the mix
You’ve got to be taught, before it’s too late
Before you are six or seven or eight
To hate all the people your relatives hate
You’ve got to be carefully taught
____________________
From the musical South Pacific
Explain to me if you will why I wrote this post, then tabled it for ten days, then paused over the delete key before finally posting.
Our three summer family reunions were terrific, especially for the kids, who have discovered or re-discovered no fewer than 50 cousins of various degrees of remove. Better yet, these cousins are good kids, enjoyable kids, funny and friendly and loving kids.
And ohhh so very religious. Which is fine, of course.
Becca and I are the dolphins in the tuna nets of our respective families. Most all of the relations on all three sides are not only churchgoing but fish-wearingly, abstinence-swearingly, cross-bearingly so. The fact that most of them are also genuinely delightful to be around — funny and friendly and loving — serves as a nice slap on my wrist any time I find myself lumping together all things and people religious.
How can I not love it when my twelve-year-old second cousin, working on a leather bracelet, asks, “Mister Dale, how do you spell ‘Colossians’?” (I nailed it.) Or when Becca, watching another young cousin making a wooden picture frame with the letters JIMS across the top, innocently asked, “Is that for sombody named Jim?” only to be told patiently that “it stands for ‘Jesus Is My Savior’.” It’s sweet. It’s lovely. Creepy-lovely, perhaps…but that’s a kind of lovely, isn’t it?
When it comes to assessing the many conservative religious folks in my life, though, there’s a complication, one that still makes me dizzy after all these years. It was captured by (of all people) Larry Flynt, who wrote in the LA Times about his unlikely friendship with Jerry Falwell after the televangelist’s death last year:
My mother always told me that no matter how repugnant you find a person, when you meet them face to face you will always find something about them to like. The more I got to know Falwell, the more I began to see that his public portrayals were caricatures of himself. There was a dichotomy between the real Falwell and the one he showed the public.
The same weird dichotomy is present in many of the deeply religious folks I know. Many are just plain good in word and deed, and I love having their influence in my kids’ lives. But many others, including some I like so much I could burst, will be in the midst of a perfectly normal conversation, then suddenly spew bile or rank ignorance — often without changing expression — before turning back to the weather or the casserole.
It’s not a case of some believers being lovely and others being nasty. That I could sort out. It’s much more confusing. Like Larry said of Jerry, they’re often the same people. But in the case of folks I know, it reveals itself in the opposite order of Flynt’s description. I liked them from the beginning, then was blindsided by the nastiness.
The conversation at one reunion found its way to gays and lesbians, and a cousin — one of my favorites, a deeply religious college graduate and the pick of the litter — suddenly said, “What kills me is when they say [homosexuality] shouldn’t be treated. Well if that’s the case, why treat schizophrenia? Why treat cancer?”
All heads nodded but mine. I was searching for the perfect line. Finally it came. “And what about the lefthanders?” I said. “And those got-dam redheads, roaming the streets untreated!”
They laughed, not quite getting it, and the topic quickly moved on to (if I remember correctly) boat motors.
I find myself related by blood or marriage to several ministers, including a couple who are among my favorite people on Earth, open and honest and deeply humane, without a shred of pretense. There’s another of whom I’m very fond as well, but in him we encounter The Mix. A quickish wit, he spends most of his time trying to make other people laugh. But when the conversation turned to the war and someone had the gall to mention the deaths of innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, he erupted:
“Oh innocent civilians, innocent bystanders, boo hoo! First of all, they’re not so innocent. Second of all, this is war! If you are my enemy, I’m not gonna shoot you in the leg, I’m not gonna shoot you in the arm…I’m going to put one right between your eyes. I’m going to annihilate you. And the sooner I do it, the sooner the world will be safe for God’s people.”
Several kids were sitting in earshot, getting themselves carefully taught. I was livid. “Now there’s a man of God!’ I said. “Hallelujah!”
Beloved Relation looked me in the eye, momentarily wordless, then decided to play it for comedy. “Just like the old days!” he bellowed. “Kill a Gook for Jesus! Kill a Commie for Christ!”
Nice.
Anybody wish to guess the denomination that would have a minister playing so fast and loose with the Sixth Commandment, not to mention the Beatitudes? Yes, you in the back, Reverend Falwell — what’s your guess?
I listened to two high school teachers bemoaning their “lazy Mexican” students. “It’s like an entire culture of unaccountability,” one said. “And if I say a word about it, I’m a racist!” The other couldn’t agree more. “Joo can’t say dat to me, joo ees raceest,” she mocked, and they laughed. I also heard them both bemoaning the posture, attitude, and irresponsibility of their non-Mexican students, but in those cases, it’s because they’re teenagers. For the Mexican kids, the same behaviors are attributed to Mexicanness. One group of sinners, in other words, is unforgiven.
