The Empire Strikes Back
[Continued from When science goes south]
Delaney was all butterflies the morning of the broadcast. I assured her she’d be just fine.
“But I’m talking to THE PRINCIPAL!” she said in mock horror. “In front of the whole school!”
She was secretly adoring the whole idea, we both knew that, but the nerves were no less real. She’d never done anything like this before.
I drove her to school early, then sat in the front office to watch the show on the monitor. After the Pledge of Allegiance (No, Luke — stay on target!), the camera panned to my daughter and the principal.
“I’m here with Delaney McGowan today who won first place in a national contest,” said Mr. Robinson. “This is amazing, Delaney! Tell us all about it.”
“Well,” she said, “I won an art contest.”
Hmm.
I grinned and shook my head. After all that, she called it an art contest. That’s fine, of course — she can call it whatever she wants. But I did think it was a bit odd. She’d never called it that before, for one thing. And I never mentioned Ms. Warner’s phone call to her. What an odd coincidence.
She went on to describe the contest with the kind of engaging, articulate poise she’s always had, but somehow got all the way through without ever saying any form of the word “evolution.” Extremely hard to do, given the nature of the contest. The closest she came was the word “adapted,” which she used once or twice. Again, it’s a non-issue…if she’s choosing her own words.
When she ran off the school bus as she always does, I engulfed her in a hug. “You…were…AWESOME,” I said. “I could never have been so clear and calm when I was nine! Did you think of all that yourself, or did anybody help you with what to say?”
(Subtle bastard.)
“Well, there was one kind of weird thing,” she said. “About two minutes before the interview, Ms. Warner told me I shouldn’t say the word ‘evolution.'”
“…”
“…”
“…”
“Dad?”
“Well…huh. You uh…you did an amazing job, that’s all I can say.”
(I think that’s what I said. It may not have included any actual human sounds.)
“What’s wrong? Something’s wrong.”
“No, nothing, I…well, I’m, I’m, I’m…I’m kind of just wondering why Ms. Warner would say such a silly thing, is all. Why not say ‘evolution’? That just seems weird.”
“Yeah, it does.”
“Didn’t Mr. Robinson say anything to her when she said that?”
“He was out in the hall right then.” Her face knotted up. “But it made me so nervous! During the whole interview, I kept worrying that I was going to say the Word.”
The Word.
Despite my silly graphics in this post — an attempt to keep things from getting too dark — this hit me like a ton of bricks. I’d gone out of my way to keep Laney from getting a negative message about her accomplishment. I’d been low-key and reasonable, and the thing had happened anyway as if I’d never left my chair.
What really hurt was hearing Delaney’s sudden anxiety. My fearless thinker, the one who loves nothing more than a good-spirited tête-à-tête over a plate of theology in the school cafeteria or politics on the playground or current events at the dinner table, who chose freedom of speech as one of the things she’s most grateful for at Thanksgiving, this amazing and unique girl had heard from an educator in her school that one of the great concepts in science was in fact a word she should not use, and by implication, a thought she should not think. Evolution, a perpetual source of wonder to her, had become The Word, a thing to avoid, something vaguely dirty.
Even worse, this woman chose Laney’s moment of excited triumph — of scientific triumph — to display her own likely ignorance of the concept that Laney understands better than most adults in any given room.
Now to fully grasp the complex challenge of that moment for Delaney, a thought experiment: Imagine you’re nine years old. You’ve won the Pillsbury Bake-Off. You are invited to speak to your school principal about it on camera in front of 1,000 of your peers. You’ve practiced what you want to say, over and over. You’re nervous and excited. Then two minutes before you go on, an Authority Figure leans over and says, “By the way: don’t mention baking.”
(Only because the confectionery arts aren’t in the elementary curriculum, you understand.)
At bedtime that night, Laney told her mom something that simply broke our hearts. Mr. Hamilton, Laney’s dynamic and gifted teacher from first grade, a HUGE favorite of hers, had popped into her classroom late in the day. “He said he saw me on the Eagle News,” she said, “but his class was too loud and he couldn’t hear what I was saying. So he wants me to come by his room and tell him all about it some time.” Her eyes watered. “But…I don’t know what I should tell him and what I shouldn’t.”
I hope we’re agreed that this is a very big deal.
I gave myself an hour to calm down, then wrote an email to the principal, still careful with my word choice. For one thing, I was “surprised and disappointed” that this had happened. Why? Because I do not want to waste a milligram of effort defending my tone. “Disappointed” is the go-to word in these situations. If you’re “furious,” the other person stops listening and starts defending. Disappointment says, “I expected more from you, and you let me down.” When someone expresses disappointment in me, I’m mortified and immediately begin trying to make it right. It’s an action word.
I also amended my desire to see Warner slowly strangled with the strings of a thousand Steinways (in the email, if not in the darkest corner of my heart). I made it clear that I was very unhappy and asked to meet with them both, very soon.
As I expected, Mr. Robinson was completely mortified when he heard what had happened. He had not spoken to Warner after our meeting, he said in his reply, “because I assumed that I would be the only staff member discussing the broadcast content with Delaney.” A reasonable assumption. Instead, he had used my input to be sure his interview questions gave Delaney the maximum ability to openly express her ideas. He simply hadn’t counted on Warner taking advantage of the two minutes he stepped into the hallway to push her agenda. There was still only one real perp in this and one clear ally.
No matter how the meeting went, I knew this would make a serious mark on her next performance evaluation. Of course we wanted a whole lot more than that.
We wanted an abject, unequivocal apology from Ms. Warner.
We wanted a school-wide statement explaining what happened and describing the real nature of Laney’s accomplishment.
We wanted Ms. Warner’s head on a platter.
We wanted damage control for Delaney.
We wanted a greatly-reduced chance of this kind of thing happening to another student in the school.
But wants are not the same as needs, and that’s where we sometimes go off the rails. Focusing too much on punishment of the perp shifts attention away from getting changes made and repairing damage. It’s a mistake I have made. It can also put your child in the middle of a struggle between adults in which the original point is completely lost.
Those first three wants would be so satisfying, but we knew we couldn’t allow them to get in the way of the last two.
It was going to be a challenge to keep our heads where they belong — especially when we had such a firm idea of where HERS belonged.
Next time, the meeting. (SPOILER ALERT: it goes well.)
When Science Goes South
My daughter wants to be a scientist. It’s all she’s ever wanted to be. And though she’s only nine, I have a pretty strong feeling she’s going to end up there.
