Evolution is candy! And so is volunteering.
Nothing seems to come out of Charlie’s Playhouse — whether blog post, newsletter, toy, shirt design, or just plain idea — that isn’t clever and fun. Yesterday Charlie’s boss Kate Miller announced a new project called Ask the Kids:
The 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s amazing book On The Origin of Species is coming up this month. To celebrate, we’re starting a conversation about evolution with kids everywhere…
We’re asking parents to pose one question to their kids: ‘What is evolution?’ …and let us know the very first answer.
Kids’ first thoughts are wonderful — charmingly wrong, spot-on accurate, or revealing what is really important. (“Evolution is candy,” said one 3-year-old.)
We’ll weave their answers into a short, fun video and release it to the world on November 24th, the 150th anniversary of “Origin of Species.” Your kids will be the stars!
Deadline is November 16, and there are parental releases to be signed and such, so don’t put it off! Click here for more.
IN OTHER NEWS: Application forms are now online for volunteer positions with Foundation Beyond Belief. We’re looking for
MEMBERSHIP DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANTS to build the Foundation’s membership prior to the full launch on January 1 launch. Especially seeking those with knowledge of/access to Unitarian Universalism, Ethical Culture, local and/or national atheist and humanist organizations, general parenting groups, Atheist Nexus, or existing forums or groups devoted to our cause areas.
CHARITABLE GIVING ASSISTANTS to assist our Charitable Giving Coordinator in gathering information about potential featured charities, managing and organizing charity nominations by members, and working with featured charities to select video, graphics, and text to present the best information for members during the feature period.
FORUM MODERATOR beginning January 1, 2010 to manage an active forum for discussion of our ten charitable categories, philanthropy in general, and humanism.
SOCIAL MEDIA COORDINATOR with significant experience as a user and/or administrator of social media such as Twitter, Facebook, Atheist Nexus, YouTube, etc. to monitor, coordinate, and update the Foundation’s many social media accounts.
PARENT EDUCATION COORDINATOR to help plan and execute the first stages of our program of parent support communities nationwide AND to establish a parent resource center on the website (Informal volunteer position to start. On January 1, 2010, we hope to open a formal search and convert to a paid quarter-time position.)
PARENT EDUCATION RESOURCE ASSISTANTS to staff our online parent resource center (including downloable documents, curricula, reviews, and family ideas for our parent education program) in conjunction with our Parent Ed Coordinator and Webmaster.
PARENTING COMMUNITY LEADERS to form groups of ten or more nontheistic parents in their local communities with a dual social and educational purpose. Leaders will receive training from me via web-based conferencing and financial and material support to get their communities off the ground.
A tale of two fingers / Can you hear me now? 2
(Please forgive the parental preening below. Ghastly stuff, but with a purpose.)
My daughter Delaney (7) is a wonder. I’ve never seen a kid so completely engaged in the world, so committed to life and happy for the chance at it.
At age five, she’d sometimes giggle quietly to herself in her car seat. I asked once what that was about. “Sometimes it’s just so amazing to be alive in my body,” she said.
She is the orchestrator of creative play in our neighborhood. It isn’t unusual to find seven kids in our front yard between the ages of five and ten: two building a tent, two hanging hula hoops on tree branches, one busily mashing seed pods in a bucket, one spreading open umbrellas and safety cones meaningfully across the lawn — and Delaney directing the works.
She wants to be a scientist. Her favorite word is “Awesome!”, used in its original meaning and intoned over an enormous orange spider or under a freaky yellow moon. She reads at an insanely high level, and when she reaches a word she doesn’t know — obfuscate, maybe, or ennui — she asks what it means. When I pause to figure out how to explain it to a second grader, she says, without a trace of arrogance, “Dad…just tell me the regular way.”
And then there’s this: Since the first week of her life, this awesome, smart, creative kid has sucked on the tips of the two middle fingers of her right hand. Never wanted a pacifier, wouldn’t take a bottle. Only the breast and her fingers, then finally just her fingers, would do.
