Resisting the eraser, Part II
There are two pieces in Parenting Beyond Belief — an essay by Annie Laurie Gaylor and a silly song lyric of my own — that are devoted to the introduction of great figures who were religious doubters of one stripe or another. I included these because it’s important for kids to know that not everyone believes — that in fact, some of the greatest minds of every generation were doubters. And it’s important to do it overtly because of that busy, busy eraser.
I feel particularly strongly about this because I grew up oblivious to the fact that I was not alone in my doubts, as most of us do. Even in college I had not discovered any significant presence of articulate disbelief in our cultural history. And it really made me doubt my own doubts. How could I disbelieve when all of my greatest intellectual heroes believed? I’d heard it said the Founding Fathers were Christians – when in fact very few were. I had heard that Charles Darwin found no contradiction between evolutionary theory and Christian belief, when in fact he did. (He made that clear in his autobiography – though those pages were removed from the first edition by his wife, with the best of misguided motives.) I assumed that Einstein’s references to God were literal reflections of a personal faith, only later discovering his several irritated denials of that claim.
I was in my thirties before I discovered, in the works of AN Wilson, how many of the greatest intellectual and moral minds of every generation were freethinkers of one stripe or another – Seneca, Diderot, Voltaire, Jefferson, Lincoln, Susan B Anthony, Thomas Edison, Einstein, Freud, Twain, Hume, H.L. Mencken, Simone de Beauvoir, Bertrand Russell. They had all written eloquently of their doubts and their reasons. But those writings had not reached me, despite every possible predilection on my part to receive them.
One of the other ways believers mask disbelief is by taking every passing use of the word ‘God’ as proof that the speaker believed in God. Albert Einstein said, “God would not play dice with the universe.” He was immediately and jubilantly proclaimed a Christian, which irritated him so much that he wrote this answer in 1954: “It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”
Kurt Vonnegut did not believe in God (and expressed it clearly), but once said that “The only proof I need of the existence of God is music.” He meant this as an ironic tribute to music, not as a statement of belief in God, but it was leapt upon so effectively that National Public Radio – NPR! – ended its tribute to him last week with that quote. Why? Because that’s what we do: We mask disbelief in the appearance of belief. A giddy listener quickly posted a claim that Vonnegut, in his last years, was “arguing with his own atheism.”
Vonnegut foreshadowed this in 1992 when he began his eulogy for (atheist/humanist) Isaac Asimov with, “Well, Isaac is up in heaven now…” But he wasn’t erasing — he was being funny. And by all accounts, it slew the gathered throng.
UU humanist and minister Kenneth Phifer said, “Humanism teaches us that it is immoral to wait for God to act for us.” In context, what he was saying is this: Whether or not there is a God, passivity is immoral. But many leapt on the statement as proof that this prominent nontheistic humanist believes in God. You can just hear the squeak, squeak of the eraser, trying desperately to make us all the same.
Here’s Kenneth Phifer trying to be abundantly clear:
“I am a humanist. The humanism I espouse is materialist, naturalistic, religious, rational, responsible and inclusive. I hold with the conviction of humanism that the scientific method is the best means we have discovered for advancing truth…I have faith in that part of humanism which sees the human being as the highest form of life, an end not a means, the creator of moral values, the maker of history… It is the human race that has invented religious communities in order to share the burden of our aloneness as individuals…
He continues: “Religion is a human enterprise. It is the human race that has created religions out of that unique self-awareness that drives us to ask questions about our origins and our destiny.”
Materialist. Naturalistic. Humans as creators of moral values, religion as a human enterprise. It is the human race that has created religions. Phifer calls himself a religious humanist, but it seems pretty clear that he is not a theistic one. He supports the coming together of humanity to do and be good as the fullest expression of religion. It’s an important difference.
A systematic cultural suppression of the rich heritage of religious doubt keeps that heritage out of view. Thus is doubt rendered unthinkable by the stripping of its intellectual tradition. Once I discovered that tradition in AN Wilson’s work (and in The Humanist Anthology, edited by James Herrick, a PBB contributor), I literally wept at times as I read the courageous works of these great thinkers of the past, many giving voice to their honest convictions at a far greater risk than any I will ever encounter. In the span of a few weeks, I went from isolation to the company of giants.
I embarked on an ecstatic engagement with the words and lives of these men and women, taking their intellectual and moral courage as my own inspiration.
Just like gays and lesbians, women, ethnic minorities and others, we have to resist our erasure every bit as insistently as the hand of the mainstream culture pushes that eraser forward.
Resisting the eraser
At the risk of making a second analogy to the struggle for racial equality: Sixty years ago this week, Jackie Robinson became the first black player in major league baseball.
