My cover is blown
I get some doozies in my inbox, but yesterday brought something genuinely new — a message from a secular humanist who is concerned that I am too, uh…too…well heck, I’ll let you figure it out:
HELLO DALE AND ASSOCIATES, 14 OF APRIL IN 2009!
AFTER READING A BUNCH IN YOUR WEBSITE [PARENTINGBEYONDBELIEF.COM], I CONCLUDED THAT YOU HAVE NOT MOVED BEYOND “RELIGION” AT ALL OR NOT FAR.
“BEYOND BELIEF” I FOUND UNTRUE…..TRUE?I FOUND SEVERAL DECLARATIONS OF HOW YOUR “REALITY” IS.
YA’LL EVEN BORROW A FEW IDEAS FROM THE WORLD OF CONVENTIONAL “CHRISTIAN RELIGIOSITY”, I BELIEVE.
ARE YOU LOCKED IN THESE IDEAS – “GOOD” AND “BAD [EVIL]” , THE IDEA THAT “DEATH” IS REAL, ETC?
THE TAINT OF “RELIGION” IS SO PERVADING IN OUR WORLD THAT ITS SMELL OR IDEAS SNEAK IN ALMOST EVERYWHERE, I FIND.DO YOU REALLY TAKE PEOPLE IN YOUR SEMINAR TO A PLACE OF “AUTHENTIC FREEDOM”, I BELIEVE, THAT HAS A HUMAN BEING BE ABLE TO BELIEVE EVERYTHING AS “TRUTH” AND TEST EVERYTHING FREELY AND INDIVIDUALLY?
THEN, I BELIEVE, THAT THE “HIGH TRUTHFULNESS AND USEFULNESS” OF WHAT I CALL “HIGH TRUTHS” WILL BE PROVEN IN THE OUTCOMES OF OUR HOLDING THAT “HIGH TRUTH” AS A “FACT” IN THE FLOW OF LIFE THAT’S TRULY “LIFE-GIVING!”.
THERE ARE A LOT OF “LOW TRUTHS” THAT TEAR DOWN LIFE, BIND MINDS, DESTROY THE HUMAN COMMUNITY OF ONENESS, CREATE WAR, ETC.
THESE ARE USEFUL IN ONLY TEACHING WHAT’S NOT TO BE HELD, I BELIEVE, AS “TRUTH” FOR THE POOR RESULTS THESE “TRUTHS” PRODUCE.
ONE OF THE LOWEST TRUTHS IS THE IDEA HELD BY SOME THAT “I AM RIGHT AND YOU ARE WRONG”.
IS THAT THOUGHT IN YOUR MIND, WORK AND BOOK, DALE?ARE YOU A “CHRISTIAN RELIGIOUS INFILTRATOR”?
OR, HAVE YA’LL CREATED YOUR OWN “RELIGION” WE MUST NOW BELIEVE AND FROM WHICH WE MUST OPERATE IN LIFE?
OR, WHAT’S UP…….?DO YA’LL GIVE A REFUND FOR YOUR SEMINAR IF A CLIENT DOES NOT FIND IT ULTIMATELY USEFUL OR A NEW THOUGHT?
Finally, enjoy an excerpt of a recent talk by Joss Whedon:
The final passage gives Joss away as another member of my secret team infiltrating humanism with some perspective and empathy regarding religion. Put a blood pressure cuff on and check the dial as he gets to the final sentences:
The enemy of humanism is not faith. The enemy of humanism is hate, is fear, is ignorance, is the darker part of man that is in every humanist, every person in the world. That is the thing we have to fight. Faith is something we have to embrace. Faith in God is believing, absolutely, in something with no proof whatsoever. Faith in humanity means believing absolutely in something with a huge amount of proof to the contrary. We are the true believers.
I pledge-a yada yada
- April 11, 2009
- By Dale McGowan
- In humor, schools
- 14
Just back from a family week in D.C. We imposed on the hospitality of very good friends, both of them deeply impressive and humane people employed by admirable non-profits influencing public policy and making a difference in the world. The kind of people who make me feel (through no fault of their own) like I’m not doing nearly enough with my own limited time as a sentient thing to make said difference in the aforementioned world.
