Information Reliability. This is a pet peeve of mine. Stephen Jay Gould was a stickler for finding out where ideas "that everybody knows" came from, and often finding the original source to be dubious. I am writing today because of a recent Mallard Fillmore cartoon proclaiming that "new reports give…
My daughters and I have started to watch some of the episodes from the Star Trek Voyager series on DVD. We are not disappointed at all. All of us are finding that the series contains well-written, thought-provoking, stories. Here is a topic that might seem unrelated to Star Trek: According to…
I spent too much time on YouTube this evening listening to Roy Zimmerman, folk singer. This video, "Creation Science 101" brought me in. I stayed for "Abstain With Me", a jab at "Abstinence Only" Christian Sex Education. As an aside, he likened it to "Just Hold It" potty training. His…
Ebonmuse (one of our authors, who also writes thoughtful posts at Daylight Atheism) recently interviewed Dale McGowan who has edited a book of essays on raising a child without religion. McGowan’s book, Parenting Beyond Belief, will be released next month.
The book features original essays by Richard Dawkins, Julia Sweeney, Penn Jillette, Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor, Michael Shermer, and more . . .
This book looks to be of superlative scope and quality, covering a wide range of important topics: religiously mixed marriages, secular education, humanist ceremonies, moral instruction, teaching children about death, and more. [B]ooks like this may well be at the forefront of the “third wave” of atheist activism – atheists moving into society, living alongside everyone else in openness and honesty, establishing a set of social structures that can directly compete with and provide an alternative to religion.
Ebonmuse’s post intrigued me enough that I placed my order for a copy of Parenting Beyond Belief. I look forward to reading it, then discussing it on this site.
In the meantime, I’ve been busy raising two open-minded daughters (aged 6 and 8 ) without the benefit of McGowan’s book. Notice that I’m not really trying to raise them “without religion.” We regularly discuss various religious traditions. On several occasions, I’ve taken my daughters to churches (not just weddings and funerals). One of my daughters received 1 1/2 years of her kindergarten and 1st grade school education at a neighborhood Catholic school. …
As a nation, we seem to be making one boneheaded decision after another.
Iraq has to be the top of that list. We attacked Iraq because we couldn’t let “them” get away with what “they” did on September 11. I have heard numerous seemingly intelligent people utter this other nonsense. The only way this justification works, however, is if all people living in the Middle East are the same. There’s no basis for believing that everyone in the Middle East is “the same,” yet this truly seems to be the foundation of the thought process of many people. Someone from the Middle East attacked us, therefore we must attack someone in the Middle East. And by someone they mean anyone.
By this same logic, when someone in my neighborhood steals my car, I am justified asking the police to throw anyone from my neighborhood in prison. Anyone at all! The important thing is that I am mad or frustrated or embarrassed and I want to cast judgment some more quickly and see something done.
It’s truly amazing that intelligent people can fall for this kind of thinking, but many of us do.
Perhaps it’s because we have trouble categorizing. Take, for instance, the category “the poor.” I know many right-leaning people who claim that all poor people are deservedly poor. And they are lazy, as well as immoral and stupid. This allows many social conservatives to justify social Darwinism at the highest levels of government.
On the other hand, I …