At first it was nearly constant. By the time she was three, it was only when she was tired, worried, or asleep. But at those times, it was a guarantee.
We began to wonder if it could cause problems. Dental experts warned of possible splaying or malocclusion of permanent teeth, possible speech impairments. But they often cited frequent and intense sucking as the most likely to produce these. At age five, she had deep calloused dents just above the nail beds where her teeth rested. By six, she seemed to be resting the tips more lightly between her teeth, but still persisted.
Becca and I were not entirely unconcerned. We discussed it casually with Laney, told her about the dental worries, offered some ideas for stopping. She’d shake her head. Sometimes her eyes would well up, and we’d drop it. Then the same night, I’d tiptoe into her room and find that she had taped her own fingers together to dissuade her sleeping self…and was sucking on the sad little cellophaned flipper anyway.
It seemed for a while like she was finding her own way out of the habit. Other days, not so much.
One night I was about to enter the girls’ room to sing them to sleep. By this time, Laney’s fingers were only in the hatch at night, something we had all noticed. But as they crept into place that night, big sister Erin (11) couldn’t leave it.
“Laney, take your fingers out,” I heard her say.
I watched unseen from the doorway. Laney glared across at Erin and left them in.
“Laney! You need to stop sucking your fingers or your teeth will be weird!”
Glare.
“Fine, suck your fingers if you want to be a baby. None of your friends suck their fingers.”
Laney made searing, defiant eye contact with Erin — and slowly slid her fingers further in, all the way to the second knuckle…then closed her eyes and sucked hard.
I entered the silent room and went to straight to Erin.
“I’m just trying to help her,” she said, half believing it.
I leaned down and whispered back, “I know, but that’s not the way. The more we force it, the harder she’ll resist.”
I switched to Laney’s bedside. Her cheeks were streaked with tears, fingers firmly enhatched. I asked what was up.
“I want to stop sucking my fingers, but I can’t,” she sobbed.
“Well, it’s hard,” I said. “You’ve always done it, right? But I don’t think you should rush it. You’ll know when it’s time.”
“I’m gonna try tonight.”
“Sweetie, I think you can just leave it for tonight. Maybe tomorrow.”
“I think I can do it.”
I smiled at her. “It’s up to you, punkin. Either way is fine.”
Whether she did or didn’t that night is unimportant. What matters is that by morning, she was convinced she had. Which made the next night a piece of cake. And the next. And she never went back.
You see where I’m going with this.
No, I’m not making a simple and cheap analogy between religious belief and thumbsucking. As much of a thigh-slapper as that is, it oversimplifies. I will point out, however, that this habit was a great comfort to Delaney, something she had never been without, something she was convinced she needed. When she felt it was threatened, she clung to it. She sucked harder. Only when I told her that she was in control, that there was no rush — only when we stopped trying to snatch it from her was she able to let it go.
When and if someone lets go of religious belief, I think the same simple principle is at work. Badgering them and ridiculing their beliefs might work for a few, but for most it has the opposite effect. The more you attack, the more they retreat into the very thing. Only when you look someone in the eye and say, in essence, “It’s your call,” can most people see their way clear.
I wouldn’t want to do without Myers and Hitchens and Condell. They speak to me. I think they tell the damn truth. They voice my frustration and outrage. I would never want them shut down. But there’s another thing that needs doing as well — an opening of space around people so they can think clearly, sometimes for the first time in their lives, about their beliefs and the consequences of those beliefs. And it takes place, more often then not, one on one.
My hope in this series is to offer some tips that I’ve found effective. I hope it’s useful.
SO THEN, tell me, secular readers (which again is who this series is primarily for): If you were once religious, what was the nature of your de-conversion? Were you at the wheel, or was someone else pushing, or some combination? Do tell.
