Atheism

“Let Them Make Up Their Own Minds”: Bringing Up Kids Without God

Greta Christina38 Comments

This one’s for everybody. But it’s especially for (a) godless parents, and (b) people who were brought up by godless parents.

It has to do with how to teach children about godlessness.

Argue
My parents were both agnostics. (A fact for which I am more grateful every week… whenever I read the sad and awful stories in the atheosphere about fights and rifts between atheists and their religious families. Both my blood relatives and my in-laws are non-religious, and while of course we have our conflicts, the fact that I’m a loud, outspoken atheist blogger isn’t one of them — in fact, it’s a source of family pride.)

Making_up_your_mind
But back to my parents. My dad actually became an atheist years before I did, my mom’s been dead for a long time so I don’t know what she’d be now — but when I was growing up, they were agnostics. And when it came to bringing us up, they were very much of the “let the kids make up their own minds about religion” camp. They were pretty clear about their own lack of belief — but they didn’t teach their non-belief to us in a dogmatic way; they exposed us to a certain amount of religion (occasional church with grandparents, mostly); and they made it clear that religion was something that was up to us to decide for ourselves.

All of which I’m grateful for.

But they also did something that I now think was a mistake. I’m sure it was well-intentioned, I can understand why they probably did it; but I do think it was a mistake.

They never explained to us why they didn’t believe in God.

Talking_with_kids
We barely discussed religion at all when I was growing up. (It’s not like it was a taboo topic or anything; it just rarely came up.) So I never really found out why my parents didn’t believe in God; what they had been taught as children, and why they left it behind. I knew they didn’t believe in God (they called themselves agnostic, but it was clearly the “you can’t be 100% sure of anything” version of agnosticism) — but I didn’t know why they didn’t. They never taught us that.

Crowleythothdeck
And I think that left me vulnerable to woo.

I’d picked up a natural resistance to conventional religion from my parents. But I didn’t have any natural resistance to Tarot cards, to reincarnation, to synchronicity, to trickster spirits, to the idea that the Universe arranged itself to teach me lessons about life.

Breakingthespell
Because while I wasn’t taught religious or spiritual beliefs, I also wasn’t taught critical thinking about religious or spiritual beliefs. I wasn’t taught about confirmation bias; about assuming the thing you’re trying to prove; about contorted apologetics and the human ability to rationalize just about any belief; about our tendency to see what we want/ hope/ expect to see; about our tendency to see patterns and intentions regardless of whether they’re there; about the problem with ideas that not only haven’t been tested but can’t be.

Capricorn
And so while I didn’t grow up believing in God, I also didn’t grow up understanding why belief in God — or Tarot, or astrology, or free will in subatomic particles, or whatever — was problematic. It took me years — many, many years — to figure out that, “God/ the soul/ etc. can’t be definitively disproven” didn’t mean, “It’s okay to believe anything I want.”

Years wasted believing an embarrassing assortment of stupid woo bullshit.

Dogma
Alas, I can’t ask my parents now what they were thinking back then, or why they did things the way they did. My mom has been dead for many years, and my dad’s stroke has left him pretty much incommunicado. But my guess would be that they didn’t want their godlessness to be dogmatic. They didn’t want us to be godless just because it was what they taught us. They wanted us to decide for ourselves.

All of which is admirable. All of which I get. I don’t think atheism should be taught to kids as if it were a fact they shouldn’t question, another true thing that your parents know and that you just have to trust. I think my parents were totally right about that.

Swimming_pool
But I also think that if you want kids to decide for themselves, you need to do more than just throw them in the deep end of the religion pool. I think that if you want kids to decide for themselves, you need to give them tools for critical thinking. I think it’s not enough to let kids make up their own minds about religion.

I think you have to teach them how to do that.

Brain_question_mark
But maybe there’s a fine line here. Maybe there’s no way to teach kids to think critically about religion without teaching them to be non-religious. Maybe there’s no way to teach kids, “It’s not okay to believe an idea that can never be tested” without teaching them, “It’s not okay to believe in religion.” And if you believe in letting kids make up their own minds about religion, I could see not wanting to do that.

So I’m curious. If you’re a godless parent, how do you handle it? If you were brought up by godless parents, how did they handle it — and how do you feel about it now? This is on my mind; I don’t have kids and don’t plan to, but I have kids in my life now, and I’m starting to think about it.

“Let Them Make Up Their Own Minds”: Bringing Up Kids Without God
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Carnivals: Humanist Symposium #12 and Carnival of the Liberals #53

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Carnival_1
Blog carnival time!

