An Inconvenient Commandment
One of the common worries I hear from religious commentators about nonreligious people is the absence of a solid, reliable, unchanging moral compass. Lacking that…why, folks could make up the rules as they go along.
I’ve written about this nonsense before (“The red herring of relativism,” July 8, 2007), so I won’t go too deep into the silly idea that moral relativism follows from the absence of religious guidance. I’m more struck at the moment by just how quickly the “solid, reliable, unchanging moral compass” of religion is cast aside when it’s inconvenient.
The Ninth Commandment, for example — which prohibits lying, or “bearing false witness” — is taking quite a hit at the moment among the most fervently religious of my fellow Americans as the presidential campaign heads into the final weeks.
Some will note that all politicians lie, as if that makes my outrage moot. Even if that’s true, it seems clear to me that they don’t do it with equal abandon. Jimmy Carter, who found it difficult to lie, declared the country had fallen into a “malaise” and was booted for his honesty. Ronald Reagan followed up by declaring “Morning in America,” then ushered in the most corrupt and scandal-ridden Administration in memory.
Secular, un-compassed me is furious when my own party lies or cynically stretches the truth, which is little different. About a decade ago, the Democrats in my then-home state of Minnesota ran a television ad with a little girl struggling to read a sentence on a blackboard: “Republicans in the state legislature cut 32 million dollars from education funding.” A tiny asterisk led to the following at the bottom of the screen:
*(Cuts forced by Governor’s memo of 03/08/99.)
It flashed by too fast and small to read, which I’m sure was an oversight.
They were forced to do it by our governor, Jesse Ventura, an Independent. I dashed off an angry note to my state party, which thanked me for (and ignored) my petty plea for integrity.
Barack Obama has offered at least one wincing, bald-faced lie in this campaign when he claimed that his comment
“it’s not surprising then that [some voters] get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations”
was really just an acknowledgment that in tough times, people turn to “the things they can count on,” traditional values that “endure.” Even without the obvious disproof of this (anti-immigrant sentiment is an enduring value?), it was obvious to all but those blinded by bias on the left that he had meant something much less flattering. The original statement, though impolitic, was true; the cover-up was false, and that diminished him in my eyes.
The half-hearted, embarrassed reaction from much of the left at the time shows that liberals tend to wince when their candidates lie so shamefully. At the very least, we tend not to line up behind him or her and repeat the obvious lie.
See where I’m headed, do ya?
How many supporters of Sarah Palin’s candidacy are wincing with embarrassment at the astonishing, breathtaking stream of lies (both half and whole) coming from her and her surrogates in the past ten days? The Bridge to Nowhere (“thanks but no thanks”) lie is just one of a dozen or more towering fabrications that have again raised serious questions about not just our collective gullibility but also the willingness of the Right to bear false witness whenever it suits the needs of the moment.
There’s a term for this — situational ethics. It also goes by the name of moral relativism. And the fact that it displays itself so dazzlingly in conservative Christian evangelicals — those whose God devoted fully ten percent of his ethical instruction manual to forbidding it — should give any sane person pause before yammering on about the rock solid reliability of that unchanging moral compass.
When Charles Gibson asked Sarah Palin about the Bush Doctrine last week, any thinking observer could see that she had no idea what he meant. She paused awkwardly, then asked if he meant “[Bush’s] general worldview.” To cover themselves and perpetuate the larger lie that Palin is prepared for the national stage, the McCain campaign engineered a whopper: Palin knew the Bush Doctrine so well that she wasn’t sure which of its many facets Gibson wanted her to address.
And a shriek of needles on paper was heard across the land, and countless polygraphs now sit sweating in straitjackets, their needles quivering fearfully, humming “Give Me Some Truth” loudly to themselves for fear they will hear the Republicans say…it…again.
When (Roman Catholic) Sean Hannity interviews (Assemblies of God) Sarah Palin this week, there can be little doubt what they will do to their beloved Commandment. He will ask her (no doubt with “respect and deference“) about the Bush Doctrine, and she will faithfully parrot the lines she has learned since Thursday about its many, many facets, pretending to have known this all along, locking the inconvenient truth away with a click as decisive as the syllables of “Ahmadinejad” she had so faithfully learned the week before.
And afterward, all talk will be about whether she hit a triple, a home run, or a ground rule double, measured not against a standard of truth, nor what it takes to be Vice-President of the U.S., but against “expectations” and the dial-in-your-vote-for-the-next-American-Idol perceptions of three hundred million marionettes.
Maybe we can’t ask for an administration that doesn’t lie. I don’t know. But is it too much to hope for one that feels some semblance of shame when they do it?
[Your City Here] Power!
