Unnatural
(Part 2, continued from “Born This Way?“)
You’ve got to be taught to be afraid / Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade / You’ve got to be carefully taught.You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late / Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate / You’ve got to be carefully taught!–from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific (1949)
It’s a riveting horror — no caption required, just the immensely sad, unaware eyes of the younger girl. There’s no reason to believe they’ve embraced the messages on their shirts yet, but every reason to assume their environment is primed to lead them there.
But is it really true that we’ve got to be taught to hate those who are different from us? Answer one way and parents can simply decline to teach them to hate. Answer the other way and there’s something we need to actively do to help them avoid it.
I think we’re more naturally inclined to hate and fear difference than not. Religion isn’t the only parting gift we got from the Paleolithic. A lot of the things we are, including some of our worst pathologies, were once strongly adaptive traits. Evolution just hasn’t had time to catch up to our circumstances. As a result, we’re a whole panel of buttons waiting to be pushed. And one of the best things a parent can do is to help those buttons rust.
Before I get to that, let’s look at more of our inheritance:
GOT TO BE TAUGHT?
A million years ago, food was desperately hard to come by, and cooperation within a small group was advantageous. But cooperating with the group next door would have doubled the mouths to feed without moving the needle much on available food. Genetic tendencies toward in-group cooperation and out-group hostility would have provided a selective advantage, as would distrust of people who dressed, looked, or acted differently from you. The more different they were, the more likely their interests conflicted with yours.
Aggressive nationalism, militarism, racism, and the exaggerated fear of immigrants and of all things foreign are modern expressions of what was once a sensible approach to staying alive. But in an interdependent world, these same characteristics can be downright harmful.
BE AFRAID
It’s a sunny Wednesday afternoon a million years ago. Two Homo erectuseses are walking through the high grass on the African savannah. Suddenly there’s movement off to the left. One of them assumes it’s something fun and goes in for a hug. The other jumps 15 feet straight up and grabs a tree limb. Even if it’s just a fluffy bunny nine times out of ten, which of these guys is more likely to pass on his genes to the next generation?
In a world bent on killing you, no characteristic would have been more useful for survival than perpetual, sweaty hypervigilance. We’ve inherited a strong tendency to assume that every shadow and sound is a threat, which in turn kept us alive and reproducing. By the time elevated blood pressure killed you off at 22, you’d already have several jittery, paranoid offspring pounding espressos and cradling stone shotguns all through the long, terrifying night.
Fast forward to a world of 7 billion people in close quarters. Suddenly it’s no longer quite so adaptive to have everybody all edgy and shooty all the time. But our brains don’t know that. One of the resulting paradoxes is that fear often increases as actual danger diminishes. If you can’t see and name it, it must be hiding, you see, which is ever so much worse. Violent crime in the U.S. recently hit the lowest level since records have been kept — in every category — but who’d ever know? Instead, we take every violent news story as proof of the opposite. We insist things are worse than ever in “this day and age,” keep cradling those shotguns…and keep forwarding those urban legends.
When you get an email warning that rapists are using $5 bills or recordings of crying babies or ether disguised as perfume to lure and capture their victims, or that child abduction rates have risen 444% since 1982 — all untrue — you’ve just received a message from the Paleolithic. But by constantly naming dangers and sounding the alarm, we feel safer.
(Think for a minute about how 9/11 — a death-dealing sneak attack by the Other — pushed our collective Paleolithic button. It was a massive confirmation of our oldest unarticulated fears, and we dropped to our collective knees.)
I could go on and on. In addition to magical thinking, fear of difference, and hypervigilance, we can add categorical thinking, enforced gender divisions, the love of weapons and authority, and much more, all of which had clear adaptive advantages during the long, dark night of our species. These things are, in a word, natural.
Which is not to say good. Rape is also natural. “From an evolutionary perspective,” says biologist/philosopher David Lahti, “considering other social species on this earth, it is remarkable that a bunch of unrelated adult males can sit on a plane together for seven hours in the presence of fertile females, with everyone arriving alive and unharmed at the end of it.” Yet it happens, ten thousand times a day, because we’ve developed a frankly unnatural social morality that trumps the natural a gratifyingly high percentage of the time.