Humanist Symposium #12 is up at Evanescent! This is probably my favorite blog carnival of all, and I always look forward to it eagerly — it’s such a perfect refutation of the idea that atheism is a depressing, negative, self-centered philosophy. My pieces in this Symposium: “A Relationship Between Physical Things”: Yet Another Rant On What Consciousness And Selfhood Might Be, and If You Weren’t An Atheist, What Would You Be? My favorite other piece in this Symposium: On Patriotism at A Load of Bright.

And Carnival of the Liberals #53 is up at Neural Gourmet. This is their “Best of 2007” edition — and so I’m extra-special pleased and proud to be part of it, with my piece Good Cop, Bad Cop: Atheist Activism. My favorite other piece in this “best of the year” carnival: Was Martin Luther King, Jr. a terrorist? by Engage: Conversations in Philosophy.

If you’re a humanist or a liberal blogger and want to get in on the hot blog-carnival action, here are submission forms for Humanist Symposium and Carnival of the Liberals. Happy reading, and happy blogging!

Carnivals: Humanist Symposium #12 and Carnival of the Liberals #53

“Trusted adults, including priests, may be the abusers”

Greta Christina7 Comments

Cartoon
From USA Today comes this story about coloring/ comic books that the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York is handing out to children to warn them about sex predators. (Click on the image to see it in its full glory.) I quote:

The Archdiocese of New York is handing out coloring and comic books that warn children about sex predators, the first such effort by a U.S. Roman Catholic diocese. In the coloring book, a perky guardian angel tells children not to keep secrets from their parents, not to meet anyone from an Internet chat room and to allow only “certain people” such as a doctor or parent to see “where your bathing suit would be.” In a comic-book version for children over 10, a teenager turns to St. Michael the Archangel for strength to report that two schoolmates are being sexually abused. The books have been distributed to about 300 schools and 400 religious education programs to use as a resource. They also can be viewed online. Some critics, while applauding the intent, say the books should say explicitly that trusted adults, including priests, may be the abusers. (Emphasis added.)

My first reaction to the “some critics say the books should say explicitly that trusted adults, including priests, may be the abusers” part was this:

Gee, ya think?

In_the_shadow_of_the_cross
In the wake of a widespread global scandal about priests molesting children as a common occurrence — and the Church acting to cover it up, even when it meant exposing children to known child molesters — do you really think it might be a good idea to warn children that priests, specifically, are among the adults who might be sexual abusers?

Gosh, what on Earth might have made you think that?

(We need a sarcasm font. Imagine the above three paragraphs in a sarcasm font.)

But then, it occurred to me.

Ratzi
Of course the Catholic Church can’t tell kids that priests, specifically, might be abusers, and that they shouldn’t automatically trust them.

Once you start telling children that priests are fallible human beings and that you can’t necessarily trust everything they tell you…

…well, you see where I’m going with this, don’t you?

Breakingthespell
Once you start telling children that you can’t necessarily trust everything the priest tells you, you undermine the whole foundation of your religion. As Dennett and Dawkins and countless others have pointed out, the survival of religion depends on the indoctrination of children. The single biggest factor, by far, in predicting what religion you are is what religion you were brought up in. Children’s brains are designed, for very good evolutionary reasons, to trust what adults tell them. It’s like that Jesuit motto: “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.”

The perpetuation of religion depends, not only on teaching children your religion, but on teaching them that religious leaders and teachers are special and trustworthy, that they know more about God than the rest of us, and that they deserve a special level of respect and trust. If you tell children not to automatically trust priests, the whole house of cards falls down.

Betrayal_front
But it’s completely half-assed to to warn kids about generic abusers without pointing out that the adults most likely to abuse them are adults they know and trust — including parents, teachers, coaches, and, hello, priests.

This doesn’t read to me like taking responsibility for the sexual abuse scandal in the priesthood. It reads to me like PR. It reads to me like yet another case of the Catholic Church covering their own ass — at the expense of children’s actual safety.

“Trusted adults, including priests, may be the abusers”

Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness Against Thy Neighbor

Greta Christina23 Comments

New_life_church
I am getting so sick of this, I could spit.

Commenting on the recent shootings at the New Life Church — and on the bravery of one person who helped stop the shooter before he could do more damage — the Atheism Sucks blog comments thusly:

What would the atheist do in this situation but run away and scream, “Hey, survival of the fittest! See ya later suckers!”

