Keeping the ‘Hell’ away from my kids
No God and no religion can survive ridicule. Mark Twain
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Meet my 9-year-old middleborn, Erin, a.k.a. “the B”:
Oh, she’d KILL me. Heh. Lemme try again:
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Yep, that’s the same kid — a radiant flower one moment and a complete bassoon the next. She’s a typical middle child, a pleaser and a peacemaker, a moralist and a goofbag. I adore her socks off, not least because I’m a middler (and therefore all those things) myself.
So my stomach sank yesterday when she came home from school with the news that her three best friends all agree she’s going to burn in hell.
Holy horseshit! I thought, mentally springing to the Bat Cave and firing up the Mach 5. Or whatever. I simply can’t bear to see my kids hurt, nor Becca, my wife. I just can’t take it. I have made Becca cry precisely three times in seventeen years, and it unhinges me so thoroughly that I will apologize for my very existence if only she will STOP.
Same with the kids. I’m not talking about fall-down-go-boom tears, now. Those mostly irritate me, since the child usually did something (shall we say) ill-advised just beforehand. But tears of genuine emotional pain — those are something else entirely. You know, like the tears that would result from the unanimous judgment of your three best friends that you are destined for the Lake of Fire.
And though all three kids’ wounded tears slay me, none are harder for me to take than the tears of the B when her heart’s been broken. I swear, the very first boyfriend to break her heart will live just long enough to see his own little cardiac balloon quivering in my outthrust fist.
(Sorry, that was massively heterosexist. Feel free to reread with “girlfriend…her own little cardiac balloon quivering etc.” See, I’m cool.)
So I knelt before the B to get the full story. “Sweetie, what’d they say that for?”
“They were talking about church and stuff, and they asked if I believe in God and go to church. And I said no, I don’t believe in God, and I don’t go to church. And then their eyes got really big and they said, ‘Oooh, you’re gonna burn in Hell.'”
I waited for the first teardrop to appear, flexing my hand in preparation for holding three quivering little hearts at once.
“I’m so sorry they said that, B. How did that make you feel?”
Instead of tears, she shrugged. “It was pretty mean. But also silly.”
I looked at her in amazement. It is silly, of course, a profoundly stupid and childish idea, but how did she come to that so directly? It took me years and years to shift Hell from terrifying to terrifying but unlikely to silly.
And then I remembered. Of course. She’s been inoculated.
If I had hidden the idea of Hell from my daughter all these years, protecting her from the very concept, the sudden invocation of the flames by her friends could have burned a fear into her that would take some serious undoing. But we’ve talked about religious ideas for years. I’ve always made my opinions clear, but I go to great lengths to let her know that other good people think differently. “Dad, did Jesus really come alive after he was dead?” “I don’t think he did, no. I think that’s just a made-up story to make people feel better about death. But talk to Grandma Barbara, I know she thinks it really happened. Then you can make up your own mind, and even change your mind back and forth about it a hundred times if you want.” That’s the usual approach.
But there are exceptions to this evenhanded treatment, and one of them is Hell. Hell gets no hearing from me. I will not allow my children to be terrorized by anyone with the sick fantasy of an afterlife of eternal punishment, especially one meted out for honest doubts. If ever there was a religious idea with human fingerprints all over it, Hell is it. So I’ve always told my children that Hell is not only fiction, it’s also…
That’s right. She was using my exact word. Silly.
Even if there is a God, I’ve told them repeatedly, he’s not going to care if you guess wrong about him. That sounds like a human king, not the all-wise creator of the universe. He might care about how good you are, or even respect your honest doubts more than the dishonest belief of people who are just trying to avoid Hell. But in any case, the idea that any god worth his salt would create a Hell to punish his children is just plain silly.
Just as we inoculate our kids against diseases by putting small amounts of the bad stuff into their arms to build resistance, we have to inoculate them against toxic ideas that can paralyze their abilities to think freely. Specifically invite fearless doubt and they can live without medieval ignorance and fear trailing them through their one and only life. Tell them about Hell, then don’t just ‘disagree’ with it: laugh it to smithereens.
Wondering and questioning, Part II
Meet my boy, Connor.
