To the contrary: we both recall the heady feeling of at last being in on the secret to which so many others, including our younger siblings, were still oblivious. Ahh, the sweet, smug smell of superiority.
But as our son Connor began to exhibit the incipient inklings of Kringledoubt, it occurred to me that something powerful was going on. I began to see the Santa paradigm as an unmissable opportunity – the ultimate dry run for a developing inquiring mind.
My boy was eight years old when he started in with the classic interrogation: How does Santa get to all those houses in one night? How does he get in when we don’t have a chimney and all the windows are locked and the alarm system is on? Why does he use the same wrapping paper as Mom? All those cookies in one night – his LDL cholesterol must be through the roof!
This is the moment, at the threshold of the question, that the natural inquiry of a child can be primed or choked off. With questions of belief, you have three choices: feed the child a confirmation, feed the child a disconfirmation – or teach the child to fish.
The “Yes, Virginia” crowd will heap implausible nonsense on the poor child, dismissing her doubts with invocations of magic or mystery or the willful suspension of physical law. Only slightly less problematic is the second choice, the debunker who simply informs the child that, yes, Santa is a big fat fraud.
“Gee,” the child can say to either of them. “Thanks. I’ll let you know if I need any more authoritative pronouncements.”
I for one chose door number three.
“Some people believe the sleigh is magic,” I said. “Does that sound right to you?” Initially, boy howdy, did it ever. He wanted to believe, and so was willing to swallow any explanation, no matter how implausible or how tentatively offered. “Some people say it isn’t literally a single night,” I once said, naughtily priming the pump for later inquiries. But little by little, the questions got tougher, and he started to answer that second part – Does that sound right to you? – a bit more agnostically.
I avoided both lying and setting myself up as a godlike authority, determined as I was to let him sort this one out himself. And when at last, at the age of nine, in the snowy parking lot of the Target store, to the sound of a Salvation Army bellringer, he asked me point blank if Santa was real – I demurred, just a bit, one last time.
“What do you think?” I said.
“Well…I think all the moms and dads are Santa.” He smiled at me. “Am I right?”
I smiled back. It was the first time he’d asked me directly, and I told him he was right.
“So,” I asked, “how do you feel about that?”
He shrugged. “That’s fine. Actually, it’s good. The world kind of… I don’t know…makes sense again.”
That’s my boy. He wasn’t betrayed, he wasn’t angry, he wasn’t bereft of hope. He was relieved. It reminded me of the feeling I had when at last I realized God was fictional. The world actually made sense again.
And when Connor started asking skeptical questions about God, I didn’t debunk it for him by fiat. I told him what various people believe and asked if that sounded right to him. It all rang a bell, of course. He’d been through the ultimate dry run.
By allowing our children to participate in the Santa myth and find their own way out of it through skeptical inquiry, we give them a priceless opportunity to see a mass cultural illusion first from the inside, then from the outside. A very casual line of post-Santa questioning can lead kids to recognize how completely we all can snow ourselves if the enticements are attractive enough. Such a lesson, viewed from the top of the hill after exiting a belief system under their own power, can gird kids against the best efforts of the evangelists – and far better than secondhand knowledge could ever hope to do.
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A related post from Krismas 2007
For Tom Flynn’s counterpoint to this position, see pp. 85-87 of Parenting Beyond Belief.
Santa’s liddle helpurz
“Dad?”
“Lane, when it’s just you and me in the room, you don’t have to say ‘Dad?’ You can just start talking.”
“Okay.”
“…”
“Dad?”
“Yes, Laney.”
“I need a box.”
“What do you need a box for?”
“It’s kind of a secret.”
“Oh. Okay, how big does it need to be?”
“Big enough for an elf.”
****
Not all elves are created equal. I managed to get the elfish proportions nailed down with a few more questions. Whatever she was up to did not involve elves on the scale of Will Ferrell, nor Elrond, nor Dobby, nor even Hermey the Dentist. Holding her hands out in front of her, Delaney (7) indicated an elf closer to pixie size—maybe four inches tall.