When Charlie’s Playhouse announced an Evolution & Art Contest last fall, she was all over it. Imagine an island with a unique environment. Choose an existing animal to put on the island. Fast forward a million years or so and imagine how the animal would evolve as a result of that environment. Draw a picture of the evolved animal. Awesome.
Soon the sketches were flying. Finally, with just days to go before the deadline, Laney showed me her entry.
“The island has purple polka-dotted trees and bushes and quiet predators,” she explained. “And the only food is hard nuts. So after a long, long time, the monkeys evolve to have purple polka dots, huge ears to hear the predators, and sharp teeth to crack the nuts.”
She might not know an allele if it jumped up and mutated all over her, but her grasp of natural selection outstrips that of most adults. And she got this grasp not through lectures but by observing the results of natural selection all around us, and caring enough to think about it.
I described our approach in Raising Freethinkers (p. 17):
If I’m out on a walk in the woods with my own daughter and we see a deer with protective coloration, I’ll often say, “Look—you can barely see it. What if I was an animal trying to find a deer to eat? That one wouldn’t be very easy to find. And its babies would have the same coloring, so I’ll bet they’d be hard to find, too.”
[Then] imagine a poor adaptation. “Hey, what if it was bright pink? I think I’d have a pink one for supper every night, they’d be so easy to catch.” I step on a twig and the deer bolts away. “Ooh, fast too! I’ll bet I’d have to eat slow pink ones every night. Soon there wouldn’t be any slow pink ones left because I’d have eaten them all!”
When she does eventually encounter allele frequencies, cladistics, the modern synthesis and all the rest, it’ll glide into place on the foundation she’s laid for it. The key for now is to keep her engaged.
Winning the contest didn’t hurt that one bit. She nearly passed out in excitement. We let her teacher know about it, and he showered her with kudos, then forwarded the news to the front office.
Last week we received a call. It was Ms. Warner, an assistant administrator at the school. Becca answered. I didn’t know who she was talking to, but it was obviously good news of some sort.
Until it wasn’t.
When she hung up, she was clearly upset.
“Laney’s going to be interviewed by the principal on the Eagle News” — that’s a closed-circuit TV program that starts each school day — “about winning the Charlie’s Playhouse contest.”
I waited.
“But Ms. Warner said they’re not going to call it an ‘Evolution & Art’ contest — just an ‘Art’ contest. When I asked why, she said, ‘Because evolution is not in the curriculum.’ I said yes it is, it’s in the high school curriculum, and she said, ‘But it’s not in the elementary curriculum, so it’ll just be described as an ‘Art’ contest.'”
The heat started in my neck and spread to my ears, then into my face. Becca began swearing a blue streak. I sat down and wrote the most fabulously profane email of my life to a friend. Venting is good. Not sure if I was madder about the ignorance or the cowardice or the dishonesty — or the fact that this educator was dismissing the truly exceptional nature of what Laney did.
It wasn’t an art contest, you see. Delaney’s accomplishment had been scientific, not artistic. The drawing is dandy, but it’s just a way of expressing her grasp of the science. To have her school — savor that for a moment, her school — not only disregard her achievement, but send her the message that it’s something to be hidden, to be ashamed of…
I know what you’re thinking. Yes, this is Georgia. But as I’ve said before, in the four years we’ve been here, I’ve had far more opportunity to be pleasantly surprised than not. In addition to living in an area even more culturally and religiously diverse than the one we left in Minneapolis, our kids are getting an incredible education in top-ranked schools.
After many years in the national basement, Georgia’s latest science standards are excellent. And when it comes to the teaching of evolution itself, it ranks in the top tier of the Fordham study (see maps) — above Oregon, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Connecticut, and 24 other states.
Science standards don’t have to be in the South to go south. As Lawrence Lerner put it in the NCSE Journal,
although there is a disproportionate concentration of ill-treatment of evolution in the Bible Belt, geography is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for such treatment. Georgia and South Carolina, for instance, treated evolution very well while New Hampshire and Wisconsin did not.
The most relevant anti-science spectrum in the US (and elsewhere) is not North-South, but urban-suburban-rural. The suburbs of Atlanta have more in common with the suburbs of Philadelphia than either has in common with the small towns in its own state. The quality of science education tends to drop in sync with population density.
But that’s on paper. As Ms. Warner and Mr. Taylor clearly show, individuals in the system will do their level best to undercut even the best standards.
A deeply depressing Penn State study released two weeks ago found that only 28 percent of high school biology teachers consistently implement National Research Council recommendations calling for introduction of evidence that evolution occurred. About 13 percent of biology teachers explicitly advocate creationism in the classroom, while 60 percent use at least one of three strategies to avoid controversy: (1) pretending that evolution applies only on the molecular level; (2) telling students it does not matter if they really ‘believe’ in evolution, only that they know it for the test; and/or (3) “teaching the controversy,” which one researcher noted “tells students that well-established concepts can be debated in the same way we debate personal opinions.”
According to the researchers, these conflict-avoiders “may play a far more important role in hindering scientific literacy in the United States than the smaller number of explicit creationists.”
The Principal of the Thing
I like to keep my posts to about 5 reading mins, so last week I posted only that part of the story and promised two more. But the (understandable) outrage began to spread like wildfire in minutes. Since I’m trying to make the case for a certain kind of approach, I didn’t need an online tsunami. So I’m going long today so you can see that it gets better. Then it gets much, much worse. Then better again. But that’s for next time.
I did the whole Mr. Taylor thing by email, which I now think was a mistake. Email lacks tone and visual cues, so it tends to read more harshly, especially in these situations. I decided to do this one in the flesh.
Becca suggested I talk to the principal, Mr. Robinson, rather than Ms. Warner. He’d be interviewing Laney, for one thing. It isn’t about Ms. Warner as such, but about seeing to it that Laney’s accomplishment isn’t misrepresented. Finally, he is among the most skilled, reasonable, and student-centered of the weirdly high number of principals I have known. A likely ally.
I asked for a quick meeting.
I knew that the best approach would be to focus on our shared interest — in this case the students and the educational messages they receive — so I started with the cool fact that a nine-year old girl in his school wants to be a scientist. She entered this contest to demonstrate her understanding of evolution and won. “Sandy Warner called and said you’d be interviewing Laney, but said it would be called an ‘Art’ contest rather than ‘Evolution & Art.’ When my wife asked why, she said evolution was not in the elementary curriculum.”
(I still can’t type that without shaking my head in amazement that anyone would try an explanation quite so obviously silly.)
