Where all roads lead (1)
I have 22 posts jostling for attention at the moment, but a Saturday night conversation with my girls has sent all other topics back to the green room for a smoke.
The three of us were lying on my bed, looking at the ceiling and talking about the day. “Dad, I have to tell you a thing. Promise you won’t get mad,” said Delaney (6), giving me the blinky doe eyes. “Promise?”
“Oh jeez, Laney, so dramatic,” said Erin, pot-to-kettlishly.
“I plan to be furious,” I said. “Out with it.”
“Okay, fine. I…I kind of got into a God fight in the cafeteria yesterday.”
I pictured children barricaded behind overturned cafeteria tables, lobbing Buddha-shaped meatballs, Flying Spaghetti Monsters, and Jesus tortillas at each other. A high-pitched voice off-camera shouts Allahu akbar!
“What’s a ‘God fight’?”
“Well I asked Courtney if she could come over on Sunday, and she said, ‘No, my family will be in church of course.’ And I said oh, what church do you go to? And she said she didn’t know, and she asked what church we go to. And I said we don’t go to church, and she said ‘Don’t you believe in God?’, and I said no, but I’m still thinking about it, and she said ‘But you HAVE to go to church and you HAVE to believe in God,” and I said no you don’t, different people can believe different things.”
Regular readers will recognize this as an almost letter-perfect transcript of a conversation Laney had with another friend last October.
I asked if the two of them were yelling or getting upset with each other. “No,” she said, “we were just talking.”
“Then I wouldn’t call it a fight. You were having a conversation about cool and interesting things.”
Delaney: Then Courtney said, ‘But if there isn’t a God, then how did the whole world and trees and people get made so perfect?’
Dad: Ooo, good question. What’d you say?
Delaney: I said, ‘But why did he make the murderers? And the bees with stingers? And the scorpions?’
Now I don’t know about you, but I doubt my first grade table banter rose to quite this level. Courtney had opened with the argument from design. Delaney countered with the argument from evil.
Delaney: But then I started wondering about how the world did get made. Do the scientists know?
I described Big Bang theory to her, something we had somehow never covered. Erin filled in the gaps with what she remembered from our own talk, that “gravity made the stars start burning,” and “the earth used to be all lava, and it cooled down.”
Laney was nodding, but her eyes were distant. “That’s cool,” she said at last. “But what made the bang happen in the first place?”
Connor had asked that exact question when he was five. I was so thrilled at the time that I wrote it into his fictional counterpart in my novel Calling Bernadette’s Bluff:
“Dad, how did the whole universe get made?”
Okay now. Teachable moment, Jack, don’t screw it up. “Well it’s like this. A long time ago – so long ago you wouldn’t even believe it – there was nothing anywhere but black space. And in the middle of all that nothing, there was all the world and the planets and stars and sun and everything all mashed into a tiny, tiny little ball, smaller than you could even see. And all of a sudden BOOOOOOOM!! The little ball exploded out and made the whole universe and the world and everything. Isn’t that amazing!”
Beat, beat, and…action. “Why did it do that? What made it explode?”
“Well, that’s a good question. Maybe it was just packed in so tight that it had to explode.”
“Maybe?” His forehead wrinkles. “So you mean nobody knows?”
“That’s right. Nobody knows for sure. “
“I don’t like that.”
“Well, you can become a scientist and help figure it out.”
“…”
“…”
“Dad, is God pretend?”
“Well, some people think he’s pretend and other people think he’s real.”
“How ’bout Jesus?”
“Well, he was probably a real guy for sure, one way or the other.”
Pause. “Well, we might never know if God is real, ’cause he’s up in the sky. But we can figure out if Jesus is real, ’cause he lived on the ground.”
“You’re way ahead of most people.”
“Uh huh. Dad?”
“Yeah, Con.”
“Would you still love me if all my boogers were squirtin’ out at you?” Pushes up the tip of his nose for maximum verité.
“No, Con, that’d pretty much tear it. Out you’d go.”
“I bet not.”
“Just try me.”
I told Laney the same thing—that we don’t know what caused the whole thing to start. “But some people think God did it,” I added.
She nodded.
“The only problem with that,” I said, “is that if God made everything, then who…”
“Oh my gosh!” Erin interrupted. “WHO MADE GOD?! I never thought of that!”
“Maybe another God made that God,” Laney offered.
“Maybe so, b…”
“OH WAIT!” she said. “Wait! But then who made THAT God? OMIGOSH!”
They giggled with excitement at their abilities. I can’t begin to describe how these moments move me. At ages six and ten, my girls had heard and rejected the cosmological (“First Cause”) argument within 30 seconds, using the same reasoning Bertrand Russell described in Why I Am Not a Christian:
I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: “My father taught me that the question ‘Who made me?’ cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question ‘Who made god?’” That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause.
…and Russell in turn was describing Mill, as a child, discovering the same thing. I doubt that Mill’s father was less moved than I am by the realization that confident claims of “obviousness,” even when swathed in polysyllables and Latin, often have foundations so rotten that they can be neutered by thoughtful children.
There was more to come. Both girls sat up and barked excited questions and answers. We somehow ended up on Buddha, then reincarnation, then evolution, and the fact that we are literally related to trees, grass, squirrels, mosses, butterflies and blue whales.