“He’ll come to our house if we build a place for him to sleep!” she said, barely able to contain herself.
“Huh. What kind of elf are we talking about?”
“A Santa elf, hello.”
“I didn’t know they came into people’s houses.”
“Well did you ever build a little place for him?”
I admitted I had not.
“Well then of course he never came.”
It was all making perfect sense. I helped her find a box and she spent the evening decorating it, right down to a bed of fabric swatches.
“They like snacks, I have to leave him snacks!”
“How do you know all this stuff?”
“Sheri told me. He visited her house, and he left notes!”
“They can write?”
“Dad! Of course they can write, jeez.” Sometimes my ignorance overwhelms us both. She put a tiny pretzel in the house along with a pen and a pad of Post-Its, then went to bed shivering with excitement.
****
“Laney Laney! He came! He came!” It was her sister Erin (10), leaning a little too excitedly over the elf house early the next morning.
“He bit the pretzel! He left a note!”
The evidence was irrefutable. The pretzel had indeed been gnawed, and a Post-It on the wall of the box said TANKS SO MUTCH.
Laney was beside herself with glee. She wolfed breakfast and bolted out the door to compare notes with an equally-excited Sheri at the bus stop.
The Southeast is awash in elf legends this time of year. I wrote about a slightly different tradition last year, one in which stuffed elves come to life in the night and move about doing mischief before ending up in some unlikely spot, as if caught in the act of living.
Erin’s complicity this year is pretty interesting; just last year she went all Mythbusters on Laney’s elfish fantasies:
ERIN: They do not.
DELANEY: They do so.
ERIN: Laney, there’s no way they come alive.
DELANEY: I know they come alive, Erin!
I walked in.
DAD: Morning, burlies!
GIRLS: Hi Daddy.
DAD: What’s the topic?
ERIN: Laney thinks the elves really come alive.
DELANEY, pleadingly: They do! I know it!
ERIN: How do you “know” it, Laney?
DELANEY: Because. I just do.
ERIN: What’s your evidence?
DELANEY: Because it moves!
ERIN: Couldn’t somebody have moved it? Like the Mom or Dad?
DELANEY: But [cousin] Melanie’s elf was up in the chandelier! Moms and Dads can’t reach that high.
ERIN: Oh, but the elf can climb that high?
(Pause.)
DELANEY: They fly.
ERIN: Oh jeez, Laney.
DELANEY: Plus all the kids on the bus believe they come alive! And all the kids in my class! (Looks at me, eyebrows raised.) That’s a lot of kids.
This year Erin’s taking genuine delight in Laney’s delight, setting up elaborate proofs of each night’s visitation — proofs further confirmed by Sheri’s daily testimonies.
One morning last week, after the bus pulled away, another good friend and neighbor, mother of a kindergartner, waved me over.
“I have a kind of…unusual question for you,” she said. Given my speciality, it turned out to be an entirely usual question.
“I wondered what you guys think about the whole Santa thing,” she said. “And…well, also these elves. I mean, I know you don’t have religious faith, but I was interested to know what your take is on all that stuff. I sometimes worry that it distracts from the real reason for Christmas. But I don’t know if I’m making too big a deal of it.”
How very lovely to be asked for such an opinion by a Christian friend. I told her that “the whole Santa thing” is a point of contention among many secular humanists as well — a nice symmetrical irony if you ask me — but that I come down firmly on the side of relaxing and letting kids enjoy these things for the limited time they will choose to, in part because it gives them a chance to think their way out.
“We know for a fact that three or four years from now, they won’t still believe in elves, probably not even in Santa Claus,” I said. “They’ll stop believing it as soon as the desire to figure it out is stronger than the desire to believe in it. That’s when they sort the things they no longer believe in from the things they continue to believe. That’s a good thinking exercise. I wouldn’t want to deprive them of that or of the fun they’re having now.”