Secularism, comfort with difference, a reasonable relaxation of vigilance, the blurring of categories (sex, gender, race, etc), the willingness to disarm ourselves and to challenge authority — these are all unnatural, recent developments, born in fits and starts out of the relative luxury of a post-Paleolithic world. I’m sure you’ll agree that they are also better responses to the world we live in now — at least those of us privileged to live in non-Paleolithic conditions.
Of course our limbic brain differs on that, but it would, wouldn’t it?
Now — the astute reader may have noticed that the things that kept us alive a million years ago line up incredibly well with the nationalistic, anti-immigrant, pro-gun, pro-authority, pro-gender-role, anti-diversity talking points of social conservatives. But if you think my point is to belittle conservatives by calling them cavemen, not so. I think there’s a lot to be gained by recognizing social conservatism, including religious conservatism, as the activation of ancient and natural fears, and to respond accordingly.
My circumstances have allowed my Paleolithic buttons to remain unpushed. That’s why I’m not a social conservative. Growing up, I was made to feel safe. I was not frightened with Satan or hell or made to question my own worth or worthiness. I was given an education, allowed to think freely, encouraged to explore the world around me and to find it wonderful. Unlike the vast majority of the friends I have who are religious conservatives, I never passed through a disempowering life crisis — a hellish divorce, a drug or alcohol spiral, the loss of a child — that may have triggered that feeling of abject helplessness before I had developed my own personal resources. So I never had to retreat into the cave of my innate fears.
In short, I’ve been lucky.
A lot of people with the same luck are religious. But in my experience, those strongly tend toward what Bruce Bawer has called the “church of love” — the tolerant, diverse, justice-oriented side of the religious spectrum, grounded in a more modern perspective but still responding to the human problem that science, admittedly, has only partly solved.
It’s rare for a person with all of the advantages listed above to freely choose the “church of law” — the narrow, hateful, Paleolithic end we rightly oppose. Those folks, one way or another, are generally thrown there, like the girls in the photo. Sometimes they find their way out, but their road is tougher than mine was.
Seeing things this way has made me more empathetic to conservative religious believers, even as I oppose the malign consequences of their beliefs. Understanding our natural inheritance also makes me frankly amazed that we ever do anything right. Given the profound mismatch between what we are and what the world is, we should all have vanished in a smoking heap by now. Instead, we create art and cure disease and write symphonies and figure out the age of the universe and somehow, despite ourselves, hang on to an essentially secular government in a predominantly religious country.
Okay, I just have to stop writing, even though I haven’t reached the punchline — what this all means for parents. So there will be a Part 3.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: After further research and smart reader input, I’ve yanked the section “Every Sperm is Sacred” from this post, which was based on hypotheses that have apparently been superseded. Science marches on!]
The easy ones and the hard ones
Preparing a talk on critical thinking and ethics reminded me of this post from three years ago.
“Omigosh. Some of these things are soooo easy, but this one is totally hard.”
“What things?”
“These Question Book questions. Some are just so easy they’re dumb.”
Delaney [then 7] has been reading Gregory Stock’s The Kids’ Book of Questions on and off for a few weeks now. Two hundred sixty-eight questions to ponder. And she’s right — some are so easy they’re dumb.
“Like this, listen,” she said. “Number 110: ‘If it would save the lives of ten kids in another country, would you be willing to have really bad acne for a year?’ That’s so dumb!”
“So what’s your answer, then?”
“Of course I would do it. I mean, it’s their lives, Dad.” She paused, crinkled her brow. “What’s acne?”
“Pimples.”
“WHAT?! That’s even stupider. I thought it was a bad sickness or something. Who would let ten kids die just to not have pimples?!”
I thought back to junior high school, trying to recall how many strangers I’d have whacked in exchange for clear skin, and decided her question was rhetorical.
“But this one is really hard. Listen — Number 50: ‘If everyone in your class but you would be killed unless you sacrificed your own life, would you save everyone else or save yourself?'”
Long pause.