It was an incredible freewheeling conversation I will never, ever forget. It led, as all honest roads eventually do, to the fact that everything that lives also dies. We’d had the conversation before, but this time a new dawning crossed Laney’s face.
“Sweetie, what is it?” I asked.
She began the deep, aching cry that accompanies her saddest realizations, and sobbed:
“I don’t want to die.”
is nothing sacred?
‘Body Of Christ’ Snatched From Church, Held Hostage By UCF Student
I smiled. I just love The Onion. Then I realized this was an actual news headline about an actual event. On Earth.
I hadn’t planned on writing about this. I’m trying to maintain a semblance of focus in this blog. But then the student’s father began defending his son in comment threads on Catholic blogs, and I had my parenting angle. Which I’ll get to. First, though, for the three of you who don’t know what I’m on about — the story that ran below that headline:
Church officials say UCF Student Senator Webster Cook was disruptive and disrespectful when he attended Mass held on campus Sunday June 29. It was during that Mass where Cook admits he obtained the Eucharist.
The Eucharist is a small bread wafer blessed by a priest. According to Catholics, the wafer becomes the Body of Christ once blessed and is to be consumed immediately after a minister passes it out to churchgoers.
Cook claims he planned to consume it, but first wanted to show it to a fellow student senator he brought to Mass who was curious about the Catholic faith.
“When I received the Eucharist, my intention was to bring it back to my seat to show him,” Cook said. “I took about three steps from the woman distributing the Eucharist and someone grabbed the inside of my elbow and blocked the path in front of me. At that point I put it in my mouth so they’d leave me alone and I went back to my seat and I removed it from my mouth.”
A church leader was watching, confronted Cook and tried to recover the sacred bread. Cook said she crossed the line and that’s why he brought it home with him.
“She came up behind me, grabbed my wrist with her right hand, with her left hand grabbed my fingers and was trying to pry them open to get the Eucharist out of my hand,” Cook said, adding she wouldn’t immediately take her hands off him despite several requests.
Cook is upset more than $40,000 in student fees have been allocated to support religious organizations on campus for the 2008-2009 school year, according to student government records. He denied he is holding the Eucharist hostage to protest that support.
Regardless of the reason, the Diocese says its main concern is to get the Eucharist back so it can be taken care of properly and with respect. Cook has been keeping the Eucharist stored in a plastic bag since last Sunday.
“It is hurtful,” said Father Migeul [sic] Gonzalez with the Diocese. “Imagine if they kidnapped somebody and you make a plea for that individual to please return that loved one to the family.”
The Diocese is dispatching a nun to UCF’s campus to oversee the next mass, protect the Eucharist and in hopes Cook will return it.
You will no doubt be shocked to learn that the student has received several death threats. As a result of that exalted terrorism, he has now returned the Divine Saltine.
Despite the fact that almost everyone in the story is acting like a baboon, this is not just a toss-off piece of silliness to me. It taps fascinating issues around the intersection of sacredness, tradition, tolerance, the media, force, academia, healthy snacking, and free expression. Most such stories are merely about baboons, but this one I simply can’t get out of my head.
Question #1: Why does the David Mills video I’ve denounced strike me instantly as a profoundly stupid gesture, while this strikes me just as instantly as an interesting and thought-provoking transgression?
The reason, I think, is that the act of crossing the church threshold with that wafer (whether he intended this or not) is a kind of Gandhian gesture. Doing something so seemingly innocuous and eliciting an explosive, violent, even homicidal response is precisely the way Gandhi drew attention to cruel policies and actions of the British Raj, the way black patrons in the deep South asserted their right to sit on a bar stool, while whites (enforcing a kind of sacred tradition) went ballistic.
No, the analogy is not perfect. Cook was not defending a right. But he did similarly draw attention to an element of belief (crackers are different once a priest’s hand has waved over them) that can tip quite suddenly into dangerous lunacy at the slightest provocation. Isn’t that a point worth making?
Mills’ feces-and-obscenity-strewn video, on the other hand, had offense not as a byproduct but as its intentional essence. Of Cook, one can say, “he just walked out the door with a wafer,” and the contrast with the fireworks that followed is clear. But saying, with sing-song innocence, that Mills was “just smearing dogshit on a book while swearing, gah,” doesn’t achieve quite the same clarity. Even though it shares the act of questioning the sacred, it’s much less interesting and much less defensible.
Question #2: Is nothing sacred?
Becca and I debated this at length. She said that all declarations of sacredness should be respected and left alone. I countered by saying the very idea of sacredness is worth discussing, and that the best way to draw attention to something of this kind — like an unjust law — is by violating it and allowing the results to play out. Should we “respect and leave alone” the opposing, irreconcilable claims of sacredness that keep the Middle East aflame? The sacred idea that men should have dominion over women? The list goes on.
But the question remains: Should anything be held “sacred”? I think the answer is yes and no, because the word “sacred” has two different major meanings.
Sacred is used to denote specialness, to mark something as awe-inspiring, worthy of veneration or deserving of respect. In this first sense, the nonreligious tend to hold many things sacred — life, integrity, knowledge, love, a sense of purpose, freedom of conscience, and much more. One might even hold sacred our right and duty to reject the second meaning of sacred: something inviolable, unquestionable, immune from challenge.
