How can you easily spot religion in science clothing? According to New Scientist book review editor Amanda Gefter, look for these code words:
"Did you know there's totally science behind muffins? Totally ruined muffins for me." Ah, the wisdom of youth. That particularly large & shiny pearl came from a blazered private school girl of perhaps 15 who I was standing next to (almost on top of) on my Connex-brand cattle-truck - I mean, "train" - this morning. Girl Student (henceforth "GS") was bemoaning the fact that in her cooking class her teacher explained that the release of carbon dioxide during the cooking process was responsible for the rising of muffins and for the tiny little pockets of air that end up being formed in all things baked. So, in response to this new but unwanted & unwelcome knowledge, GS now proclaims her hatred for - or at least new found apathy toward - the little round cakes she used to love. Naturally, her comment got me thinking. Does GS approach every mundane mystery in her life in such a manner? Would she disavow Myspace if she figured out that barely any of those seventeen thousand and eighty-four "friends" of hers actually qualified for such a title? Would she stop catching the train if she knew a tad more about electricity? What if she found out what keeps planes in the air? Sweet flaming crikey, no more summer trips to the Whitsundays then (probably a good thing, it'd totally suck to find out how that big hot disc in the sky is making you slightly darker). Safer stuck at home I guess, with just the TV/Wii/Blu-Rayer/microwave/mobile phone for company ... on the other hand, perhaps not. Perhaps all those modern wonders are just a fresh crop of parades waiting to be stripped of their brilliance by the acid rain of knowledge. You never know what awful, awful knowledge might leach into your brain if you sit on the remote and accidentally switch to the Discovery Channel.
In the shadow of all the antivax buzz lately, I'd like to recommend a process of intellectual inoculation for children. This post is based on Best Practices 5: Encourage religious literacy from The Meming of Life. It illustrates the benefit of teaching your children about religion, to protect them from its excesses. McGowan argues that parents who want their kids to follow in their secular (agnostic/atheist/ignostic/etc) footsteps should not obsessively protect them from all exposure to the churchy crowd. Rather one needs to gradually expose them to doses of gentle strains of all the relevant faith memes. If not, they will be vulnerable to the first virulent strain to come along when they begin independent thought, and have a "teen epiphany". (Excerpt)
Struggles with identity, confidence, and countless other issues are a given part of the teen years. Sometimes these struggles generate a genuine personal crisis, at which point religious peers often pose a single question: "Don't you know about Jesus?" If your child says, "No," the peer will come back incredulously with, "YOU don't know JESUS? Omigosh, Jesus is The Answer!" Boom, we have an emotional hijacking. And such hijackings don't end up in moderate Methodism. This is the moment when nonreligious teens fly all the way across the spectrum to evangelical fundamentalism.
A little knowledge about religion allows the teen to say, "Yeah, I know about Jesus"-and to know that reliable answers to personal problems are better found elsewhere.
It is best to start early. Bedtime stories should have consistency for the comfort of the child, and variety to hold the interest of the child. Maybe do a month of "how we got here" stories from various cultures. Kipling, Torah, Norse, Navajo, Hindu, and so on. Show the richness of cultures and the similarities of ideas that underlie all the world religions. But parents need to be prepared. Learn about oral traditions and the power of mythos. Read Joseph Campbell , Homer , and The Arabian Nights . Know of Gilgamesh and Beowulf and Odin , the Ring of the Nibelungen and the Bhagavad Gita , and certainly know the current local favorite, the Torah .Here's what often happens when you videotape police. The priest who tried to videotape this incident eventually got his camera back, which is more than you can say for many other folks who have tried to photograph law enforcement officers in public places. Here's a related post dealing with threats of arrest for taking photos in public places. And be careful when you consider blogging about your First Amendment rights, especially when arrogant judges get wind of it.
Have you ever wondered what it is like to learn how to run a prison, you should check out this video: This Bureau of Prisons video has become public in an unusual way. It was part of a huge grab of "free" public records that was obtained then made much more accessible by two activists. The story is told here, and is close to my heart because it involves criticism of the enormously clunky PACER system, which contains all federal case filings. The activists decided to download all of the recent cases on PACER in order to make them more accessible. They were in the process of doing that when the federal courts shut them down. Fascinating stuff. They also obtained government videos that they've collected into "FedFlix,"
a growing archive of many films originally produced by the federal government, which he’s been uploading to the Internet Archive and a YouTube channel.
The 524 films in the FedFlix catalogue so far include such gems as “Sludge Management,” “Welcome to the Bureau of Prisons!” “Foreign Lottery Scams,” “(Motorola Presents) Atomic Attack,” battle footage and training films from World War II and Vietnam, and the Cold War classic “Duck and Cover” [starring "Bert the Turtle"].
Does the word "propaganda" come to mind when you're viewing any of these? For a lot more information, visit the activists' website, Public Resource.