It’s certainly in the middle and high school curriculum, I said, handing him a highlighted copy of each. If a third grader won a national calculus competition, no one would say, “Dagnabbit, if only that was in the elementary curriculum we could celebrate it!”
“I’m sure you’ll agree that’s not the reason anyway,” I said. “She was trying to avoid conflict. That’s an understandable impulse, but not when it damages the educational environment.” I handed him a summary of the deeply depressing Penn State study suggesting that conflict avoidance is the strategy currently doing the most damage to the scientific literacy of our kids.
Then there’s my kid, and the interview the following day. Among many other problems, I said that Delaney would be completely unable to answer his questions in any terms but evolutionary ones. Even a question like, “So tell me about this monkey” would lead to a description of the three adaptations she devised, since that’s what the contest was about.
He was nodding vigorously. “Absolutely. There’s not the slightest reason for her to hide any aspect of her accomplishment. But the curriculum is irrelevant in any case because…”
Oh my word, he was going to say it himself. Before I could even mount the slam-dunk argument against Warner’s ridiculous attempt, he would say it himself.
“…it’s student-initiated. Teachers have to stay within the curriculum, sure, but if a student initiates a project or has an outside accomplishment, they are absolutely able to talk about it freely without any regard to curriculum.” He explained that he is trying to encourage even more of this, to get the school celebrating outside accomplishments of all kinds to integrate the students’ outside lives into their school life. “This fits into that perfectly.”
See? Principals tend to know things. Actual educational policies. Court precedents. Best practices.
Total elapsed time: 7 minutes.
Now step back a minute and see what happened here. We (GOOD GUYS!) sent notice of Laney’s contest win to her teacher, who thought it was fantastic and submitted it for inclusion in the broadcast. GOOD GUY!
A middle administrator attempted to screw it up (both out of a misplaced sense of her responsibilities and, I have reason to believe, a reflection of her own point of view). BAD GUY!
The principal immediately recognized that the middle admin had screwed up and put it right. GOOD GUY!
Pretty good ratio, eh? But we often take our cue from the one person who did something dumb and respond with a scorched-earth policy that engulfs potential allies and puts everyone in a defensive crouch. Once I do that, they’re only looking to survive the attack. They can’t hear what I have to say, much less see that they have more in common with me than with the perp.
More often than not, the perp is surrounded by people who agree with you that the act was wrong, people who can join you in condemning the act and fixing the problem if you let them.
I’d like to say that’s the end of the story. (Continue to Part 2)
DADT and the chaplains
A little while ago I said that accepting a certain level of facepalming human malpractice is one of the keys to passing my short vivre with some degree of joie. But I added that some nonsense is misguided and unworthy enough of respect to get me out of my chair. And sometimes, despite every effort to understand, I can’t muster anything but nauseous contempt.
Such a thing came to my attention yesterday in an action alert from the Interfaith Alliance, an outstanding organization that opposes religious extremism and promotes separation of church and state for the benefit of both. It was a letter, sent to the President by retired military chaplains, claiming that the repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” would infringe on the religious freedoms of active-duty chaplains because they would no longer be able to preach intolerance of homosexuality.
That’s not as much of a paraphrase as you might hope. From the letter:
If the government normalizes homosexual behavior in the armed forces, many (if not most) chaplains will confront a profoundly difficult moral choice: whether they are to obey God or to obey men. This forced choice must be faced, since orthodox Christianity—which represents a significant percentage of religious belief in the armed forces—does not affirm homosexual behavior. Imposing this conflict by normalizing homosexual behavior within the armed forces seems to have two likely—and equally undesirable—results.
First, chaplains might be pressured by adverse discipline and collapsed careers into watering down their teachings and avoiding—if not abandoning—key elements of their sending denomination’s faith and practice. Such a result would be the very antithesis of religious freedom and inimical to the guarantees made by our First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Second, chaplains might have their ability to freely share their religious beliefs challenged and torn away in a variety of everyday situations. For instance, chaplains who methodically preach book-by-book from the Bible would inevitably present religious teachings that identify homosexual behavior as immoral. Thus, while chaplains fulfill their duty to God to preach the doctrines of their faith, they would find themselves speaking words that are in unequivocal conflict with official policies.
(The chaplains had the cojones to footnote this with Leviticus 18:22 but weirdly neglected to mention the required punishment.)
The letter is a festival of fallacies, including the slippery slope, special pleading, ad populum, and argument from authority. But poor argumentation and bigotry are not the real problem here. The chaplains are asking not just for the private right to hold these beliefs about homosexuality, which are theirs to keep, but that their beliefs be given pre-eminence — that military policy be bent and shaped to reflect their beliefs, first and foremost, and that the rights of others be foregone to accommodate them.
Balancing private and public rights is tricky, but a lovely body of law and policy has defined that balance over the years. Better yet for the current debate, the Pentagon’s recent DADT report already examined and dismissed First Amendment concerns:
…the reality is that in today’s U.S. military, Service members of sharply religious convictions and moral values…and those who have no religious convictions at all, already co-exist, work, live, and fight together on a daily basis. This is a reflection of the pluralistic American society at large…
Service members will not be required to change their personal views and religious beliefs; they must, however, continue to respect and co-exist with others who may hold different views and beliefs… [p. 135, emphasis added]
It’s heartening to see the Pentagon grasping the balance of private and public rights that eludes so many of their retired chaplains. Unfortunately it also eludes some of the current ones. Again, from the Pentagon report:
In the course of our review, we heard some chaplains condemn in the strongest possible terms homosexuality as a sin and an abomination, and inform us that they would refuse to in any way support, comfort, or assist someone they knew to be homosexual. [p. 134]
I had to read that three times. I hope and assume that any chaplain following up on that disgusting threat would be dishonorably discharged.
But there are others:
In equally strong terms, other chaplains, including those who also believe homosexuality is a sin, informed us that ‘we are all sinners,’ and that it is a chaplain’s duty to care for all Service members. [p. 134]
I could do without the gratuitous crap about sin, but accepting a certain base level of facepalming human malpractice is etc. Still other chaplains, and many religious laypeople, have come out unequivocally in favor of ending the prohibition, and without the backhanded sin-slap. “[Gay soldiers] were forced by the situation, the system, to be dishonest, and that took its toll on them. And me,” said Rev. Dennis Camp, a former Army chaplain. “It was horrible. Right from the beginning, I was saying, ‘This is bad. This is wrong.”
