That’s what I’M talkin’ about!
After watching the Founding Fund Drive for Foundation Beyond Belief slow nearly to a stop at 37 percent of the goal, we are now back on track with a bullet. In a single day, the generosity and commitment of our supporters sent us tearing through the halfway point. As of Wednesday morning, we’re 54 percent of the way home.
We’re not finished yet, but we’re now within striking distance of establishing the first-stage web presence for this pioneering effort in humanist philanthropy on October 1. At that point members will begin registering, setting up personal profiles, learning about our first slate of beneficiaries, and planning their monthly donation strategy.
Donations received between October 1 and December 31 go to the Foundation itself to help fund the first year of operations. When the full site launches on January 1, members will begin distributing their monthly donation among ten cause areas, forming groups, debating causes, following a brand new blog — and making a profound positive impact in the world.
The renewed vigor of the Fund Drive has energized everyone working for the Foundation and redoubled our determination to justify your trust and do this thing right.
Look for a normal, non-Foundational post tomorrow soon. In the meantime, many thanks to those who have donated! For those who were waiting for the drama of the final stretch: THE END TIMES ARE UPON US! Help us reach the goal that will put the Foundation on solid ground by donating through the ChipIn widget in the sidebar.
So…are you in?
Foundation Beyond Belief is halfway through its first fund drive—but only 37 percent of the way to the goal.
Over 1600 people expressed their support for this project by signing up for our mailing list and Facebook group—a fantastic show of enthusiasm. But just four percent of those have so far been moved to donate to this crucial fund drive. We are enormously grateful to those few—but we need the rest of you.
Here’s why.
By the end of next year, we hope to empower a new force in philanthropic giving, fuel the great work of over thirty charitable organizations around the world, and begin to transform the popular perception of secular humanism. On the educational side, we will create both a community and a resource center for nonreligious parents.
To accomplish all of this, we need a world-class web center—not just a “brochure” site with a donation button, but a touchpoint and resource center for a vibrant and engaged community of humanists.
The site will include detailed information about featured organizations, a forum and social network for members to debate, investigate, and help select future beneficiaries, an invitational blog on humanism and philanthropy, and profiles to allow members to distribute their monthly donations among the causes as they see fit.
So—IF you support this idea, and IF you can spare the shekels, please take a moment to help create this Foundation by making a donation of any size in the sidebar.
We’ll do our best to make you proud.
Dale McGowan
Executive Director
Foundation Beyond Belief
The FBB Founding Fund Drive
Two big news items for Foundation Beyond Belief, the new humanist charitable and educational foundation scheduled to launch on January 1:
Web designer selected
Our call for web designers brought applications from 19 high-quality professionals. After a process both excruciating and exciting, the Foundation Board has selected From Concept to Completion to create the initial “pre-launch” site by October 1 AND our fully functional online community for humanist philanthropy by January 1. Our sincere thanks to all those who applied.
Founding Fund Drive
The Foundation is ready at last to accept tax-deductible donations! Our Founding Fund Drive, which begins today and runs through Sept. 1, will help create a world-class web presence for the Foundation community and spread the word about the Foundation through a professional publicity campaign.
We’re working hard to make this initiative a powerful expression of humanism at its very best. Many thanks for your support and encouragement, as well as your patience as we find our way forward.
(To contribute, please click on the big blue ChipIn widget at the top of the sidebar.)
A simple plan
Seems a bit of a donnybrook has ausgebroken in the comments on one of my YouTube videos. Don’t get excited, now – it’s mild enough. But it started with a pretty common misunderstanding of my position. And my real position on this is among my most deeply-held convictions as a parent, so I can’t stay quiet.
Here’s the argument: Because I advocate letting kids sort things out for themselves in the long run, I am saying that all points of view are equally valid. Ipso facto, I’m a relativist.
As regular Memlings will know, I do have opinions. I think some points of view are excellent, some are neutral, some are utter nonsense, and some are outrageously stupid and dangerous. I’ve come to these conclusions not because my parents fed them to me, but by using the tools and values they gave me and then sorting it out on my own. I try hard to stay open to a change of mind on each and every opinion. Sometimes I even succeed.
By thinking hard, paying attention, and caring about getting the right answer, I’ve come to the conclusion that evolution by natural selection is true and “intelligent design” is both false and much less interesting. I’ve come to think that Catholic doctrine is one of the most grotesque collections of dehumanizing stuff we’ve ever come up with as a species, and that many of the Catholics I know are nonetheless among the best people I know. In the midst of a high church Episcopal service, I whiplash between being seduced by the pageantry and sickened by it.
