So the first day or two after we got back Aiden adopted the family prayer-fascination role, because he is the current six-year-old. He kept suggesting we pray before eating. I’d say, “That’s for people who believe there’s a god up in the sky.” And he’d say something like, “There is one. You have to believe in him and he has a beard and a lightening bolt and his name is Zeus.”

So anyway, Trinity, the former six-year-old who at one time hounded us with lots of prayer requests but now says, “How about we pray to Mom and thank HER for the food?” (yeah, that’s my girl)–well, she had an idea last Sunday when we were getting ready for my husband’s Jewish grandmother to come over (Jewish in a heavy heritage/cultural sense, not so much in an actively religious one).

Trinity said, “How about when Grandma is here and we sit down to eat, we act like we’re going to pray, but then we all chant, ‘Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and caldron bubble. By the pricking of my thumb, something wicked this way comes.’” (You Shakespeare geeks will recognize that).

Yeah…so my husband and kids did that. I don’t include myself because 1) I never bothered to learn it. 2) Grandma may not be very religious but I thought she might freak a little.

I went along with it, at least…When my husband suggested we all hold hands in a circle around the table I did it too. And when they did their dark chant, I saw Grandma’s eye brow creep up, just a little.

And then Grandma responded with, “I’ve got one.” And I thought, Oh no, I have to sit through another prayer? I thought I left that back in Kansas City.

Then she said, “Everybody put your elbows on the table.” So we did.

“Now clasp your hands together…and rest your chin on them.” We did. And at this point I’m relieved and trying not to laugh because my kids have no idea that nobody prays in that position. Then she says something like, “Thanks for the bread, thanks for the meat. Now when the heck are we going to eat?”

Laughs all around the table and we’re having a good time and let me just say, I’m glad we have friends and loved ones who will blaspheme with us.

In the interview, Schaeffer describes how he and his minister father, a friend of the Reagan’s and the Bush’s, helped organize the Christian right by means of the Pro-Life movement, how it evolved to take over Republican Politics, and the hypocrisy that finally drove him away from it.

There is so much that is fascinating in this interview. If you haven’t already heard it, you can listen by following this link.

Let me start by saying that I’m not truly 100% vegan. I think of myself as vegan, but every once in a while I remember that the real hard-core purist vegans might not consider me one.

First, I eat eggs once in a long while, which I buy from my friend because I’ve seen her chickens and how free they are to roam on her property. I don’t bake with them. But sometimes we fry them.

Second, I snag some of my kids’ Cheez-It’s here and there, and sometimes I have some dessert while we’re out that has an egg or milk in it. But all of my own cooking and baking is vegan, and most of what I eat when dining out or with friends is vegan, as well. I figure it’s better that I allow myself a few exceptions than that I go back to meat-eating because I miss just a couple things.

The (Many) Reasons

Jason asked me this question when I mentioned that I am now a vegan…

Were the reasons you went vegan for philosophical reasons or health reasons? Just curious as I know many who have arrived at vegetarianism and veganism on many separate paths…

My reasons for becoming a vegan are all of the above, plus some. Veganism is better for the environment. Think of all that land going to feed cows, just so that we can eat them and drink their milk. Think of all that methane.

Veganism is compassionate. Not only do the animals lose their right to life, but many of them suffer a low-quality of life, and often a brutal one.

It’s healthy. That one was a surprise for me. Because I have a problem with hypo-glycemia and was always very concerned about getting enough protein, I never thought I could forgo meat. It turns out that plant-based protein is more stable, and my blood-sugar has never been as regular as it is now. Of course, you have to eat a whole-foods diet in order for it to be healthy. That requires a major lifestyle change for most Americans. I recommend taking gradual steps in a vegan direction.

It’s moral. I’ve always thought it was a better moral decision to choose not to eat meat or animal by-products. But because I didn’t realize I could do that and be healthy, it didn’t seem like a moral imperative. Now that I have learned that it’s possible to let the animals live–while improving my health at the same time–I do believe it is the right thing to do.

The Family Meals

What about my family? They’re not true vegetarians, although they eat a vegetarian diet at home. When we go out they often choose animal products (my husband, not so much). But they’re all fine with the vegan diet we eat at home because they like my food. There are so many amazing vegan recipes to explore that in the nine months I’ve been cooking this way, I’ve only repeated a few recipes. My husband prefers my food to all of our favorite restaurants.

My Recommendations

If you’re looking to eat fewer animals, I have a couple favorite sources, which are the keys to my being able to do this, while keeping everyone happy…

Moosewood Restaraunt New Classics and Moosewood Simple Suppers recipe books–These are not totally vegan. They have vegetarian recipes, fish and seafood recipes, and vegan recipes. They’re delicious. They make me turn my nose up at other restaurant food. They’re easy to follow (although, many of the New Classics recipes, which are amazing, will keep you in the kitchen longer).

