Win a free signed copy of Atheism For Dummies!
There’s a new Facebook page for Atheism For Dummies, and for the next four weeks I’ll be posting a quote a day from the book, including some in the form of shareable memes.
Share any quote or meme from that page between March 16 and April 13 and you’ll be entered in a drawing for a free signed copy of the book! Talk about easy. Four winners in all, one per week.
Drop on by and Like the page, then start sharing that sweeeet dummy love.
Come and giddit!
I’m pleased to announce that Atheism for Dummies is now available! Amazon has both the paperback and Kindle editions.
It’s especially fun to share this with those of you who followed the process from the first announcement nine months ago (isn’t THAT adorable) through the short daily posts of the Dummies Diary, during which you all helped tremendously with some knotty questions.
I’m deeply grateful to a lot of good people for help with this complex project. I’ll post my Acknowledgments page below, and those of you with an eye for bold font may catch a hat tip in your direction:
AUTHOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks first of all to the great and friendly atheist Hemant Mehta, the first person to think I’d be a good person to write this book. I’m deeply indebted to Ed Buckner and Amanda Metskas, two giants of the freethought world who took the time to read this book while it was in progress and whose rod and staff guided me when I went astray.
Greta Christina and Jennifer Michael Hecht are the two great writers and thinkers on whose work I’ve drawn more than any others for this project.
Immense thanks to the staff and interns at Foundation Beyond Belief who kept things humming while I wrote: Airan Wright, Brittany Shoots-Reinhard, Claire Vinyard, Kelly Wright, Walker Bristol, Cathleen O’Grady, Andrew Geary, Sam Shore, Sarah Hamilton, Kate Donovan, Chana Messinger, Corey Glasscock, Lauren Lane…and special praise for the dynamic duo of Noelle George and AJ Chalom.
A hat tip to my blog readers at The Meming of Life who helped plumb the depths of several big questions.
Many thanks to the professional and supportive team at Wiley, especially Anam Ahmed and Chad Sievers, and my splendid agent Dr. Uwe Stender.
Finally, all thanks and love to my wife Becca, who also read and improved every page, and our three spectacular kids, Connor, Erin, and Delaney. You make it all worthwhile.
If you feel moved after reading the book to leave a review at Amazon, that would be swell. Reviews are especially important in the early going. And if you have questions about the book once you see it, click the Ask a Question button. I’ll get to as many as I can.
Now shoo!
The born-again blog
I’m back, and there’s a new plan! — Jesus Christ
I launched this blog in March 2007 with an announcement about the upcoming release of Parenting Beyond Belief. I was 44, and my kids were 5, 9, and 11. We were living in Minnesota, getting ready to move to Atlanta. I’d quit my job as a professor at a Catholic college the previous year and was scraping by with a few freelance writing clients. For better and worse, I had time and some ideas that I hadn’t already said.
Half a million words later, a lot has changed. I’m turning 50 next month. My kids are 11, 15, and 17. I’m writing books pretty much continuously and running a charitable foundation, and I do a decent amount of traveling and speaking. I’m getting an unfair amount of fun and satisfaction out of all this stuff, but it means (obviously) I sometimes drop the blog and can’t find it in the leaves.
Busyness is only part of the problem. Now that I’m writing most of the day, I honestly get tired of my own voice, and I just can’t sit down and force out a blog post — at least not one worth reading. I find I can write about 2,000 good words a day. The next 500 are words, sure enough, but they mostly lay there, grinning up at me as they wallow in their own filth.
Then starting with #2501, every damn word makes me want to strangle myself with my own typewriter ribbon. Which is much harder than it used to be.
The pile of new topics and ideas was also enormous in the beginning. But after 600+ posts, I was starting to do donuts in the parking lot, which feels self-indulgent. The navel-gazing aspect of blogging has always made me a little nauseous (he blogged), but as long as I felt I had fresh things to say, I could handle it.
Even if I can’t manage new posts too often anymore, I’m sometimes glad to find that I still have this window to stand naked in when I need to. Like last year, when I wrote Atheism for Dummies. You all were incredibly helpful in grappling with some of those questions, which is why you get a collective shout in the Acknowledgements.
So here’s the new plan. In addition to the very occasional freestanding new post, the blog will now have three faces:
1. Book blog
When I’m working on a book, I’ll blog that process in short bursts, asking for your help when I need it. (There appears to be a new project coming, btw — stand by for news.)