I think Mormon doctrine is incredibly strange, liberal Quakerism is a beautiful expression of the religious impulse, and Pat Robertson is a pig. Ecclesiastes is lovely and sad. Leviticus is vile. Unitarians are fascinating in their self-contradictions, and their social justice work is second to none.
I think the differences between Sunni and Shi’ite Islam are microscopic (a POV shared, it seems, by most Islamic intellectuals), and yet appears to be enough to justify an ongoing mutual slaughter a la 17th century Christian Europe. Jain principles are cool, and I wonder if most Jains follow them, or if they’re pretty much like the rest of us (i.e. great on paper).
If you’d like to know how I’ve come to any one of these opinions, I can walk you through the entire process because I was there. My parents declined to force-feed me their opinions, though I knew what they were and was surely influenced by them. Instead, my parents taught me to think hard, pay attention, and care about getting the right answer.
My kids get a hearty helping of my opinions, along with an express invitation to ignore them and find their own way. And because Becca and I spend so much time and effort teaching them to think hard, pay attention, and care about getting the right answer, I’m convinced their destination will be one of the good ones (plural), even if it isn’t the same as mine.
And you know what? It seems to be working really well.
In an earlier post on relativism, I put it this way: “A moment’s reflection makes it clear that there’s something between stone tablets and coin-flipping — between Thou shalt not and Whatever makes your weenie wiggle. It’s called moral judgment.”
Teach and model good judgment, then let them judge. It’s a simple plan, and for the sake of my kids, and everyone they will cross paths with, I’m sticking to it.
Nice label. What else ya got?
I found myself behind a home repairman’s van the other day. I don’t remember the company name, but I remember what was under it: an ichthys, or Jesus fish, followed by a tagline, like so:
The FISH says it all!
It’s not uncommon to see the Jesus fish on business cards, vehicles, signs and shop windows in the South. But this was the first time I’d seen a tagline that so clearly said, “Nuff said.”
A few months ago, I scanned the merchandise table during the break in a freethought meeting I was speaking to. Suddenly the gent selling books and T-shirts felt the call of nature. “Be right back,” he said and headed toward the restroom. Suddenly he stopped in mid-stride and looked back at the mound of cash sitting open on the table. He thought for a moment, then waved his hand dismissively and said aloud, “That’s OK. We’re all humanists here,” before scuttling off toward relief.
I’ll bet the Christian handyman really is a nice guy who never grabs an unattended wallet or has his way with the cat. And I was pretty sure that no one at the humanist meeting would help himself to the open pile of currency, either. But both have more to do with the demonstrable fact that most people, for a number of reasonable reasons, behave morally in most situations. In neither case would my confidence have anything to do with the waving of a worldview flag.
The assumption goes the other way as well, of course, when a worldview (or race, or nationality, etc) is hissed between the teeth as a self-sufficient epithet.
The fish does NOT say it all, and neither does the Happy Human. It’s possible to call yourself a Christian or a secular humanist and to be a breathtakingly unethical pig. Lots of folks on both sides manage that straddle just fine. Maybe it’s a Fred-Phelps-type Christian who finds his instructions in hateful Leviticus instead of the Sermon on the Mount, or a Joe-Stalin-type nonbeliever who seems to take the absence of divine oversight as an invitation to go homicidally nuts.
I’ve also known both believers and nonbelievers who I’d trust with my life. That trust comes not from hearing what a person calls him or herself, but from seeing what the person does with their worldview. Deed, not creed, and all that.
Worldview labels are handy shortcuts, nothing more. They save us the hard work of holding ourselves and others to a discernable standard, as if claiming the label is the same as living the highest ideals of that label.
So next time somebody flashes their worldview at you as if it means something all by its lonesome, yawn and say, “Nice label. What else ya got?”
“Values and beliefs with which we don’t agree”
I’m spending a lot of time and effort vetting firms to create the website for Foundation Beyond Belief. All in all an aggravating and slow process. Yesterday I filled out a long and detailed form about the Foundation and the site we need for a web design firm in my old home state of Minnesota.
Today I received this reply:
Hi Dale,
I appreciate the time you took to fill out our website questionnaire. Unfortunately, I don’t think we are a good fit for developing your website as we are committed Christians. I think it would be difficult for us to give our all to a website promoting values and beliefs with which we don’t agree.
Thanks again for your time. I hope you understand my reasons for declining your request.