Can you hear me now? (Intro)
A Charlotte Allen published an op-ed in the LA Times about just how dreadfully sick she is of atheists.
A Facebook friend asked me what I consider to be the “negatives of church.” A good question that I answered.
Another Facebooker asked why I am “so against God.” An unanswerably silly question. He rephrased, I answered.
Yet another FB friend went positively ballistic when I strayed from the apparent party line in response to the President’s Nobel Prize.
After seven years, my youngest daughter stopped sucking her fingers. Just boom, stopped cold.
A participant in one of my recent seminars wrote to thank me. She had followed my advice for talking to her religious father. A four-year rift was healed, she said, in about five minutes.
I received my 27th email from a Christian gentleman in Missouri letting me know he’s praying for me.
I de-friended an old HS friend on Facebook whose page was filled with Bible verses (perfectly fine) and unfiltered hatred of those unlike him (not fine). Then I wished like hell I hadn’t.
I saw that seven new reasons for not believing in God have been added to a website that for some reason lists such things.
Robert Krulwich of my beloved Radiolab interviewed Richard Dawkins and made me nearly drive into the Hudson River. And I live in Georgia.
I came across a fascinating quote from Charles Darwin with great whacks of modern relevance.
I read the now infamous article in Newsweek in which (atheist journalist Chris) Mooney and (agnostic biologist Sheril) Kirshenbaum suggested that science is done no favors by insisting that it is necessarily incompatible with religion — followed by an epic blog-tizzy of sarcastic proportions.
I read the Richard Dawkins interview in Newsweek, and the blog-tizzy that followed, including many atheists who wondered if Dawkins had become an “accommodationist.”
They probably seem disconnected, this baker’s dozen. But as each happened, the same string was plucked in my head. I decided to blog. The topic strikes me as pretty much all we should be talking about, and I’ve thought about it so intensely for the past ten years or more that I think I might have something useful to say. Who knows. It’s too big for one post, so it’ll be an occasional series for the remainder of 2009.
I’m motivated half by anger, half by frustration, and half by hope. The first two make me want to chuck the whole topic. It’s the third half that makes me care enough to blog — the hope that some of us are finally on the verge of learning how to communicate effectively, both within and between our “camps,” and that naming the problem and suggesting ways around it might do some good.
That’s the topic, by the way — communication. How to stop talking past and through and around each other. Hearing and being heard.
In order to practice what I recommend, I’m going to try very hard to frame this thing in terms of what I have learned, what I have found effective, and how I have changed in my approach in recent years. I don’t plan to scold anyone for how they approach these things, since that puts an end to listening, and hearing and being heard are my primary goals here. But I might ask that others consider how lovely and useful those two goals are, and whether it isn’t a shame that we all give them so damn little attention.
(I tried four more ambitious expletives before settling on ‘damn.’ Like I said, I’m half motivated by anger here. But then I remembered my objectives.)
My intended audience for this series is my fellow atheists etc. Any religious believers who drift in are more than welcome to read along and even comment, but know that even as I talk about how to talk across lines of difference, I’m not doing that now. This is an in-house meeting.
I’ll start next time with Delaney’s fingers.
The All-American rollercoaster
It’s been one of those rollercoaster weeks for fans of intelligence in the U.S. On Wednesday, we watched a US President deploying bone-crushing intelligence and rhetorical gifts in pursuit of progress in health care policy, one of the most pressing moral issues of our time.
Now there’s this:
New Charles Darwin film is ‘too controversial’ for religious American audiences
Daily Mail Reporter (UK)
12th September 2009A new British film about Charles Darwin has failed to land a distribution deal in the States because his theories on human evolution are too controversial for religious American audiences, according to the film’s producer.
Creation follows the British naturalist’s ‘struggle between faith and reason’ as he wrote his 1859 book, On The Origin Of The Species.
The film, directed by Jon Amielm, was chosen to open the Toronto Film Festival and has now been sold to almost every territory in the world.