2. Greatest hits
A lot of my old posts expand on ideas in my books, and I think about a third of them are worth rerunning, especially for those who haven’t read all 500,000 words quite yet. I’ll bring some of my favorites back.
3. Q&A
I get a steady stream of email questions, usually but not always about secular parenting. Instead of always answering offline, I’d like to invite y’all to ask questions or suggest topics using the new Ask a Question form in the sidebar. I won’t be able to answer them all, but I’ll pick a few and answer on the blog. Sky’s the limit on this one. Ask me anything.
Hopefully this will keep it fresh. Thanks for reading!
Q: Where is the story of disbelief most interesting?
In the middle of Chapter 14 now and having a ball. It’s a kind of snapshot chapter — lots of stats and facts about religious disbelief today, including the way it presents differently around the world. Like:
• China and India, where the environment for atheism has been relatively relaxed for thousands of years
• Norway (et al.), where most people are non-believing Lutherans and the state church just (mostly) disestablished itself voluntarily
• Québec, which in 40 years went from the most religious province in Canada (and 83 percent Catholic) to the least religious province in Canada…and still 83 percent Catholic
• California, which in 30 years went from part of the “Unchurched Belt” to the middle of the pack in religious identity, largely because of the influx of Catholic Hispanics
• The UK, of course, which underwent such a rapid secularization after WWII that they had to create a National Health Service to deal with all the whiplash
• The fact that urban-rural is overtaking all other variables in the secular-religious split
You get the picture. I’m trying to draw out these interesting narratives in short spurts. So
Q: Do you know of any interesting stories of the rise, fall, or other change in nonreligious identity at the national or local level, anywhere in the world?
Vermont, you went from 13% nonreligious to 34% in 20 years. Got to be a story there. Also wondering about Uganda for a half dozen reasons. I’m especially interested in the global South, but anything interesting will do. Just a few sentences and a link if appropriate. Thanks!
Pause for poker
Slight pause — I’m headed to Poker in the Church in Denver today. It’s a fabulous fundraiser for Foundation Beyond Belief‘s current slate of featured charities and the kickoff event for the Second Annual International Freethought Film Festival.
On the plane I’ll start working on a section called “Is Science Incompatible with God?” Can’t wait to get to the end and find out.
32. Moving the Godposts
(Post 32 of 33 in my 16-hour shift for the Secular Student Alliance Blogathon.)
11:30 pm EDT
About ten years ago, I had a conversation with one of my favorite people, a theologian and deeply good guy who taught at the same Catholic college I did. I’d been growing frustrated with the gap between the college’s theory and practice regarding the “open marketplace of ideas” and ever more outspoken about that frustration. I was getting reckless and didn’t care. He was worried about me.
That was nice. Most of my colleagues just kept smiling — though not with their eyes — but he came to my office and sat down to see what he could do. The pained expression on the face of this exceptional man just about killed me. He seemed completely at a loss to understand where I was coming from.
Then this intelligent man said something so unworthy that I was the one stuck for a response.
“Dale,” he said, “I can’t help thinking that the God in whom you don’t believe…is one I don’t believe in, either.”
I’m sure you’ve heard this one before. I’ve heard it countless times, always presented with the confidence that it’s mind blowing and novel. It’s often followed with a tiny, patient smile that shows the speaker will wait as long as necessary while I reel from the impact of this new idea, then walk me back into the Garden.
It is almost always well meant, I know, but it’s deeply insulting. After all the work and thinking I’d done, all the deep engagement with the concept of the divine, and all the risk I was then confronting, he really believed that I had merely gotten myself stuck on the nine-year-old’s conception of God — white beard, big throne, deep voice — and having decided that was silly, chucked the whole thing, instead of moving past it, as he did, into the highly attenuated (and intentional ill-defined) version he had found more supportable. Or shall we say, less deniable.
If I had found my voice, I might have asked if his God created the universe and/or us, and/or cares about us, and/or exists in a supernatural realm in any way separate from our own material universe, and/or provides for us a life after the current one. If he would cop to any one of these features, I would say, like a witness in Law & Order — “Yep, that’s him, that’s the guy.”
But as much as his misconception bothered me, it was overwhelmed by the fact that he had cared enough to talk to me when very few others would. That was more important to me then, and it’s more important now.
31. Michael, Keanu, and me
(Post 31 of 33 in my 16-hour shift for the Secular Student Alliance Blogathon.)