“I don’t know! That’s soooo hard! I really love to be alive. But so do they!”
She seemed genuinely tormented by the dilemma. It’s precisely the sacrifice that makes the Christ story so compelling. The willing sacrifice of one’s own life is just so hard to fathom. Until you add the heavenly out, at which point I suppose Christs and hijackers alike gain a decided advantage in nerve.
Laney, having no such advantage, prefers to live.
Squinting in hindsight
Delaney (10) is on an awesome winning streak with fantastic teachers all the way back to preschool. Her current one has her all lit up about the American Revolution, and she gets off the bus every day and regales me (in the fluent Lightspeedese of an excited fourth grader) with the implications of the Intolerable Acts or Paul Revere’s provocative engraving of Occupy Boston the Boston Massacre. (That’s Revere’s propaganda piece to the left.)
So I wasn’t surprised when she came home last week with news that Ms. Monsour had asked the kids a really good question: If you were alive in the Revolution, would you have been a Patriot, a Loyalist, or a neutral?
The question comes from way up in the nosebleed section of Bloom’s taxonomy. It’s a higher-order question, one with ten times more educational potential per square inch than the leading brand. And in this case, it’s one with an obvious answer, which is not to say an accurate one: I’d have been a Patriot, of course, how dare you.
If Mrs. Burks asked me the same question when I was in fourth grade — and maybe she did, I don’t remember — I’m pretty sure that’s what I’d have said. I’d have sided with the revolutionaries. They were after all the good guys. And I wouldn’t have been a nasty slaveholder in the 1850s, I’d have helped run the Underground Railroad, duh. I certainly wouldn’t have sat silent during the Nazi atrocities in the Third Reich either. I’d have had ten Anne Franks in my attic. And so on.
The moment hindsight assigns the white and black hats, we “know” which side we’d have been on with such confidence that we rarely even think to pose the question. “Would I have been for or against Hitler? WTF??!”
This doesn’t mean slavery and genocide were somehow “okay” in the context of another time. But the question of what “I” would have done and believed as a product of that time is a different one. “I” can’t be plucked from the here and now and inserted into some long-ago there and then in any meaningful way. My values and convictions flow from my knowledge and experience, two things that would have been entirely different then. It’s a tenfold version of “If I could be 18 again, knowing what I know now…” A nice game, but in the end not all that enlightening.
“So what’d you say?”
“I was the only one who said I’d be a Loyalist. Everybody else said they’d be Patriots.”
“Ooh, interesting. Why would you have been a Loyalist?”
“Well not because I think they were right,” she said. “But the British army and navy were SO much bigger, and they had all these resources, and the colonists just had a little. I probably would have wanted to be on the winning side, and it would have looked like the colonists were going to lose. I might have also thought the colonists were like terrorists fighting against my government, you know? So yeah, I would have probably been a Loyalist.”
Raymond Taylor, my 7th grade history teacher, was the first to help me to see history as something other than a parade of inevitabilities — helping me squint my 20/20 hindsight into a blur until I felt what it must have been like to dump that tea in Boston Harbor or sign that Declaration or march against Hitler or sit at a segregated lunch counter without the benefit of a known outcome. History suddenly becomes a whole different animal, pulsing with uncertainty and populated with scriptless actors.
I’d like to think I’d have always been on the side of the now-bloody-obvious, but I doubt that. I’ve played a game with my kids for years, imagining how future generations might facepalm at us: “Just imagine, Mergadink-5,” says the mother to her 24th century child. “People in the 21st century kept animals in their homes as pets, gave them demeaning names like Goober and Mister Tickles, and walked them on leashes. And children weren’t even allowed to work! Their parents gave them money in little bits called ‘allowances.'” And so on.
That game is a nice little slice of humble pie to complicate our smug hindsights, and my kids love to generate their own examples. It’s hard to be too cocksure about your position in the past when you’re not entirely sure you’ve got the present right.