But US distributors have turned down the film that could cause uproar in a country that, on the whole, dismisses scientific theories of the way we evolved.
Christian film review website Movieguide.org described Darwin as ‘a racist, a bigot and a 1800s naturalist whose legacy is mass murder.’
The site also stated that his ‘half-baked theory’ influenced Adolf Hitler and led to ‘atrocities, crimes against humanity, cloning and generic engineering.’
Jeremy Thomas, the Oscar-winning producer of Creation, said he was astonished that such attitudes exist 150 years after On The Origin of Species was published.
‘That’s what we’re up against. In 2009. It’s amazing,’ he said.
‘The film has no distributor in America. It has got a deal everywhere else in the world but in the US, and it’s because of what the film is about. People have been saying this is the best film they’ve seen all year, yet nobody in the US has picked it up.
‘It is unbelievable to us that this is still a really hot potato in America. There’s still a great belief that He made the world in six days.
‘It’s quite difficult for we in the UK to imagine religion in America. We live in a country which is no longer so religious. But in the US, outside of New York and LA, religion rules.
‘Charles Darwin is, I suppose, the hero of the film. But we tried to make the film in a very even-handed way. Darwin wasn’t saying “kill all religion”, he never said such a thing, but he is a totem for people.’
I suppose it’s time to change the last few seconds of the trailer to “Not coming anytime soon.”
CONSOLATIONS
One of the most beautiful and creative websites I’ve ever seen
A marvelous review by the incomparable Eugenie Scott
Roger Ebert waxes rhapsodic about Darwin
Darwin in five minutes
Science from Giants
A big dino-roar to Kate Miller of Charlie’s Playhouse for tipping me off to an unbearably cool new thing for kids–a CD/DVD by the brilliant and unpredictable band They Might Be Giants called HERE COMES SCIENCE. The tracks:
1. Science Is Real
2. Meet the Elements
3. I Am a Paleontologist
4. The Bloodmobile
5. Electric Car
6. My Brother the Ape
7. What Is a Shooting Star?
8. How Many Planets?
9. Why Does the Sun Shine?
10. Why Does the Sun Really Shine?
11. Roy G. Biv
12. Put It to the Test
13. Photosynthesis
14. Cells
15. Speed and Velocity
16. Computer Assisted Design
17. Solid Liquid Gas
18. Here Comes Science Bonus Track
19. The Ballad of Davy Crockett (in Outer Space)
19 tracks of music on the CD, and animated music videos for each of them on the DVD.
Preorder now — releases on September 8.
Preview the music video for Science is Real. Be sure to enjoy the comment thread on Amazon below the video.
Could be worse
Curriculum Night at my freshman son’s fabulous high school. I’m dazzled. Enthusiastic and intelligent teachers half my damn age but who’s counting. A sparkling clean building one NINTH my age. Nationally-ranked academics.
All this to say that I was not looking for trouble when I stopped and scanned a cartoony poster in his science class titled “WHY STUDY BIOLOGY?”
At left is the largest photo of it I could find online.
Scattered around the poster are cute and curious children studying the natural world and giving all the reasons such study is worthwhile. The three most important reasons, judging from font size alone, are to answer the questions “Where do birds go in the winter?”, “Where do ants go in the winter?”, and “Where do snakes go in the winter?”
But in the left center, another reason caught my not-for-trouble-looking eye:
So I can decide if I believe in evolution.
Yes, I know what’s wrong with that sentence. But I surprised myself by seeing it as their explanation…not too bad.
Now anybody rushing to the comment section with the word “gravity” on your fingertips can take a pill. As much as I cringe at the phrase “believe in evolution,” it is not the same as “believing in gravity,” and we should stop making that glib comparison. Although evolution is as solidly established a fact as gravity, it’s not half as obvious. It takes effort and education to see how thoroughly established a fact evolution is. To believe in gravity, all you need is a ladder and a six-pack.