Vegetarian Food For Thought Podcast by Colleen Patrick Goudreau–This is such an informative podcast on everything having to do with vegetarian cooking and animal cruelty. I also have her cookbook, The Joy Of Vegan Baking, and we LOVE the stuff we make from this.

Listen from the website.

It sure was fun talking about things I really haven’t talked much about in a while. It’s nice seeing my old friends trickling in to the blog again, too. Plus some new names–those never stopped, though, amazingly.

I never did tell you about the article I wrote for the Humanist Network News back in March for their Secular Parenting column. Here’s how it starts…

The “Out” Parent

I walked into my child’s preschool one day right before class was to let out. There was a lobby full of parents and one of them raised her voice above the crowd to say to me, “I noticed your license plate says AGMOM. What does that mean?”

Those of you who have read my articles or blog will recognize it as my blog name, Agnostic Mom. While most of my friends know about this, it wasn’t something I wanted to shout across a crowded room of parents at my child’s preschool. Yet there they all were, staring at me, curious.

Would you like to read the rest of the story? Then please click here.

If you’re newer to Agnostic Mom and would like to read all of my articles when I had a regular column with them, you might want to head over to this page.

The Podcast

Tomorrow on Chuck Bryant’s Something Happening Here podcast, an interview with me will air. I’ll be back to link to it, but I thought I’d give you a heads up…you know, since I’m not around so much lately. =)

You might want to check out his site and show by then, too.

My husband and I began putting major efforts into some other projects earlier in the year. For a while I’ve been unsure what to do about AgnosticMom because I love this blog, but it’s hard to do something well when your attention is split.

Once summer came, that was it. Trying to keep my children from turning into little vegetables on the couch, or monkeys in the rafters, is consuming so much time! Every summer surprises me with its demands. And this one is no different.

So, I’ve devoted all my extra time to our other projects. I told the Humanist Network News that I was taking the summer off from writing and that I hope to be able to pick things back up again when school starts. Even with the return of my usual schedule, I am unsure about this blog. As long as I write my monthly HNN articles, I will at least post a link here.

I have thoughts I want to share here all the time. And I wonder about those of you I’ve gotten to know through your comments. I’ve also been interviewed a number of times over recent months. I was interviewed on a Canadian-based international radio station at Easter (that was interesting!). Most recently, an Atheist organization interviewed me for their newsletter. I’d like to post that interview here when I get the chance.

But if I don’t, I hope you are all happy and doing well. We’re having a fun (and overly active, in my opinion) summer. Everyone is generally healthy. And I have been enjoying the fact that we are receiving a whole lot of love from friends and family who don’t mind that we “nonbelievers.” I know not everyone is so fortunate.

I promise this isn’t my last post, but I can’t promise how often I’ll be around. You may want to subscribe to my RSS feed so that you can be prompted when I do pop in. Thanks for sticking around! And thanks to those of you who have tried to check up on me!

Our interview starts at 9:30 EST, but the actual show starts at 9pm with an interview of Julie from Mothergoosemouse. Julie is an atheist and some of you old-timers might remember her commenting on AgnosticMom.

You can call or email the host with comments or questions, so come prepared. If you can’t make it tonight, the show will be archived and you can listen to it at your convenience.

That doesn’t mean we can’t help. Here is what Dale said we could do:

A polite expression of curious interest combined with excitement for the appearance of such a reasonable and respectful book — that’s the ticket. Something like this:

Dear Mr. Windybottom,

I just came across a great new parenting book and wondered if you’d heard about it. It’s called “Parenting Beyond Belief: On Raising Ethical, Caring Kids Without Religion” and is co-written by a number of prominent authors ranging from Richard Dawkins to a Unitarian minister. Early reviews are praising it as evenhanded and down-to-earth, not an angry screed. As a longtime reader of [insert mag name here], I’d love to see a review of this book in your pages. Would you happen to know if that’s in the works? I look forward to hearing from you!

Regards,
Sandy Subscriber

As for the list of mags I’m most eager to break into, here’s my top ten:

Parents Magazine: www.parents.com
Parenting Magazine (circ. over 2 million): www.parenting.com
Informed Parent – includes prominent book reviews: www.informedparent.com
Brain, Child – very good content fit: www.brainchildmag.com
Family Resource.com – prominent reviews: www.familyresources.com
Gay Parent – many gay parents are secularists: www.gayparentmag.com
Cookie Magazine: www.cookiemag.com
New Parent Magazine: www.newparent.com
Wondertime Magazine: www.wondertime.go.com
Mothering Magazine: www.mothering.com

I’d be very grateful for help in gently contacting the editors at these publications. Thanks Noell, and thanks to your readers!

Some days my seven-year-old daughter believes there is a god. Hers is a god of lost pencils and favorite foods. On other days, when said god doesn’t come through to grant a wish, she announces, “I guess I don’t believe in god anymore.”