Some secular folks are especially horrified by the image of the little neighbor girls, each deceived by her own family, running to the bus stop to reinforce each other’s delusions. I can’t roll my eyes fast or high enough at such handwringing. Far worse, I think, are the parents who insist on shielding their kids from all nonsense. Isn’t it better for them to run into a little harmless nonsense right here and now than to grow up in a hermetically-sealed clean room of Truth? Just when and how do we expect them to learn to think their way around the messy real world if we raise them in a nonsense-free zone of their parents’ careful construction?
More on that Wednesday, when I’ll also say a bit about the great time I just had in Austin and update you on my sad little attempt at bridgebuilding.
PBB in the Harvard Gazette
One of the best articles yet on Parenting Beyond Belief and/or the seminars appeared Thursday in the Harvard Gazette. Many thanks to Cory Ireland for a thoughtful and positive piece.
Author McGowan is honored as ‘2008 Harvard Humanist of the Year’
By Corydon Ireland
Harvard News Office
Can parents raise moral children without religion?
Greg Epstein M.T.S. ’07 thinks so. He’s the Humanist chaplain at Harvard, and has just finished writing a book due out next fall. Its title: “Good Without God.”
Dale McGowan thinks so too. He edited the recent anthology “Parenting Beyond Belief: On Raising Ethical, Caring Kids Without Religion” (AMACOM, 2007). Last Saturday (Dec. 6), the Atlanta-based author was honored as 2008 Harvard Humanist of the Year, an award sponsored by Epstein’s office. He delivered the 16th annual Alexander Lincoln Lecture.
Previous honorees include the late television personality Steve Allen; biologist E.O. Wilson, Harvard’s Pellegrino University Professor emeritus; and Rep. Fortney H. “Pete” Stark (D-Calif.), who last year used his Lincoln lecture to formally out himself as the first openly Humanist member of Congress.
Cheerful, tall, and sporting a trim beard and wide smile, McGowan is the antithesis of the image of strident, hair-trigger Humanists — those with what he calls “UTT syndrome” (as in, “Unholier Than Thou”).
McGowan delivered the late-morning lecture at Boylston Hall’s Fong Auditorium, ate a lunch of burritos with his audience, then moderated an afternoon seminar on nonreligious parenting.
At a booth outside the auditorium was the lecture’s co-sponsor, Kate Miller, founder of the Providence, R.I.-based Charlie’s Playhouse, a maker of games and toys inspired by Darwin. Among them: a long narrow mat that condenses 600 million years of Earth timeline into 18 picture-packed feet of skipping surface; cards on ancient creatures; and what Miller said is her best-selling T-shirt, which bears the legend, “Product of Natural Selection.”
McGowan exudes a similar lightness. In both the lecture and seminar, he said, the operative word is “Relax.”
For one, relax about that morality question. Research shows that children arrive at moral values “reliably, and on time,” he said, as long as they grow up in a supportive environment.
Citing another study, McGowan related that at age 3 or 4 children are “universally selfish,” but by 7 or 8 they develop “a strong sense of fairness,” the foundation of a moral life.
In fact, research shows that indoctrination, often the focus of religious upbringing, is, more than anything else, what impedes moral development, claimed McGowan. “At the heart of indoctrination is the distrust of reason.”
Better off are children who get from their parents “an explicit invitation to disagree,” he said — that is, children “actively engaged in the refinement of their own moral development.”
Read the complete article here.
Look at the Bird
And now…the third and final winner of the first annual Parenting Beyond Belief Column Competition: Robbin Dawson’s “Look at the Bird.” Thanks again to all who participated!
Look at the Bird
by Robbin Dawson
You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird… So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing—that’s what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something. —Richard Feynman
“What’s the matter, babe?”
We were at a bowling alley for the birthday party of my son’s friend, Joe. My son, Ethan, was walking toward me with tears welling.
I met him halfway, scanned him for goose eggs, then began examining his fingers. When 7 year-olds are bowling, there are some things in the alley that can break.
“No, it’s not that!” He wrenched his hand from mine. I followed him to some nearby chairs. He crossed his arms over the back of his seat and rested his chin atop. A few tears slid down his cheeks.
We sat quietly for a few minutes.
“Joe said I’m not his best friend.”
Wow…hmm…really?
