bright kids

I'm always climbing up on my soap-box to rail about the reprehensible mental and emotional crippling of children through religious-ideological indoctrination. But what is to be done about it? Miso's question yesterday in A&S, followed by Lauren's & Matt's & Dean's reports, all underscore the urgency of freeing children from this persistent, insidious virus.

Here's important new video on empowering the next generations of free-thinkers, featuring Dan Dennett and others, at The Brights site. Let's give kids the tools they need to break out of unreflective conformism, and watch what happens. The rippling effects of a relatively few enlightened parents, nurturers, and educators taking the simple initiative of speaking honestly and plainly on this subject in public, in schools, and in our homes could be astonishing and game-changing. Why don't we try it and find out? The Parenting Beyond Belief movement, too, is making impressive strides in this direction. (PBB video)

I used to think Richard Dawkins was over the top with his "child abuse" charge, but no more. Dean described being led by his "youth minister" to draw images of himself in Hell, at age 10. If I learned that any adult had attempted to implant such horrific ideas in my daughters' minds, at that or any age, I'm very sure "abuse" would be one of the mildest epithets to come immediately to mind.

"Shiny, Happy Atheists"

Well written, Messrs. L.*

Why is it that we almost never see the noun “atheist” without some pejorative adjective like “dyspeptic,” which Judith Shulevitz shoehorns into her review of “The Faith Instinct” (Dec. 27)? Are the great majority of atheists really sour and sulky, angry and indignant?

Some unbelievers, uneasy at being the only group known by what it does not believe, have started the Brights, an organization that declares its faith in a natural world, without supernatural intervention. The atheist Einstein professed awe and wonder at this earthly home of ours, and I have not read a word of grump in anything he — or William Butler Yeats, or Matthew Arnold, or a number of other nonbelievers, have said. C’mon, play fair.

*RICHARD LETTIS
Ramsey, N.J.



(Re “Atheists’ Ad Campaign” (letter, Dec. 10), about the American Humanist Association’s ads:) Rather than continuing to remain publicly invisible, the association has recently been fulfilling its mission to raise the visibility and respectability of humanism through ads and other activities. Members of A.H.A. identify themselves in various ways — humanist, agnostic, atheist, freethinker and so on. Our ads reach out to kindred spirits to let them know that they are not alone in their nontheism.

Some people are “embarrassed” by the public acknowledgment that we are humanists. People of good will are not offended simply because others assert differing beliefs. I am not offended by those who say they are good because of God. Similarly, they should not object to others saying they are good without God. As long as we are all good, we can be united in our good works. And this unity is what A.H.A.’s ad campaign can accomplish.

*Mel Lipman
Las Vegas, Dec. 10, 2009
The writer is immediate past president of the American Humanist Association.

(published in the Times)

special dust

To the new atheists, the material world of physical beauty and the wonders of science are all the spiritual fulfilment they need. Dawkins writes that a ''proper understanding of the magnificence of the real world … can fill the inspirational role that religion has historically - and inadequately - usurped''.

Joel Kilgour refuses to describe himself as a spiritual person, but, ''if you ask if I have transcending moments, absolutely''. ''Sunset over the ocean, holding the hands of families or friends, looking into the face of my newborn niece … A lot of people claim spirituality for those moments … but I think people just like to feel they are special, that the universe was created specifically for them when, really, we're just a speck of dust.'' Michael Bachelard

Well, are we "just a speck of dust" any more than our planet is a speck of dust, or from a more distant vantage our sun or our galaxy or even our universe? The whole astonishing glorious spectacle of natural existence is wondrous, inspiring, magnificent, humbling, exalting... words do, really, pale.  Our own existence is a natural  miracle, and source of more "spiritual fulfillment" than any of us can adequately absorb.  Of course we're special.  Isn't that what Philip Pullman was talking about, with his "dust"? And Carl Sagan, with his "star-stuff"? And, with their clumsier way of re-branding, isn't that what the "Brights" are talking about too?

Dawkins, Dennett, & James on religion

Is religion one of our species' most valuable "springs of delight," even when it veers (as so often it does) into absurdity and unreasoning dogma? (I don't share Richard Dawkins' view that it pretty much lives there permanently, though he scores plenty of points in that direction in The God Delusion).

William James thought religion to be one of our most important cultural achievements, even while admitting the absurdity of its many and contradictory doctrinal intransigences. In Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) he defined religion as "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine." Elsewhere James wrote that religion is not about God, it's about life and our quest for a richer, more meaningful experience thereof.

By sharp contrast with James's neutrality about supernaturalism in religious persons' designation of their own sense of "the divine," Daniel Dennett in Breaking the Spell proposes to define religions as "social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought... a religion without God or gods is like a vertebrate without a backbone."

I confess some ambivalence about all this. I like the open-endedness of James's receptivity to all kinds of religions, which for him really was just a way of saying "hands off" other people's personal enthusiasms. But I also find myself cheering many of Dawkins' and Dennett's acid repudiations of casual supernaturalism and mysticism, their "Bright"-ness (see www.the_Brights.net).

I plan to discuss some of this tonight, when I teach the second and last installment of an adult evening (fundraiser) course at my kids' school. It'll probably come up in class this afternoon, too, at ESU (my particular Enormous State University) -- today's topic is "the problem of evil." That always provokes students' religious reflexes, and often instigates discord, not a bad thing in a philosophy classroom if it can be constructively harnessed. I look forward to good conversations today.