M___
I usually let this kind of thing roll off my back, but this one got under my skin in a way that nothing has for years. For one thing, I doubt they’d have offered the same reason to a Jewish or Muslim foundation. (On second thought, who knows.) I was also struck by the fact that our values are suspect even when we’re involved in an overtly charitable initiative.
I replied:
Hi M___,
Thanks so much for your reply. I must agree, we would be a very poor fit — but not because you are committed Christians.
Our foundation is dedicated primarily to the encouragement of charitable giving among the nonreligious but will be supporting both religious and secular charities. I would only want to work with someone who shares those values of generosity and openness, who sees the importance of reaching across lines of difference. Thanks for letting me know that you don’t agree with such values.
My current website was created by two committed Christians, one of whom is a past administrator for the Campus Crusade for Christ. They noted our differences but recognized that we share the same core values of mutual respect and a desire to make the world a better place.
Here’s to more Christians like them.
Dale
(If you are a professional web designer who would like to be considered for this job — regardless of your worldview — drop me a note with a link to your online portfolio. My contact info is in the sidebar.)
Which way do your kids roll?
What is needed is not the will to believe but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite. — Bertrand Russell
Unwillingly back from 17 days off, with a wallet full of Post-Its full of ideas for the blog.
The first popped up when Michael Jackson’s ghost was spotted at Neverland. Here’s my favorite video clip of the event (cue soundtrack):
The debunk is easy, of course. More interesting is the question it raises for parents who want to raise critical thinkers. Some, I’m sure, sat their kids in front of the video and fed them the critique of credulity: “Look, at 0:18, see? There’s a courtyard to the left there. You can even see the windows into that room. And look look, one second later you can see a set light standing in that room! There’s obviously a crew setting up in there, and somebody just walked by that window! See? Not a ghost. Right?”
Johnny and Janey nod solemnly and power down, pending future input.
By debunking it for them, Parental Unit handed them a piece of information: this ghost was a shadow. But s/he didn’t allow the kids to stretch their own critical thinking hamstrings. S/he gave them a fish instead of teaching them to fish.
News of the ghost reached us on vacation as we drove with Grandma to the coolest kid museum in the U.S. (more on this later). One of my kids had heard it on a morning show: during an interview, a news crew had captured Michael Jackson’s ghost walking by in a nearby room. That’s how it’s generally presented, of course — never “a news crew captured something that some people thought looked like a ghost, and further assumed to be the ghost of Michael Jackson.” Too many ickily precise words. “An eerie presence at Neverland was captured on film” is the usual approach to keeping us tuned in.
“Huh,” sez I, or some such noncommital thing.
We had a fine time at the museum. Later that afternoon, I pulled out my computer and found the YouTube video I knew would be there.
“Hey, who wants to see Michael Jackson’s ghost?” I said. Yup — I left out the precision, too. I did so because I know which way my kids roll, and that they don’t need a push from me.
Present some folks with Elvis in a restaraunt, or Mary in a tortilla, or an exotic miracle juice, and they’ll roll fast and hard toward belief. As Russell would put it (after his third gin XanGo), they have the will to believe and they’re not afraid to use it. No matter how much you try to drag them back uphill, such folks will lie at the bottom of the hill cooing contentedly in the lap of Elvis or Mary, munching on mangosteen while P.T. Barnum grazes on their wallets.
My kids roll the other way. As a result of the low-key and fun questioning atmosphere they’ve grown up in, they have a serious crush on the real world. Oh they like fantasy just fine. But to paraphrase Russell again, their will to find out is reliably stronger than their desire to believe any given proposition. And they’ve blown their minds often enough by the wonders of that real world that they’ll wait patiently, tossing aside counterfeit wonder, until the real thing comes along.
The will to believe is a form of incuriosity. The will to find out is about simple, persistent curiosity. Raise curious kids by being curious yourself, out loud. Show a hunger for the actual and a delight in finding it, over and over again, and your kids will tend to roll that way as well.
Though they all roll toward reality, the steepness of grade isn’t the same for all three of my kids. Erin (11) rolls gently but steadily toward reality, and Delaney (7) makes long detours. But both eventually end up wanting to know what’s actually what.
For Connor (14), it’s a cliff. That can present problems of its own. He’s often unwilling to even consider any unconventional possibilities. That protects him from being duped by salesmen, politicians, and faith healers, but it can also keep him from seeing how deeply bizarre reality can be. He has, for example, dismissed my descriptions of quantum strangeness with a simple, “Oh yeah, I’m so sure.” In his defense, that’s pretty much the same thing Einstein said about quantum physics (“Ach ja, ich bin so sicher.”)