But imagine someone suggesting that he didn’t really integrate baseball because he wasn’t really black — he was just very, very, uh…dark white.
My editor at Amacom (a very good folk, by the way) continues to wring her hands over a statement of mine on the website, in the study guide, and in the book itself, that the majority of Unitarian Universalists are nonbelievers, noting that the UU website puts the number at 19%.
I visited the UUA site. Here are the numbers from the most recent survey in which UUs were asked to choose just ONE label (something UUs hate to do, God bless ’em):
Humanist: 46%
Atheist: 19%
Earth/nature-centered: 19%
Theist: 13%
Christian: 9.5%
Buddhist: 4%
Jewish: 1.3%
Hindu: tiny %
Muslim: tiny %
…etc etc. Only a tiny fraction of people who choose “humanist” or even “religious humanist” as their primary label believe in a god. Even if we leave the mostly non-god-believing pagans and Buddhists behind, these numbers indicate that about two-thirds of UUs are nonbelievers.
Those of you who are not new to this kind of discourse might know what my editor did next: she began redefining words. From her message:
“The term ‘believers’ refers to whether you believe in a religion, not whether you believe in God. Therefore, by definition, all religious humanists are believers…so you can’t call them non-believers.”
Now let me point out that her intentions are entirely good. She does not want the book to draw unnecessary criticism that would divert attention from substantive things. Still, this reasoning frustrates me. I’m pretty confident that “nonbeliever” in a religious context reliably means “does not believe in a god.” This kind of thing is why my head feels like it’s splitting apart at the midline whenever I get into religious discourse. Just as you put their king in check, they simply bump the table and scatter the pieces, then claim that’s how they were to begin with.
And this is the way disbelief gets gradually erased from the culture: We ignore it, or deny it, or redefine it out of existence. Everybody’s a believer, even those who don’t believe.
Even more troubling is the frantic impression I get from her messages (her subject line was YIKES!) — as if we had called these fine people a terribly dirty thing. If she believed I had mistakenly called the majority of UUs lefthanded, I doubt it would have been a problem. And even implying that all of those humanists are actually God-believing humanists strikes her as erring in the “right” direction. But nonbeliever — why, them’s fightin’ words!
Most of the UU humanists I know would be just as offended by the attempt to call them “believers” as Robinson would have been by the suggestion that he was essentially white.
One of the central purposes of this book is to normalize disbelief, and one of the central tasks in that game is taking the eraser away from those who feel the need to mask the presence of disbelief.
Parenting “as if”
What’ll it be tonight? It’s been an impressive 24 hours. Maybe I should tell y’all about the book climbing into the top 0.1% on Amazon — pretty good for a book without an audience — or the quintupling of traffic to the website. Or maybe I should blog about the secular Tin Foil Hatter who has launched a classic and baseless MSTT attack on one of the book’s contributors, saying s/he discredits the project because said contributor once knew someone who stood next to someone who thought an unrigorous thought. Get a hobby.
Then there’s the flurry of frantic emails from the publisher (very good folks, by the way), fretting because I claimed on the PBB website that Unitarians are “majority nontheistic” while the UUA website claims it’s only 19 percent. YIKES! You have to change that, you didn’t send the study guide to the UUs already, did you?? (In fact, the UUA says 19 percent are atheists and 46 percent are humanists. 19+46 = 65% = majority.) Once again we get our undies in a bunch over nothing much. (And a good thing, too, since they seem not to have noticed I said the same thing in the book…)
Forget all that. I’d rather tell you about Delaney:
This is my five -year-old Delaney, a.k.a. Linky, and I love her so much it hurts.
Linky came to me at my usual station (hunched over the laptop) and threw her arms around me. “I’m so proud of your book, Daddy.”
Oh, for meltin’ out loud. “Aren’t you a sweetie! Thanks, butterbutt.”
“I wrote a book too.” And she showed me The Bigist Pumkin Anybode Saw — nine stapled pages of instant classic. I read it aloud, oohed and aahed, told her I was even prouder of hers.
“Thanks, she said. “And I’m gonna take your book and my book to show to my class tomorrow.”
“…”
Instead of an ellipsis, the proper response of any good father would have been “Of course, my precious little Blossom Bottom! I’m so glad you’re so proud!” But…well, there are complications. Stuff to dance around. You know, grown up things to consider…
I’ll cut to the chase. Here’s a picture of her preschool:
Okay, I couldn’t get a picture of her actual school, but you get the idea. She goes to preschool at our local Lutheran church. Why? Because the program is the best pre-K in town, the teachers are wonderful, and she gets a basic low-key introduction to religious literacy without a hint of damnation. All of my kids have gone there, then into public schools. Please direct all MSTT concerns to your local proctologist at his place of employment.