And when confronted with atheists in the comments, pointing out that this is not even remotely how atheists think, feel, believe or act, the blogger, Frank Walton, still insists that his opinion of atheists and atheism is correct. To quote again:

The atheist can save a life if they want, but according to the atheist worldview man is nothing more than matter and motion – saving a human life is no more better than saving protoplasm.

Okay.

Deep breath.

Atheist_cartoon
I can understand this attitude from a theist who hasn’t spent any time talking with atheists. I can understand it from the theists who come into the atheist blogosphere without any previous knowledge or experience of actual atheists, who only know about atheists and atheism from the monstrous, pathetic picture their pastors or other religious leaders have painted for them.

But once you’ve actually spoken with a few atheists — once you’ve had, say, half a dozen atheists tell you, “Of course I treasure human life; of course I believe in ethics and altruism; of course I’m not nihilistic or amoral or hopeless or joyless” — then you don’t have any excuse.

Atheists_in_foxholes
You know that it’s not true. You have the evidence of thousands of people telling you, and showing you with the reality of their lives, that it’s not true. You have, just for example, atheist soldiers, atheist cops, atheist firefighters… all willing to risk their lives for their fellow humans on a daily basis.

And yet you still insist on saying that atheists don’t value human life; that atheists selfishly look after themselves at the expense of helping others.

So what I want to know is this:

Ten_commandments_monument
Whatever happened to “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor”?

Every now and then, I do an ego-Google search on my name. (No, this isn’t a tangent; stay with me.) And experience has taught me to search on my name plus the words “Comforting Thoughts.” Because a number of Christian ministers have been using my essay, Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing To Do With God, in their sermons — as an example of why atheism is a depressing, joyless, terrifying, nihilistic worldview.

How do they manage this, you may ask?

Gravestone
Well, they take the first part of the essay — the part where I try to be honest about the very real problem of permanent death and how frightening and paralyzing it can be — and they quote it out of context. They make it seem as if that’s the entire thrust of my piece. They conveniently neglect to mention the entire damn point of the essay… which is that, while the permanence of death may seem to be an impossibly horrible buzzkill for atheists, in fact it is not.

It is difficult to see this behavior as anything other than a flat-out lie. It is a deliberate misrepresentation of others, for the sole purpose of supporting your own world view.

And again I ask:

Whatever happened to “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor”?

Lies_lying_liars
Even I know that you shouldn’t bear false witness against your neighbor. Even I know that you shouldn’t intentionally tell lies about people; that you shouldn’t deliberately misrepresent other people’s actions and beliefs and opinions. And I’m an atheist. I don’t think it’s wrong because God told it to Abraham. I think it’s wrong because it hurts people needlessly.

How difficult is that?

Theatheiste
Is your belief that atheism is a joyless, heartless worldview so important to your faith that you have to deny the largely positive reality of atheist lives? Is your belief so important that you not only deny that reality in your own heart and mind, but feel compelled to convince others of it? Is your belief so important that you have to lie about that reality, not just to yourself, but to the rest of the world?

And is your faith so weak that it can’t accept the existence of people who don’t share it and yet have good, happy lives, full of meaning and connection and concern for others?

“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”

It’s not rocket science.

(P.S. Thanks to Susie Bright for the tip.)

Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness Against Thy Neighbor

Atheism in Pop Culture Part 7: The Motherlode

Greta Christina15 Comments

Tedwilliams
Ted Williams and Nina Hartley. David Cronenberg and Dave Barry. Brian Eno and Barry Manilow. Joss Whedon and Andy Rooney. Sarah Vowell and Ted Turner.

All atheists.

I’ve found the “atheism in pop culture” motherlode, people. It’s the Celebrity Atheist List, “an offbeat collection of notable individuals who have been public about their lack of belief in deities.”

And it’s hilarious.

It’s just such a fascinating mish-mosh. I’d be hard pressed to find any other characteristic that all these people have in common, apart from being carbon-based humanoid life forms.

Manilow
I mean — Barry Manilow?

Really?

And that’s what I like about it. It’s such a rich vein of counter-examples to the stereotype of atheists as sad, hopeless, amoral, unpatriotic, self-centered nihilists who only live for ourselves and only live for the moment.

Dave_barry
After all, are you really going to call Dave Barry sad and hopeless? Andy Rooney unpatriotic? Studs Terkel nihilistic? Salman Rushdie self-centered and amoral? Did Pat Tillman live only for himself? Does Barbara Ehrenreich live only for the moment?

Plus it’s just hilarious. I mean — Mickey Dolenz and Ingmar Bergman! Jean-Luc Godard and Ani DiFranco! Ray Romano and Marie Curie! Noam Chomsky and Bjork!

