Resisting the eraser, Part II
There are two pieces in Parenting Beyond Belief — an essay by Annie Laurie Gaylor and a silly song lyric of my own — that are devoted to the introduction of great figures who were religious doubters of one stripe or another. I included these because it’s important for kids to know that not everyone believes — that in fact, some of the greatest minds of every generation were doubters. And it’s important to do it overtly because of that busy, busy eraser.
I feel particularly strongly about this because I grew up oblivious to the fact that I was not alone in my doubts, as most of us do. Even in college I had not discovered any significant presence of articulate disbelief in our cultural history. And it really made me doubt my own doubts. How could I disbelieve when all of my greatest intellectual heroes believed? I’d heard it said the Founding Fathers were Christians – when in fact very few were. I had heard that Charles Darwin found no contradiction between evolutionary theory and Christian belief, when in fact he did. (He made that clear in his autobiography – though those pages were removed from the first edition by his wife, with the best of misguided motives.) I assumed that Einstein’s references to God were literal reflections of a personal faith, only later discovering his several irritated denials of that claim.
I was in my thirties before I discovered, in the works of AN Wilson, how many of the greatest intellectual and moral minds of every generation were freethinkers of one stripe or another – Seneca, Diderot, Voltaire, Jefferson, Lincoln, Susan B Anthony, Thomas Edison, Einstein, Freud, Twain, Hume, H.L. Mencken, Simone de Beauvoir, Bertrand Russell. They had all written eloquently of their doubts and their reasons. But those writings had not reached me, despite every possible predilection on my part to receive them.
One of the other ways believers mask disbelief is by taking every passing use of the word ‘God’ as proof that the speaker believed in God. Albert Einstein said, “God would not play dice with the universe.” He was immediately and jubilantly proclaimed a Christian, which irritated him so much that he wrote this answer in 1954: “It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”
Kurt Vonnegut did not believe in God (and expressed it clearly), but once said that “The only proof I need of the existence of God is music.” He meant this as an ironic tribute to music, not as a statement of belief in God, but it was leapt upon so effectively that National Public Radio – NPR! – ended its tribute to him last week with that quote. Why? Because that’s what we do: We mask disbelief in the appearance of belief. A giddy listener quickly posted a claim that Vonnegut, in his last years, was “arguing with his own atheism.”
Vonnegut foreshadowed this in 1992 when he began his eulogy for (atheist/humanist) Isaac Asimov with, “Well, Isaac is up in heaven now…” But he wasn’t erasing — he was being funny. And by all accounts, it slew the gathered throng.
UU humanist and minister Kenneth Phifer said, “Humanism teaches us that it is immoral to wait for God to act for us.” In context, what he was saying is this: Whether or not there is a God, passivity is immoral. But many leapt on the statement as proof that this prominent nontheistic humanist believes in God. You can just hear the squeak, squeak of the eraser, trying desperately to make us all the same.
Here’s Kenneth Phifer trying to be abundantly clear:
“I am a humanist. The humanism I espouse is materialist, naturalistic, religious, rational, responsible and inclusive. I hold with the conviction of humanism that the scientific method is the best means we have discovered for advancing truth…I have faith in that part of humanism which sees the human being as the highest form of life, an end not a means, the creator of moral values, the maker of history… It is the human race that has invented religious communities in order to share the burden of our aloneness as individuals…
He continues: “Religion is a human enterprise. It is the human race that has created religions out of that unique self-awareness that drives us to ask questions about our origins and our destiny.”
Materialist. Naturalistic. Humans as creators of moral values, religion as a human enterprise. It is the human race that has created religions. Phifer calls himself a religious humanist, but it seems pretty clear that he is not a theistic one. He supports the coming together of humanity to do and be good as the fullest expression of religion. It’s an important difference.
A systematic cultural suppression of the rich heritage of religious doubt keeps that heritage out of view. Thus is doubt rendered unthinkable by the stripping of its intellectual tradition. Once I discovered that tradition in AN Wilson’s work (and in The Humanist Anthology, edited by James Herrick, a PBB contributor), I literally wept at times as I read the courageous works of these great thinkers of the past, many giving voice to their honest convictions at a far greater risk than any I will ever encounter. In the span of a few weeks, I went from isolation to the company of giants.
I embarked on an ecstatic engagement with the words and lives of these men and women, taking their intellectual and moral courage as my own inspiration.
Just like gays and lesbians, women, ethnic minorities and others, we have to resist our erasure every bit as insistently as the hand of the mainstream culture pushes that eraser forward.