Okay, folks, I’m throwing out the old algorithm for scheduling the seminar tour. Finding out firsthand where the interested folks are is ever so much more fun, and much more likely to build successful events.
Since posting Wednesday about the blizzard of requests I’d had from Austin to bring the parenting seminar there, the storm front has widened. I’ve received requests from 27 cities in the U.S., three in Canada, and one each in Belgium and the Netherlands. Woohoo! Time to get my shots!
But five cities stood out:
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AUSTIN (44 requests)
PORTLAND, OREGON (18 requests)
CHICAGO (17 requests)
SEATTLE (17 requests)
NEW YORK (13 requests)
…so these folks are getting the first seminars in 2009.
If you’re in one of those cities and haven’t yet sent in your email address, please click on your city name above to do so. When the schedule’s set, you’ll be among the first to know. And I’d like to hear from anyone in those five cities who might be connected to a potential host organization that can provide the room and help with promotion. Click here to drop me a note.
Other places climbing the list:
ST. LOUIS and KANSAS CITY: I’m already in conversation with the Ethical Society of St. Louis and All Souls UU in Kansas City for a pair of Missouri seminars, probably in January.
FLORIDA: A good number of Florida parents have expressed interest. Unfortunately they are literally all over the map, in seven different cities. If any one Florida city can organize a strong enough blizzard of interest, I’ll point my Honda south.
ASHEVILLE/CHARLOTTE NC: About eight requests from western North Carolina. That’s a quick drive for me, so double that number and I’m there.
DENVER/COLORADO SPRINGS: Weather delayed my plane and forced the cancellation of my Colorado Springs seminar in June. We’ll get that horse back under sail soon.
MINNEAPOLIS (again), PHOENIX, and LOS ANGELES: I’ve received just a handful for each of these. I’ll need a larger indication of interest before I happily submit to the airport security cavity search for y’all.
And a few more remain to go in 2008:
CINCINNATI on September 20
IOWA CITY on September 27
DES MOINES on September 28
PALO ALTO CA on October 25
…and BOSTON on December 6, in conjunction with my Alexander Lincoln “Harvard Humanist of the Year” Lecture at Harvard. (Registration info to come.)
If you’d like to see the half-day seminar come your way, fill out the general request form and get other interested parents to do the same.
Here’s what some past participants have said about the event:
“Very positive, practical, humorous, ethical presentation!”
“Eye-opening, interesting…fascinating”
“Wonderful seminar, wonderful book!”
“Very powerful to be given these tools to help our children…fabulous!”
“I have never felt less alone. Thank you Dale”
“I wish we could have gone on all day!”
“An effective combination of humor and powerful information”
“The family spectrum exercise was so revealing. I don’t see myself as an island anymore”
“I came away with a more positive attitude about parenting than I can remember having, ever.”
“Exhilarating, informative, fun”
Put down the knife! Now back away, slowly…
The leaves are falling, temperatures are falling…and foreskins, apparently, are falling as well.
Circumcision is in the air! I received two emails recently asking for my thoughts on the procedure, both from fathers who are making the decision soon for a newborn son. Then yesterday I came across a very thoughtful post about it on the Domestic Father blog. He says most of what I would say, but I’ll go on the record here as well.
We had our son circumcised, and I wish we hadn’t. The question just snuck up on me in the form of a nurse and a clipboard when I was exhausted. “Most people do,” she said. Baaaaaa, I replied.
It was originally a religious ceremony, a (quite strange, if you think about it) symbol of faithfulness to God. But interestingly, circumcision was not common outside of Jewish and Muslim practice until the 1890s, when a few religious enthusiasts, including the strange character JH Kellogg, recommended it as a cure for “masturbatory insanity.” Kellogg spent much of his professional effort combating the sexual impulse and helping others to do the same, claiming a plague of masturbation-related deaths in which “a victim literally dies by his own hand” and offering circumcision as a vital defense. “Neither the plague, nor war, nor small-pox, nor similar diseases, have produced results so disastrous to humanity as this pernicious habit,” warned a Dr. Alan Clarke (referring to masturbation, not circumcision).
Given these jeremiads by well-titled professionals, the attitudes of American parents in the 1890s turned overnight from horror at the barbarity of this “un-Christian” practice to immediate conviction that it would save their boys from short and insane lives. It was even reverse-engineered as a symbol of Christian fidelity and membership in the church.
(Isn’t it a relief that we’ve left this kind of mass gullibility so very far behind?)
The supposed health benefits and other red herrings were created after the fact, in the early 20th century, to undergird sexual repression with a firm foundation of pseudoscience.
Anyone interested in the non-pseudo variety might look to the Council on Scientific Affairs, the American Medical Association, and dozens of similar organizations around the world who have issued statements calling the practice of circumcision “not recommended” because of associated risks. Others, including the British Medical Association, have articulated a slight possibility of slight benefits. Even so, The U.S. is the only remaining developed country in which the practice is still somewhat common — though many American HMOs no longer cover it.