At that time, Joe and Ethan were inseparable. Their usual mode of greeting involved Joe running across the playground screaming, “Eetthhaaaaaannnnn!” before they tackle-hugged. The two would then thoroughly vet each playscape while sharing the milestones that had occurred since their last meeting.
Certainly, they each had other friends. Certainly, friendships changed and shifted. I just hadn’t seen this coming, and neither had my son.
“He said that,” Ethan sniffled and blew out a breath. “He said that Jesus is his best friend.”
Ah. Now that made more sense.
I picked quarters out of my purse and motioned toward a vending machine in the arcade. While Ethan chugged his cold drink, I selected a pool cue from a rack on the wall and rolled it across a table.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m judging how straight this cue stick is.” (It wobbled across the felt like a lady wearing one stiletto.) I was just about to challenge Ethan to a game, when he appeared at my side with another cue to test.
I explained eight ball, taught him how to hold a cue and helped him break. There is something inherently satisfying in the sound and feel of breaking. I racked the balls several more times for him, ostensibly for practice.
Two turns in, I tested the waters. “Joe seemed to like the Bionicle you gave him.”
“Yeah.” Ethan’s tone was matter-of-fact. “He’s been wanting Toa Hordika Vakama for a long time.”
“Oh. I guess that’s something a friend would know.” I paused to prepare my innocent, casual tone. “I wonder if he’ll let Jesus play with it.”
Ethan looked up from his shot, one eyebrow raised.
“What?” I shrugged. “I share my Bionicles with my friends.”
“Mama! You don’t have Bionicles!” He resumed lining up his next shot with entertaining concentration.
“True. But if I had Bionicles, I would let my friends play with them. My bug collecting boxes, too. I might even let them play with that goop in a jar that makes farting noises.”
We giggled. Then we talked about what makes our friends our friends. Enjoyable conversation, shared interests and helping each other out were high on both of our lists.
I was just about to bring the talk full circle, back to Jesus, when Ethan did it for us.
He laid his pool cue on the table. “I know I’m still Joe’s best real friend—you know, his best people friend. It just made me feel bad when he said that I was second.”
Several months prior, he’d asked me to refrain from hugs and kisses in public. Alone in the arcade nook, he accepted both without complaint.
We continued our game. In between helping him visualize angles and realizing that my skills had atrophied to embarrassing, I did my level best to explain the notion of a personal god and why anyone might refer to a god as a “friend.”
“Do you believe that?” he asked.
“No, I don’t.”
“Me either.”
“Oh?”
“No. I mean, you can’t see God, and you can’t hear God.” A light bulb flicked on. “I’m going to try praying tonight.”
I sensed a chance to inject methodology. “What would your hypothe…”
“I got one!” he yelled. He had indeed managed to sink a ball in a corner pocket.
“Great shot!” I did not point out that the ball was mine, or that the cue ball had followed it.
“Mama, can I go back now?”
“Of course.”
I couldn’t help but smile. We would get to fuller explanations of others’ religious beliefs. We would visit places of worship. He would eventually decide for himself.
At that moment, though, watching the bird and seeing what it did seemed the most age-appropriate, educational approach possible.
_________________
ROBBIN DAWSON lives on a tiny mountain in upstate South Carolina with her illustrator/cartoonist husband and their two fabulous kids. She bid farewell to corporate accounting in 2004 to home school her children, and co-founded an inclusive support group. When she’s not out exploring the world with her kids, she’s usually reading or spending quality time with her computer.
Boy, the stuff I don’t know about Islam
I know just enough about Islam to embarrass myself at Ramadan parties. Half of what I learn confirms Islam’s common ground (good and bad) with Judaism and that other one.
That common ground is especially fun when evangelical grandma takes the Belief-o-Matic Quiz and learns she’s 70 percent Muslim.
Then there are the differences, and they can go pretty deep. While cruising a webpage titled Effective Islamic Parenting, I came across this intriguing difference in a list of “General Laws of Development”:
An infant child comes into the world perfectly good and only becomes other than perfectly good while growing into adulthood due to the influences upon him/her during their years of development.