So we watched the video three times. Erin and Delaney toyed with the idea that Jackson’s ghost had really appeared before asking each other a few simple questions and watching it fall apart. (Connor went straight to pfft.)
To my surprise, CNN actually debunked the rumor, showing that it was a simple shadow:
…which enraged some roll-to-beliefers. My favorite comment:
Fine, so it’s a shadow. So what? Have you so-called “skeptics” ever considered the possibility that ghosts ALSO cast shadows???
Keeping forbidden fruit from taking root
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It’s funny/sad/scary how many things we humans get not just wrong but precisely backwards.
We try to make ourselves safe from terrorism by military force—in the process, creating deeper anger and much more fertile ground for terrorism.
We try to raise moral kids by inculcating unquestionable rules and commandments—which turns out to be “worse than doing nothing” because “it interferes with moral development.”1
We try to prevent teen pregnancy by abstinence-only sex ed, which results in equal or greater rates of teen pregnancy. 2
Some of us try to protect our kids from religious fundamentalism by shielding them from all exposure to religion—an ignorance that results in many secular kids being emotionally seduced into religious fundamentalism.
And in our fervor to protect our kids from risks, we often deny them the chance to develop their own risk management smarts—which then puts them at far greater risk.
The whiplash reply to this line of thought is often, “Oh, so you’re saying we should raise kids without rules, encourage them to enjoy unprotected multispecies sex at age twelve, and let them cartwheel down the middle of the freeway while smoking?”
That’s right. Those are the two choices–ya diametrical, dualistic, black-and-white, not-more-than-two-options-seeing putz.
(Sorry, that was harsh.)
One of the decisions parents have to make is how best to approach the issue of alcohol. Since most of us can be assumed to share the goal of raising kids who will use alcohol responsibly and safely once they are of legal drinking age, the question is about how best to get there.
Once again, it’s research to the rescue. And once again, it turns out that the advice of our jerking knee is precisely wrong. Children are more likely to develop dysfunctional and unhealthy habits regarding alcohol if it’s made into forbidden fruit and a magical rite of passage into adulthood.
“The best evidence shows that teaching kids to drink responsibly is better than shutting them off entirely from it,” says Dr. Paul Steinberg, former director of counseling at Georgetown University. “You want to introduce your kids to it, and get across the point that this is to be enjoyed but not abused.” 3
In his landmark 1983 study The Natural History of Alcoholism, Harvard psychiatrist George Vaillant found that people who grew up in families where alcohol was forbidden at the table but consumed elsewhere were seven times more likely to be alcoholics that those who came from families where wine was served with meals but drunkenness was not tolerated.
Vaillant also looked at cross-cultural data, finding a much higher frequency of alcohol abuse in cultures that prohibit drinking among children but condone adult drunkenness (such as Ireland) and a relatively low occurrence of alcohol abuse in countries that allow children to occasionally sample wine or beer but frown on adult drunkenness (such as Italy).
Moderate exposure coupled with mature adult modeling is the key.
Vaillant concluded that teens should be allowed to enjoy wine on occasion with family meals. “The way you teach responsibility,” he noted in 2008, “is to let parents teach appropriate use.” 4
Religious and cultural traditions that forbid forbid forbid often end up with more dysfunction per acre than those that teach and encourage moderation. Southern Baptists joke even amongst themselves about their hypocrisy regarding alcohol. My mother-in-law once went to a hotel that was completely filled with conventioneers — yet when she went to the hotel bar, it was completely empty.
“Where is everybody?” she asked the bartender.
“It’s a Baptist convention,” he said, “so they’re drinking in their rooms.”
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Fascinating article about the Baptist resolution condemning alcohol consumption — complete with a demonstration of the weak art of argument by scriptural cherrypicking (on all sides)
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1Quoted in Pearson, Beth, “The art of creating ethics man,” The Herald (Scotland), January 23, 2006.
2Abstinence Education Faces An Uncertain Future,” New York Times, July 18, 2007; Bearman, Peter and Hannah Brückner: “Promising the Future: Virginity Pledges and First Intercourse.” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 106, No. 4 (Jan 2001), pp. 859-912.
3Quoted in Asimov, Eric, “Can Sips at Home Prevent Binges?” New York Times, March 26, 2008.
4Ibid.