This second definition of sacredness is much like the concept of hell — it exists primarily as a thoughtstopper. As such, it has no place in a home energized by freethought. One of the most sacred (def. 1) principles of freethought is that no question is unaskable, no authority unquestionable.
Which bring me to Question #3, the parenting angle. If this were my son, and he had undertaken this as a kind of civil disobedience, would I be proud?
Immensely. Intensely. Uncontainably. It’s Kohlberg’s sixth stage of moral development, and it makes me weak in the knees.
Encouraging reckless inquiry in your kids means laughing the second definition of “sacred” straight out the door. Given that understanding of the dual meaning of sacredness, it should now make sense that I consider it a sacred duty to hold nothing sacred.
The ‘Out’ Parent: column by Noell Hyman (Agnostic Mom)
The “Out” Parent
guest column by Noell Hyman
This column also appears in the March 19 issue of Humanist Network News.
________________
I walked into my child’s preschool one day right before class was to let out. There was a lobby full of parents and one of them raised her voice above the crowd to say to me, “I noticed your license plate says AGMOM. What does that mean?”
Those of you who have read my articles or blog will recognize it as my blog name, Agnostic Mom. While most of my friends know about this, it wasn’t something I wanted to shout across a crowded room of parents at my child’s preschool. Yet there they all were, staring at me, curious.
I had figured out an evasive strategy for these types of situations. It goes like this. 1) Give a vague, answer, like “Oh, it’s just a blog name I used to use.” 2) Immediately change the subject. For example, “What are the kids doing? I was so worried I’d be late today because I was…”
My strategy, which I only used in the most threatening situations, seemed to work until the principal of my older children’s elementary school took notice of the plates. Thanks to my state’s Open Enrollment policy, my kids attend a progressive public school that is outside of our district. But don’t get the wrong idea. The school is progressive by Mormon-dominated Mesa, Arizona standards, and most of the students are Mormon or active in some other Christian religion.
As I was dropping my kids off at the front of the school one morning, the principal, always happy and enthusiastic, swung the car door open for the kids to get out and asked me, “What does AGMOM mean?”
I gave my usual “blog name” response, but before I could move on to strategy step number two he persisted, “But what does the AG stand for?”
I had one of those moments where the world somehow pauses for you while a page worth of thoughts and images swim through your mind. This is the argument happening in my mind during that moment:
He can easily kick my kids out of this school or not allow them back next year.
Yeah, but he’s progressive and liberal in his philosophies.
Progressive or not, he’s a Mormon and a believer.
But he has filled the school with non-Mormon teachers…he’s got a reputation for openness.
I blurted it out, “It means Agnostic Mom.”
He got a look on his face that suggested a realization he had probed in the wrong place; as if to say, “Sorry for making you answer that. It’s really not my business.”
He waved goodbye, and immediately the librarian stopped me to say hi. “What does your license plate mean?”
I couldn’t believe it. Twice within a minute? But the worst was done. The man with the power to end the type of education that is perfect for my children already knows what it means. Nothing else matters now.
“It means Agnostic Mom,” I said, and flashed the librarian a big smile.
Surprised, he let me go, and life has continued as usual. My children were accepted to return to the school next year and even my preschooler will get to start in August for kindergarten.
While Arizona is conservative, the state leans libertarian. Even most Mormons follow a “Live and Let Live” mentality. Things might have gone differently if we were living in Kansas, a part of the less-tolerant Bible-Belt where I finished high school. But after five years of telling people I’m atheist or agnostic (whichever term I feel like using at the time) I have not lost a friend and neither have my children. They have chosen to be open about not believing in gods, as well.
Once in a while there is even a surprise response. Like the time my daughter replied to a cafeteria discussion of Jesus with, “I don’t believe in Jesus.” Her closest friend, whose mother I befriended more than two years prior, answered, “I don’t either.”
In all those play dates when we swapped ideas on vegetarianism, environmentalism, travel and arts, religion never came into our minds. I had no idea. So when my daughter told me her story, I called and the mother was just as surprised and delighted as I was.
Then last week, my washer repairman asked me what my license plate means and I told him, “Agnostic Mom.”
A smile grew on his face and he practically shouted, “You don’t believe in god?” I laughed, “No.” And suddenly he wouldn’t stop talking, like I was the first person in years he could share his stories with.
I can’t think of a circumstance now where I wouldn’t feel comfortable answering a question about my license plate. Venturing into that territory has been a positive thing for me. Introducing believers to a happy godless person is a positive thing for everyone.
____________________________
Noell Hyman (pictured with son Aiden) is a stay-at-home mom of three children, living in Mesa, Arizona. The once-blogger for AgnosticMom.com, was a regular columnist for Humanist Network News. She is the author of two articles in Parenting Beyond Belief. She now blogs and podcasts on her favorite subject, which is the visual art of story-telling through scrapbooking. Visit Noell at Agnostic Mom or at Paperclipping.
EyePlejjaleejins
Yesterday I read through a parenting book called How to Raise an American. The book is full of helpful advice for raising children with an unthinking allegiance to the nation of your choice. This one is pitched at the United States, but the techniques described will work equally well — and have worked equally well — to produce unquestioning loyalty to almost any political entity. Lithuanian, are you? Just change the relevant facts, dates and flags, and this book will help you create a saluting servant of Lithuania, singing the National Hymn with pride:
Lithuania, my homeland, land of heroes!