Compare to a passage I’ve quoted before from evangelical radio minister John MacArthur in his book Successful Christian Parenting:
The truth is that our children are already marred by sin from the moment they are conceived. The drive to sin is embedded in their very natures. All that is required for the tragic harvest is that children be allowed to give unrestrained expression to those evil desires.
In other words, children do not go bad because of something their parents do. They are born sinful, and that sinfulness manifests itself because of what their parents do not do.…There’s only one remedy for the child’s inborn depravity: The new birth — [to be ‘born again’].
Anyone out there with enough knowledge of Islam to confirm that it does not include a doctrine of inherent human sinfulness? If so, it’s a pretty fundamental difference, and one I did not know.
Best Practices 3: Promote ravenous curiosity
What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.
BERTRAND RUSSELL, in Sceptical Essays (1928)
_______________________
here was a time when I was a quiet, closeted nonbeliever. It was a smallish moment that tipped me from passive disbelief to secular humanist activism. Not some Robertson/Falwell nonsense, nor a Bushism, not the abuse of children nor the disempowerment of women nor the endless throttling of science, not some reversal of social progress nor the spreading of ignorance and hatred and fear. These are all good reasons to become an activist, but the thing that tipped me was a simple moment of incuriosity.
My son Connor had always been a fantastically curious kid. I saw him once off by himself at the edge of our local wading pool, oblivious to a hundred other screaming, splashing kids, studying a tiny plant growing from a crack in the cement. For fifteen minutes. That’s my boy.
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We had him in a Lutheran preschool, a great local program where he received a low-key, brimstone-free exposure to Judeo-Christian ideas and some early practice engaging those ideas with fearless curiosity. But there came a point, toward the end of his third and final year there, that I wondered if he had picked up something else.
One Sunday afternoon in April 2000, following him up the stairs of our home, I said, “Connor, look at you! Why are you growing so fast?”
“I don’t know,” he answered with a shrug. “I guess God just wants me to grow.”
“…”
That reply would make a lot of parents all warm and woobly inside. Me, not so much. For me it was a sucker-punch to the heart. He had given his very first utterly incurious reply. He didn’t have to care or wonder about his own transformation from infancy to kidhood — he’d handed off the knotty question to God.
It kicked off a whole new phase in my life, that moment on the stairs. The next morning, the day after attending our Baptist church (for the last time), I dropped my son at his Lutheran preschool and headed off to my job at a Catholic college. When I got to work, I started posting timid quotations from nonbelievers on my office door with a sign inviting discussion, hoping to draw out debate or expressions of interest or even agreement from some of the closeted nonbelievers I knew were on campus.
Two years later, I published a satirical novel about a humanist professor at a Catholic college. A year after that, I came to blows with the college administration over free speech and hypocritical college policy. Three years after that I quit the job, and a year later Parenting Beyond Belief was born.
It all goes back to my allergic reaction to my son’s moment of bland incuriosity.
It was just a case of the intellectual sniffles for Connor. I’m sure he was back on his curious feet five minutes later. But it helped me to define one of the central values of my own life.
It’s not that religion is inherently incurious. Religion and science are both planted in the cortical freakishness that demands answers. It’s just that religion wants the answers it wants, while science wants the answers that are in the answer key. Also known as “the actual answers.”
Kids start off curious. Our job is to simply prevent it from being blunted by familiarity and passivity. I try to wonder aloud myself ( “I wonder why different trees turn different colors in the fall”) to keep my kids dissatisfied with the mere surface of things — the coolest stuff is behind the curtain, after all — and to always, always reward their curiosity with engagement, no matter how tired I am.
Not that I have to try all that hard. I have a house full of full-time wonderers, 100% distractable by their curiosity. Now that Becca’s teaching again, I’m the morning guy, and it only took a week or so for me to realize I can’t simply send Laney (7) upstairs after breakfast to put on her socks and shoes. When ten minutes pass and the bus is in view, I sprint up the stairs to find her engrossed in a book, tracing the rain on the window, or trying to sing while drinking water.