Connor is nearly twelve, wickedly smart and funny, endlessly creative and thoughtful and kind. I’ve had more outright conversational joy from Connor in the nine years since he started talking than from most of the rest of our species. Combined.
He wants to be an engineer. Sometimes he shares with me his plans for reversing global warming. Once he shared an idea for exceeding the speed of light—and I still can’t figure out why it wouldn’t work, at least in theory. Last week he sketched an ingenious idea for an inexhaustible light bulb. (I know why that one won’t work, but importantly, kept my pie-hole shut.) At the age of seven, he proposed a device that could identify which person in a packed elevator had farted. A panel in the floor would then light up under the perpetrator.
(We were alone in an elevator when he came up with that one, of course—and when the door opened and admitted an elderly lady, we vibrated with swallowed laughter, imagining the floor lighting up beneath her.)
But sometimes—much of the time—the topic is philosophical. Connor wonders about consciousness, death, ethics, time, and the idea of gods. One of his favorite riffs is to marvel at the fact that he was born at all, which brings us to one of the central differences, imho, between the religious and secular worldviews.
Let’s begin with a song, one that captures a large whack of my own worldview—so much, in fact, that it is one of our favorite lullabies:
It’s inherently humbling, that scientifically-informed worldview. Instead of being specially made in the image of the creator of the universe, given dominion over the world and all that’s in it, and having God’s only son take our form to come to Earth and die so we could live forever, it turns out we’re one transitory species among millions, an unimaginably small blink in time on an unimaginably small dot in space—trousered apes who will disappear into complete non-existence upon the death of our bodies.
But remember, when you’re feeling very small and insecure, how amazingly unlikely was your birth. And it was this thread that my son and I riffed on the other day, picking up an inexhaustible thread.
It started with boxer shorts.
Connor needed boxer shorts immediately. I’ll spare you the reason, a familiar hash of peer pressure and arbitrary norms and middle school locker rooms. I ran him to the mall and we bought a few pairs. On the way home, I suddenly flashed on something from long ago. I turned and mentioned to Connor that he owed his existence to (among many other things) boxer shorts. What follows is, I submit, a definitively secular exchange of wonder.
Boxer shorts? This was news to the boy. Not the general idea of owing his existence to countless small happenstances, mind you. He has long enjoyed the knowledge that several hundred things could have prevented his parents from meeting, from finding each other attractive, from dating, from marrying, and from staying married long enough to spring off. He understands that one particular sperm and one particular egg had to meet for him to ever exist. And he vibrates with dawning excitement as he extends these had-tos back through the generations, back to his Confederate great-great-great grandfather who was felled by a Yankee bullet through the neck at nineteen and bled profusely—almost, but not quite, enough to erase the great-great-great grandson he would one day have. Connor has worked his way back through a million generations of humans and prehumans to imagine two ratlike creatures rocking the casbah at the precise moment the asteroid slammed into Chicxulub 65 million years ago, further clinching the existence of their great-great-great etc grandson. (Oooh, baby, one rat says to the other. Did you feel that too?)
But boxer shorts—that was a new one. He demanded to know what I was talking about.
We’ve already done the sex talk (went very well, thank you). So now I told him that the sperm can get sluggish if they are too warm, that briefs hold the testicles against a man’s warm body, and that four months after his mom and I started trying to create him, without luck, I saw this article that suggested switching to boxer shorts, and boom…
His eyes were wide. “You got pregnant.”
“Well Mom did, technically, but I…”
He clutched his head. “Oh my GOSH! What the freakin’ heck!” (His current favorite pseudo-swear.) He seemed to get it. He turned toward me with an electric look, the look of a person who just missed getting hit by a train. “What if you saw that article a month EARLIER?”
Oh yeah, he gets it. “Or later.” We’d added another casual causal coincidence to the march of time—his father stumbling over some random magazine article…at GreatClips, I think it was, while I waited for a haircut…
“WHAT IF SHE FINISHED THE OTHER HAIRCUT BEFORE YOU SAW THE…?”
Boy does he get it.