Hitchens’ best moment
Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) has had a profound influence on me for years. It’s hard to think of a greater artist with the language or a more incisive thinker. He took a different approach than I do to religion and atheism, but it irritates the crap out of me when interviewers set me up as a nice-guy foil to the Horsemen. It’s not an either-or. Hitchens speaks to me, and often for me, while I’m busy reaching across aisles. I wouldn’t for a minute want to do without that voice. And when his conclusions were different from mine, he gave me serious pause. It’s damn hard to wave Hitchens away with a casual hand.
When my son Connor told me this morning that Hitchens had died, my mind went straight to what I think is his greatest moment — not one of his debates, and not a written polemic. It was what he did when he was wrong.
Several times, including in an article in Slate in late 2007, Hitchens defended U.S. interrogation methods in the “War on Terror,” saying they fell short of torture. Instead of just bloviating for applause, he agreed to test his claim by undergoing the experience himself. He relented in mortal terror after 16 seconds, then went on to write a Vanity Fair piece titled, “Believe Me, It’s Torture.”
Several liberal commentators went all John 20:29 on him at the time, saying duh, they figured out it was torture without getting under the towel themselves. A lot of conservative fans of the technique apparently need, but for some reason decline to volunteer for, the experience.
Hitchens made a false claim, then put his money where his mouth was, changed his mind, and gave me a lesson in intellectual integrity I won’t forget. It’s one of many gifts from Hitchens that I’m grateful for.
“Who will believe this silly stuff?”
Another excerpt from Voices of Unbelief, my current project. You may remember that one of my goals in this book is to fill in the 1400-year silence between Rome and the Renaissance that dogs most atheist anthologies. Sure, European atheism was mum during this time, for obvious reasons — but other cultures, including India, had flourishing atheistic schools of thought in philosophy and religion. One example is Jainism, a strong candidate for Best Religion on Earth. Read on:
The 6th century BCE was a time of great innovation in Hinduism, giving rise to diverse new schools of thought. Among these was Jainism, a nontheistic religion based on natural law, pacifism, and nonviolence toward all living things. Jainism rejects the idea that the universe was created or is sustained by supernatural beings and includes direct criticisms of supernatural belief in many of its texts.
Mahapurana is one of the most important Jain texts. Written primarily by the Acharya (religious teacher) Jinasena and finished by his student Gunabhadra in the 9th century CE, this text gives a thorough description of Jain tradition and belief, including what historian Vipan Chandra has called “the finest and most audacious ancient defense of atheism.” That famous passage, presented below, echoes the arguments of Epicurus and Diagoras and presages those of the 18th century Enlightenment.
Document: Acharya Jinasena, Mahapurana 4.16-31 (9th c. CE)
Some foolish men declare that Creator made the world.
The doctrine that the world was created is ill-advised, and should be rejected.If God created the world, where was he before creation? If you say he was transcendent then, and needed no support, where is he now?
No single being had the skill to make the world—for how can an immaterial god create that which is material?
How could God have made the world without any raw material?
If you say he made this first, and then the world, you are face with an endless regression.If you declare that the raw material arose naturally you fall into another fallacy, for the whole universe might thus have been its own creator, and have risen equally naturally.
If God created the world by an act of will, without any raw material, then it is just his will and nothing else—and who will believe this silly stuff?
If he is ever perfect, and complete, how could the will to create have arisen in him?
If, on the other hand, he is not perfect, he could no more create the universe than a potter could.If he is formless, actionless, and all-embracing, how could he have created the world? Such a soul, devoid of all modality, would have no desire to create anything.
If you say that he created to no purpose, because it was his nature to do so then God is pointless. If he created in some kind of sport, it was the sport of a foolish child, leading to trouble….
If he created out of love for living things and need of them he made the world; why did he not make creation wholly blissful, free from misfortune?…
Thus the doctrine that the world was created by God makes no sense at all.
And God commits great sin in slaying the children whom he himself created.
If you say that he slays only to destroy evil beings, why did he create such beings in the first place?…Good men should combat the believer in divine creation, maddened by an evil doctrine.
Know that the world is uncreated, as time itself is, without beginning and end, and is based on the principles [natural law], life, and the rest.
(From Voices of Unbelief: Documents from Atheists and Agnostics, coming from ABC-CLIO in August 2012.)