They have twin daughters on the cusp of eight, both of them funny and adorable and whip-smart. One evening the girls shared, in identical sing-song, their school’s morning ritual, which is led as in most schools today by a talking head on closed-circuit TV. In the process, they illustrated the pure pointlessness of such things:
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America,
and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God,
indivisible with liberty and justice for all, as a Belmont student
I promise to do my school work to the best of my ability,
I will be kind courteous, considerate and respectful
to other students and teachers, today’s lunch choices are.
Powering down
I’m unplugging for seven days of family time. Back on April 11. While I’m gone:
Then, and only then…power down yourself. Go outside. Have a day.
Not that it’s a competition, but…
…we have a winner.
In the past seven years or so, I’ve seen quite a few humanistic organizations from the inside — freethought groups, Ethical Societies, Congregations for Humanistic Judaism, UUs, etc. Met a lot of wonderful people working hard to make their groups succeed. All of the groups have different strengths, and all are struggling with One Big Problem: creating a genuine sense of community.
I’ve written before about community and the difficulty freethought groups generally have creating it. Some get closer than others, but it always seems to fall a bit short of the sense of community that churches so often create. And I don’t think it has a thing to do with God.
The question I hear more and more from freethought groups is, “How can we bring people in the door and keep them coming back?” The answer is to make our groups more humanistic — something churches, ironically, often do better than we do.
Now I’ve met an organization founded on freethought principles that seems to get humanistic community precisely right. It’s the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture (above), host of my seminar and talk last weekend, and the single most effective humanistic community I have ever seen.
So what do they have going for them? My top ten list:
10. A great space. Not every group can meet in a neo-Jacobean mansion with lions guarding the stairs, dark woodwork, high ceilings and art-glass windows—but too many groups meet in sterile, fluorescent-lit common rooms full of metal folding chairs and free of even a scrap of inspiration or warmth. Budgets are tight, but every group should do whatever it can to warm up the spaces in which they meet—curtains, wood, carpet, tablecloths, art, etc.
9. Music. When I walked into the Brooklyn Society, a member was playing showtunes on an old upright piano as people stood around chatting and laughing. Twenty minutes before the gathering began, they switched on a CD of jazz standards. Think of what music does for a dinner party, filling in gaps in conversation and casting a glow around the room. EVERY GROUP should have music playing 20 minutes before the meeting begins.
8. Food. Everybody loves to eat. All meetings should start with yummy food. Not a box of pink frosted cookies. Food, glorious food.
7. A call to action. Have a prominent display calling members to collective social action—a donation box, a chart tracking funds raised, a signup sheet for the next Habitat for Humanity day. Keep social action as prominent as any intellectual content. And make sure to include human-centered social action, like soup kitchens, food pantries, battered women’s shelters, etc. — not just trash pickup and book sales.
6. Ritual. (Uh oh, I lost half the audience.) Ritual doesn’t have to mean fuzzy-wuzzy woowoo. In the case of the BSEC, leader Greg Tewksbury started the gathering by yanking on a tubular wind chime that hung at the side of the lectern. He tugged it again at each dividing point in the gathering. Gives a nice sense of rhythm and structure.
5. Emotion. Freethought groups naturally like their intellectual content, but it frequently happens to the complete exclusion of emotional and inspirational elements. BSEC managed to include a constant feeling of emotional warmth without the slightest theistic feel. Since my talk was on parenting, Greg opened by asking those present to turn to the person next to them and share a time they nurtured someone or were nurtured by someone. Five minutes of discussion followed, centered not on debunking this or that but on human emotion.
4. Symbolism. Like the UU chalice, the two candles on the lectern were a clear reference to light, warmth, knowledge, and life. Adds a very nice touch.