Mindless, pointless hatred is bad enough, but asking others to feed and water it is outrageous. Little by little and against the odds, we’ve pulled ourselves up out of the tar of so many of our old fears despite the resistance of orthodox religious traditions claiming the special right to preserve those fears. As others have pointed out, the same dynamic was in play when the U.S. military introduced racial integration.
It must be difficult to find yourself doctrinally bound to the wrong side of the great moral issues of our time, chaplains. But while you wallow in the tar, don’t expect the rest of us to offer you an ankle.
The retired chaplains’ letter
The Pentagon DADT Report
“Chaplains’ views on gays strong, varied” – WaPo “On Faith” blog
Countries that allow gays in the military
Countries that disallow gays in the military
The other one
One of these things is not like the others
- November 20, 2010
- By Dale McGowan
- In My kids, schools, values
12
Delaney’s (outstanding) third grade teacher put together a nice slideshow for the parents to watch during the “Thanksgiving Feast” day at school this year. In the show, each student offered a list of things s/he is thankful for.
I don’t mean in the least to diminish the lovely expressions of gratitude by her classmates when I say that I would have recognized my daughter’s own list of gratefuls even if I were blindfolded and they were read by James Earl Jones. Not better or worse, but distinctively Delaney. Can you find her in this sampling?
Student A: I’m grateful for my parents, my school, God, my country, and my teacher Miss Jones.
Student B: I’m grateful for my family, food, my house, my pets, and my teacher Miss Jones.
Student C: I’m grateful for God, Jesus, my family, a roof over my head, and my teacher Miss Jones.
Student D: I’m grateful for my family and friends, for a roof over my head and a meal every night, for a good education, and for freedom of speech.
Let ’em drive!
Ventured into the backwoods of upstate NY last week for a quick visit to Camp Inquiry, a fabulous science-and-wonder-based summer camp run by the Center for Inquiry. Fifty-two sharp and curious kids and a terrific staff under the direction of the energetic and talented Angie McQuaig.
About 30 parents stuck around on Sunday evening for a parent chat around the campfire. These unscripted discussions are my favorites. And as it usually does, one of my key messages came up over and over — the importance of letting kids drive their own decisionmaking as much as we can, even when we disagree. It’s vital to let them take the wheel as often as possible if we want them to develop the long-term ability to think ethically and well on their own. Obviously there are many times when we have to assert our own judgment. But letting go when we can has some great long-term benefits.
This mostly nonreligious crowd was focused on questions of raising kids in a culture dominated by religion. The Pledge of Allegiance, the proselytizing neighbor, Grandma’s insistence on taking the kids to her church, pressure from religious peers — in every case, the best thing a secular parent can do is help the child assess options and weigh consequences, then let the child make his or her own decision about what to do, even if the parent thinks it’s a mistake. They’ll learn more from the experience than from any pre-emptive lecture we can give. (Not to mention the possibility that our advice would have been wrong.)
I blogged about one such situation in 2008. Erin (then 10) asked if she could wear a pink beaded cross necklace to school. She’d bought it on vacation at the dollar store, but now she said, “I feel weird wearing it when I don’t really believe in god. Like I’m not being honest. But I just like to wear it.”
“It’s fine, sweetie. It’s a pretty necklace.”
She paused. There was more, I could tell. “It makes me feel good to wear it.”
Uhhh, okay, there’s at least one unfortunate way to read that sentence. “You mean it makes you feel like a good person to wear a cross?”
“No, of course not,” she said. “It just…” She smiled sheepishly. “It makes me feel good to rub it.”
I’d been ready for that sentence for years, but the context was all wrong.
“When I’m worried, I rub it with my fingers and it makes the worry go away.”
It was a simple talisman to her. And Erin does spend more time worrying than she ought to. I told her about the jade worry stone I carried in my pocket throughout middle school. Same deal. It did make me feel better. Her cross had no more connection to God than my worry stone. In fact, her concern was that people might think it did when it didn’t. But even if it did have that significance, I was fully prepared to let her drive the decision.
As it happens, she wore it for a week, then told me she didn’t want to wear it anymore because of the dishonest feeling it gave her. And because she had made the decision herself, there’s a much greater chance that she gained something more valuable than if I had simply issued a ruling.
I returned home from Camp Inquiry to a message from Elizabeth, a parent I’d met. Her son Alex (13) is on a baseball team that has started praying before each game. From her email (reprinted with permission):
Bill, the gentleman who initiated the prayer ritual, is a close friend to our family, and my husband Jason is one of the assistant coaches. Our families have get-togethers at each other’s houses. Bill and Jason have shared many “religious” talks through the years, so we know their family’s belief system and they know ours, and it has never been an issue.
When Bill first started praying before the game, Jason had a private talk with him and explained why he did not feel that it was an appropriate thing to do. Jason explained to Bill that he has no idea what the belief systems of all the kids on the team are, and that it was presumptuous of him to think that all the kids came from religious households. And even if ‘most’ of the kids are religious, he would have no way of knowing what faith they practiced. He also reminded Bill that our own family was not religious. Bill was not persuaded and continued the team prayer before each game.
Nicely done, Jason — especially the choice to frame it in terms of all kids on the team, not just one.
At this point Jason asked Alex how he felt about the prayer before each game. Alex said that he thought it was silly. Jason asked Alex what (if anything) Alex wanted to do about it and gave him a few options. They could “sit out” the prayer, Jason could try talking to Bill again, or they could just “go with the flow” and wink at each other while the prayer was taking place. 🙂
At that point Alex said something that just made our hearts swell with pride -– he said, “I think it is kind of stupid, but Coach Bill means more to me than a prayer. If it makes him happy to say a prayer before the game, then that’s OK with me.” I wish more adults would act like our son did at that moment.
Alex is choosing his battles, and his parents are letting him. The more they do that, the better and more nuanced his decisionmaking will become.
Maybe after a few games, Alex will change his mind, or maybe not. Maybe he’ll just reflect further on the very odd concept of the God-bothering sports team. Maybe Bill will do some reflection of his own. But if Alex’s parents had forced another conclusion — if Jason, for example, had pushed harder in his talk with Bill — Alex would have lost an opportunity to make his own choice, live with it, and learn from it. But they recognized that this was Alex’s situation, first and foremost, and they let him take the wheel.
Kudos to all three.
Embiggening humanism
A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man. — Jebediah Springfield
I’m alternately enjoying and “D’oh!”-ing my way through a controversy of my own creation at Foundation Beyond Belief. The following are my personal thoughts on the matter, btw, not an official statement of the Foundation (which is why they are found here, on my blog, not there, on its).