Preferring peace
Her name was Ann, that much I remember for sure. Or Monica. We were both in fourth grade when she informed our teacher that she would not be saying the Pledge of Allegiance.
She explained in a quiet, confident voice that she was a Jehovah’s Witness, and as such was not to pledge an oath to anyone or anything but God.
Though I suppose she was essentially abandoning one set of rote instructions for another, at the time it smacked me in the head like a whistling cartoon anvil falling from a cliff. Wow, I thought. This thing I had done for years without thinking could be thought about and responded to. It’s my earliest memory of witnessing a principled dissent.
I thought of Ann/Monica when the story broke earlier this year about Goshen College, a small Mennonite school in Indiana that made the decision to stop playing the Star-Spangled Banner at sporting events. There were the usual cries of outrage from the usual bawling gobs, the usual torrents of hate mail that I understand are continuing still. But I for one had the same response I had forty years ago: Wow.
There are plenty of reasons to dislike our national anthem — musical, textual, and historical. For starters, it’s a waltz. Nobody else has a national anthem that’s a waltz. Okay, “God Save the Queen,” but that’s about it. It’s also unsingable, with a too-wide range of an octave and a fifth. That’s why ballpark yahoos always yodel up into falsetto on “land of the FREE” — to make it look like they meant to sound bad on that high F.
It’s also militaristic, which is the problem Goshen College had with it. Peace and nonviolence are key components of the Mennonite worldview, and the Goshen College motto (“Healing the World, Peace by Peace”) made crowing about rockets and bombs a bit of a problem. They chose instead to celebrate our spacious skies and amber waves by substituting America the Beautiful, a better song in almost every way.
(I don’t actually mind the military setting as much as I once did. The song celebrates surviving an assault, not slaughtering the foe — unlike the Marseillaise of France, which (though musically unbeatable) is easily the most bloodthirsty anthem on Earth. You have to love the “Children’s Verse,” in which the children of France sing of their yearning to avenge their ancestors in battle and join them in their coffins.)
Then there are historical problems. The tune is of English origin. You may recall that the War of 1812 was not against the hated Costa Ricans or the dreaded Laplanders, but the English. So when we dug deep into our repertoire for a tune that matched the metrical structure of the poem Francis Scott Key had written commemorating our victory over the English, we chose “To Anacreon in Heaven” -– an English drinking song.
Yes, the tune of our hallowed national anthem was originally a bawdy drinking song, written in London in the 1770s by members of the Anacreontic Society, an upper class men’s club.
Here’s the first verse of the original lyrics. You know the tune:
To Anacreon, in Heav’n, where he sat in full glee,
A few sons of harmony sent a petition,
That he their inspirer and patron would be,
When this answer arrived from the jolly old Grecian
Voice, fiddle and flute, No longer be mute,
I’ll lend ye my name, and inspire ye to boot…
And, besides, I’ll instruct ye, like me, to entwine,
The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus’s vine.
So Anacreon, a Greek lyric poet of the 6th century BCE, approves the use of his name and instructs the “sons of harmony” to “entwine the myrtle of Venus” (goddess of love) “with Bacchus’s vine” (god of wine). He orders them, in short, to have drunken sex.
In subsequent verses, Zeus is made furious by the news of the proposed entwining, convinced that the goddesses will abandon Olympus in order to have sex with drunken mortals. But the king of the gods is laid low with diarrhea 
and, fleeing Olympus with his “nine fusty maids,” is thereby rendered unable to countermand the order.
I couldn’t make this stuff up on my best day.
The lyrics that replaced these are actually pretty well crafted. (Say those first two full sentences aloud — some elegant sentence construction going on there.) But most people aren’t aware that the fourth stanza includes the first direct suggestion that “In God We Trust” (actually “In God is our trust”) should be our national motto. A hundred forty-two years later, he got his wish.
Finally, we did without a national anthem for more than 150 years. Though Key’s poem was around from 1814 and even got the tune stuck to it shortly thereafter (as a spritely dance number), it wasn’t adopted as the national anthem until 1931. That’s right — this ancient, venerable, untouchable tradition was born the same year as my dad. Prior to that it was just another national song, like “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy.”