On the ride home from one of the reunions, Erin told of a cousin she idolizes saying “I hate Democrats!” then informing the rest of the group in a whisper that Obama is “a Muslim.”
My kids are plenty old enough to pick up on these things. Connor was nine when he asked, “Why does [Beloved Relation X] hate A-rabs so much?” with the requisite long ‘A’. In answering such questions, I find myself struggling more than anything with The Mix, trying hard to emphasize the positive qualities of religion, to keep them away from the broad brush, to remember that we are all a Mix, to not to create my own category of unforgiven sinners. Again — many of the religious folks in their lives are wonderful, kind, and ethical. But I can also say, with honest regret, that the greatest poison my kids hear comes from fervently religious people they know and love.
Why is that? (he asked rhetorically). And why am I so damned hesitant to point it out?
not just another day
A few months ago I caught sight of a forehead-thumpingly dumb initiative called “Just Another Day,” an attempt by some atheist activists (including the usually level-headed Ellen Johnson) to encourage nonbelievers to treat the presidential election of November 4 as “just another day” by refusing to vote. The candidates are climbing over each other to pander to the faithful, went the reasoning, and until they begin to represent my interests as well as those of the religious majority, I’m taking my cool Pee-Wee Herman action figure home where no one else can play with it.
Solid proof that the religious have no monopoly on delusion and self-satire.
The initiative now seems to have been scrubbed from the Internet — no small feat. I can find no trace. And that’s good, because although both major candidates are indeed playing up their supercalinaturalistic bona fides, one of them has distinguished himself with comments like this:
If you have not heard this unprecedented, jaw-droppingly, hair-blow-backingly brilliant speech, here’s a longer clip. (I’ll paste it at the end as well.)
And then we have business as usual. (Is it true that we blink more rapidly when we know we are not being truthful?):
So one candidate appears to have read and understood the Constitution and (better yet) to have internalized its implications and its spirit, while the other has apparently read Chuck Colson.
Regardless of Obama’s personal religious beliefs, I find his grasp of this issue incredibly encouraging. I don’t need a president who shares my every view. I would like one with a solid handle on the principles on which the nation is predicated. And if I’m not mistaken, I’ve found one. So I’ll be in the sandbox with the rest of you on November 4.
And yes, you can play with my Pee-Wee.
__________________________________
A five-minute clip of Mr. Obama’s speech. Do not pass go until you hear it.
believe you me
The Meming of Life is back in the saddle after the third and final family reunion of the summer. The blog’s new look should be online shortly. Nine days from now, we will hear an alarm clock for the first (damn) time in three months as school resumes. Today my boy comes of age, beginning a year-long project that (should he choose to accept it) will culminate in a celebration, special gifts, new rights, and new responsibilities as he enters high school.
Posts to come on all of the above — but for now, let’s ease into August with something I’ve wanted to feature for some time…
I suggest in the seminars that nonreligious parents do what they can to make beliefs a normal topic of discussion in their extended families. Not that it is in mine — my poor dear relatives seem positively constipated on the topic of religion since my book came out. I think they’re hoping to avoid offending me, not realizing that (1) I am pert near unoffendable, and (2) I would be delighted if our differences could be openly acknowledged and we could talk to / joke with /challenge each about something more interesting than truck transmissions and Dancing With the Stars.
One guaranteed conversation starter is the Belief-O-Matic Quiz at Beliefnet.com. Take the quiz, talk about your results, and invite other family members to do the same.
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 tell you what church you should be going to. If any.
Email all family members the link before your next gathering.
My most recent result:
1. Secular Humanism (100%)
2. Unitarian Universalism (92%)
3. Liberal Quakers (76%)
4. Theravada Buddhism (73%)
5. Nontheist (73%)
6. Neo-Pagan (65%)
7. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (59%)
8. New Age (49%)
9. Taoism (47%)
10. Orthodox Quaker (43%)
11. Reform Judaism (41%)
12. Mahayana Buddhism (41%)
13. Sikhism (32%)
14. Jainism (30%)
15. Bahá’í Faith (30%)
16. Scientology (28%)
17. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (27%)
18. New Thought (25%)
19. Seventh Day Adventist (22%)
20. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (20%)
21. Hinduism (20%)
22. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (20%)
23. Eastern Orthodox (18%)
24. Islam (18%)
25. Orthodox Judaism (18%)
26. Roman Catholic (18%)
27. Jehovah’s Witness (13%)
Now tell me that’s not a fun and interesting conversation starter.