Hours of time-wasting fun. Check it out. And tell me who your favorites are!

Atheism in Pop Culture Part 7: The Motherlode

Carnival of the Godless #80

Greta Christina4 Comments

Carnival
Carnival of the Godless #80 is up at The Jesus Myth.

My pieces in this Carnival: True or False? Helpful or Harmful? The Two Different Arguments About Religion, and If You Weren’t An Atheist, What Would You Be?.

My favorite other pieces in this Carnival:

More Perspective on the Pledge from Atheist Ethicist — an absolutely brilliant “parallel universe” piece, reminiscent of Douglas Hofstadter, that makes vividly clear what, exactly, is wrong with the “under God” part of the Pledge of Allegiance. Pull quote: “Then, 50 years ago, Congress added the word white to the Pledge of Allegiance. We are supposed to be one white nation, indivisible.”

And The Grinch and the True Meaning of Christmas (plus the piece on Christmas traditions that it links to) from Letters from a Broad. She says a lot of how I feel about Christmas — both the fucked-up parts and the neat parts.

The next Carnival of the Godless will be on December 23. If you’re a godless blogger and want a piece of the carnival action, here’s the submission form. Happy reading, and happy blogging!

Carnival of the Godless #80

How Sweet the Sound: Atheism and Religious Music

Greta Christina41 Comments

Pesuasions
This weird thing has been happening since I started with the atheist blogging. I’m not happy about it, and I’m wondering if other godless people have experienced it — and if so, how you’ve dealt with it.

What’s happening is that I don’t want to listen to religious music anymore.

When a song about Jesus or God comes up on my shuffle, I feel this cringing, this little internal flinch. And I almost always skip past it.

Love_god_murder
It didn’t used to be that way. I was always able to just listen to the music, and either ignore the words or appreciate them as expressing a common human sentiment I didn’t happen to share. Like sad tortured love songs, or murder ballads. Unless the religious content was unusually heavy or actually offensive, I never even thought about it that much.

But since I’ve been spending so much time writing — and thinking — about atheism and religion, my feelings about religious music have become completely different. Not my thoughts, you understand, or my opinions. My thoughts and opinions about religious music are very much what they ever were. It’s a purely emotional response. The response is, “This is fucked-up. I don’t want to listen to this.”

And I don’t like it.

Anonymous_4
Some of my favorite music has religious content. I don’t want to not like it. I don’t want to flinch when I hear it. Some of the best music ever written is religious music. And there’s lots of it. I don’t want to be cut off from it all.

It’s especially a problem now because it’s Christmastime. And while I realize this makes me a total freak, I actually like Christmas carols. A lot of them, anyway. I don’t like the sappy Musak versions, or the drippy modern ones like (shudder) “The Little Drummer Boy.” But “Joy to the World”? “Angels We Have Heard On High”? “The Angel Gabriel”? That shit rocks!

I don’t want to not like Christmas music. I like liking Christmas music. I want to be able to hear it, and sing it, and be happy about it. And as much as I like the secular songs and the parodies, I don’t want to be limited to them.

Mozart_requiem
It’s not usually a problem if the music is in Latin or something; I can listen to Mozart’s “Requiem” happily and joyfully. It’s definitely the words that create the problem.

Which clues me in to why I think this is happening. Since I started atheist blogging, I read religious writing all the time. I read more religious writing than I have at any time in my life since I was a religion major in college. Way, way more. I read it, I think about it, I engage with it, I debate it — on an almost daily basis.

Sacred_harp
So now, when I hear, “Help me, Jesus, my soul’s in your hands,” or, “And when from death I’m free, I’ll sing on,” or, for fuck’s sake, “Oh come, oh come, Emmanuel/And ransom captive Israel” (my candidate for the most anti-Semitic Christmas carol ever)… it doesn’t make me think of country roads or street-corner choirs or snowy evenings by the tree with my family listening to the Time/Life Christmas record. It makes me think of Michael Behe, and Dinesh D’Souza, and whatever other lackwit is getting up my nose that week. I don’t want to sing along. I want to argue.

Nick_cave
But I’m really not thrilled about this. I’m very much hoping it’s a phase. Again, there’s a vast and wonderful world of religious music out there, and I don’t want to get annoyed every time I hear it. If I can happily listen to Smokey Robinson sing about loving a girl he doesn’t like very much, or Nick Cave sing about committing mass murder, I should bloody well be able to listen Johnny Cash or the Anonymous 4 sing about Jesus.