Let your Sons draw strength from the past.
Let your children follow only the paths of virtue,
working for the good of their native land and for all mankind.
(To foster an even higher degree of rabid Lithumania, leave out the part about ‘all mankind.’ Pfft.)
It goes without saying that the same techniques promoted in this book fostered unthinking allegiance to Germany in the 1930s, China in the 1950s, and probably Genghis Khan in the 1220s, for that matter. These are irrelevant, of course, because we are very, very good and they were all very, very bad.
All the same, I’d prefer my kids forgo unthinking allegiance in favor of thoughtful critical engagement. That way, if our nation ever did do something bad — hypothetically, campers, hypothetically — my kids would be in a position to challenge the bad thing, though all around them salute and sing.
It’s Kohlberg’s sixth and highest level of moral development — to be guided by universal principle, even at a high personal cost, to do what’s right instead of what is popular, patriotic, or otherwise rewarded by those around you.
EyePlejjaleejins
During her after-school snack several weeks ago, Delaney (6) asked, “What does ‘liberty’ mean?”
I realized right away why she would ask about ‘liberty’ and was once again ashamed of myself in comparison to my kids. I don’t think I pondered the meaning of the Pledge of Allegiance until I was well into middle school. When I was her age, I’m certain that I thought “EyePlejjaleejins” was one word that meant something like “Hey, look at the flag.” I certainly didn’t know I was promising undying loyalty to something.
“Liberty means freedom,” I said. “I means being free to do what you want as long as you don’t hurt someone else.”
“Oh, okay.” Pause. “What about ‘justice’?”
“Justice means fairness. If there is justice, it means everybody gets treated in a fair way.”
“Oh! So when we say ‘with liberty and justice for all,’ it means ‘everybody should be free and everybody should be fair.'”
“That’s the idea.”
“Hmm,” she said. “I like that.”
I like it too. A fine, fine idea. I also like the idea that the next time Laney said the Pledge, she had a little more knowledge of just what she was pledging her allegiance to.
There’s an email that circulates quite a bit during the times we are asked to stand united against [INSERT IMPLACABLE ENEMY HERE] — the text of a speech by the comedian Red Skelton in which he recounts the words of an early teacher of his. The teacher had supposedly noticed the students going through the rote recitation of the pledge and decided to explain, word for word, what it meant:
It would have been interesting, even instructive, if Skelton had held up a photo of himself and his class saluting the flag, which for the first 50 years was done like so:
This gesture was replaced with the hand-over-heart, for some reason, in 1942.
Delivered in 1969, Skelton’s piece is a bit saccharine in the old style, of course. And I’ll refrain from answering his rhetorical question at the end, heh. But the idea itself — of wanting kids to understand what they are saying — I’m entirely in favor of that.
Getting kids to understand what the pledge means solves one of the four issues I have with the Pledge of Allegiance. There is the “under God” clause, of course (which the Ninth Circuit court essentially called a constitutional no-brainer before wimping out on procedural grounds) — but that’s the least of my concerns.
Far worse is the fact that it is mandated, either by law, policy, or social pressure. No one of any age should be placed in a situation where a loyalty oath is extracted by force, subtle or otherwise.
Worse than that is something I had never considered before I heard it spelled out by Unitarian Universalist minister (and Parenting Beyond Belief contributor) Kendyl Gibbons several years ago, at the onset of the latest Iraq War, in a brilliant sermon titled “Why I’m Not Saying the Pledge of Allegiance Anymore.” At one point she noted how important integrity is to humanism:
One of the most basic obligations that I learned growing up as a humanist was to guard the integrity of my given word. Who and what I am as a human being is not predicated on the role assigned to me by a supernatural creator; neither am I merely a cog in the pre-ordained workings of some cosmic machine. Rather, I am what I say I am; I am the loyalties I give, the promises I keep, the values I affirm, the covenants by which I undertake to live. To give my loyalties carelessly, to bespeak commitments casually, is to throw away the integrity that defines me, that helps me to live in wholeness and to cherish the unique worth and dignity of myself as a person….We had better mean what we solemnly, publicly say and sign.
And then, the central issue — that the pledge is to a flag, when in fact it should be to principles, to values. One hopes that the flag stands for these things, but it’s too easy for prcinples to slip and slide behind a symbol. A swastika symbolized universal harmony in ancient Buddhist and Hindu iconography, then something quite different in Germany of the 1930s and 40s. Better to pledge allegiance to universal harmony than to the drifting swastika.
The same is true of a flag — any flag. Here’s Kendyl again:
I will not give my allegiance to a flag; it is too flimsy a thing, in good times or in bad; if it is even a symbol for the values I most cherish, that is only because of the sacrifices that others have made in its name. I will not commit the idolatry of mistaking the flag for the nation, or the nation for the ideals. Yet I must find an abiding place for my loyalty, lest it evaporate into the mist of disincarnate values, powerless to give any shape to the real lives that we live in the real world. Therefore my allegiance is to my country as an expression of its ideals.