Saturday I watched the final game of her soccer season with Laney as goalie. When I saw the hot air balloon rising over the horizon, I knew without a doubt what would happen. Sure enough, five minutes later the balloon caught her eye, and she stood enchanted, unable to take her eyes from it as the ball sailed by and into the net.
Curiosity didn’t kill the cat, but I imagine it’s responsible for more than a few easy goals.
Her body language and crimson face broke my heart. It took her several minutes to clear her head and wipe the tears from her eyes.
When we got into the car at the end, I didn’t say “you’ve got to focus on the game.” She got that message clearly enough, as she will all her life. Instead I asked if she saw that amazing hot air balloon.
She lit up. “It was awesome,” she said. “I wonder how they work?”
Secular Homeschoolers — guest column by JJ Ross
You think YOUR secular kids face some tricky issues in Christian-branded society? Ha!
Picture a homeschooling family. Do you see a bible in the picture, prominent in the foreground — perhaps on the kitchen table around which six or seven modestly-dressed children do their lessons, while their denim-jumpered mother bakes bread and solemnly applies her righteous rod to strays?
Kathleen Parker’s column this week about the GOP might as well be about homeschooling:
To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch…is what ails [us] and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn’t soon cometh.
You could say I’m a “constituent” of homeschooling, but in a radically different picture from the evangelical right wing oogedy-boogedy branch. Heck, not just a different picture, a whole different story, written in another language.
Last week Dale said of secular parent blogging:
“Our greatest deficit — the lack of a connected, mutually supportive community — is slowly being erased. Equally important, this chorus of voices helps us to build consensus about the best practices for nonreligious parenting. So visit ‘em, read ‘em, comment and link up — and let me know who I missed.”
He can picture secular homeschool parent bloggers as a friendly neighborhood in that community. So if homeschooling, like Harvard, had a Humanist of the Year Award — and why don’t we, come to think of it? — Dale would deserve it. 🙂
We’re just starting to find ourselves and each other in the blogosphere, a search made more challenging by the fact we don’t know what to call ourselves. (Homeschoolers Beyond Belief?) Secular, inclusive, rational, atheist, freethinking? The online homeschooling community fights over the word “homeschool” itself, never mind the weight of all those adjectives hung around it like baggage on a skycap’s cart.
Some of us are trying Thinking Homeschoolers and Evolved Homeschoolers on for size. The main lesson I’ve taught myself so far is that it takes real thinking — knowledge work if you will — with plenty of detours through link farms and those insipid generic “about homeschooling” blurbs, to discover solid secular homeschooling resources that endure.
Three comprehensive favorites:
National Home Education Network with discussion forums (now read-only) on thinking topics such as networking between religious and not-religious families
Sandra Dodd’s Radical Unschooling and her “merrily unschooling” family blog
A secular network of trustworthy — preferably jaded — independent homeschooling parents doesn’t just connect us with the good stuff; it helps steer us around the bad. There’s the HSLDA to get to the bottom of, of course, which I won’t link because those patriarchs blot out the homeschooling sun without any help from me. Then there’s an elaborate online con game in which an individual (with many names) sets up a fake but believable show of influence as homeschool leader and authority, quoted by reporters, selling products and running private schools, sometimes from dozens of intertwined sites very unlikely for one parent to suspect, detect or connect.
It takes running down rabbit trails and then networking in controlled chaos, to share what we learn in places innocent newbies are likely to find it, and save them starting all over again — real education! I would give you three infamous names to prove the point, except then Dale would get indignant letters threatening legal action. (That’s how they operate. See why you probably won’t hear about them without some networking?)
Email lists were the hot ticket when we started homeschooling in the 1990s. For years they were my lifeline. Ten years ago the secular National Home Education Network (NHEN) was born of and built on email lists. But — maybe in a form of punctuated equilibrium, or would it be climate change? — it’s not the same today. My blog partner Nance Confer and I still operate Parent-Directed Education for a static membership, 28,000 archived messages dating back to the summer of 2001.