These are relatively trivial things, of course, compared to Goshen’s reasoning. It was just so gratifying for me to see someone reflecting on their actions — even the most rote and expected of those actions — then thinking about whether those actions line up with their stated principles and making adjustments as needed.
Not all principles are admirable, but caring enough about peace and nonviolence to step on nationalistic toes is something I can get behind. Kudos to Goshen.
Ten years of Calling Bernadette’s Bluff
My 500th post goes back ten years to the beginning of my public freethought life, before Parenting Beyond Belief, before Foundation Beyond Belief…
Spring 2001. I’m a mostly closeted secular humanist on the faculty of a Catholic women’s college in Minnesota. It’s Friday afternoon, so I’m sitting with a small, sad knot of St. Kate’s faculty men at The Dubliner, a pub in St. Paul. Guinness in and bile out.
A sociology prof and good friend named Brian Fogarty tells about seeing two students on the quad earlier that day, having a pitched argument. No contact, but plenty of heat. As Brian slunk by the two, another student leapt out from behind a column and thrust a slip of paper at him:
WHAT DID YOU DO ABOUT IT??
“You know,” he sighed after describing it, “if I did stick my nose in, it would have been ‘a male thing to do.’ You just can’t win.”
He was right about that. The campus was laced with these double-binds. “Somebody has to write a satirical novel about this place,” I said.
“Yeah yeah, you always say that. So write it.”
“Wha…me? I was actually thinking of a writer.”
“Write one scene,” he said. “See what happens.”
That night I wrote an eight-page scene in which a faculty committee discusses what to do about the school song. The meeting is called to order by Jack Kassel, who is, by the most extraordinary coincidence, a closeted secular humanist male professor at a Catholic women’s college:
Well then, we meet again to discuss changes to the college fight song.” Audible gasps around the table. Jack’s eyes inflate as he realizes his mistake. “I mean, the college song,” he sputters in a rush. “The song. The Hymn to Saint Bernadette.”
Oh goody, he thinks. Now I get to start in a hole. Shit on a stick.
The next day I laid out the storyline. Jack is already at the end of his rope when his oldest partner in disbelief shows up — as the campus priest, no less — and he finally plunges over the edge when his ex-wife enrolls their brilliant young son in a Lutheran school and the boy begins quoting Scripture in response to Jack’s questions. Back against the wall, Jack starts to come out as a nonbeliever at what turns out to be the worst possible time — as visions of the Virgin Mary begin appearing on campus.
I wrote for ten weeks straight, a fun and feverish thing, finishing up ten years ago this month. After months of refining, I published it through Xlibris, and in January 2002, just seven months after Brian’s taunt, Calling Bernadette’s Bluff went public.
The book was stocked in the college bookstore and sold out repeatedly. The local paper did a nice feature, and reviews have been good. The resemblance of “St. Bernie’s” to St. Kate’s (and the presence of characters said to resemble actual carbon-based people on campus, including the president, the dean of faculty, and half a dozen profs) was duly noted. The dean of faculty even asked for a signed copy. What fun.
The next year…not so much. That’s when my slow-burning conflict with the administration began over free expression on campus, leading eventually to my disgusted resignation in ’06.
Hard to believe how much has happened in ten years. Along the way, in addition to the parenting books, I wrote Good Thunder, which picks up three days after Bernadette ends. But I didn’t release that one until last year for various reasons, then didn’t announce the release to anyone until now. There’s just been too much going on.
And even now, I’m mentioning it only in the context of Bernadette’s Bluff because Good Thunder would be incomprehensible without reading Bernadette first. Don’t even think about trying.
I’m really surprised at how well both books hold up for me as a reader after all these years. I usually hate who I was and what I did over nine minutes ago, but these still say what I wanted to say.