To the extent that the republic for which our flag stands is faithful to the premises of its founding and to the practices that have evolved over two centuries to safeguard our freedoms and equal justice, it has my loyalty, my devotion, even my pride. But to the extent that it is a finite and imperfect expression of the ideals to which my allegiance is ultimately given, to the extent that it falls into deceit and self-deception, into arrogance and coercion and violence, into self-serving secrecy and double standards of justice, to that extent my loyalty must take the form of protest, and my devotion must be expressed in dissent.
It remains to this day one of the most eloquent and powerful speeches I have ever heard. And it continues to motivate me to raise children who pledge their allegiance conditionally rather than blindly. That will make their eventual allegiances all the more meaningful.
The complete text of Kendyl’s talk is here.
yakety yak
- March 04, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In death, My kids, Parenting, reviews, schools, values
5
By the time our children are of school age, we take their talk for granted. We have turned all our attention to their reading and writing, not realizing that talk is still the motor that drives their intellectual development.
–from Raising Lifelong Learners by Lucy Calkins
One of my favorite things about dadding this family is the five-way dinner conversation. Becca and I recently realized how rare it is that the five of us are NOT together for dinner — maybe half a dozen times a year, if that. I don’t think having dinner together is the magic bullet so many soc-sci pundits currently make it out to be — more likely a co-variable for some other good things — but it is, without a doubt, the best possible opportunity to talk. And boy do we.
As Lucy Calkins points out in her fabulous, simple, sensible book Raising Lifelong Learners,
Just sitting at the table to share a family dinner in no way guarantees shared conversation. Frequently the rule, unspoken or not, is that adults talk only to each other. Children are expected to carry on their own separate conversation or to just be quiet. It makes all the difference in the world if children and parents expect that conversations will be shared. This means that when I talk with my husband about my work at Teachers College, one of my sons will invariably interrupt with questions. “What do you mean the cost of benefits is going up? What are benefits?”
This happens in our family all the time, but it wasn’t until Calkins drew my attention to it that it registered as something special. Our family conversations are completely integrated, which gives the kids access to topics they’d otherwise never intersect. It surely helps them see themselves as more actively connected to the world around them. Sure, Becca and I have our private conversations, but we either remove ourselves from the throng or just raise a finger at the first question and say, “This is Mom and Dad’s time.” More often, though, they are welcome to listen in, and find themselves privy to many topics that adults might often think would be uninteresting to them.
So I love our dinner talk. You never know where it’ll start or go. One of the five of us will throw a topic in the air like a jump ball and all the rest leap at it. It’s fantastic. I just adore it. I’ve written before about breaking down walls between domains of knowledge for kids — like our family’s “open shelf policy” — and our dinner table is a good example. No separate adult and kid conversations. Everybody’s in, age 6 to 45.
In The Read-Aloud Handbook, Jim Trelease notes that the average American adult spends 6 hours a week shopping and 30 hours a week (!) watching television, but one-on-one conversation in homes between parents and their school-age kids averages less than ten minutes per parent per day.
Calkins points to oral language as the foundation of all literacy, and conversation in the home as the best possible catalyst for its development. Don’t look to school to develop it — as researcher Gordon Wells learned, kids engage in even less conversation with an adult in a given school day than at home, and what interactions there are tend to be narrow and scripted. Most of the time, teachers (for understandable reasons) are trying to get kids to STOP talking.
Last night it started with reggae. I decided we really need some around the house. Erin asked what it sounds like, and I did a few bars of Marley’s “Three Little Birds.” That led to Bob Marley, then to the Rastafari movement and the whole extremely weird Haile Selassie connection, which, if you don’t know about it, enjoy. Connor mentioned dreadlocks, then asked if Marley was still alive.
“No,” I said. “He died when he was 36.”
“What from?”
“Cancer,” I said, “sort of.” He really died of religion, but why go there.
“How can you sort of die of cancer!”
“Well…” Oh fine. “A cancer developed in his toe. He could have had the toe amputated and been fine. But Rastafarians believe you should never cut a part of your body away, or you give up eternal life. So he refused the surgery, and the cancer spread to his brain and liver and killed him.”
We chewed on that in silence for awhile, then Becca said something about an article she read yesterday about steroids in sports.
“That’s the drug that made that wrestler-guy kill his family, isn’t it?” Connor asked.
“Oh. Chris Benoit,” I said. Turns out it wasn’t actually steroids, though they thought that at first. Severely brain-damaged from years of concussions, Benoit killed his wife and son and hanged himself, not 40 miles from here. Becca explained that his head injuries from wrestling had made his brain stop working right, which made him do this terrible thing.
Now some might reasonably flinch at cancer, amputation, performance-enhancing drugs, murder, and suicide as dinnertime chat for children. It’s just as often puppies and butterflies, I promise. But on this particular night, we wandered into some unusually dark spaces. My kids will ride any conversational wave that comes along, and I think their worldview and points of reference will be all the more rich and diverse for it.
So where were we? Oh yeah — Chris Benoit going crazy and killing his family.
Suddenly, six-year-old Delaney’s eyes widened, and she burst out, “HEY! That’s just like that hero!!”
“What?” I said. “What hero?”
“The hero! In the myth! Hercules! The one who killed his wife and children because the goddess put madness in his mind.”
