Keeping forbidden fruit from taking root
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
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.
Loving paintings more than frames
I don’t remember the commencement addresses I heard in college, but I’ll bet the University of Portland Class of 2009 will remember theirs.
Part of the problem for my grad speakers was that UC Berkeley is huge, so it holds separate commencements by department. I was a double major, so I had not one but two forgettable events – one for music, one for anthropology. The speakers spoke as and to musicians and anthropologists, I’ll bet, not as and to humans with their toes at the edge of a cliff and a hang glider on their backs.
When it comes to commencement addresses, specialization murders inspiration.
The University of Portland is about a tenth the size of UC Berkeley, so it makes sense that they got ten times the speech – this year, at least. The speaker was Paul Hawken, author, environmental activist, and co-founder of Smith & Hawken, as well as Erewhon and several other environmentally progressive firms.
Though the speech is peppered with religious terminology and ideas – unsurprisingly, since University of Portland is a Catholic institution — I’m struck by the similarity between his ideas and mine. Some excerpts:
There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn’t bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: YOU ARE BRILLIANT, AND THE EARTH IS HIRING.
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When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on Earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse.
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The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams. Literally you are breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by Moses, Mother Teresa, and Bono. We are vastly interconnected. Our fates are inseparable. We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells. In each of you are one quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells. Your body is a community, and without those other microorganisms you would perish in hours.
Each human cell has 400 billion molecules conducting millions of processes between trillions of atoms. The total cellular activity in one human body is staggering: one septillion actions at any one moment, a one with twenty-four zeros after it. In a millisecond, our body has undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the universe – exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science would discover that each living creature was a “little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven.”
____Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would become religious overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch television.
I respond differently to the religious bits than I once would have. In my thirties, while teaching at a Catholic college, my high wince-factor at lines like “The world would become religious overnight” would have blinded me to the incredible insight of the lines around it (“Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course…Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch television”). I might also have failed to notice that he was doing no harm – in fact, that his speech was a call to positive action in perfect alignment with my own values.
Now I’m more inclined to notice that Paul Hawken and I agree on the painting rather than fussing quite so much about the frame.
Full text of the Hawken address
(Hat tip to Facebook friend Debra Hill Frewin for bringing the Hawken talk to my attention!)
What a day
Some days it just plain pays to get out of bed.
For the past 110 days, Nonviolent Peaceforce, the global civilian peacekeeping organization for which I work, has been traumatized by the kidnapping of one of our peacekeepers on Basilan Island in the Philippines, a Sri Lankan national named Umar Jaleel. Since his abduction on February 13, I have had the privilege of watching from the inside as this frankly amazing organization worked tirelessly to bring about his release without violence or ransom. I can finally talk about it publicly because today, at 1245 UTC, Jaleel was released and is now receiving medical attention before returning home to his family. We are all beyond relieved.
Jaleel is one of a team of 17 International Civilian Peacekeepers (ICPs) serving in the Mindanao region of the Philippines, where fighting between the Armed Forces of the Philippines and an Islamic separatist group has put tens of thousands of civilians in the line of fire. The ICPs offer accompaniment and protective presence to displaced persons while working with local peacebuilding groups to create lasting structures for nonviolent conflict resolution. The idea is to protect civilians during this conflict while building civil society structures to prevent the next one. A new model for managing and resolving conflict — and it works.
This afternoon I talked for over an hour with Jeff MacDonald, a reporter from the Christian Science Monitor. He’s working on a piece about how the nonreligious movement in the U.S. is not only growing but changing in character — becoming more humanistic, as it were, more comfortable with and interested in the emotional side of things — less exclusively focused on the intellectual. More Sally than Harry, you might say.
Then there’s the growth of Foundation Beyond Belief. Since the announcement on June 1st, over 550 600 650 people have signed up on either the Facebook Causes page or the mailing list. I was hoping for 1,000 Foundation members by January 1. While mailing list does not equal donating members, I do think it’s time to upgrade my dreams a bit.
In addition to the general interest, I’ve been blizzarded with messages from people wanting to help in one way or another, and even a few from organizations hoping to be considered as beneficiaries.
I daresay we’ve struck a chord.
I’ll keep you all updated as we hit major landmarks. Much fun and sweat ahead!
Join Foundation Beyond Belief on Facebook
(Not on Facebook? Join the mailing list here.)