It helped that so many characters are based on real people. The deeply nutty aspects of Catholicism are on display, but (as several reviewers have noted) the strongest and most likable character is Genevieve Martin, the Catholic dean, who was based on the actual dean at the time. So when Dean Martin butts heads with spineless Jack, it’s hard even for nontheists to entirely know who to root for. Likewise Leslie, the militant feminist with the blinding Grin, manages to make sense and nonsense and to convince and infuriate at the same time. I don’t think I could have written that character convincingly from scratch. Fortunately I’d known her in person, and been convinced and infuriated by her for years. She was one of several people at St. Kate’s who helped turn me from a passive feminist to a deeply committed one. But she also showed me, quite unintentionally, just how silly it could get at times, resting as it does in human hands.
The weirdest thing about Bernadette is the fact that several things in the story ended up happening on campus the next year. My favorite: A construction project on the fictional St. Bernie’s campus unearthed bones, and the Lakota Sioux claimed they were sacred and halted the project. A year after publication, a construction project on the non-fictional St. Kate’s campus unearthed an underground spring. The Lakota Sioux claimed it was sacred and halted the project.
Like they say, you can’t make this stuff up.
20 Reasons to support FBB in July
Humanists like to have good reasons for what they do. It’s one of the most adorable things about us. That’s why Foundation Beyond Belief, a humanist charitable membership organization, is building its member/donor drive around 20 Reasons to Give or Join in July.
Maybe you’ll join or give because without a God, it’s up to us to make things better on this planet, or because we don’t keep a dime of your donations to the featured charities, or because our regular giving model appeals to you.
Maybe you’ll do it for the yummy dopamine hit or the pretty decent chance to win an iPad2.
There’s also the opportunity to confuse Arthur Brooks, who says the secular suffer from a “virtue gap,” or to make Dinesh D’Souza look even sillier.
Then there’s our new Volunteers Beyond Belief program to support, Andrew Jackson’s hair to celebrate, and fear, arguably the greatest cause of human misery, to overcome.
Start at our 20 Reasons page, select your own favorite reason, and share it on Facebook and beyond.
For the videogenic among us, there’s the 20 Reasons Video Contest. Make a short video (<60 seconds) about your reason for being a member or supporter of Foundation Beyond Belief -- funny, serious, 
animated, whatever — then upload it to YouTube as a response to this one by FBB board member Zach Moore. Share it, ask your friends to Like it, and we’ll do the same by posting it on all of our social media pages. The two videos with the most Likes at the end of July will each receive a $50 Amazon gift certificate.
It comes down to this: We’re really proud of what we’ve done so far, putting compassionate humanism to work by raising over $160,000 for outstanding charities worldwide, and we’re excited about what’s next. Our Volunteers Beyond Belief program launched today, with chapters in eight U.S. cities, and our ongoing humanist emergency response program will launch on August 1. We’re working hard to build a positive, effective expression of compassionate humanism. We need your help to keep it moving forward by donating, joining, or just spreading the word.
Thanks for doing whatever you can to make our July drive a success.
Best Picture: The New Humanism
Parenting Beyond Belief was published four years ago this week. Since then, I’ve had hundreds of requests for advice of one kind or another. When I’m not qualified to answer the question, I either decline entirely or lateral to someone who is qualified.
In the process of those laterals, I’ve developed a pretty good sense of our strengths and weaknesses as a community — the areas we have plenty well covered, and the ones that are still cobwebbed corners. I’ve also developed a few favorite resources, and I’d like to give a shout to one of them.
This morning I got a request from Melissa, a recently-graduated RN who is currently in orientation as an Obstetrics nurse. The orientation group discussed cultural competency and the importance of providing patient-centered care. All of the usual cultures, ethnicities, and religions were covered, she said, but no mention was made of the nonreligious.
To her great credit, she spoke up.
“I politely informed my colleagues and our orienting nurse about the growing demographic of people who identified themselves as non-religious freethinkers whose goal was to live ethical, fulfilling lives, and use science and logic to make decisions about our beliefs, values, and lives,” she said. “The orienting nurse was shocked to learn about us and was not aware of the needs of the non-religious.”
The orienting nurse was entirely supportive of her self-disclosure, she said, and was interested in learning more about the nonreligious community. Melissa asked if I could recommend websites, articles, and other resources to help introduce this person to the community.
What a fantastic moment.
