17. The first thing you hear
(Post 17 of 33 in my 16-hour shift for the Secular Student Alliance Blogathon.)
4:00 pm EDT
There’s a Post-It that’s been stuck to my desk for years, one of many such lost thoughts. It says “Blog E-C Obama Muslim 9/11 (in car from NC)”. Weirdly, I think I remember what that means….
Harp music and waaaavy lines…
ERIN (then 10): [Cousin Bill] said Obama is a Muslim. What’s a Muslim?
MOM: That’s another religion, same as Islamic. He isn’t, though.
ERIN: What’s so bad about being a Muslim?
CONNOR (then 13): Well it was Muslims who flew the planes into…
DAD and MOM, simultaneously: AAAAAAHHHH!! AAAAAHHH! WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT!!!
CONNOR, miffed: What??
DAD: Well…when somebody’s first learning about a big group of people, you don’t start with the worst things.
CONNOR: But she asked what was wrong with being a Muslim.
DAD: That’s not the same as, “What are some bad things some Muslims have done?”
CONNOR: Yes it is!
DAD: Okay then. Hey, you know what’s wrong with teenagers? It was teenagers who shot up Columbine High School. THAT’s what’s wrong with teenagers.
The crystal fades right about there, but I’ll bet he rushed to grant me the point.
16. Character
(Post 16 of 33 in my 16-hour shift for the Secular Student Alliance Blogathon.)
3:30 pm EDT
A good friend in Ohio just submitted this question:
Q: I’ve been nominated the chair of the “character committee” for my daughter’s school. Basically, the parents and teachers in the committee are going to recommend values and character education ideas to the teachers for curriculum changes. Any ideas that might be blog worthy during your blogathon?
A: Such great news! For your own background, I recommend reading A.C. Grayling’s Meditations for the Humanist: Ethics for a Secular Age, which is divided by topic into short reflections, including several on character.
A well-reviewed curriculum supplement is Barbara Lewis’s What Do You Stand For? A Guide to Building Character. There’s one for kids and one for teens, and I’ve seen glowing recommendations by educators for both. Includes individual quizzes to structure discussion and reflection.
Both Ethical Culture and UUs have developed curricular materials for character development, and both are likely to be excellent.
Finally, you might be interested in a current character ed situation brewing in the UK in the wake of the riots etc. Andrew Copson is attempting to keep the humanist voice in the debate.
Hey readers! Any other suggestions?
15. Content is overrated
(Post 15 of 33 in my 16-hour shift for the Secular Student Alliance Blogathon.)
3:00 pm EDT
Okay, my head is getting hurty. Time for a few low-calorie posts.
Five things about me:
1. My first job out of college was delivering singing telegrams dressed as Superman.
2. My first clarinet teacher is now the guy who plays Lisa Simpson’s saxophone.
3. I studied film scoring at UCLA and fully intended to write music for films until I met the other 4,000 people vying for those six spots.
4. I tried hard to move to New Zealand when I was 25.
5. I am missing one sinus.
14. Quakermaker
(Post 14 of 33 in my 16-hour shift for the Secular Student Alliance Blogathon.)
2:30 pm EDT
I’ve written at length before about my burning love for the Belief-o-Matic Quiz. I may even do so again before midnight if I run out of words to coin. The quiz asks twenty multiple choice worldview questions, then spits out a list of belief systems and your percentage of overlap with each system. In other words, it doesn’t tell you what church you go to, but it might suggest what church you ought to be going to. If any.
I read a passing comment in an article about the quiz several years ago that I’ve never forgotten. It seems that many of the people taking the quiz were finding a high correlation with one particular denomination: Satanism.
Wait no, my finger slipped. I meant Liberal Quakers.
So many people were finding themselves in high alignment with Liberal Quakerism that the headquarters of the Society of Friends (their fancy name) reported a tripling of inquiries in the first year of the quiz.
A lot of these inquiries were surely from people who call themselves Lutherans, or Baptists, or Presbyterians, or Catholics, or Mormons, because every Sunday they put on their blinker, check the mirror, and turn into the parking lot of a church with that denomination on the sign. But they are actually black-hat-wearing, oats-munching Quakers. Liberal Quakers, to be precise.