After repeatedly noting that this secular humanist foundation would consider supporting charities based in any worldview so long as they do not proselytize, we’ve put our commitment to the test. This quarter, FBB is featuring a religiously-based charity as one of our ten options for member support.
The category is Peace, the religion is Quakerism, and the organization is Quaker Peace and Social Witness. And the reaction is pretty much what I expected — a mix of bravos, surprise, outrage, enthusiasm, and revealed (shall we say, and gently) knowledge gaps in some of my beloved fellow nontheists. More on the “gaps” later.
Some blogs ask why on Earth we would do such a thing. “I’m an atheist. I don’t support religious groups,” said one, as if the second sentence follows obviously and necessarily from the first.
So the first reason to do it is to show that it is indeed possible for nontheists to see good work being done in a religious context and to support and encourage it. Far from a contradiction, some of us think that’s humanism at its best.
The second reason is that many of our members want to express their humanism in that way. And since the Foundation exists to allow individual humanists a means of expressing their worldview positively and doing good in the name of that worldview, it seems fitting to occasionally feature a carefully-screened, non-dogmatic, non-proselytizing, effective organization based in a sane and progressive denomination as one of our choices.
“Well,” one commenter said, “if you HAVE TO support a religious group, I mean absolutely HAVE to, I suppose the Quakers would be the ones.”
A glimmer of light there. But we didn’t have to do this. My word, it would have been much easier not to. We wanted to do it. We see value in doing it.
In a way, this should be a non-issue. Individual members have full control over the distribution of their donations and can zero out any category any time. Some members, disinterested in supporting a religiously-based organization no matter how progressive, have made perfect and appropriate use of this flexible system by shifting their funds elsewhere this quarter. Others — including such strong atheist voices as Adam Lee of Daylight Atheism — have actually increased their Peace donation in support of this idea. That’s freethought in action.
Not all religious expressions are benign, of course. The more a religious tradition insists on conformity to a received set of ideas, the more harm it does. The more it allows people to challenge ideas and think independently, the more good it does. Religion will always be with us in some form. It’s too hand-in-glove with human aspirations and failings to ever vanish at the touch of argument or example. So I think one of the best ways for humanists to confront the malignant is to support and encourage the benign, the non-dogmatic, the progressive.
Speaking of whom.
Liberal Quakers are utterly non-dogmatic, include many nontheists in their ranks, and hold that no individual can tell any other what to believe. That’s a religious organization embracing the essence of freethought. It’s no coincidence that they also have a brilliant history of social justice work. While Southern Baptists fronted biblical arguments in support of slavery, Quakers were among the most courageous abolitionists (along with Northern Baptists). While the Catholic Church vigorously opposed women’s voting rights, Quakers were often leading the movement and getting themselves arrested and imprisoned in the process (along with many Catholic individuals who recognized bad dogma when they saw it). And while multiple denominations rend themselves in twain over gay rights, Liberal Quakers were among the first to openly support gay rights and gay marriage. (This last is not so much the case with Orthodox Quakers, who differ from the Liberals in several respects.)
In the area of peace and nonviolence advocacy, Quakers are second to none. Continuing a centuries-old tradition, Quaker Peace & Social Witness is at work in the Ugandan conflict, supporting and training groups working on peacemaking and peacebuilding; facilitating truth and reconciliation work to deal with the past in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia; managing teams of human rights observers in Palestine and Israel; working to strengthen nonviolent movements in South Asia; and advocating at the UN for refugees and for disarmament policies. In 1947, QPSW shared the Nobel Prize for Peace.
Maybe you can see why we’re proud to support them.
Making discernments is difficult, but it’s worth doing. That’s why the (don’t say ignorance, don’t say ignorance) misinformedness of some atheists about the spectrum of religion has troubled me.
“I am NOT giving money to somebody who’s going to hit me over the head with a bible or say my kids are going to hell,” said one. Fair enough. Of course there’s as much chance of a bluefooted booby doing either of those as a Liberal Quaker.
Others who probably recognize a slippery slope fallacy if someone else uses it (“You can’t let gays marry. Next thing you know, farmers will be marrying their tractors!”) went ahead and employed one themselves. “It’s a slippery slope,” said one email. “A year from now, you’ll be paying for Catholic missionaries!” (I especially enjoy it when someone calls a fallacy by name, then pulls the ripcord anyhow.)
And on it goes. This is what siloing will do to good and smart people. It makes them sloppy, myself included. And we talk nonsense, and end up looking silly to anyone outside of our silo.
One atheist friend predicted we would lose a third of our members overnight. In the two weeks since we announced the decision, two members have closed their accounts (neither mentioning the Quaker choice) and 24 have joined.
The weakness of the arguments against our choice has reassured me, and the majority of responses I’ve heard have been strongly supportive of the idea of providing members with this option. “I’m so proud to be a part of this,” said one member. “Honestly, it’s like the free thought movement is growing up all at once. Thank you for showing vision beyond the usual sounding of alarms and building of barricades.”
Can’t you just feel the embiggening?
The Relaxed Parent Film Festival [greatest hits]
- June 17, 2010
- By Dale McGowan
- In morality, My kids, Parenting, sex, values
- 13
[Continuing the reruns during my busy weeks. This one first appeared on May 23, 2007, so adjust ages etc. accordingly.]
Our Friday night tradition started sometime last year. Every Friday we get a pizza the size of a Buick and a family movie.
By family movie, I don’t mean “family movie.” I mean a movie that our whole family watches together, which believe you me is not often the same thing. And here’s where it gets interesting. It’s my job each week to choose the film. Here’s the audience:
MALE, 44, WRITER. Enjoys philosophical themes; unpredictable, non-linear narratives; line-crossing humor.
FEMALE, 41, EDUCATOR. Enjoys chick-flicks, ro-coms, foreign films. Has never seen a movie without crying.
MALE, 11. Enjoys science fiction, sports, fantasy, adventure. Hates everything he loved at ages nine and five.
FEMALE, 9. Enjoys character-driven dramas and comedies. Gets lost in non-linear narratives, requiring frequent paternal trips to the pause button.
FEMALE, 5. Enjoys an amazingly wide range of flicks, from Pokemon to war movies to comedies to space epics. Can’t read, so captions are out. Hides eyes whenever the music turns minor.