I have several religious friends who think that God fixes these things for us. He put the mag there, you see, and kept the haircut going until I could read it. We each have one ideal mate, and God works things out so we meet, fall in love, have the children we’re supposed to have when we’re supposed to have them. Setting aside the revolting idea that God wanted an abused woman to marry her abuser, etc etc, we still end up with a world that makes me yawn, a world with a good measure of the wonder stripped out. In that world, we are Jehovah’s chesspieces, moving in preordained patterns, how exceptionally tedious. Tedious in a holy way, I mean.
Meditating instead on how amazingly unlikely was your birth—well, if you haven’t done it, please be my guest. It’s hard to take existence quite so much for granted once you realize how very, very, very close you came to missing the dance entirely.
Wondering and questioning, Part I
My greatest thrill as a secular parent is watching my kids follow their intellectual curiosity wherever it leads. My job is to run ahead down the corridor, flinging wide as many doors as possible—or much better yet, to stay the hell out of the way.
I’m convinced that the reckless, ecstatic wondering I’ve seen in my kids owes a lot to secular parenting. Religion, in addition to inspiring a certain degree and type of wonder, tends also to place real limits on the inquiring mind. Some things are sacred, after all, or otherwise unquestionable, or at least inappropriate, or too complicated to explain, or beyond the poor grasp of our human minds, too unseemly, too shocking, too sad, too unthinkable. You can hear one portcullis after another slamming shut.
There are no unthinkable thoughts in our home, no unaskable questions, no unbearable hypotheses. Not one. How can you decide whether something is right, I tell my kids, if you won’t even let yourself think it first? As a result of this simple policy, my kids are growing up with minds that race through fields of possibility, unhindered by the dark barricades of someone else’s fears.
It leads to some pretty strange places, like the time Erin, then eight, declared that she was SO glad we’re white.
I stifled my natural reaction
and asked why. Turns out she had listened carefully on MLK Day, realized what a raw deal blacks have had, and was honestly grateful that she didn’t have to endure it herself.
There was a time when my daughter Delaney came up with a new theological hypothesis every week or so. Once, at age four, she declared that Jesus made all the good things in the world and that God made all the bad and scary things.
The next five words out of the mouths of many religious parents would be No no no no no—in that order—followed by a dose of theological castor oil to set the child straight. Very few would let the day end with their child still entertaining the notion that God is the source of all evil. Some secular parents do little better for the child’s independence of thought when they take the opportunity to say No no no no no—God isn’t real. I’ve always preferred to praise the independent thought and let the child run like mad with it.
Cool, I said to Delaney. I never thought of it like that.
The next week, she promulgated a revised encyclical: God, she said, makes all the things for grownups, and Jesus makes the things for kids. My favorite example: God made the deep end of the pool, and Jesus made the shallow end, for her.
I hugged her. “So God for me and Jesus for you, eh?”
“I guess so,” she said. “I don’t know for sure. I’m still thinking about it.”
She’s parroting one of my constant parental invocations there—the need to keep thinking, to never close one’s self off to further information.
Earlier this year on the way home from school, she told me about a chat she’d had that day with Mrs. W, the teacher at her Lutheran preschool. “I told Mrs. W I think God is just pretend, but I said I’m still thinking about it…And I asked if she thinks God is pretend.”
I looked at her in the rearview mirror, munching on the tart apple I’d for once remembered to bring for her snack, so beautifully innocent of the fact that she had stood with her little toes at the edge of an age-old crevasse, shouting a courageous and ancient question to her teacher on the far rim. My daughter, you see, hasn’t heard that there are unaskable questions.
“What did Mrs. W say?”
“She said no,” Laney said, matter-of-factly. “She said, ‘I think God is very real.’ ”
“Uh huh. Then what did you say?”
“I said, ‘That’s okay…as long as you’re still thinking about it, too.’”
Two years later, I still look at that sentence with awe. That’s okay, she said—because it would never occur to her that people must all believe the same—and then the call to continuous freethought, the caveat against the closed process.
How many people of religious faith ever hear that their faith is okay only if it remains open to disconfirmation? Whatever that number is, if I can keep my kids blissfully ignorant of the “rules,” it will go up.