3. Diversity. Most groups I’ve visited are 80 percent white male. They don’t want to be, but they don’t know what to do about it. It helps to live in a place like Brooklyn, which made for the most diverse crowd I’ve addressed in years. If you are elsewhere, do some outreach and networking to invite folks from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds to a meeting.
2. Multiple generations. I know, chicken and egg. But I cannot begin to tell you what a fabulous sense of community the Brooklyn Society gets from 20 kids running in and out among the legs of the adult members in the half-hour beforehand. And with kids come parents—people in their 20s-40s, another demographic missing from many freethought groups. Attract families by building community. Build community by doing what’s on this list.
Especially the next one.
1. A warm welcome. This is #1 on the list for a reason. It’s no surprise that we rational freethinking types aren’t generally good at sticking our hands out to welcome strangers into a room. I’m terrible at it. But there is no less welcoming feeling than entering a new space full of strangers without anyone saying word one to you.
This happens to me alllll the time as I travel around. I show up, walk in, and am promptly ignored. Ten minutes of awkward pamphlet reading later, someone finally walks up and asks if I’m new to the group.
Not at the Brooklyn Society. No fewer than five warm and pleasant people welcomed me in the first five minutes and chatted me up BEFORE they even knew I was the speaker.
The difference this makes is enormous. Every freethought group should find the person most comfortable with greeting fellow mammals and assign him/her to watch the door and enthusiastically usher newcomers in, show them around, introduce them to others.
And it needs to go well beyond one greeter. EVERY MEMBER of EVERY GROUP should make it a point to chat up new folks—and each other, for that matter. And not just about the latest debunky book. Ask where he’s from, what she does for a living, whether he follows the Mets or the Yankees. You know, mammal talk. (Now now…I joke because I love!)
Can’t manage everything on the list? No problem. Start with #1, then add what you can when and how you can. Before you know it, you’ll have a thriving, warm, humanistic community where people visit and then return, bringing their spouses and children and friends and neighbors. If I lived in Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture would get my sorry butt out of bed every single Sunday.
And that’s saying something.
pwned by the little sister
- March 30, 2009
- By Dale McGowan
- In humor, My kids
- 3
ERIN (11): What in the world is that?
DELANEY (7): What?
ERIN: Uh, the huge fancy book in your lap, hello.
DELANEY: Oh. It’s the bible.
ERIN: Why do you have the bible?
DELANEY: I’m reading it. It’s interesting.
ERIN: Yeah right, you’re reading the bible.
DELANEY: I’m not done yet. I just started today.
ERIN: Okay, then tell me what happpens first.
DELANEY: God makes light, then he splits apart the light and dark, then he splits apart the water from the land.
ERIN: I’m so sure. Lemme see that. (Flip flip flip. Flip. Flip.)
(Long pause.)
ERIN: Whatever. (Tosses bible back to beaming little sister. Fade to black.)
Of planets and pronouns
- March 25, 2009
- By Dale McGowan
- In My kids, Parenting, Science, wonder
- 21
I’ve spent a lot of virtual ink taking to task the College of St. Catherine (a Catholic college for women on whose faculty I spent many years) for the hypocrisy that eventually made me pull up stakes and go solo. But I don’t often enough mention the positive things St. Kate’s gave me.
St. Kate’s is where my interest in critical thinking turned from hobby to academic specialization to lifelong enthusiasm. It inspired the satirical novel that launched my little writing career. And it made me a genuine feminist.
Which is good, because now I find myself raising two girls, doing what I can to keep limiting assumptions from calcifying around them.
That takes some doing. Kids gather assumptions about the world by the bucket, taking tiny samples, believing most of what they hear or see, spinning huge generalizations, and moving on. You can bemoan or huzzah this all you want, but it’s both a fact and inevitable. I touched on this in Parenting Beyond Belief:
Children have the daunting task of changing from helpless newborns into fully functioning adults in just over six thousand days. Think of that. A certain degree of gullibility necessarily follows. Children are believing machines, and for good reason: when we are children, the tendency to believe it when we are told that fire is dangerous, two and two are four, cliffs are not to be dangled from, and so on, helps us, in the words of Richard Dawkins, “to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and our ancestors” in order to accomplish the unthinkably complex feat of becoming adults. The immensity of the task requires children to be “suckers” for whatever it is adults tell them. It is our job as parents to be certain not to abuse this period of relative intellectual dependency and trust. (p. 181)
Kids soak up unintended messages as reliably as the intended ones, and they don’t always announce it when they’ve begun to form a pearl around the grain of a new assumption. Once in a while I become aware that something’s been ingested that I didn’t know about. Like gender roles.