The practice almost completely ended in the UK with the publication of a 1949 paper noting that 16-19 infant deaths per year were attributable to complications from the procedure.
One of my correspondents told me that “all the doctors we talk to say that it doesn’t matter one way or the other.” This seems to answer the question. No invasive medical procedure should be undertaken that does not have demonstrable benefits.
Add to that the strong possibility that sexual sensitivity is diminished, and I’d advise against it. It’s a form of genital mutilation, after all — just a more familiar one.
There’s also no rush. The boy can choose to go under the knife at 18 if he wishes. Considering just how likely that is should give any parent serious pause before greenlighting a pointless ritual relic when he’s an infant.
Austin Power!
- September 10, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In Parenting, PBB
25
I get occasional email questions about the nonreligious parenting seminar tour. It’s usually a request to bring it to a particular city, but once in awhile someone wants to know (as one gent put it) my “algorithm for selecting locations.”
Okay. I hesitate to give away too much to the competition, but here it is:
…where x=population divided by number of churches and A= “cheese.”
For some reason, the answer is always “Wisconsin.”
An apparent grass-roots effort in Austin, Texas now has me reconsidering this time-honored approach.
There’s a form on my Seminars page inviting folks to submit the name of their city or town to have it considered for the seminar tour itinerary. If I get a dozen inquiries from a given city, that’s a good indication that interest is high enough to consider an event there. I’ve received hundreds of inquiries from over thirty-five cities in the U.S., three in Canada, and one in The Netherlands.
I gave a talk in Austin in May, but not the seminar. Then three days ago, a request came in from Austin via that online form. And another. And another. In one two-hour period, I received fifteen messages. By last night I’d received thirty-two requests to bring the seminar to Austin. Woohoo!
Austin has now leapt to the tippy-top of the waiting list.
If you’re hoping to bring the seminar your way, you might consider the Austin technique. Each seminar takes an enormous investment of time and effort. Knowing that there’s an audience chomping at the bit makes it well worth it.
Click here for the Add Your City page, or here for the general description of the seminar. Get a gaggle of friends to do the same and believe me, you’ll get my attention. Austin sure did. Yeah, baby!
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IN OTHER NEWS…
A new category has opened up in the Parenting Beyond Belief Discussion Forum: POLITICS 2008! It’s a place to vent, exult, cathart, convince, discuss, or commiserate about this election season with other nonreligious parents. Local, state, or national. Any perspective welcome. No worries about relevance — this affects EVERYTHING else, so have at it!
Harvard honors the Sarah Palin of humanism
- September 09, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In Parenting, PBB
36
It’s always interesting when someone unexpectedly breaks from the backfield and grabs a high-profile plum from more worthy contenders. Dan Quayle, Harriet Miers, and Clarence Thomas leap to mind. Shakespeare in Love beating Saving Private Ryan for Best Picture, or Art Carney (!) beating Dustin Hoffmann, Jack Nicholson, and Al Pacino for Best Actor.
Sarah Palin recently joined the ranks of those unexpectedly thrust to the front of the line, to be met with a collective shout of “WHO??”
Now Harvard has given us another one.
Among many other fine programs and services, the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard University selects one person each year as Harvard Humanist of the Year — someone who has made a significant contribution to the promotion and understanding of humanism. The list of past recipients is impressive, including
Sociobiologist E.O. Wilson, author of Consilience, The Ants, and On Human Nature, winner of two Pulitzers, the Crafoord Prize, and the National Medal of Science;
Courageous Bengali human rights activist and feminist Taslima Nasreen, poet and essayist, winner of the Sakharov Prize and multiple international human rights awards;
UN Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire, a Canadian senator and humanitarian best-known for his attempts to halt the Rwandan genocide in 1993-94;
Rice University’s Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor of Humanities Anthony Pinn, author and Humanist liberation theologian;
Representative Pete Stark, the first openly-nontheistic member of the U.S. Congress.
This year, the good folks at Harvard chose someone so obscure that he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. Just think of that. Even Numa Numa Guy has a Wikipedia page.
Click here to see this year’s choice for Harvard Humanist of the Year.
Best Practices 1: Widening circles of empathy
[First in a nine-part series on best practices for nonreligious parenting.]
“I feel your pain.”
–BILL CLINTON at a campaign rally in 1992“We need to…pass along the value of empathy to our children. Not sympathy, but empathy – the ability to stand in somebody else’s shoes; to look at the world through their eyes.”