In addition to being awfully Buddhist, I’m apparently less Jewish now (18 percent) than I was three years ago (38 percent) but slightly more Catholic (18 vs. 16 percent). And this is the most interesting feature of the quiz — the revealed common ground.
Even so, comparing results between people can carry a very different message. Just for sport, I took the quiz answering as if I were a Baptist evangelical:
1. Eastern Orthodox (100%)
2. Roman Catholic (100%)
3. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (99%)
4. Jehovah’s Witness (87%)
5. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (83%)
6. Seventh Day Adventist (80%)
7. Orthodox Judaism (79%)
8. Islam (70%)
9. Orthodox Quaker (67%)
10. Hinduism (59%)
11. Sikhism (51%)
12. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (40%)
13. Bahá’í Faith (37%)
14. Jainism (37%)
15. Reform Judaism (30%)
16. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (21%)
17. Mahayana Buddhism (21%)
18. Theravada Buddhism (21%)
19. Liberal Quakers (20%)
20. Scientology (19%)
21. Nontheist (18%)
22. Unitarian Universalism (16%)
23. New Thought (15%)
24. Neo-Pagan (8%)
25. New Age (4%)
26. Taoism (2%)
27. Secular Humanism (0%)
Have the heart pills ready when Born-Again Grandma finds out she’s 70 percent Islamic.
It might seem surprising at first that Catholic and Conservative Protestant come out so close, but the differences in the two, like the devil himself, are primarily in the details. The quiz goes after foundational worldview questions, not the piles and piles of minutiae that kept the two at each others’ throats for so many centuries.
But take a look at the gap between conservative Christianity and secular humanism. It’s true that the churched and unchurched share an incredible amount of common ground as human beings, but when it comes to the worldview questions around which the quiz is built, a chasm opens. In the great metaphysical Q&A, my conservative relations and I share between zero and 20 percent.
So while we’re celebrating the humanistic ties that bind us, it doesn’t hurt to recognize the challenge faced by bridge builders on both sides.
Perhaps the most revealing result of the two lists is where mainline-to-liberal Christianity falls on each. I share 59 percent with the average liberal Christian, while our hypothetical conservative Baptist shares 40 percent with the liberal Christian. Mainline-Liberal Christians have a good deal more in common with secular humanists than they do with Pat Robertson and Benedict XVI. Both humanists and liberal Christians would benefit enormously from recognizing, and building on, this large overlap.
The humanistic hell that is Norway
As we pull together Connor’s coming of age process for the coming year, one country keeps popping its blonde head into the frame–Norway. No surprise: Norway is among the least theistic countries on Earth and has the longest continuous history of humanist coming-of-age ceremonies. I mentioned this in passing late last year:
One of the most marvelous and successful [humanist coming-of-age] programs in the world is the Humanist Confirmation program in Norway. According to the website of the Norwegian Humanist Association, 10,000 fifteen-year-old Norwegians each spring “go through a course where they discuss life stances and world religions, ethics and human sexuality, human rights and civic duties. At the end of the course the participants receive a diploma at a ceremony including music, poetry and speeches.” They are thereby confirmed not into atheism, but into the humanist values that underlie all aspects of civil society, including religion.
As for Norway itself, I could go on and on. It is among the nations with the lowest rates of crime and poverty while topping the developed world in generosity and nearly all standards of living. Yet fewer than 10 percent of Norwegians attend church regularly.
I’ll let Russell’s Teapot take it on home:
[CAVEAT LECTOR: The cartoonist has overreached a bit here. Sixty-eight percent of the Norwegian population self-identifies as nontheistic. A much smaller percentage (around 10 percent) self-identify as atheists. Hat tip to MoL reader Ellen!]
guessing games
There is a game that my girls (10 and 6) play at great length. One of them puts her hands over her eyes and asks, “Are my eyes open or closed?”
The guesser stares at the back of her sister’s hands. “Uhhhh…open!” at which point the first one pulls her hands away to reveal, most often, closed eyes.
I hate this game.
I hate it because even if everyone is rigorously honest (pfft), there is literally no way to know in the first place. The guess is necessarily, definitively wild. The only honest answer is “I have no idea, go away.”
Once in a while, forgetting my opinion on the matter, one of them will turn the latest version on me. “Daddy,” Laney will say, hands behind her back, “guess whether my fingers are crossed!”
“Go far away.”
“Just guess!”