For ten full seconds I had no idea what she was talking about. Then I remembered: About a month ago, we read a strange episode in the life of Hercules, one I always forget about. Juno, queen of the gods and wife of Jupiter, always hated Hercules, the offspring of one of Jupiter’s affairs. So she placed a temporary madness in the mind of Hercules, during which he killed his family. He was horrified and spent the rest of his life in search of repentance.
I showered her with my amazement. She had made a connection between a Roman myth and current events — not the first time she’s made that sort of link.
I can’t wait to see what’s for supper tonight.
rule, britannia
I love the UK. The six months I lived there were the best of my life. When I return — and Zeus knows I will — I will hug a lamppost in Charing Cross, and all the Queen’s horses and men will not budge me. Enough intelligence, wit, history, beauty, eccentricity, originality and ennui is packed into those little islands to satisfy my many hungers for the rest of my days.
One reason I find it attractive (not by any means the most significant, but one) is the normalized presence of religious disbelief. For a small taste of how deeply different the British religious situation is, watch this recent PSA by the British Humanist Association. You’ll want to see it more than once to take in all of the information and implications:
Now picture anything remotely like it in the U.S.
labels
[continued from the open shelf]
“What does ‘humanist’ mean?” Delaney asked.
I swallowed. You’d think that, given my current work, I’d have sat myself down at some point and worked out guidelines for such inevitable moments:
CONTINGENCY 113.e
Requests for Definitions
iii. Term: “humanist”
Subset 2: Age 5-6
Children in this demographic cohort who make a direct request for the definition of “humanist” and/or any of its etymological class members (e.g. humanism, humanistic) are to be referred to Article 6, section D of the Humanist Manifesto, except in Arkansas and Hawaii.
Lacking such a road map, I simply answered her question. In retrospect, to my surprise, I even answered it correctly.
“A humanist is somebody who thinks that people should all take care of each other, and that even if there is a heaven or a god, we should spend our time making this life and this world better.”
“Awesome!”
I should note that Laney (age 6) uses Awesome! to signify everything from “I find that rather astonishing” to “That’s something I didn’t know before, and now I know it!” The latter meaning was in play here, I think, the word Awesome! signifying a new piece of the world clattering against the bottom of the piggy bank of her receptive mind.
Later that evening, after she’d been read to and sung to and tucked and kissed, I went back to my study to close up for the night. Scattered on and around the recliner she’d been sitting in were The Humanist Anthology, Tristram Shandy, The Kids’ Book of Questions, The World Almanac, The Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, The Simpsons and Philosophy, Cosmos, and Bulfinch’s Mythology. I reloaded the shelves and went to bed.
One week later, during our afterschool snack-chat, Laney informed me excitedly that there are nine different religions in her class.
“Nine, wow! How do you know there are nine?”
“We’re talking about different religions, and Mr. Monroe asked if anybody wanted to say what kind of religion their family believed.”
I was not surprised to hear of some diversity. There are lots of South Asian kids in the class. Compared to the demographic mayonnaise I had pictured North Atlanta to be, I’ve been thrilled with the diversity here. “And there were nine different ones?!”
“Yeah, nine…” She looked at the ceiling and began to rattle them off. “Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Baptiss, Jewish, Chains…” (“Chains” is probably “Jain,” one of the most benign and respectable religious traditions on Earth). She counted on her fingers. “Anyway, I can’t remember all of them.” She suddenly beamed. “And I was the only humanist!”
I paused for a week or so.
I am adamantly opposed to labeling children, or even allowing them to label themselves, with words that imply the informed selection of a complex worldview. Dawkins hits it right on the head when he refers to a long-ago caption on a photo in The Guardian. The photo was of three children in a Nativity play:
They are referred to as “Mandeep, a Sikh child; Aakifah, a Muslim child; and Sarah, a Christian child” — and no one bats an eye. Just imagine if the caption had read “Mandeep, a Monetarist; Aakifah, a Keynesian; and Sarah, a Marxist.” Ridiculous! Yet not one bit less ridiculous than the other.
That incisive analogy is Richard’s greatest contribution to secular parenting. I completely agree, as (I am increasingly convinced) do most nonreligious parents. Once a label is attached, thinking is necessarily colored and shaped by that label. I don’t want my kids to have to think their way out from under a presumptive claim placed on them by one worldview or another. So prior to age twelve, I won’t allow my children to be called “atheists” any more than I’d allow them to be called “Christians”–not even by themselves. (More on the ‘age twelve’ comment in a later post. Remind me when I forget.)
So my first impulse was to give the usual cautionary speech: Now be careful not to stop thinking. There are still too many questions to ask, too much you don’t know. Someday you’ll be able to make up your own mind on this, but it’s not time yet.
I looked at Laney, still beaming proudly through a mouthful of Nilla Wafers. At the time she had learned the meaning of humanist from me, I didn’t know she had said to herself, That’s me. She was obviously delighted to have had something to say when all the other kids were claiming their tribal identities, and clearly had no idea of the dark chain reactions set off in the fundamentalist mind by the word “humanist.”
“So what did Mr. Monroe say?”
“He said that was cool!” And I’m sure he did. He’s a great guy. No evidence of dark chain reactions in him, nor in her classmates.
“And he asked what a humanist believes,” she continues.
“What’d you say?”