Now imagine yourself in the same position. Someone unfamiliar with humanism or atheism is interested in learning more — not so they can explore their own views, but to better serve the growing number who are in that demographic. There are currently more self-identified nonreligious Americans than African-Americans, after all — think of that — and five times as many nonreligious Americans as Jewish Americans. As more people discover that, this kind of request will become more common.
So where would you send someone for the best picture of our community?
My current favorite in that category is The New Humanism, an online magazine founded in late 2009 by the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard. A good 95 percent of websites with a freethought identity are defined primarily by their opposition to, or difference from, religion. Nothing wrong with that, of course — there’s a lot of ground to be plowed there — but it’s good to see a growing desire to also flesh out humanism itself, to explore our own values and issues, and (something we too rarely do) to challenge our own assumptions.
In the past 18 months, TNH has featured such topics as building secular communities, the place of emotions in humanism, humanist rituals, the difficulty of giving up the illusion of immortality, the double-challenge black humanists face, secular meditation, two articles reflecting on the common ground between humanism and Buddhism, whether humanists should join in interfaith work, a personal appeal for genuine inclusiveness, and a refreshingly honest recent article that attempts to shake the nonreligious community out of its obsessive focus on the intellectual, urging greater attention to the kind of comfort, care, and need that religion provides.
Here’s a passage from that last piece that ends with a simple, incisive question, completely reframing the conversation:
A friend of mine told me recently that she thought organized religion was for “weak and uneducated people.” Though I was a bit offended, my response was simply, “Well, what is the secular world doing for weak and uneducated people?”
Sift that provocative question through your head a bit, then read the article.
TNH even has an engaging article written from the perspective of a humanist nurse — something I was glad to be able to show to my correspondent.
I have a dozen favorite voices, but it’s hard to think of a source of humanist thought that quite matches The New Humanism’s blend of depth, clarity, and originality. The writing is both brilliant and accessible — a damn hard thing to pull off once, much less again and again. And (as you can see above) it raises questions that, for all their simplicity and power, are rarely or never raised anywhere else in our community.
Like anything worthwhile, TNH is not without its detractors. Many have rightly noted that these topics alienate hard core nontheists. This just in: Not everything we do has to be aimed at the hard core. They already have lots of nifty toys. The fact that 99.5% of those who share our worldview are not associated with us in any way should get our attention. How about giving them a place to stand, a way to be humanists? In my humble, TNH offers an opportunity to do just that.
So there’s my vote. Where would YOU have sent Melissa for the best picture of humanism?
Humanism at work in Japan
- March 16, 2011
- By Dale McGowan
- In action, values
3
On the day Japan was devastated by an 8.9 earthquake and massive tsunami, Foundation Beyond Belief, the humanist charitable foundation I direct, launched a fund drive for the relief effort.
We were tempted to name a relief organization as recipient on that day, but we waited. No two natural disasters are alike. The earthquakes in Haiti and Chile presented dramatically different challenges for relief organizations, and the current situation had its own unique character and needs.
It’s a good thing we waited. After a few days it became clear that most international relief organizations would be only marginally involved in the response. Through long, painful experience, Japan has become the best-prepared nation on Earth for natural disasters. Even so, the sheer scale of the task at hand will require an immense amount of effort and financial resources.
As donations poured in from our members and supporters, we monitored the situation to determine how best to direct the funds. Yesterday it became clear that our support would do the most good not in international hands, but by direct contribution to the domestic Japanese agency at the center of this massive effort.
Foundation Beyond Belief will forward 100 percent of collected funds to the Japanese Red Cross.
The Japanese Red Cross operates 92 hospitals nationwide and forms the backbone of domestic disaster response in Japan. By donating directly to JRCS, we can be confident that our funds are going where they are needed most for the long recovery ahead. And as of Wednesday March 16, Foundation Beyond Belief members and supporters have donated over $12,000 to the relief fund.
To make a donation to the Japanese Red Cross through Foundation Beyond Belief, visit our homepage and click on the orange ChipIn button in the sidebar.
Deepest thanks to all of you who have donated so generously.