By the numbers
At the moment (28 April, 2:16 pm US Central Time), Parenting Beyond Belief (aka “The Book Without An Audience”)…
…is selling faster than 99.9% of the titles on Amazon — and we haven’t even started our major marketing. Sales have been so brisk that Amazon has thrown it back to preorder status until they can restock.
…is the #3 parenting reference on Amazon Canada and #4 parenting reference on Amazon.com.
…is continuing to Google over 24,000.
One would think Barnes & Noble would like a piece of that action…
Oh, and speaking of the big booksellers:
Blog reader Augustus Gloo… I mean, STEELMAN has found one of the 78 PBBs planted in Borders bookstores around the US! Only 77 left! Sprint to your local Borders and snap ’em up, then report back here!
I want a PBB, Daddy, and I want it now!
UPDATE: make that 76 — another has turned up in Florida!
Coming out
Something rare and humbling happened to me in 2002. I had a novel released that January, Calling Bernadette’s Bluff, which got some quite lovely reviews and was well-received by both of its readers.
(No, that wasn’t the rare and humbling thing. Good reviews aren’t humbling; they make you feel like this.)
The novel explores the gradual frustrations of a tired secular humanist professor at a Catholic college, his eventual (pathetic) coming out and the hilarity that ensues. But the most incredible thing happened about four months after the book’s release. The phone rang. It was my mom.
She had finished reading my book.
Oh here we go, I thought. “And?”
She told me how much she’d liked it (and believe me, she’d tell the truth, damn her), then said: “I’m a secular humanist.”
“You…you’re…you are?”
“I didn’t have the name for it before, but…yeah. That’s what I am.”
I was floored. I hadn’t known, you see. We hadn’t discussed religion much growing up (which gave me the space to think for myself), but we did go to church regularly. I had assumed she was some sort of indemnity Christian at least, a Pascal’s Wagerer if nothing else. But no. I had to wait forty years and write a humanist novel before I could find out my mother shared my beliefs.
It was a stunning feeling for a child to have that impact on a parent. Usually goes the other way.
In the preface of PBB I describe similar scenes in book clubs I’ve spoken to about my novel. At some point in the discussion, someone will inevitably say, “Hey, you know what — I guess I’m a secular humanist, too.” And everyone says, “LIN-da!! Really?!” — not the least in judgment or condemnation, but in genuine surprise.
Then someone else chimes in “Actually, me too,” (“MAR-garet!!”), then someone else. It is electric. Everyone assumes everyone else is a believer — including those who aren’t themselves. The result of the uncloseting is a deepening of relationships as we realize how much richer is the diversity among even our closest friends.
One of the most moving and fascinating aspects of the launch of PBB has been hearing stories of self-revelations, including people who reveal to friends and family for the first time that they don’t believe when they forward an email announcement about PBB. Such revelations are almost always followed by an outpouring of supportive replies — not 100%, of course, but always more than we think will be the case.
I was touched to read a blog entry by PBB contributor Shannon Cherry in which she (somewhat nervously) came out to her readers at the same time she announced her co-authorship of the book. Her beliefs had been unknown to many in her life even though her husband Matt runs an international humanist foundation and think tank. If Shannon Cherry was partially closeted, who among us is completely out?
Another contributor, Pete Wernick, is an internationally-renowned bluegrass banjo player (listen here!) and…secular humanist. The bluegrass world is apparently extremely evangelical, so Pete, despite being a very active humanist, had kept his two identities separate. Until now. After much thought and worry, Pete sent out a broadcast email to his bluegrass circle of friends announcing his beliefs and his participation in the book.
The result? An outpouring of supportive replies — and, I’m sure, some silence. That’s OK. The cathartic honesty is worth a little uncomfortable silence.
The goal is a world in which someone can answer belief questions with the nontheistic label of choice and elicit nothing more than you’d get from saying, “Presbyterian.” A long way to go, yes, but we’re on our way.
A quick ten
- April 20, 2007
- By Dale McGowan
- In PBB, Uncategorized
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Ten interesting bits about the book:
10. Say hello to Tom Flynn.
I just found out one of the pieces (one of my favorites) was left out of the Table of Contents: the point/counterpoint on Santa Claus between Tom Flynn and me. Tom (editor of Free Inquiry and marvelous guy) was incredibly gracious about the unfortunate and unintentional snub. If you have the book, turn right now to p.85 and dig in.