During my ellipsis (if you’ll forgive a presumptious and ultimately shameful comparison), I flashed on the most heartbreaking passage in Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail:
When you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people…then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.
My little girl is proud of my work, and there’s nothing at all wrong with my work or her pride in it — yet I know that the potential exists for bigotry and ignorance in the next layer to set “ominous clouds” in my own daughter’s “little mental sky” when she flashes a secular parenting book in a church school classroom. It isn’t right, it isn’t just, but there it is. I looked at her beaming face and knew that she was aware only of what made sense, not of the nonsense that demands to be danced around.
After what was actually only a second or two, I decided to opt for parenting “as if”: Act as if the world were sane and reasonable, and see if it just might rise to the invitation.
I gave her a tight hug. “Well if you aren’t the best! Of course you can do that. I’m just so flattered for my book to be there with yours.” And we set my book and her book in her plastic bucket for show and tell.
I picked her up from school the next day and she ran out, elated. This is good, because that’s what she always does. “Hey, how was show and tell?” I asked.
“Great!”
“What did you say about the books?”
“I said, ‘My daddy wrote a book, and it’s about raising great children without religion.’ My teacher was so surprised!”
“Oh, uh…oh yeah? How was she surprised?”
“She didn’t know it was already out. She said is was really great.”
Now see? Once again I gave the next layer too little credit. “What about The Bigist Pumkin?”
She smiled. “They said that one was great too. Did you bring a snack?”
And so, thanks to some slow, aching progress over the centuries, instead of preparing for a mob with pitchforks, we were dealing with the fact that, once again, I forgot to bring her snack.
Giving kids permission to gamble with Pascal
One of my favorite interview questions is this: What is the one things you hope to give your kids by raising them without religion? The answer is freedom from fear.
No, not all fears, ya tyke — but several of the most parasitic and life-destroying. Scratch the smiling surface of a good many people with strong religious convictions and you’ll find stark raving terror. Many (not all, dammit, never all) are convinced that only the grace of God, moment to moment, protects us all from catastrophe.
A relative of mine clipped out a prayer and taped it to his/her fridge. It begins: O Lord, please give me the strength to face another day… Even though said fridge is in a comfortable upper middle class home in the suburbs, it keeps my relative bowed and feeling somehow spared, like an abused wife. Husband or wife, I mean. Life, it says, is unbearable. Only God spares us from its horrors, and the horrors beyond.
My kids will have their share of fears, but I’d like to help them see life as an amazing privilege, not as a source of terror from which we must be saved.
When a believer tells me that he simply can’t bear the thought of a world without God, or that without God we would all crack open each others’ heads and feast on the goo inside — I get a glimpse of his terror, his absolute distrust of himself and of the rest of humanity. This person genuinely believes that we’re all felons-in-waiting, just itching for the Cop to look away for one second so we can stick a shank in the ribs of the next guy.
This is my cue to inch away from this person, and by all means to stop challenging his beliefs, since I’m the next guy. Yikes.
But this post isn’t about all the reasons that idea is silly — they are countless, and several essays in PBB (Mercer and Koepsell among them) go into it just fine. This post is about why that’s sad — and why I’m so eager to help my kids avoid those particular shackles.
Imagine you’re sitting in class, struggling with a single true/false question on the paper in front of you. The teacher stands behind you with a loaded gun. Picture Snape, if you wish. True or false? he asks. Mark your answer carefully. Oh, and one more thing. Choose ‘true’ and there’s no penalty, even if you’re wrong. But if you choose ‘false’ and you’re wrong — I’ll shoot you in the head. Concentrate, now…
It’s Pascal’s Wager — one of the more cynical things ever uttered by a smart person. Once that gun is cocked, getting it right is no longer the issue, is it? Instead of thinking about the question, you’re focused rather tightly on not getting shot.
The one message I try to instill in my kids above all others is not that God is pretend, but that even if God exists, it is silly to think that the most important thing to him would be your belief in his existence. Honestly, can you imagine anything more petty, more outrageously egotistical — more human? So I tell my kids this: If there is a God, he’s not gonna care if you guess wrong about him.
I had to discover that one on my own, and it took many, many years. Too many. Once I did discover that simple and obvious fact, the freedom from fear allowed me to actually think. At which point I had a chance to get it right.