–BARACK OBAMA in a speech on Father’s Day 2008
In the Preface of Raising Freethinkers I offer a list of nine best practices for nonreligious parenting. The list is drawn largely from the growing consensus of nonreligious parents and grounded when possible in the social and developmental sciences. Between now and the release, I’ll try to draw attention to all nine. They are not commandments but an attempt to capture the consensus regarding effective practices. They’re intended to be the starting point of the conversation, not the end, carved in butter, not stone. So grab a spatula and shape away!
In today’s “On Language” column in the New York Times Magazine, William Safire identifies empathy as one of the buzzwords of the current campaign. He notes that the issue of whether a given candidate could really empathize with everyday folks is nothing new. George H.W. Bush was (unfairly, but effectively) excoriated for not knowing the price of a gallon of milk in 1992. John McCain’s uncertain number of houses is assumed to undercut his empathy quotient, as Obama’s Ivy education and taste for arugula are said to undercut his.
Safire echoes Obama’s distinction between empathy and sympathy:
If you think empathy is the synonym of sympathy, I’m sorry for your confusion. Back to the Greeks: pathos is “emotion.” Sympathy feels pity for another person’s troubles…empathy identifies with whatever is going on in another’s mind…The Greek prefix sym means “together with, alongside”; the verbal prefix em goes deeper, meaning “within, inside.” When you’re sympathetic, your arm goes around the shoulders of others; when you’re empathetic, your mind lines up with what’s going on inside their heads. Big difference.
We talk about empathy as if it’s either something magical or something that can be willed into existence by saying, in essence, “Feel empathy! It’s what good people do.” Empathy is neither as easy nor as hard as we make it seem.
One school of thought in psychology (Carolyn Zahn-Waxler, Nancy Eisenberg, et al.) suggests infants are largely self-centered, putting the first twitches of empathy between 18 and 36 months. Another (led by Harry Stack Sullivan, Martin Hoffman and others) has recently made a case for “infantile empathy” toward the mother — something that would certainly make sense.
In either case, by age three, kids are reliably exhibiting empathy, which Eisenberg defines as “an affective response that stems from comprehension of another’s emotional state or condition and is similar to what the other person would be expected to feel.”
That sentence might ring some bells if you’ve followed the recent work on mirror neurons. I wrote about this in July of last year:
In your head are neurons that fire whenever you experience something. Pick up a marble, yawn, or slam your shin into a trailer hitch, and these neurons get busy. No news there. But these neurons also fire when you see someone else picking up a marble, yawning, or slamming a shin. They are called mirror neurons, and they have the powerful capacity to make you feel, quite directly, what somebody else is feeling…The implications are gi-normous, since it means we’re not completely self-contained after all…
It takes very little to see, in this remarkable neural system, the root of empathy, sympathy, compassion, conscience, cooperation, guilt, and a whole lot of other useful tendencies. It explains my kids’ tendency to wither under disapproval…Thanks to mirror neurons, the accused feels the condemnation all the more intensely. Empathizing with someone else’s rage toward you translates into a kind of self-loathing that we call guilt or conscience. Once again, no need for a supernatural agent.
So what are those “ever-wider circles” about?
Our natural tendency is to feel empathy for those who are most like us. Empathy extends outward from Mom to the rest of the family to the local tribe — all those who look and act essentially like us. And I’d argue that moral development is measurable in part by how far outward your concentric circles extend. I encourage my kids not just to think about how a person of a different gender, color, nationality, or worldview feels or thinks, but to see themselves in that person — to get those mirror neurons dancing to the tune of a shared humanity.
And why stop at the species? One of the biggest implications of evolution is a profound connectedness to the rest of life on Earth. As a recent interviewer put it, “It seems like you could be positively paralyzed” by the realization that walking the dog, eating a burger, and climbing a tree is literally walking, eating, and climbing distant cousins. True enough.
I applaud religious ideas that reinforce and sanctify connectedness, as well as seeing self in others. “See the Buddha in all things” is an example. “Love your neighbor as yourself” is another. But so many traditional ideas — religious, cultural, political — instead draw lines between people, defining in-groups and out-groups and outlining colorful punishments for those on the wrong side of that line. Having “dominion over the earth” doesn’t help matters, and Deuteronomy and Revelation are dedicated almost entirely to defining, judging, and annihilating the hated Other. Bad news for empathy, don’t you think?
Free of religious orthodoxy, nonreligious and progressive religious parents alike can encourage their kids to push the concentric circles of their empathy as far and wide as possible. That includes, of course, people who believe differently from us. I don’t have to buy what their selling, nor do I have to refrain from challenging it. But I want my kids to work hard at understanding why people believe as they do. And if I expect it of them, I damn well better achieve it myself. Sometimes I do all right at that. Other times…meh.
So then…how are y’all doing with empathy for religious believers?