It seems to me that a person who calls himself a Baptist but believes that Joseph Smith received golden tablets describing the ministry of Christ in the New World from the Angel Moroni in Upstate New York, along with a pair of special glasses for translating them, etc., it seems to me that that person is in point of fact a Mormon, no matter what pew receives his weekly backside.
Yet statistics on the total size of the various denominations count backsides in pews. The pollsters don’t often ask what the people attached to those backsides actually believe about golden tablets, or transubstantiation, or immaculate conception, or purgatory, or whether salvation is by works or by faith alone, or how many gods there are and whether any of them have the head of an elephant. They should ask these things if they really wanted to know how many people are in a given belief system, but they generally don’t ask or probably care.
But the Belief-o-Matic cares enough to ask. And I care about the answer for this Quakery result for one special reason: Liberal Quakers are really cool.
For starters, many mainstream churches are based on revelation— the belief that one person or group can know what God wants. Revelation-based churches in the U.S. are the primary opponents of countless progressive social policies and the primary supporters of militarism, authoritarian politics, corporal punishment, and more. They tend to use God as a bludgeon against others.
Liberal Quakers, on the other hand, reject revelation and consider the experience of God to be personal and individual. As such, they are utterly opposed to forcing moral or dogmatic opinions on others. No person can tell any other person what the experience of God is like, at which point all sorts of nonsense goes away. And lo and behold, this denomination that has walked away from dogma and revelation has a long, rich history of being on the right side of important social issues. They were among the first abolitionists. They marched and got themselves arrested for women’s suffrage. They promote peace and nonviolence and devote themselves to alleviating human suffering rather than adding to it.
If it’s true that a significant proportion of the American population has values and beliefs in line with a church that rejects revelation and is a force for social progress, yet their membership and dollars go to churches that embrace revelation and are a force for social regress, I think a conversation is in order, and the Belief-o-Matic can do that. We’d be better off if they recognized the mismatch and Quakered up.
(Hey! Donate to SSA in the sidebar!)
13. Differdawkin’®
(Post 13 of 33 in my 16-hour shift for the Secular Student Alliance Blogathon.)
2:00 pm EDT
Richard Dawkins has said a ridiculously large number of things in his life that I’ve agreed with. Once in a while, I find myself disagreeing with him. That’s not only fine but to be encouraged — If I hear one more defense of an idea because Famous Freethinker X Says So, I’m gonna blow bangers out me bewdle.
Voicing our differences with our own upper echelon is such a good idea, I’ve coined a term: it’s called differdawkin’®. It captures not only the difference in opinion but my own chutzpah for differing with royalty in the first place.
Example: I think it was Dawkins who once suggested that “The Passion of St. Matthew” might someday be replaced by “The Passion of the Milky Way.” I’m gonna have to differdawk on that one. I think we’ll always express our deepest emotions and connections in human terms, not by singing the praises of abstract or inert things, no matter how inspiring.
See? Variations include notsoshermerin’ and taking a different twain.
Meditate on how you ever got along without my important new word, then haste to yon sidebar and donate a dollar to SSA for every time you intend to use it.
12. Government as God
(Post 12 of 33 in my 16-hour shift for the Secular Student Alliance Blogathon.)
1:30 pm EDT
Q: I classify myself as an atheist libertarian. From the few atheist/humanist gatherings I have been to, I see some with political views very different from my own. My husband summed up this observation when he noted that it seems like many humanists try to replace “god” with “government”. We shouldn’t pray for things, we shouldn’t rely on commandments, but instead we should legislate people to behave according to the morals what the “enlightened” humanists “agree” are good.
A: I’d phrase the equation a little differently, but I think it’s an explanation on the right track. The God hypothesis is an attempt to order and control a chaotic world. The deeply-felt need for that order and control doesn’t go away when god-belief does. For many, that belief is replaced by collective human judgment and a utilitarian ethic that seeks the greatest good for the greatest number. (And yes, that leads to all sorts of Gordian knots itself, but there it is.)