(As of this reposting, we are 47, 44, 14, 12, and 8. The 14-year-old now hates everything he loved at 11, and the 8-year-old reads better than I do, but still hides eyes when the music says to.)
Okay now…find us a movie.
When it comes to parental concerns on movie night, our guidelines might strike some as reckless. I prefer the word relaxed. And that relaxation is a good fit with our worldview.
Conservative religious denominations often teach that humankind is inherently sinful — that beneath a thin veneer of civility lurks a boiling depravity, just itching to stretch its legs. We must erect all sorts of protections and precautions to avoid opening the floodgates, lest we crack each others’ heads open to feast on the goo inside.
Not a Veneerist myself. Though we humans do occasionally screw things up rather royally, most of the time most of us behave well, especially if we feel loved and supported by those around us. It’s yet another gift of evolution. Populations with a tendency toward self-destruction would quickly lose the selective advantage to cooperative ones. The outlook that my kids are evolutionarily inclined to be good changes almost EVERYTHING about my parenting, especially compared to those who see their kids as simmering pots of potential felony and monitoring the flames beneath them as the most urgent parental task. It allows me, among other things, to focus on drawing them out instead of beating them in.
I don’t have to psychotically protect my children from scratches to their protective layer. I want to immerse them in the colors and contrasts and confusions of the world — gradually, yes, but definitely. I believe this fearless approach is ending us up with some pretty remarkable, multifaceted, complex, wonderful kids. You should meet them. I think you’d agree. So, dinner on Thursday, then?
I once had a student, a college freshman, who had never seen a non-Disney movie. It was the standard her parents had developed to protect her from certain ideas, images, and themes — call them “colors” — that could have scratched her veneer, damaging the porcelain doll beneath, or worse yet, letting loose the she-wolf within.
As a result, she hadn’t seen The Wizard of Oz. She hadn’t seen E.T. Is there a Disney film that deals with the longing for home as beautifully as those two?
Since we began our movie tradition about forty Fridays ago, my kids have been exposed to a fantastic variety of themes and ideas, cultural touchpoints they refer to over and over. Yes, we’ve seen Flicka and Flipper, Over the Hedge, Little Manhattan and The Karate Kid. But then there are these:
Pleasantville • Edward Scissorhands • Cool Hand Luke • The Great Escape • Jesus Christ Superstar • Rain Man • Big Fish • Empire of the Sun • Life of Brian • Groundhog Day • Walking with Cavemen • South Pacific • Raising Arizona • Intimate Universe • The Truman Show • Walking with Dinosaurs • The Pursuit of Happyness • Stranger than Fiction • I, Robot • About a Boy • Brian’s Song • Parenthood • Bridge on the River Kwai
In addition to the Gs and PGs, they’ve seen plenty of PG-13s, and a few carefully-chosen Rs (like Rain Man). That means once in a while our kids hear a good solid swear or a reference to actual human sexuality, and have somehow avoided the plunge into foul-mouthed promiscuity.
I think this kind of low-key, normalized exposure makes it less likely they’ll gravitate toward these behaviors. If instead we hide these things, we make them powerful, attractive…forbidden fruit. When a Veneerist jumps for the remote at the first deep kiss or angry curse, he underlines the message that something truly magical is afoot.
Readers who tend toward Veneerism will naturally suppose that I’m advocating porn and slasher marathons for toddlers. Non-Veneerists know there’s something between Little House on the Prairie and Debbie Does Dallas — a great big juicy wonderful and textured middle. My kids have been there, and they’re all the richer for it.
In less than a year, the five of us have explored the importance of honesty (About a Boy, Liar Liar), felt deep compassion and empathy (Brian’s Song, Pursuit of Happyness), learned to care deeply about those who are different (Rain Man, Edward Scissorhands), admired courage and perseverance (Empire of the Sun, The Great Escape), contemplated the meaning of humanness (I, Robot), challenged smiling conformity (Pleasantville, Life of Brian, Big Fish) and questioned our assumptions about reality itself (The Truman Show, Stranger than Fiction, Groundhog Day, Big Fish). We even stood with Judas as he took Jesus to task for neglecting the less fortunate as he pursued his own fame (Jesus Christ Superstar), traced our origins (Walking With Cavemen) and learned never, ever to build a bridge for the enemy, even if your craftsmanship makes you proud (Bridge on the River Kwai). Can’t tell you how many times that lesson has come in handy.
My kids have cried with empathy for people who initially scared them.
Most important of all, they’ve learned that a man really can eat fifty eggs.
Yes, fine, Charlie Babbitt [Tom Cruise] says “fuck” about a dozen times in Rain Man. He does so because he’s an arrogant, selfish jerk — and arrogant, selfish jerks don’t say “boogers” when they’re mad. My kids didn’t want to be like Charlie Babbitt, so why would they emulate his language? Instead, they marveled at how his selfishness slowly transformed into first tolerance, then selfless love for his brother — something underlined by his changing use of the full palette of the English language.
About the tenth time Charlie cussed, Erin shot me a look and said, “Boy, you can tell what kind of person he is.” She had a chance to handle it, process it, and put it in perspective in our living room rather than on the schoolbus.
Best of all, they’re developing a taste for the unique, the creative, and the offbeat, for imaginative narratives and complex visions of the world.
Sure, sometimes I cringe and leap to the remote when a scene heads a little further than we’d expected. But it’s worth the risk. So next time you’re thinking about a film for the whole family, reach beyond G and PG. Let them engage the messy, fascinating world out there while you’re in the living room with them. They can handle more than we give them credit for.
Words fail me [greatest hits]
Six busy weeks coming up, including a week unplugged at the beach, a speech to the UU General Assembly in Minneapolis, a visit to Camp Inquiry in New York, and moving. Rather than let the blog grow all weedy, I’ll run a few of my own favorite posts from long ago.
Words Fail Me
First appeared Sept 28, 2007
Love is too weak a word for what I feel – I luuurve you, you know, I loave you, I luff you.
WOODY ALLEN in Annie Hall
I was born in the Sixties. My first two kids were born in the Nineties. But try to name the decade my youngest was born in, the one we’re in at the moment, and you’re left muttering clunkers like “the first decade of the twenty-first century,” or sounding like Grandpa Simpson by referring to the “aughts.” It’s called a lexical gap, a concept for which a given language lacks a concise label. German is said to lack a precise word for a person’s “chest,” while English speakers are left speechless when it comes to Fahrvergnügen.