If you think about it, the common phrase “as surely as the Earth revolves around the Sun” is also citing something that’s well established but far from obvious.
What the poster is saying, really, is that you study biology so you have the education to understand the evidence for evolution. It’s saying Don’t base your decision on the gut feeling that you’re far too special to be related to a chimp. Learn, then decide. Only by stubbornly not learning about it, by not encountering that staggering evidence, can a person hope to hang on to his or her opposition to it.
So I can and do quibble with the wording — it’s not about “belief” — but the message is pretty much on the mark. At least it could be worse.
Interview with Amanda Metskas
Amanda Metskas — whip-smart and Obama-cool executive director of Camp Quest, contributor to Parenting Beyond Belief and co-author of Raising Freethinkers — was interviewed about Camp Quest last week over on Science-Based Parenting by Skeptic Dad.
In case you don’t know (and haven’t clicked on the big blue button in the sidebar), Camp Quest is the first residential summer camp designed for the children of atheists, freethinkers, humanists, brights, or others who hold a naturalistic (as opposed to supernatural) worldview.
The purpose of Camp Quest is to provide children of freethinking parents a residential summer camp dedicated to improving the human condition through rational inquiry, critical and creative thinking, scientific method, self-respect, ethics, competency, democracy, free speech, and the separation of religion and government.
BONUS: There’s a lovely review of Raising Freethinkers at one of my favorite blogs ever — Motherhood Uncensored. On second thought, don’t go. Once you read Kristen Chase, you’ll never come back to my insipid drivel.
Of planets and pronouns
- March 25, 2009
- By Dale McGowan
- In My kids, Parenting, Science, wonder
21
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I’ve spent a lot of virtual ink taking to task the College of St. Catherine (a Catholic college for women on whose faculty I spent many years) for the hypocrisy that eventually made me pull up stakes and go solo. But I don’t often enough mention the positive things St. Kate’s gave me.
St. Kate’s is where my interest in critical thinking turned from hobby to academic specialization to lifelong enthusiasm. It inspired the satirical novel that launched my little writing career. And it made me a genuine feminist.
Which is good, because now I find myself raising two girls, doing what I can to keep limiting assumptions from calcifying around them.
That takes some doing. Kids gather assumptions about the world by the bucket, taking tiny samples, believing most of what they hear or see, spinning huge generalizations, and moving on. You can bemoan or huzzah this all you want, but it’s both a fact and inevitable. I touched on this in Parenting Beyond Belief:
Children have the daunting task of changing from helpless newborns into fully functioning adults in just over six thousand days. Think of that. A certain degree of gullibility necessarily follows. Children are believing machines, and for good reason: when we are children, the tendency to believe it when we are told that fire is dangerous, two and two are four, cliffs are not to be dangled from, and so on, helps us, in the words of Richard Dawkins, “to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and our ancestors” in order to accomplish the unthinkably complex feat of becoming adults. The immensity of the task requires children to be “suckers” for whatever it is adults tell them. It is our job as parents to be certain not to abuse this period of relative intellectual dependency and trust. (p. 181)
Kids soak up unintended messages as reliably as the intended ones, and they don’t always announce it when they’ve begun to form a pearl around the grain of a new assumption. Once in a while I become aware that something’s been ingested that I didn’t know about. Like gender roles.
My favorite of these surfaced in the pediatrician’s office with Erin (now 11, then 8), waiting to see Dr. Melissa Vincent, her doctor since birth.
“I like Dr. Vincent,” Erin said.
“Me too.”
Long pause.
“But I was wondering something,” she continued. ” Can boys be doctors, too?”
I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Erin’s desire for a career in or near medicine had a lot to do with the example of Dr. Vincent. Currently at the top of her list is cellular biologist, followed by family practice GP in a small but not too small town.
Her sister Delaney (7) wants to be a scientist but isn’t sure what kind. (I tell her the clock’s ticking. “You don’t wanna be one of those pathetic third graders still wandering through the curriculum trying to ‘find herself.'”)