Just guess. I only like educated guessing. I like looking at scraps of information and trying to tease out the answer to a puzzle. That’s fun. But in this case she’s essentially saying Take a random stab at it, based on nothing. Say the first thing that comes to mind. Go with your gut. Reach out with your feeeelings. Use the Force, Luke. I don’t wanna.
As Malcolm Gladwell illustrates in the fascinating (though subtitularly offputting) Blink — The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, what we call “going with your gut” can actually be effective when there are data. We often make decisions in a blink that turn out to be informed by evidence that we perceived but didn’t consciously process. Gladwell goes to great lengths to note that what we call “intuition” is not magic — it’s regular old cognition, just quick and subconscious.
I usually end up playing along with the girls, just to be Mr. Daddy Fun Fun, but I quit after two or three rounds because the whole idea of pretending I have a clue when I have none irritates me. It just does.
Becca went through a period of playing the same game when pregnant with each of our kids. In the dark of our room, three minutes after the light went out, her voice would suddenly pipe up: “Do you think it’s a boy or a girl?”
“Well of course.”
“Which one?”
“Oh, which one? No idea.”
“Just guess, silly!”
“…”
I guess I didn’t care enough about being Mr. Husband Fun Fun to play along. She got her revenge, though. The girls learned the game in utero.
is nothing sacred? epilogue
I recently offered my thoughts on the difference between pointless and pointful challenges to sacredness:
Why does the David Mills video I’ve denounced strike me instantly as a profoundly stupid gesture, while [Webster Cook’s removal of a communion wafer from a mass] strikes me just as instantly as an interesting and thought-provoking transgression?
The reason, I think, is that the act of crossing the church threshold with that wafer (whether he intended this or not) is a kind of Gandhian gesture. Doing something so seemingly innocuous and eliciting an explosive, violent, even homicidal response is precisely the way Gandhi drew attention to cruel policies and actions of the British Raj, the way black patrons in the deep South asserted their right to sit on a bar stool, while whites (enforcing a kind of sacred tradition) went ballistic….
Mills’ feces-and-obscenity-strewn video, on the other hand, had offense not as a byproduct but as its intentional essence. Of Cook, one can say, “he just walked out the door with a wafer,” and the contrast with the fireworks that followed is clear. But saying, with sing-song innocence, that Mills was “just smearing dogshit on a book while swearing, gah,” doesn’t achieve quite the same clarity. Even though it shares the act of questioning the sacred, it’s much less interesting and much less defensible.
When PZ Myers of the science blog Pharyngula made known his intention to desecrate a communion wafer, I held my breath a tad, wondering which way it would go. Would he do something stupid or something thought-provoking? Pointless or pointful?
Now Myers has made his gesture — and I couldn’t be more thrilled:
This fascinates me even more than Wafergate because it is so achingly close to the Mills’ video on the surface, yet light years away in substance.
Had Myers theatrically smashed a pile of communion wafers with a hammer while laughing hysterically, he’d have undercut his own point that it is just a “frackin’ cracker.” Instead, he made use of that old and brilliant insight that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference.
So he quite simply threw it out, along with the coffee grounds.
Granted, he put a nail through it, a subtle and ironic comic touch that I’m doomed to love. But the real brilliance is in the background. Myers has also thrown out pages of the Koran and The God Delusion. He isn’t allowing anything to be held sacred. ALL ideas must be exposed to disrespect, disconfirmation, and disinterest. The good ones can take the abuse, and the bad ones, to quote Twain, will be “[blown] to rags and atoms at a blast.” If instead we shield a set of beliefs or ideas from scrutiny or attack, the bad bits survive along with the good.
Myers is also making the important point that these are NOT ideas in the garbage — they are paper and wheat, which must not be confused with the things they represent any more than a flag should be revered in lieu of the principles for which it stands.
Toss in a wink at Ray Comfort’s banana argument against atheism and the whole tableau simply rocks with meaning, power, humor and intelligence. And pointfulness.
Myers’ post is long, but please take a few minutes to read it. I can’t recommend it highly enough for its provision of context and just plain smarts. The final paragraph drives it all home:
Nothing must be held sacred. Question everything. God is not great, Jesus is not your lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet. You are all human beings who must make your way through your life by thinking and learning, and you have the job of advancing humanities’ knowledge by winnowing out the errors of past generations and finding deeper understanding of reality. You will not find wisdom in rituals and sacraments and dogma, which build only self-satisfied ignorance, but you can find truth by looking at your world with fresh eyes and a questioning mind.
When it comes to challenging sacredness, if I can get my kids to grasp the difference between Mills and Myers, I’ll count myself proud.