My favorite of these surfaced in the pediatrician’s office with Erin (now 11, then 8), waiting to see Dr. Melissa Vincent, her doctor since birth.
“I like Dr. Vincent,” Erin said.
“Me too.”
Long pause.
“But I was wondering something,” she continued. ” Can boys be doctors, too?”
I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Erin’s desire for a career in or near medicine had a lot to do with the example of Dr. Vincent. Currently at the top of her list is cellular biologist, followed by family practice GP in a small but not too small town.
Her sister Delaney (7) wants to be a scientist but isn’t sure what kind. (I tell her the clock’s ticking. “You don’t wanna be one of those pathetic third graders still wandering through the curriculum trying to ‘find herself.'”)
One of Laney’s common openers is, “Do The Scientists know how/what/why…” I think this disembodied image of The Scientists is pretty close to my own early image of science. I decided to try to individualize it more for her as we engaged the questions:
“How did The Scientists figure out what’s in the middle of the Earth if nobody’s even been there?”
“I’ll bet it started with somebody wondering about it, then maybe asking about it, just like you do. Then he thought about the problem, and how you can learn about something you can’t see.”
(Dammit! Did you catch that? Shitshitshit.)
I had her close her eyes. “How can you learn about my face if you can’t see it?”
“I have no idea.”
“Sure you do.”
“I could peek,” she giggled.
“Cheaters rarely prosper. So you think maybe the scientist peeked at the earth’s core?”
“Dad, jeez. Oh wait, I have an idea!” She extended her hands and began exploring my face. “Pokey,” she said when she got to the beard. “You’re a porcupine!” said the blind man to the elephant.
(Or blind woman! Shitshitshit.)
Yesterday she asked if The Scientists have found any planets like Earth yet. Last summer I told her about the search and described the extremely cool inductive method used to find gas giants (Jupiter-plus sizes) by measuring tiny eccentric wobbles in their home stars — a method that has turned up 344 extrasolar planets in ten years.
Number of known planets outside our solar system 15 years ago: 0
At the time, Laney had signaled her agreement that this constituted one of the most paradigmatically significant discoveries in human history by declaring it “so awesome to think about” — but was sorry the method couldn’t locate smaller, rockier bits like Earth.
Now she was checking to see if we’re closer to finding fellow Earths. Thanks to a NOVA podcast I heard a few months ago, I knew we were.
I simplified it into a graspable narrative. “One of the scientists got a great idea. If a planet crosses in front of its star, that star would dim a tiny bit…you know, like a fly passing in front of a light bulb.”
She started to tremble with excitement, doing this weird hand-flapping thing that is endemic to our family. “Yeah? And??” Flap-flap-flap.
“But she realized we needed a much stronger telescope, one that…”
“SHE?” Laney interrupted. “The one who figured it out was a girl??” Flap-flap-flap!
“Uh…I think so, yeah!”
Now the fact is, there wasn’t any one person — there rarely is — and I have no idea whether those involved had knishes or putzes. But I knew she wouldn’t have blinked if I said “he,” which means I’d uncovered a potentially limiting assumption — hopefully before the pearl could form.
I went on to tell her about the Kepler telescope, launched earlier this month (to almost universal public disinterest) for the primary purpose of finding other Earths. She dubbed it “so awesome.” And maybe the Kepler, connected in Delaney’s mind to a woman of science, will become a useful grain of sand as she continues to form her own possibilities.
_______________________________
NOVA podcast “Finding Other Earths” (4:44)