So I’m wondering: Have any of the godless people reading this blog ever had this happen? Did you get over it, or is it still a problem? How did you deal with it? This is bugging me, and any advice you can give would be greatly appreciated.

How Sweet the Sound: Atheism and Religious Music

Hopelessness, Stalinism, Yawn: Pope Ratzi’s Encyclical Against Atheism

Greta Christina9 Comments

Ratzi
It’s not like I expected the Pope to be gung-ho about atheism.

It’s not like I expected him to be all ecumenical and Unitarian about it. It’s not like I expected him to say, “We love our atheist brothers and sisters, and we think they make some good points, and everyone finds God in their own way, and as long as they live ethical lives they’re okay with us.” I’m not completely stupid.

Stalincult
But really. Is this the best he could come up with? This tired old crap? “Atheism is hopeless,” and “Atheism caused Stalinism”?

Here in the atheist blogosphere, we eat arguments like that for breakfast. (We’ll start the bidding at, “No, it’s not,” and, “No, it didn’t.”) Does he really think that’s original? Or, indeed, interesting?

So here’s what I actually did find interesting about the Pope’s recent encyclical about atheism:

True_or_false
It’s such a perfect example of the True or False? Helpful or Harmful? point I’ve been making — about how far too many religious debaters mix up the arguments about whether religion is true with the arguments about whether it’s beneficial.

I mean, look at it. In this encyclical, Pope Ratzi addresses one of the central atheist arguments for Why God Doesn’t Exist: the problem of suffering. He spells it out very eloquently, in fact.

The atheism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is — in its origins and aims — a type of moralism: a protest against the injustices of the world and of world history. A world marked by so much injustice, innocent suffering, and cynicism of power cannot be the work of a good God. A God with responsibility for such a world would not be a just God, much less a good God. It is for the sake of morality that this God has to be contested.

Yup.

I rarely say this, but the Pope sure got that right.

But his response? His response to this centuries-old argument against the existence of God?

Touch_of_evil
Atheism is bad.

Atheism is harmful.

Atheism is a philosophy that is devoid of hope; and atheism “has led to the greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice.”

Hope
I’m not even going to get into why atheism isn’t, in fact, a hopeless philosophy. I’m not even going to get into why atheism wasn’t responsible for Stalinism. Plenty of atheist writers, including myself, have addressed either or both of these questions in lavish detail. (For a couple of examples, here’s Ebon Muse on the hopelessness question and the Stalinism question.)

What I want to point out instead is that “Atheism is bad” is a lousy response to an argument for why God doesn’t exist.

Santa
In fact, it’s not even a lousy response. It’s not actually a response at all. It’s changing the subject because you don’t like where the argument is heading. It’s a classic example of an ad hominem argument, and a schoolyard one at that. “Dickie says Santa Claus isn’t real, and it’s just our moms and dads sneaking stuff under the tree.” “Yeah, well, Dickie is a nerd, and he made my sister cry.” Even if Dickie were a nerd, and even if he had made your sister cry, that’s hardly an argument for the existence of Santa.

Foucault
It was actually sort of disappointing. I mean, the guy is the head of one of the largest and most powerful religions in the world. He must have spent years — decades — studying theology and apologetics. And this is what he comes up with against atheism? Hopelessness, and Stalinism? Couldn’t he at least have come up with something original? Atheism will make you impotent? Atheism makes people root for the Los Angeles Dodgers? Atheism has led to deconstructionism, which is boring and impenetrable? Atheism is the reason the Earth will be burned up in five billion years?

I guess not.

Hopelessness, and Stalinism.

Pathetic.

Hopelessness, Stalinism, Yawn: Pope Ratzi’s Encyclical Against Atheism

“The Lord is spanking us”: An Update

Greta Christina4 Comments

Update:

A question had been raised as to whether the “Jesus spanking” cartoon in my “The Lord is spanking us” post was genuine or a satire. I did a little digging, and with the help of Google and Adele Haze (where I first found the cartoon) I discovered this:

No, the comic isn’t a satire. It was produced by The Family, a.k.a. Children of God, an abusive evangelical Endtime religious movement/ cult/ missionary organization. The cult was not only medically irresponsible; it was physically and sexually abusive as well, towards both adults and children. There’s a citation of this comic in this legal document; it’s 295 pages long, but it’s indexed, and you can find a reference to it at the top of the “Medical Neglect” section.

This is officially no longer funny. I feel bad now for thinking that it was.

“The Lord is spanking us”: An Update