If you’re just burning to roam the archives of a particular list, it may be worth joining. State and local email lists often thrive; I hear two good examples are VA Eclectic HS with Shay Seaborne and Stephanie Elms (see her bloglink below) and Ben Bennett’s Indiana Home Educators Network (IHEN).
And there are tightly focused mentoring lists, for new unschoolers say, or college prep advice. But generally I no longer recommend email lists, for any homeschool parent comfortable in the blogosphere.
So think blogs, maybe find a couple here that speak to you. Then see who comments there, and who’s on that blog’s blogroll. Follow at your leisure, to infinity if you like. The universe is expanding, not contracting. 🙂
This has worked better for me than searching for atheist or rational, plus homeschooling or school choice or education freedom, etc. Oh, yeah, here’s a tip — don’t assume “rational” means merely logic and thinking. It can indicate ideology more than analysis, code for Ayn Rand discipleship as an “Objectivist” and sometimes coupled with an extreme brand of libertarian homeschool politics that uses Founding Father quotes and defend-the-constitution rhetoric to forward its fascist fringe beliefs. There is one blog for example listed on every “rational” homeschool blogroll I see, that’s anything but. So I don’t go back to that blog. Just sayin’ — it would be RATIONAL to vet your links more thoroughly, ahem, unless you too actually believe Obama is Jesus and Hitler all rolled up into one Marxist plot to overthrow America.
With that [drum roll please!] here’s a grab bag of 15 smartly secular homeschooling blogs, from my own little corner in my own little chair, just right for my home and hearth:
Home Education, Religion, Politics & Eclectic Stuff (HERP&ES)
Unschool Days
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JJ Ross blogs about thinking parenting and secular homeschooling at Cocking a Snook!
Grandmas Gone God-Wild
This guest column by Robyn Parnell is one of three winners in the first annual Parenting Beyond Belief Column Competition.
Grandmas Gone God-Wild
by Robyn Parnell
What defines good or evil? Can moral authority exist without divine dictate? If there’s no god, who pops up the next Kleenex? These questions are pieces of existential cake for secular parents compared to dealing with Grandmas Gone God-Wild.
Our family recently attended my husband’s (H) family reunion. As is her custom after such visits, H’s mother (MIL) wrote to our children. As is their custom upon receiving snailmail, my daughter (D) and son (S) handed their respective notecards to me, requesting translation (“I can’t read Grandma’s handwriting.”)
The notes seemed innocuous, if gushier than usual. Grandma thanked them for coming to the reunion, praised their characters, and effused about the pictures she’d taken: “D, You are a beautiful person, inside & out; it’s fun to see your smile!”
D, who loathes family photo sessions, lasered me an I-know-what-she’s-doing-and-it-won’t-work! look. We both giggled, then gasped, as the notes’ closings caught us off guard: “We didn’t discuss it when we were with you but we are still disappointed & sad that you all have rejected God. He is really a loving God – so hope you get to know Him sometime! We love you!”
“All that stuff about the smile and being a beautiful person – ick,” D sputtered. “She was buttering me up!”
“Just when I thought this conflict was over….” S spoke as if narrating a horror movie. “It’s back from the grave with an icy hand!”
Years ago, our family realized that our naturalistic world view isn’t compatible with religion. We neither concealed nor proclaimed this fact, although our car’s accumulation of freethought-friendly bumper stickers (“What would the Flying Spaghetti Monster Do canadianviagras.com?”) was a likely pointer.
During a summer visit, MIL noticed our de-churched Sundays and questioned H, who confirmed her suspicions. It brought out a side to the heretofore moderate, MYOB Lutheran lady that neither H nor I anticipated.
At first she confined her Save-An-Apostate efforts to H. Then, during a Spring Break trip to my in-laws’ home, out of the breakfast table blue MIL asked H and me why we’d “rejected God.” (“It was weird,” said S, who’d overheard the conversation. “The calmer you and Dad stayed, the more upset Grandma got.”) And after yet another family trip, MIL sent H a four-page letter on the subject. One good thing has risen from this situation, she wrote: her faith is stronger, and she prays for us daily.