When I first heard Alvy Singer struggling to express his feelings for Annie Hall, I thought it was just for laughs. But I’ve begun to struggle in recent years with precisely the same lexical gap — so much so that I’ve almost entirely stopped telling my wife and children that I love them.
Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.
The problem is the overuse of what was once, I suspect, a more sparingly-used, and therefore more powerful, word. The fact that Paul McCartney’s only response to the problem of “silly love songs” was to sing the phrase “I love you” fifteen times in three minutes seems to prove my point.
As a result of using “love” to express our feelings about everything from self-indulgence (“I love sleeping in on Sunday”) to food (“I love Taco Bell’s new Pizzaburgerrito”), I find the word “love” now entirely inadequate to describe the feeling engendered in me by my wife and kids. I don’t love them. I luuurve them.
No no, come back. I’m not going to wax rhapsodic. I’m zeroing in on a practical, lexical problem, that’s all.
Mawwiage
Mawwiage. Mawwiage is what bwings us togevah today. Mawwiage, that bwessed awwangement, that dweam wifin a dweam. And wuv, twu wuv, wiw fowwow you, fowevah.
IMPRESSIVE CLERGYMAN from The Princess Bride
Whenever I think of the reasons I luuurve my wife, I recall an event I attended two years ago — a debate between an atheist and a theist. I described the scene in PBB (pp. 96-7):
When the discussion turned to morality, [the theist] said something I will never forget. “We need divine commandments to distinguish between right and wrong,” he said. “If not for the seventh commandment…” He pointed to his wife in the front row. “…there would be nothing keeping me from walking out the door every night and cheating on my wife!”
His wife, to my shock, nodded in agreement. The room full of evangelical teens nodded, wide-eyed at the thin scriptural thread that keeps us from falling into the abyss.
I sat dumbfounded. Nothing keeps him from cheating on his wife but the seventh commandment? Really?
Not love?
How about respect? I thought. And the promise you made when you married her? And the fact that doing to her what you wouldn’t want done to you is wrong in every moral system on Earth? Or the possibility that you simply find your marriage satisfying and don’t need to fling yourself at your secretary? Are respect and love and integrity and fulfillment really so inadequate that you need to have it specifically prohibited in stone?
I first dated Becca because of conditional things. Non-transcendent things. Had she not been so unbearably attractive to me, had she not had the most appealing personality of anyone I knew, had she not been so funny and smart and levelheaded, I wouldn’t have flipped over her like I did. It may sound off to say it this way, but she fulfilled the conditions for the relationship I wanted, and I, thank Vishnu, did the same for her. I asked her to marry me in large part because of these not inconsiderable things.
But then, the moment I asked her to marry me, something considerably more transcendent began to happen between us. She said yes — and I was instantly struck dumb by the power of it. This splendid person was willing to commit herself to me for the remainder of her one and only life.
Holy (though I try to keep this blog free of both these words) shit.
No, I am not waxing, dammit, I am making a point. We were moving into the unconditional, you see. She had moved from being one of the many attractive, magnetic, funny, smart people I knew to The One Such Person Who Committed to Me. See the difference? And then, once she actually took three small packets of my DNA and used them to knit children — well, at that point, it became hard to look at her without bursting into song. I’m still not over it. What was a strong but technically conditional love moved decisively into unconditional luuurve.
So yes, there are things beyond the seventh commandment that keep me from cheating on my wife. Like the hilarity I feel at the thought of finding any other woman with any amount of those conditionals more attractive.
As for the children…
You’re an atheist? So then…you think your children are…just a bunch of…processes?
JEHOVAH’S WITNESS at my door last year
Last week a radio interviewer asked about my kids, with mild facetiousness: “So how about your own kids? Good kids, ya love ’em and everything?” In addition to the pure silliness of answering such a question, I fell head-first into that lexical gap once again — and the resulting three seconds of dead air probably did me no favors with the audience. I finally sputtered something about them being amazing kids, terrific kids, but it fell short, as it always does, of my real feelings.
I don’t make up for this lexical gap with the kids by telling them I luuurve them. Instead, almost every single day, I tell them, “I do not love you.” And they smile and say, “Oh yes you do!” — and all is understood.
They know in a thousand ways that I am transported by being their dad. They’ve become accustomed, for example, to the sudden realization that Dad is staring again. They’ll get that prickly feeling and turn to see me lost in a contemplative gawk. They’re very good about it, usually returning a smile rather than a roll of the eyes, which I think is very nice of them.
Recognizing that the love of our children is rooted in part in biology — that I am, in part, adaptively fond of them — does not diminish the way I’m transported by contemplating the fact of them, and of our special connection, of their uniqueness, and of the generational passing of the torch.
But it’s interesting to note that, unlike my relationship with Becca, this meditative gawking began on day one. The order of things is reversed. My marriage started in the conditional and added the unconditional. I loved her from the beginning, but only slowly came to be so completely slain by her.
Kids, on the other hand, begin in the unconditional and add the conditional. From the moment they emerged from my wife — seriously, reflect on that for a moment — they were unconditionally wonderful to me. They were half me and half she. They were our connection to the future. Etc.
Gradually we formed additional bonds based on their actual attributes. They are smart as whips, wickedly funny, generous and kind and fun to be around. But that’s all frosting on an unconditional cake. Marriage, on the other hand — if it goes well — starts with frosting and gradually slips the cake underneath.
So yes, my kids are “processes,” whatever that means, and so is my wife. But they are also the main reasons I wake up grateful and filled with meaning and purpose every single day.
(Wax off.)
My fundamentalism
I am a fundamentalist.
No, this isn’t one of those glib non-confessional confessions ( “If loving my country too much is a crime, then I’m guilty as sin!”). I think fundamentalism, even in the name of something good, is a bad thing.
Fundamentalism is best described as the uncompromising adherence to a set of basic principles. Adhering to principles isn’t the sticking point. It’s the uncompromising part that presents the problem — the unwillingness to allow any other concerns into the discussion lest they distract from a laserlike focus on your guiding light.
My particular fundamentalism is free expression. I’ve become convinced that it is an essential good to be protected at all costs. Some people take this as a license to act badly, and I wish they wouldn’t, but their lack of judgment shouldn’t trammel this good and glorious thing, which in the end, torpedoes be damned, leads to a better future for everyone.
If you doubt that this is a kind of fundamentalism, read that paragraph again, changing “free expression” to “Christianity” or “Islam” or “the love of my country.” First principles are fine, but nothing should ever get exclusive control over our decisionmaking.