Introducing…Foundation Beyond Belief
Being a humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead. — Kurt Vonnegut
I don’t give as much as I’d like to the causes I care about. I consider myself a pretty generous guy, and when I give, I give generously. But I get to the end of each year and realize that I just haven’t given as much as I wish I had. Again.
Another thing: When religious folks give through religious charities and churches, it registers as an expression of their worldview. I want that too. I want my contributions to “count” as a visible expression of my secular humanism.
Then there’s this: Multiple solid surveys by philanthropic research organizations like Independent Sector and the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey1 show that churchgoers give a much greater percentage of their income to charitable causes than non-churchgoers like me. Arthur C. Brooks (author of Who Really Cares) is pretty sure he’s got my number: he says it’s “evidence of a gap in everyday virtue” (p. 40) between the religious and nonreligious.
I think he’s missing something obvious. If people in Group A are asked to pass a plate full of the generous donations of their friends and neighbors and either add to it or not, 52 times a year, while people in Group B have no such regular and public nudge — I’d say something other than virtue is in play.
I think the difference has much more to do with whether or not you have systematic opportunities for giving than some “gap in virtue.” I speak at Unitarian fellowships and Ethical Societies all the time, places brimming with friendly atheists. And when that offering plate passes by, I give, and so do they, knowing that these places will use it to do some good.
The offering plate is also passing through a million mainstream church pews every Sunday, giving the religious an easy and regular way to give and to combine their giving with others as a positive collective expression of their worldview.
I don’t agree with those who insist religious people give primarily out of fear or guilt. That may be in the mix, but most I know give because they are challenged and encouraged to do so, because generosity feels wonderful, and because the habit of giving turns giving into a habit.
I want to do better. It’s time for those of us who are otherwise engaged on Sunday mornings to have our own easy and regular means of giving, one that focuses and encourages humanistic generosity and demonstrates it to the world.
Welcome to Foundation Beyond Belief.
> what it is
Foundation Beyond Belief is a new charitable and educational foundation created (1) to focus, encourage and demonstrate humanistic generosity, and (2) to support a nationwide nonreligious parent education program.
The Foundation will highlight ten charitable organizations per quarter–one in each of ten areas (health, poverty, environment, education, human rights, and more). Members join the Foundation by signing up for a monthly automatic donation in the amount of their choice, then set up personal profiles to indicate how they would like their contribution distributed among the ten categories. Maybe you’d like to give 25 percent each to human rights, poverty, education, and the environment. We’ll distribute it accordingly. By year’s end, you will have helped support a dozen organizations in the areas you care most about.
The centerpiece of the Foundation will be a lively online community. Active members can join a social network and discussion forums centered on the ten categories of giving, upload videos, recruit new members, advocate for causes and help us choose the new beneficiaries each quarter. We’ll also create and host a multi-author blog of world-class contributors focused on the cause areas, as well as humanism, philanthropy, and the intersection of the two.
Carefully selected for impact and efficiency, the beneficiaries may be founded on any worldview so long as they do not engage in proselytizing. At the end of each quarter, 100 percent of the donations will be forwarded and a new slate of beneficiaries selected.
On the educational side, the Foundation will build the next stage in nonreligious parent education—a nationwide training program for parenting seminar leaders. We plan to have 30-40 people teaching nonreligious parenting seminars in cities across the country within a year.
We’ve begun assembling a stellar cast to guide the Foundation through its infancy. The Board of Directors includes Hemant Mehta (author, Friendly Atheist blogger, Secular Student Alliance board chair), Dr. Wayne Huey (ethicist, educator, author, former Georgia and U.S. High School Counselor of the Year), Trish Hotze Cowan (Sunday School Director, Ethical Society of St. Louis), and executive director Dale McGowan. (That’s me.)
The Foundation will launch in two stages. On October 1 we’ll unveil the pre-launch website, where members can begin setting up profiles and basic donations. On January 1, 2010, we will launch the full site, including the ten featured causes, all profile options, blog, social networking, and the means for members to select and change their preferred distributions.
We’re making no little plans here, and there’s the potential to do something pretty earthshaking. But this is a community thing, or it’s nothing. We’ll need your help.
> what you can do now
There are two ways to stay in the loop as we work toward the Foundation’s partial launch in October and full launch in January:
Facebook users: Click here to join the Foundation Beyond Belief group on Facebook Causes. No donation required — just keeping yourself in the loop.
Non-Facebookers: Click here to put your email on our mailing list.
Either way, sign up and we’ll keep you informed as it takes shape.
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1And the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, and the American Community Survey of the U.S. Census…the list goes on. The facts themselves are not in doubt.