One of Laney’s common openers is, “Do The Scientists know how/what/why…” I think this disembodied image of The Scientists is pretty close to my own early image of science. I decided to try to individualize it more for her as we engaged the questions:
“How did The Scientists figure out what’s in the middle of the Earth if nobody’s even been there?”
“I’ll bet it started with somebody wondering about it, then maybe asking about it, just like you do. Then he thought about the problem, and how you can learn about something you can’t see.”
(Dammit! Did you catch that? Shitshitshit.)
I had her close her eyes. “How can you learn about my face if you can’t see it?”
“I have no idea.”
“Sure you do.”
“I could peek,” she giggled.
“Cheaters rarely prosper. So you think maybe the scientist peeked at the earth’s core?”
“Dad, jeez. Oh wait, I have an idea!” She extended her hands and began exploring my face. “Pokey,” she said when she got to the beard. “You’re a porcupine!” said the blind man to the elephant.
(Or blind woman! Shitshitshit.)
Yesterday she asked if The Scientists have found any planets like Earth yet. Last summer I told her about the search and described the extremely cool inductive method used to find gas giants (Jupiter-plus sizes) by measuring tiny eccentric wobbles in their home stars — a method that has turned up 344 extrasolar planets in ten years.
Number of known planets outside our solar system 15 years ago: 0
At the time, Laney had signaled her agreement that this constituted one of the most paradigmatically significant discoveries in human history by declaring it “so awesome to think about” — but was sorry the method couldn’t locate smaller, rockier bits like Earth.
Now she was checking to see if we’re closer to finding fellow Earths. Thanks to a NOVA podcast I heard a few months ago, I knew we were.
I simplified it into a graspable narrative. “One of the scientists got a great idea. If a planet crosses in front of its star, that star would dim a tiny bit…you know, like a fly passing in front of a light bulb.”
She started to tremble with excitement, doing this weird hand-flapping thing that is endemic to our family. “Yeah? And??” Flap-flap-flap.
“But she realized we needed a much stronger telescope, one that…”
“SHE?” Laney interrupted. “The one who figured it out was a girl??” Flap-flap-flap!
“Uh…I think so, yeah!”
Now the fact is, there wasn’t any one person — there rarely is — and I have no idea whether those involved had knishes or putzes. But I knew she wouldn’t have blinked if I said “he,” which means I’d uncovered a potentially limiting assumption — hopefully before the pearl could form.
I went on to tell her about the Kepler telescope, launched earlier this month (to almost universal public disinterest) for the primary purpose of finding other Earths. She dubbed it “so awesome.” And maybe the Kepler, connected in Delaney’s mind to a woman of science, will become a useful grain of sand as she continues to form her own possibilities.
_______________________________
NOVA podcast “Finding Other Earths” (4:44)
Isn’t this enough?
An homage to the unconditional love of reality. One of the wittiest and best-done bits I’ve seen in ages and ages. (Caution: Rated R for language. Deep breath, you’ll be okay.)
Best Practices 4: Teach engaged coexistence
strology survived Copernicus.
That’s my simple response whenever someone suggests to me that science will eventually put religion out of business.
By all rights, astrology should have been forced out of business in 1543. Among other things, astrology is founded on the necessary condition of an Earth-centered universe. Medieval treatises on astrology include sentences like “As the orb of the World is center’d in the celestial spheres, so then is it reasonable to conclude that…” So long as the other planets orbited Earth and the constellations of the Zodiac were arrayed in reference to an Earthly center, the idea that constellations determined our personalities and controlled our destinies had at least a snowball’s chance of respectability.
But after the publication of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus in 1543 — followed by two centuries of theological arm-wrestling — Earth was decisively removed from cosmic center court. At this point, astrology, shorn of its most essential assumption, should have followed geocentrism into obscurity. The fact that it did not — that it has endured several centuries goofily unaware that new knowledge has rendered it null and void — is enough to make it ridiculous.