“I said a humanist believes the most important thing is to take care of each other and the world.”
If she had called herself a secular humanist, I would have protested. But what is there about believing ‘the most important thing is to take care of each other and the world’ that requires more time and thought and study? Is she impeding her thought process by declaring this — or is this a value, like honesty and empathy, upon which she can build her search for an identity? There are, after all, both religious humanists and secular humanists. Erasmus and Paine, two great heroes of mine, were among the former.
Humanism has no connection to atheism for her. The definition I gave her even included the option of believing in a god and being a humanist. By calling herself a humanist in the broadest terms, she hasn’t bought into complex metaphysics; she’s simply embraced a concept that even a six-year-old can sign on to. And in the process, she introduced her classmates, and her teacher, to a new idea, and associated it with her smiling, eager, proud little face.
So Laney’s done it again — she’s taken my armchair abstractions and turned them inside out, making me realize that not all worldview labels are ridiculous or harmful for kids. Some can even serve as catalysts for the next stage in a child’s process of finding her place in the world. And the next stage, and the next.
photo by Paula Porter
NOVA–Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 8-10 PM (on most PBS stations)
JUDGMENT DAY: INTELLIGENT DESIGN ON TRIAL
Q&A with Paula S. Apsell, Senior Executive Producer of NOVA
Q: This program tackles a contentious issue for many people, particularly for many devout Christians. Why did NOVA and Paul Allen’s Vulcan Productions, your coproducer, take it on?
Apsell: Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial is in many ways a hornet’s nest. And we had to think long and hard before we decided to take it on. I think the real reason that we made that decision is because evolution is the foundation of the biological sciences. As Theodosius Dobzhansky, one of the great biologists of the 20th century, once said, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”
In 2004, the Dover, Pennsylvania school board established a policy that science teachers would have to read a statement to biology students suggesting that there is an alternative to Darwin’s theory of evolution called intelligent design. Intelligent design, or ID, claims that certain features of life are too complex to have evolved naturally, and therefore must have been designed by an intelligent agent. The Dover high school science teachers refused to comply with the policy, refused to read the statement. And parents opposed to the school board’s actions filed a lawsuit in federal court.
The trial that followed was fascinating. It was like a primer, like a biology textbook. Some of the nation’s best biologists testified. When I began delving into the case, it was clear that both the trial and the issue were perfect subjects for NOVA.
Q: But why would a science series cover a court case?
Apsell: This is not just any case; it’s an historic case as well as a critical science lesson. Through six weeks of expert testimony, the case provided a crash course in modern evolutionary science, and it really hit home just how firmly established evolutionary theory is. The case also explored the very nature of science—how science is defined. Perhaps most importantly, the trial had great potential for altering science education and the public understanding of science.
Dover’s lawyers tried to argue that ID is science and, therefore, that teaching it does not violate the principle of the separation of church and state in the Establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution. At the end of the trial, Judge John Jones issued a 139-page verdict supporting the teaching of evolution and characterizing intelligent design as a religious idea with no place in the science classroom. It was a landmark decision, all the more so because Judge Jones was appointed by President Bush and nominated by Republican Senator Rick Santorum.
If the decision had gone the other way, it could have had dire consequences for science education in this country. We know that state boards of education in Kansas and Ohio were considering changing science standards and curriculums to accommodate intelligent design, and they since have decided against it in the wake of this verdict.
sacre bleu!
(I just love that gif.)
L’Actualité received over 100 letters and emails—far more than usual—after their November 1 cover story “Growing Up Without God,” which featured an interview with the editor/co-author of Parenting Beyond Belief, one Dale McGowan. Senior writer Louise Gendron gathered and translated a sampling of the comments for me. “Remember that angry people write in far more often than happy ones,” she said. “It is clear from the sales numbers for this issue that interest was very, very high.” The book itself topped out at #285 on Amazon Canada.
The previous post can give you an indication of the tone of the article. Here’s a sampler of reader responses:
I find this guy interesting. He helps us to feel more accepted.
Faith is god-given. Children raised without god will always lack a certain life-dimension. It makes me very sad to think of his children.
The media are very good at brainwashing us to push their way of thinking on us. The last century has shown the fruits of falling away from religion, such as atheistic communism. Happily, Europe kept its faith as a barrier against those enemies.
Atheism is very bad for Québec. It will make us disappear into the English-speaking majority.
I found this article very interesting – I am a mother, trying to explain the world reasonably to my children, and this is helpful.
I am very sad for Dr. McGowan.
Dr. McGowan as a devout nonbeliever has the same narrow faith as some fanatic priest. The big mistake is to be convinced of your own ideas and to stop thinking about them.
I am an atheist and I feel comfortable among the 360 million Buddhists in the world who are also atheists.
Very good article – my great grandparents were Catholic, and I am an atheist.
Very nice article – I am a father of two-year-old who asks why the sun sets. This is a very difficult question to answer in a way that a two-year-old will understand!
Very interesting article – it follows the same philosophy as “Spirituality without God” by Möller de la Rouvière.
I am writing from prison where I am serving time for killing someone. Say hello to Dr. McGowan from me. I don’t understand or have knowledge to sort out whether God exists, but I am open to all ways of thinking. I chose to believe in God because it works for me. My life was a fiasco, a complete mess, and religion helped me sort it out. But I keep thinking, and who knows about what I will believe tomorrow?