11:00 pm EDT
Interesting bit of Parenting Beyond Belief trivia #1: Michael Shermer’s foreword originally started with this paragraph:
In the 1989 Ron Howard film Parenthood, the Keanu Reeves character, Tod Higgins, a wild-eyed young man trying to find his way in life after being raised by a single mom, bemoans to his future mother-in-law: “You know, Mrs. Buckman, you need a license to buy a dog, to drive a car—hell, you even need a license to catch a fish. But they’ll let any butt-reaming asshole be a father.
Call me crazy, but we were entering uncharted territory with this book, and I thought it might be best for the first nonreligious parenting book to not also be the first parenting book with the phrase “butt-reaming asshole” in the opening paragraph.
Michael thought I was being overcautious, but he kindly agreed to paraphrase viagrasstore.net. I like Michael.
Interesting bit #2: Michael Shermer and I went to the same suburban LA high school, about five years apart.
Donate to SSA! I seem to recall that’s what this is all about! To the sidebar!
30. What Vonnegut said, or maybe didn’t
(Post 30 of 33 in my 16-hour shift for the Secular Student Alliance Blogathon.)
10:30 pm EDT
Kurt Vonnegut once said something that changed my life. At least I think it was Vonnegut.
Lemme start over.
Somebody once said this incredible thing that instantly changed my perspective and lowered my blood pressure, permanently. I think it was Vonnegut, I’d have sworn it was Vonnegut, but try as I might over the years, I’ve never been able to find it again.
It was something like this: “When I was a young man, I used to get very upset because the world was not as good as it could be. But once I learned more about how we evolved, and the mess of a brain we’re carrying around in our heads, I was struck by amazement that we ever get anything right.” Something like that.
Whatever it was, it turned my head around. It’s true, you know. Given what we are, given the jury-rigged dog’s breakfast we call a brain, we really should have vanished in a smoking heap long ago. Instead, we’ve done some pretty amazing and wonderful things, large and small. Yes, there’s a lot of nonsense and mess, we all get that. We devote huge energies to killing each other. But we devote even more time to not killing each other. We are cruel and stupid, but not full time, despite our faulty, fearful programming. And we sometimes let people merge in traffic, and refrain from hating and fearing someone our Paleolithic brain tells us we should really, really hate and fear.
It just ought to be so much worse than it is. I think there’s something to be said for tempering our outrage with a sigh of relief, just once in a while.
I’m holding that quote for 90 days. If Vonnegut doesn’t claim it, then I said it.
29. Finding a tribe
(Post 29 of 33 in my 16-hour shift for the Secular Student Alliance Blogathon.)
10:00 pm EDT
I am a citizen of the world. – Diogenes of Sinope (412-323 BCE)
I first ran into Diogenes in elementary school. He was another example of people from history who apparently did one thing — told other people to eat cake, or guessed Livingston’s name, or let the Queen step on his coat. Diogenes was the guy who held up a lamp as he searched for an honest man. Just that, nothing else. Weird, but no weirder than the cake or the coat.
Over the years I kept running into Diogenes, who, like Socrates, turns out to have been a full-time smart ass. The point of the search for an honest man becomes clear when you realize that he told people what he was doing as he walked past them.
I assume he died of a broken nose.
The idea of being a citizen of the world has always had incredible appeal to me. So much grief comes from our evolved tendency to clump with those most like us. But like most evolved tendencies, we can’t just wish it away. It’s another gift from the Paleolithic, another non-negotiable part of being human. The trick is not to pretend we can kick the habit but to do it positively and well.
When I started college at UC Berkeley, I was immediately terrified by the prospect of disappearing into an ocean of 32,000 undergrads. Fortunately I had joined the Cal Band, which immediately became my defining tribe.
Kids who don’t have a defining identity will generally find one, and it might not be what you would have preferred. Parents should help their kids find groups and activities that give them an opportunity for “meaningful doing” with others — the key element of recent life satisfaction studies.
28. Getting punchy
(Post 28 of 33 in my 16-hour shift for the Secular Student Alliance Blogathon.)
9:30 pm EDT
Starting to look like Jerry Lewis at the end of the telethon. Becca just came into the office, saw my red-rimmed eyes, and insisted on dragging me away from the computer for a walk around the block. A perfect Georgia summer night, wet from a full day’s rain, full of the sound of crickets.
Hey, a thing: Several people have expressed concern that this or that post today will be buried in the blogathoning and be missed by a lot of readers. Very nice to hear that some of them have hit the mark. My plan is to pull out a dozen or so and repost them gradually over the next few months, in among the newbies. But first I’m taking two weeks off, dammit.
Yes, this counts as a post. Donate to SSA!