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9. Borders has purchased only 78 copies of the book and planted them around the country to see how they sell before ordering more. Fetch, Gentle Readers! Fetch!
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8. I asked Kurt Vonnegut — a literary and personal hero of mine — to write a piece for the book. He never answered my letter and is now with Jesus.
7. Michael Shermer’s excellent Foreword to the book refers to a priceless scene in the movie Parenthood: Keanu Reeves’ character (“that Tod”) bemoans the fact that you need a license to drive or catch a fish, but anyone can be a father. In his initial draft, Michael quoted the character verbatim:
“You know, Mrs. Buckman, you need a license to buy a dog, to drive a car – hell, you even need a license to catch a fish. But they’ll let any butt-reaming asshole be a father.”
It works beautifully coming out of Tod Higgins, but I had my doubts about a parenting book. As it turns out, all direct quotes from films must be cleared, and we had no time to get permission. So alas, ours did not become the first parenting book of all time to include the phrase “butt-reaming asshole” on the first page. The world will just have to wait for James Dobson’s next book for that.
6. When I picked Delaney up from her Lutheran preschool yesterday (the day after Laney shared my book for show and tell), her teacher pulled me aside to say (genuinely) how wonderful it all was — that I was so open about my beliefs, that I brought my kids to a church school instead of avoiding religious ideas, and that Laney was so unbearably proud of me. A great lady to whom this photo does no justice.
5. I just got the news that Barnes & Noble will not be stocking the book in their stores. This is NOT about the content — they just have to make decisions based on projected sales, so the book needs to prove itself. If we show them there’s a market, I’m sure they’ll jump on board. It’s all about the bucks.
4. I did my first press interview this week for a small local paper and was so distracted by the incredible speed of the reporter’s laptop typing that I completely lost my train of thought. I type with the middle finger of my left hand and the first three fingers of my right. She uses at least six others. I continued yammering while my mind searched for the right simile — which turned out to be “like rain on a rubber roof” — then had to beg her pardon and start a sentence over. I’m mostly but not entirely sure I didn’t say, “My Dark Lord Satan shall guide my parenting with his cloven hoof” during the simile search. I guess we’ll see when the piece comes out on April 26.
3. The Minneapolis Star Tribune did a profile on me in the Faith and Values section of today’s paper. It’s a regular feature called “Believer,” and they apparently went back and forth a bit over whether to call mine “(Non)Believer.” In the end, it posed too many problems for the template, so they said, “Well, you do believe in things, just not God.” Okie doke.
2. We’re starting to work on small local tours before I permanently leave the Upper Midwest for the Lower Mid-Southeast. Madison WI and Mankato MN are in my sights at the moment.
1. PBB has received a FABULOUS review from Library Journal. This is one of the most important possible review venues, since a good review can ultimately lead to the acquisition of scads of books for libraries across the U.S. What? Oh, the review? If you insist:
Parenting Beyond Belief: On Raising Ethical, Caring Kids Without Religion.
AMACOM: American Management Assn. Apr. 2007. c.288p. ed. by Dale McGowan.
McGowan, a professor, freelance writer, and novelist, has collected essays from some of contemporary secularism’s big names, e.g., Richard Dawkins, Margaret Downey, in support of those nonreligious American parents who seek to “articulate values, celebrate rites of passage, find consolation, and make meaning” sans religion. Contributor Ed Buckner writes that secular means “not based on religion” rather than “hostile to religion.” Though a few entries do evidence anger or resentment, it is clear that all of these astute essayists have thought carefully about God’s nonexistence. Most of the 30-odd contributors recommend imbuing children with the ability to think well independently; when pressured or rejected by real and figurative institutions that tend to favor the religious (e.g., schools, scouting, holidays), parents are advised to stick to their nontheistic guns. The book considers parents as pedagogues, recalling Deborah Stipek and Kathy Seal’s Motivated Minds: Raising Children To Love Learning. Engaging and down-to-earth, this collection balances the scores of religious parenting titles shelved in the average library and is highly recommended for large public libraries and parenting collections.
— Douglas C. Lord, Connecticut State Lib., Hartford