“The last thing we intended by leaving religion was to create a religious fanatic,” I chuckled. H concurred, and drafted a reply. Which he didn’t send. He told me he didn’t want to encourage “that kind of relationship” with his mom.
Prior to the reunion trip, our children told me they dreaded Grandma harping on “the religion thing.” “It’s like she thinks we’re a problem she has to solve,” D moaned. MIL’s notes provoked more than indignant laughter from her grandchildren — disappointment, anger, and betrayal flashed in their eyes. So now, I told H, you have a problem to solve.
Letters, phone calls, “witnessing” books – what MIL says and sends to us is extraneous to the issue at hand, which is that she must stop sermonizing our kids. Professions of love are irrelevant. She loves them? Duh; she’s their grandmother. She needs to love them as a grandparent should: unconditionally and uncritically.
She noted their fine qualities — was that sincere? Aside from being in better moods come Sunday morning their essential natures haven’t changed since our family became religion-free. They remain the “intelligent, wonderful, helpful, kind” children she’d extolled; they haven’t started kicking blind beggars or tearing legs off flies. The only discernible change is her attitude toward them.
D & S are well aware of Grandma’s views on religion. Offering unsolicited, critical comments about their views is presumptuous; also, she’s setting herself up for not being taken at face value by her grandkids, who have experienced her not-so-hidden agenda. Praise, compliments, and (biggest ick of all) declarations of love are now seen as set-ups for the altar call. I assume MIL wants love and respect, not toleration, but she’s heading toward “Just smile and nod, you know how she is,” territory.
H rose to the occasion and sent a letter to his mother, analogizing the Serenity Prayer (nice touch, I thought) to warmly yet firmly request that, if she feels she must proselytize, she should pick on someone her own size. MIL replied with more professions of love, declaring she’d merely intended to share “the facts” with us. She did not acknowledge his request.
“We haven’t heard the last of this,” H sighed.
This calls for another bumper sticker. Perhaps I’ll append one I’ve seen elsewhere: “Lord, save us from your followers. Or just Grandma.”
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ROBYN PARNELL is a writer and secular parent living in Oregon. When not working on innumerable fiction projects, she searches for worthy additions to her bumper sticker collection, which includes family favorites “God Told Me To Embarrass My Kids,” and “Jesus is My Co-Pilot, Buddha is my Navigator, And Vishnu Will Be Serving Drinks Once We Reach Cruising Altitude.” Parnell shares life with one freethinking husband, two children, and an assortment of pagan pets (cats, reptiles, spiders, dust bunnies).
Blog on, ye secular parentals!
When first I turned the key on the Meming of Life, I poked around the Internets a bit to see who else might be blogging about secular parenting. I found four: Noell Hyman’s Agnostic Mom, The Atheist Mama, Atheist in a Minivan, and Humanist Mama.
I started writing The Meming of Life in March ’07, two weeks before Parenting Beyond Belief was released, expecting to blog for about six months, just to see the book launch through. Still at it, 255 posts later.
In the past two years, a number of blogs have appeared with a significant nonreligious parenting focus, each helping to open that closet door a wee bit wider. Here’s an attempted timeline:
AUG 2005
Agnostic Mom
NOV 2005
The Atheist Mama
AUG 2006
Atheist in a Minivan
FEB 2007
Humanist Mama
MAR 2007
The Meming of Life
Belgian Atheist
AUG 2007
The SkepDad Blog
NOV 2007
Raising Three Thinkers
FEB 2008
Humanist Dad
APR 2008
A Secular Parenting Blog
Science-Based Parenting by Skeptic Dad
MAY 2008
PhD in Parenting
JUN 2008
Skeptical Mom
JUL 2008
Domestic Father
AUG 2008
Humanist Mom
SEP 2008
Rational Moms
OCT 2008
Atheist Dad
Our greatest deficit — the lack of a connected, mutually supportive community — is slowly being erased. Equally important, this chorus of voices helps us to build consensus about the best practices for nonreligious parenting. So visit ’em, read ’em, comment and link up — and let me know who I missed.
[Watch for a post next week featuring secular homeschooling bloggers.]