Free expression has defined a large portion of my adult life. My college teaching career was ended as a direct result of a free expression issue. As a result of this and other experiences, I tend to see free speech issues in fairly black-and-white terms.
It was my free-expression fundamentalism that led me last week to support Everybody Draw Muhammad Day. I looked at the issue, checked my free-speech compass, and BOOM, knew what was right.
But critics of EDMD have cited several concerns that they say should have shared the stage with free speech issues in this case, among them:
– That the existing atmosphere of general hostility toward Muslims is only exacerbated by the event;
– That the event represents a powerful majority attacking a less powerful minority;
– That moderate Muslims are unfairly attacked along with the extremists, increasing distance at precisely the time we need to be decreasing it;
– That “diluting the fatwa” is meaningful only in the abstract, and actually increases the chance of harm coming to those who most prominently depicted Muhammad;
– That many who participated took the opportunity to create intentionally obscene or demeaning images of Muhammad, and that this was inevitable;
– and more.
Not all of the arguments are equally good, and some are irrelevant (including at least one of those above, in my humble). The canard that the event represented “offense for the sake of offense” is the weakest of all, an assertion that really means, “I haven’t taken the time to figure out your point, so I’ll declare it nonexistent.” I think just about any argument that includes the avoidance of “offense” as its driving principle is hollow and misguided. Finally, I am still troubled by the assertion that those who participated out of ignorant or hateful motives irreparably taint those who did not.
But I’m also becoming more pragmatic in my dotage, and outcomes matter as much to me as abstract principles. (Those who have never thrown your entire family under the wheels of your principles may not know where I’m coming from, and that’s okay. My 30-year-old self agrees with you.)
In addition to some thoughtful opinion pieces, several people have offered convincing analogies. “There are campaigns to remove Mark Twain’s books from school libraries [because of the use of the word ‘nigger’],” said FB friend Bruce Ayati. “Would a campaign to use that racial slur, only to prove you can, be the right thing to do?” Not bad.
“Given the position of atheists in this country,” he continued, “it’s not hard to imagine something similar happening to us, where an Angry Atheist somewhere does something terrible, and we are all subjected to undeserved hostility in the name of ‘standing up’ to us and the supposed threat we pose to this country.”
Damn, that’s a good one. Damn.
The best of these and other arguments, offered by smart and articulate people, slapped me out of my hypnotic free-expression trance long enough to first confuse the issue for me, then to lead me to a change of mind. I’m now of the opinion that EDMD was not the right thing to do, and will in the end have done more harm than good. I still defend the right to do it, of course, and especially support those who are working so hard to do it right.
Considered in glorious isolation, the free-expression question was always open and shut. But nothing in human life exists in isolation, and a more thorough consideration of the context has led me to change my position. Not with 100 percent certainty. Anyone who registers complete certainty in a case like this is hereby invited to have a very nice day indeed, and my you’re looking fit.
And as before, and as always, I may be wrong. Most important, I continue to offer my strong support to those who choose to participate. How can I not, with articulate and thoughtful supporters like this?
[Thanks as well to commenters nonplus and yinyang and my old friend Scott M. for their part in slapping me awake.]
Anyone else have a principle so beloved that it sometimes blinds you to other considerations?
Image problems
Our family visited Washington DC last year. Among the usuals, we were toured through something I’d never heard of before: the Capitol Crypt.
Beneath the dome of the Capitol Rotunda, below the ground floor, is a round room with forty Doric columns. A star set in the middle of the room marks the spot from which all streets in the capital were laid out.
The plan was to inter George Washington there in a stately sarcophagus. But Washington’s family refused to allow it, as George had opposed any imperial tendencies in the Presidency. He is said to have declined the title “Your Excellency” in favor of “Mr. President,” resisted a second term and refused a third, returning instead to life as a gentleman farmer.
The crypt now lies empty, a monument to our refusal of monarchy.
I loved this story instantly and was quite disappointed later — though not surprised, I guess — to learn that it’s mostly fable. After initially resisting the idea of moving his remains from Mount Vernon, Martha Washington acquiesced in 1800. Construction delays and the War of 1812 pushed the plan back. By the time it was finished in 1827, tensions between the North and South were such that Southern legislators and others refused to allow his remains to leave Virginia. So the Capitol Crypt lies empty as a tribute not so much to high democratic principle as to simmering provincial enmity.
Rats.
But it is apparently true that Washington opposed having himself revered. And we, being what we are, revere him for that.
In 1865, a fresco The Apotheosis of Washington was completed in the oculus of the Rotunda dome (“apotheosis” = “to transform into a god,” from Greek apotheoun) to show Washington that he wasn’t about to win a battle between what he wanted to be and what we needed him to be:
A close look reveals just how George would have felt about it:
This is what we do. No matter how much the founder of a movement or tradition or religion resists deification, we’ll start building the temple the moment s/he’s gone.
On his deathbed, the Buddha is said to have laughed when his followers suggested he was a god. They had the last laugh, as survivors do. But Buddha is quoted in the Digha Nikaya discouraging representations of himself “after the extinction of the body” because he saw it as a denial of that extinction. The prohibition was followed until the first century CE, at which point Greek influence led to a flowering of Buddhist iconography.
Buddha could not be reached for comment.
Christianity and Judaism also have a clear prohibition on images, one that’s ignored by way of clever abridgement. “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image,” says the version we know and say and carve into courthouses. The rest is less convenient: “…nor any likeness of any thing that is in Heaven above, nor that is in the earth beneath, nor that is in the water under the earth.” The Sistine Chapel has some ‘splainin’ to do.
I’ve also recently learned that the Islamic prohibition on images of Muhammad, so much in the news of late, was originally intended not to elevate Muhammad to divine status, but to prevent exactly that. From an outstanding recent article in the Washington Post:
“In the Holy Koran of Islam,” says political scientist As’ad AbuKhalil, a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley, “the one sin unforgivable is that of polytheism. The prohibition is intended to protect the faithful from that sin. The fear was that intense reverence for the prophet might if unrestrained cross over into worship.“
Well what do you know. Once again, we silly monkeys take a good idea and flip it inside out. A rule established to avoid intense worship of the wrong thing instead fuels that worship. Ironically, then, the creators of the prohibition on images of Muhammad and the creators of Everybody Draw Muhammad end up sharing a principle with each other, and Buddha, and George Washington: opposition to the slavish worship of the wrong things.
MORE
Great article on aniconism
A site with images of Muhammad through the ages (currently making the rounds among moderates in Islamic countries)