Yet the Harris poll shows Americans’ belief in astrology going up, not down (25% in 2005, 29% in 2007, 31% in 2008).
If astrology’s coffin needed any more nails, Hubble provided them in 1924 when he first discovered the true size of the universe and distance between stars — at which point the “constellations of the Zodiac” and all other apparent celestial patterns were seen to be associated only incidentally from our accidental vantage point. In fact, they are separated by millions of light years from each other not only in two dimensions but in the third as well. One star that appears to be snuggling another is often millions of light years behind it, just as the moon, which often appears to be right next to my thumb is actually, amazingly, not.
Yet the thing shows no signs of vanishing any time soon.
So when even so bright a light as Richard Dawkins says that the discovery of a Grand Unified Theory would “deal an overdue death blow to religion and other juvenile superstitions,” I say, with the utmost respect and admiration, pfft.
The confident demise of religion has been predicted at least since Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Several scientific commentators during the 20th century predicted the demise of religion in 25, 50, or 100 years. I think they’ve all failed to realize that precious few religious believers are assiduously poring over facts to be sure their worldview still holds water. They stick with it because it is such a dynamite cure for what ails them (adjective meant in all possible ways).
Add to that the fact that a large part of humanity will always lack access to knowledge and security, not to mention the simple awareness of any Grand Unified Theory we might discover, and I feel confident that religion will continue, forever, to plug the hole. Religion will always be with us.
I do think religion will gradually become less influential in the developed world and (on the whole) less fanatical and intolerant, thanks in part to increased access to knowledge and security. Despite the loud evangelicals, that’s already well underway. But new religious movements pop up at an estimated rate of two or three per day in developing countries. In the developed world, the thing continues to (ironically) evolve to keep pace with both our ever- and our never-changing itches.
For the record, I’d prefer this not be the case. Since it is the case, I do what I can to hasten the evolution of religious expression and practice toward the less fanatical and intolerant. It’s a process that is already going full steam in Europe, by the way (at least as far as Euro-Judeo-Christianity goes. For more on Euro-Islam, see Sam Harris).
When it comes to parenting, I’m raising kids for what I call “engaged coexistence” with other world views. It rejects both the “Everbuddy’s gwine tuh hail ceptin’ me an my dawg” attitude of the fundamentalists and the “I hold all religions in deep respect as multiple manifestations of the True” of the New Age.
The trick is to sort out the word respect.
Respect for individuals and respect for their ideas are quite different and must be separated.
People are inherently deserving of respect as human beings, and no one can be faulted for shutting you out if you declare disrespect for their very personhood. Ideas are another matter. I feel too much respect for the word “respect” to grant it automatically to all ideas.
Even if I disagree with it, I can respect an opinion if it is founded on something meaningful, like rational argument or careful, repeatable observation. The other person may have interpreted the information differently, but I can still respect the way she’s going about it. Suppose on the other hand that someone says Elvis and JFK are working at a laundromat in Fargo and offers a dream or tea leaves or a palm reading as evidence. It would render the word “respect” meaningless to say I respect that opinion. I both disagree with it and withhold my respect for it. And that’s okay. No need to degrade the other person. I know all sorts of lovely, respectable people who hold a silly belief or two—including myself, no doubt—and wouldn’t think of judging them, or me, less worthy of respect as human beings.
Ideas are another thing entirely. It’s not only wrong to grant respect to all ideas, it can be downright dangerous. So I teach my kids to work toward a better, saner world by challenging all ideas AND inviting the same challenge of their own, explicitly, out loud, no matter what worldview they adopt.
That’s engaged coexistence. We recognize that we’re going to be sharing this apartment for the long haul and work together to keep each other’s feet off the furniture.
[CORRECTION: This post initially claimed that the New York Times has an astrology column. It has no such thing. I regret the error.]