The title of McGowan’s book should have been “How to Fool Your Kids.”
I want my tax money devoted to ethics in schools. I will keep that money to go toward religious education.
I don’t want to spoil Dr. McGowan’s party, but I am a Catholic whose husband died two years ago, and I am still struggling to find a way to explain it to our two young children. It is not easy for people of faith to provide answers either.
I was an atheist, and though now outside of all churches, I am a believer.
Cancel my subscription!
I am very sad for all those kids that this man’s non-beliefs will spoil things for them. This man and his bullshit are going to do a lot of harm.
Dr McGowan is too self-confident. I think his knowledge of religion dates from the Stone Age.
That was absolutely fascinating. Another book should be developed for what to tell your teenagers as they reach more advanced levels of questioning.
Your article made me fall off my chair! Think about Pascal’s wisdom when he wrote, [Pascal quotation.]
To the Editor in Chief – who let pass this terrible article?
I am a believer who found this article completely fascinating! You should now allow a believer to answer it.
Dale McGowan makes me think of Dale Carnegie. He will be a millionnaire with his ideas!
Reason justified terrible crimes in the 20th century. [Chesterton quotation. Plato quotation. Kant quotation.]
Dr. McGowan provides very satisfying answers regarding war and suffering and death. What would he answer about the origin of life, the existence of beauty, and generosity? For those he has no answers.
This is crap. I’m fed up with you using my money to bury me in shit. Cancel my subscription.
There are no wars, no hatred, no problems in the world, Dr. McGowan. Everything is just wonderful in the world, so we apparently do not need religion. Isn’t that nice.
I am a teacher in Senegal Africa. I fell off my chair, astonished at your article about children with no religion. In my classroom of 72 kids, I have Muslims and Christians, and it is out of the question to teach each one their religion without a separate teacher for each. I am astonished to find that there are people who don’t believe and are parents!
I am happy to see that I am not the only one to think like that. My daughter now has a child of her own and has decided to raise him without religion, and I am very happy about it.
I taught ethics in public school and let me tell you: It is so much easier to do without the idea of god.

the Quéstion of Québec
Il est faux de penser que la religion rend la mort plus acceptable. À preuve, les rites funéraires sont marqués par des moments d’intense tristesse. Et la plupart des croyants ont peur de la mort et font leur possible pour retarder sa venue! Demandez-lui si elle avait peur avant de venir au monde. Elle risque de répondre en riant : «Bien sûr que non, je n’étais pas là!» Expliquez-lui que c’est la même chose pour la personne qui décède. Elle n’est simplement plus là. Il existe plusieurs façons d’apprivoiser la mort. C’en est une.
Accepter sa propre finalité est le défi d’une vie, et ça restera toujours une peur qu’on maîtrise sans jamais la faire disparaître totalement.
M. Dale McGowan, auteur de Parenting Beyond Belief
No no, come back! I haven’t really become sophisticated — except in the pages of the Montréal-based public affairs magazine L’actualité, which carries an interview avec moi as its November cover story.
I was interviewed last month by Louise Gendron, a senior reporter for what is the largest French-language magazine in Canada with over one million readers. A website Q&A (in French) supplements the print interview.
So why the sudden interest among the Québécois about parents non-croyants? It’s a fascinating story. Québec has historically been the most religious of the Canadian provinces. Over 83 percent of the population is Catholic — hardly surprising, since the French permitted only Catholics to settle what was New France back in the day.
But now Québec is considered the least religious province by a considerable margin — and without losing a single Catholic.
Non-religious Catholics, you say? Oui! French Canadians are eager to maintain their unique identity in the midst of the English Protestant neighborhood — and “French” goes with “Catholic” in Canada even more than it does with “fries” in the U.S. Yet educated Catholics — I’ve discussed this elsewhere — are the most likely of all religious identities to leave religious faith entirely. There is, by all accounts, a very short step from educated Catholic to religious nonbeliever.
In recent years, a very large percentage of Catholic Québécois have essentially become “cultural Catholics” — continuing to embrace the identity and traditions of the Church despite having utterly lost their belief. The most striking evidence is a referendum, five years ago, to transition the provincial school system from Catholic to secular. The referendum passed easily, and a five-year transition began in 2003. This year is the last year of that transition — and to the shock and surprise of many, the entire process has taken place with very little uproar.
Until now.
____________________________
“In recent years, a very large percentage of Catholic Québécois
have essentially become “cultural Catholics” — continuing
to embrace the identity and traditions of the Church
despite having utterly lost their belief. “
____________________________
My interview was going to be a good-sized piece, but two weeks ago (in the words of Louise Gendron), “all hell broke loose” in Québec as orthodox Catholic family organizations launched a coordinated media campaign attacking the secularization of the schools. At which point L’actualité decided to make the interview the cover story and enlarge the website Q&A.
Most “cultural Catholic” parents in Québec support the transition but wonder how to explain death, teach morality, encourage wonder — in short, how to raise ethical, caring kids — without religion.
Perhaps you can understand my sudden, intense interest in Québec, and why there is talk — very early talk — of a possible French edition of Parenting Beyond Belief, to be published in (vous avez deviné correctement!) Québec!