So crazy…it just might work
[Walking downhill toward home with Delaney after seeing if Kaylee could come over and play. She couldn’t. The conversation that ensued is so improbable that I feel the need to pinky-swear that it is nonfiction. Here’s as close a transcription as I could manage 90 seconds later when I found a piece of paper.]
DELANEY (7): Kaylee’s family goes to church.
DAD: Mm hm.
DELANEY: And Rachel’s family is Jewish.
DAD: Yup.
DELANEY: I like to have friends who believe different things.
DAD: I don’t know where you get your crazy ideas. Everybody has to believe the same.
DELANEY: Dad.
DAD: But it needs to be my exact way, of course.
DELANEY: Dad. I know you’re joking. There have to be different ideas or the world would never get any better.
[A new one. DAD pauses.]
DAD: And why is that?
DELANEY: It’s like this. If there are a hundred different ideas, then the person with the best idea can talk to the other people and…you know, convince them about it. But if you have just one idea, it might not be the best, and you would do it anyway. And things would get worse and worse in the world from doing ideas that aren’t the best.
DAD: Holy shit, girl!
DAD, out loud: Wow.
DELANEY: Yeah.
[Pause.]
DAD: What if somebody had an idea to kill or hate people?
[Pause.]
DELANEY: Maybe he never heard any other ideas, so he doesn’t know a better one. The other people can show him their ideas. And then they vote.
(This defense of the marketplace of ideas precisely parallels a line of thought in Stephen Law’s excellent book The War for Children’s Minds. But Laney has not (to my knowledge) read his book. And Law is not (to my knowledge) seven, so I’m not quite so impressed with him.)
Fighting the fallacies of friends
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I have a guilty pleasure: It’s watching my chest-thumping rationalist friends commit the human errors they can’t forgive in others. I do the same thing myself at times (see image at left). Hoo-hoo-hoo-HAAA!
Since Foundation Beyond Belief went public last week, I’ve received a lot of encouragement and a lot of priceless constructive advice. But there’ve also been a few angry sneers — few, but loud — always from the nonreligious so far, always written in the Snark dialect, and at the moment favoring a single whopping logical error.
In the announcement, I said that religious people in the U.S. give away a greater percentage of their income than those self-identified as nonreligious. I said it because it is both true and well-documented by reliable research.1 I quickly followed by noting that this is NOT a question of character, but a natural result of one group passing a plate 52 times a year and the other not.
Still I knew, even as I wrote it, what snarky fate awaited me.
A few folks told me, with great irritation, that my claim is nonsense because most of the money donated by the religious goes to run religious institutions. Their facts are correct — churches absorb 74-78% of the offerings and donations of their members — but it’s irrelevant to the claim that religious individuals give more.
They go on to say that if the money kept by the churches were removed from the equation, the disparity vanishes. This, I’m afraid, is both irrelevant and false. The very same surveys show churchgoers beating non-churchgoers in levels of giving to secular charities.
But whether true or false, this argument’s irrelevance is what kills me. The original claim is about the personal act of giving, not how the money is used by those who receive it. So my chest-thumping friends have responded to one claim by refuting something entirely else — just the sort of thing they can’t abide in the religious.
In a related fallacy, several point out that this or that source is a conservative, or a Catholic, or an evangelical, and therefore not worth listening to. Since I don’t trust ANY secondary source out of hand, I looked at the primary sources. And in this case, Brooks and Barna, et al. were right.
It happens, you know.
I do think we have an opportunity to be better stewards of individual generosity than churches. We have no buildings, choir robes, or parking lots to pay for, no youth retreats, no missionaries. But while we’re acknowledging that church-based donations don’t go very far out the door, let’s restate and underline the original point: Religious folks give away a (much) greater percentage of their personal income than the nonreligious. We do several things better than they do. This is one of several things they do best. It’s not a question of character, but of the need for a systematic means of giving as an expression of worldview outside of those church doors.
Either way, it’s a problem worth tackling. Church attendance is declining rapidly in the U.S., and if churchgoers give a lot more to charity, this constitutes a genuine concern for philanthropy.
It’s time to acknowledge the facts, set our diversionary tactics aside, and learn from anyone who has something to teach us. That, among other things, is what Foundation Beyond Belief is about.
Join the Foundation Beyond Belief group on Facebook Causes, or click here to join our mailing list.
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1Surveys by Independent Sector, the Giving Institute, the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, 2002 General Social Survey, American Community Survey of the U.S. Census, and more.