Suffering fools
I should wait. I should not sit down and blog when I am this irritated. On the other hand, I said this would be a good place to allow my less-filtered thoughts some room to , and waiting until I can edit out all of my perfectly valid emotions (thank you Dr. Phil, *deep breath*, *happy place*) constitutes filtering.
On the other hand, I’m an editor. I filter. For example: I originally had “pissed off” in the second sentence, but changed it to “irritated” — largely because I have yet to define my audience in my head, which is certain death for writing.
You are dying of curiosity, admit it, possibly even assuming that I’ve been ticked off by a religious correspondent decrying the book. Not even close. In fact, I am increasingly convinced that my headaches in this release are going to come almost exclusively from the other side.
I don’t mind fools one bit. Foolishness is a human birthright. Read The Praise of Folly, seriously, find a good recent translation and read it. It’s one of the most influential books in Western literature. Anyway, fools are just fine. I’m a fool. But self-righteous fools I just can’t stand.
More later. I have to both cool off and define my audience.
PBB is released…and the meme struggles to get past my mother
Okay, folks — PBB has been released! The trick now is to get the meme propagating.
One of the most interesting questions in memetics is the variable rate of propagation. In other words, why does one idea get passed around like a giggle at a slumber party, while another spreads haltingly, inefficiently — like a giggle at a funeral?
Take the Ashley Flores story, an email launched in May 2006 to help find a girl who was somehow abducted in Philadelphia despite the fact that she doesn’t exist.
At one point, the urban legend site Snopes.com was receiving 25,000 inquiries per day about this story. And that’s just the people who actually cared enough to try to find out if it was true — surely a tiny percentage indeed. Nearly a year later, the Ashley Flores hoax is still the #1 forwarded email message in the U.S., hitting several hundred thousand inboxes a day and rebounding effortlessly into several hundred thousand more.
Why? Because it speaks to our deepest fears, gives us an opportunity to do good with little effort, and includes a photo of an attractive, happy young teenage girl. Unfortunately, those are the characteristics that trigger our compassion and get the meme spreading like [insert simile here], a fact the Onion neatly satirizes here.
This is relevant to the book, by the way. Be patient.
How fast does a forwarded email spread? Suppose I send the Ashley Flores hoax to 20 friends at 8 am, and each of them forwards to 20 more one hour later, and the forwarding continues at that rate, every hour on the hour.
At 8 am, 20 people have the message.
At 9 am, 400 people have the message.
At 10 am, 8,000 people.
At 11 am, 160,000 people.
At noon, we’re up to 3.2 million.
At this rate, by the time I clock out at 5 pm, a hypothetical 10.2 trillion people are looking for a nonexistent, non-missing girl. That’s 900 messages for every man, woman and child who has ever lived. I just filled Genghis Khan’s inbox with crap! That should slow down the conquest of Asia Minor a bit.
Fortunately, even a meme that pushes all the right buttons doesn’t have that rate of success. Let’s say I send the Ashley message to 20 friends, but only one in four continues to forward it to twenty friends, and so on — a mere 25% rate of success per round:
At 9 am, 100 people have the message.
At noon, 62,500 people have the message.
Pfft. Sixty-two thousand people? Hardly worth getting out of bed. But not to worry: Before I get back into bed tonight, 6.1 billion people will have received the message. That’s everybody.
Compare this, now, to a meme without the pushbutton advantages of the Ashley message — one that asks us to think, for example, or make an effort of some kind, or one that challenges our preconceptions. Or suggests that you can raise ethical, caring kids without religion. Something like that.
Let’s do the math on this one. I recently forwarded an announcement about the book’s release to twenty close friends and family — including my mother, a very sharp, non-conforming secular humanist of whom I am immensely proud.
The next day she replied: I’ve gone through my entire address book, and I just can’t find a single person that I can send the announcement to!
She is concerned, of course, about the reaction from the next layer. Even though the book advocates co-existence and religious literacy and all sorts of other good and noble things, the very idea of living without religion has been anathematized so successfully over the millennia that the very idea causes some people to shut down. But — and here’s the thing — I think we tend to grossly overestimate the number of such people in the next layer.
Back to our memetic calculus. Given the fact that the woman who carried the author in her womb for nine months and who shares his worldview entirely forwarded his book announcement to no one… well, let’s calculate the likely success rate of this email meme:
At 8 am, 20 people will have received the message.
At 9 am, 20 people will have received the message.
Six months later, 20 people will have received the message.
This, for those of you without a calculator, is a slower rate of propagation. Because we tend to forward e-memes only to those whose worldview is reinforced by the message, ideas that challenge us to see the world in a different way tend to die on the vine.
Lest I’m being too subtle: Why not make a stop at the PBB home page and use the Tell a Friend feature to send the link around to twenty people? Just skip my mother.