Which gets me to the real point of the post. I value the freedom to think for myself above just about anything else (other than the love of a good woman and about six other things, shut up). I get (as my Baptist/Episcopal mother-in-law would say) pissed to the tits when someone tries to force me to accept the prefiltered product of their own thinking. As I edited PBB, I kept this cardinal value in the forefront of my mind. I had one central goal for content editing: that every statement in the book should be reasonable. I didn’t say I would agree with every statement in the book — I don’t, by the way — but unless I’ve missed something, I am prepared to defend the reasonableness of every jot and tittle that made it in.
Not every j&t made it in, you see. I worked with several of the contributors to revise or remove statements I considered to be unreasonable or insufficiently grounded. And all of the writers, with one exception (oh DROP it WILL you PLEASE), were extraordinarily generous and willing to collaborate to that end.
Some of the essays are harsher than I’d choose to be. I think some are too forgiving of certain religious ideas. Some give way too much credit to atheists as a group. Others I just flat disagree with. But if I had edited those elements out, there goes your chance to think for yourself. If you read something with which you disagree, be sure to be glad for the chance to do so.
We’re used to being fed a single predigested POV. If that’s what you were expecting in this book, there’s just one thing I can say: You’re welcome.
Unholier than thou
Okay, I’m ready. Becca tells me to watch what I say, so I’ll type with my eyes open.
One of the less helpful notions in orthodox religious thought is the idea that there is a very small circle in which we may dance.
Some of the sillier extremes of this are the various sects who try to live by the literal dictates of Leviticus. Never mix two kinds of thread in the same garment. Never plant two different crops in the same field. Wash your pots just so, don’t touch a menstruating woman, etc etc etc. So very many ways to bring down God’s fist.
For later sects, it became simpler but more insidious, since it moved inside your head: don’t lust, don’t covet, and most of all, don’t doubt. But the message was the same: every moment of your life, you are one false move away from the abyss.
Hard to enjoy being a conscious thing when consciousness dreams up this kind of self-paralyzing crap.
One of the frankly hilarious features of the freethought world is our tendency to reproduce this irritating feature of religion in our own way by twisting ourselves in knots just as Gordian, just as asphyxiating, defining ever-smaller circles around ourselves and spurning those outside the circle as insufficiently pure.
Let’s call this syndrome “unholier-than-thou” (UTT).
Do you have UTT? Some symptoms to watch for:
1. Insisting that anyone who does not share your taste for slurs and epithets against religious believers is “gutless.”
2. Arguing endlessly about labels (atheist vs. humanist, humanist vs. secular humanist, atheist vs. nontheist, disbeliever vs. nonbeliever vs. nonreligious, ad infinitum). Insisting that any one label is obviously right or obviously wrong is a classic sign of UTT. Seek professional help.
3. Attempting to banish another person from the (un)sacred circle by claiming s/he has a connection to some form of thought or way of life less rigorously rational and secularly pure than one’s own. The secular equivalent of screaming WIIIIITCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
As you may have guessed, I’ve dealt with all three of these so far regarding Parenting Beyond Belief. I will surely hear more of it in the months ahead. Here’s my carefully-considered response to all of them, once again quoting Python:
If you want freethought to be forever marginalized, forever a minuscule percentage of humanity, by all means, continue with your petty proscriptions. And if you want your kids to grow up with the same fear of the fatal misstep, teach them that there’s a very narrow path to secular salvation.
Myself, I have other plans. I want to normalize disbelief, to make it something that regular, non-zealot types can consider. That means setting up a big tent. Get used to people who do disbelief in a different way from you. Stick your loyalty oaths and litmus tests and pet labels where it’ll take a sigmoidoscopy to find them.
There. I feel ever so much better.
(Damn Duncan Crary, by the way, for realizing, before I did, that ‘unholier than thou’ is much, much better than ‘more secular than thou.’)
Suffering fools
I should wait. I should not sit down and blog when I am this irritated. On the other hand, I said this would be a good place to allow my less-filtered thoughts some room to , and waiting until I can edit out all of my perfectly valid emotions (thank you Dr. Phil, *deep breath*, *happy place*) constitutes filtering.
On the other hand, I’m an editor. I filter. For example: I originally had “pissed off” in the second sentence, but changed it to “irritated” — largely because I have yet to define my audience in my head, which is certain death for writing.
You are dying of curiosity, admit it, possibly even assuming that I’ve been ticked off by a religious correspondent decrying the book. Not even close. In fact, I am increasingly convinced that my headaches in this release are going to come almost exclusively from the other side.
I don’t mind fools one bit. Foolishness is a human birthright. Read The Praise of Folly, seriously, find a good recent translation and read it. It’s one of the most influential books in Western literature. Anyway, fools are just fine. I’m a fool. But self-righteous fools I just can’t stand.
More later. I have to both cool off and define my audience.