To read more, follow the link to this week’s article in the Humanist Network News. Feel free to write a letter to the editor in response. Or come back here if you’d like to comment on my blog.

I wanted to thank everyone for the great response to the previous post about Parenting Beyond Belief. It was great to see so many links back to my posting and to the book; so many purchases, even multiple purchases, and gifts to local libraries! Awesome.

Somebody asked which of the magazines and stores are rejecting the book. I contacted Dale McGowan about this. So far he is waiting to hear the specifics from the publisher. Once he gets the information I’ll be sure to update you so all the interested activists in this readership can start writing letters.

Here is a positive review from Library Journal. This is a publication that is instrumental in getting libraries to purchase copies:

McGowan, a professor, freelance writer, and novelist, has collected essays from some of contemporary secularism’s big names, e.g., Richard Dawkins, Margaret Downey, in support of those nonreligious American parents who seek to “articulate values, celebrate rites of passage, find consolation, and make meaning” sans religion. Contributor Ed Buckner writes that secular means “not based on religion” rather than “hostile to religion.” Though a few entries do evidence anger or resentment, it is clear that all of these astute essayists have thought carefully about God’s nonexistence. Most of the 30-odd contributors recommend imbuing children with the ability to think well independently; when pressured or rejected by real and figurative institutions that tend to favor the religious (e.g., schools, scouting, holidays), parents are advised to stick to their nontheistic guns. The book considers parents as pedagogues, recalling Deborah Stipek and Kathy Seal’s Motivated Minds: Raising Children To Love Learning. Engaging and down-to-earth, this collection balances the scores of religious parenting titles shelved in the average library and is highly recommended for large public libraries and parenting collections. — Douglas C. Lord, Connecticut State Lib., Hartford

Thanks for your interest, everyone! Don’t forget to stop over to HNN for a little reading.

Several parenting magazines are declining to review the book for fear of offending religious subscribers, and a few retailers are declining to stock the book, claiming there is no market for it. It is essential that we demonstrate otherwise, so please put all promotional oars in the water as soon as possible.

I know that a huge percentage of AgnosticMom readers have blogs. Will you please promote the book on your sites? You can also send a link to the friends and family members on your email lists. Plus, if you can spare the change, how about ordering one for your local library?

Here is a link to the book, Parenting Beyond Belief. Let me know when your order your copy!

I have long expressed that empathy is a key factor in a person’s morality. Empathy is a state that the human brain evolved a capacity for. Guilt is another. Our social upbringing also comes into play, but only because an ability to experiences these things first evolved within the brain.

Gregg100 sent me a link to an article that tells of a recent study on this subject. I’ve pulled out a few statements that summarize the main points of the article but I recommend you read the whole thing so you know the specifics and the limitations to how far the study extends.

Damage to the part of the brain that controls social emotions changes the way people respond to thorny moral problems, demonstrating the role of empathy and other feelings in life-or-death decisions.

“Part of our moral behavior is grounded … in a specific part of our brains,” said Dr. Antonio Damasio, one of the study’s lead authors and director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at USC.

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex processes feelings of empathy, shame, compassion and guilt. Damage to this part of the brain, which occupies a small region in the forehead, causes a diminished capacity for social emotions but leaves logical reasoning intact.

Researchers found no difference among groups in their responses to scenarios with no moral content, such as turning a tractor left to harvest turnips.

This study is not in isolation. Without even looking for them I come across studies with similar or related conclusions quite regularly. The conclusions have perspective-altering implications that might challenge the way religious believers expect their god to hold people accountable for their “sins.” Or the way societies deal with criminals. Such implications and how we should deal with them are complicated. But I think this is an extremely important area to learn more about if we are ever going to understand human nature and hope for a more peaceful world.

Thanks for all your thoughts on the last two posts! They were amazing to read. And they just kept coming and coming. So many of you posted for the first time and I really appreciate it. You’re all welcome back if you have more to say!

My apologies, by the way, on my wording of the first question in the last post. It made the assumption that we have a soul and that was purely accidental.

But for now, if you don’t already get HNN in your inbox, head on over to read my article, When The Sympony Stops Playing. If you have thoughts you can write a letter to the editor at HNN or you can comment here on my blog.

Would you do me a favor, even if you’ve never commented before? Even if you want to use an anonymous name and a fake email. Please sign in and tell us:

1) Do you believe the soul continues to exist after death?
2) Have you found peace with the probability that when it’s over it is really over? Does this fill you with fear and dread? Or are you somewhere in between (please explain).

And please, this one post is just for the non-religious only. If you’re religious and feel a need to comment, please leave it in the previous post.

Thanks in advance!

The concept no longer makes sense in light of evolution, unless we are willing to grant souls to chimps, dogs, sea sponges and celery. Since species evolve incrementally over time, insisting that we have souls, but other living things do not, requires us to come up with some pretty unlikely scenarios. At what point in evolution did the soul suddenly appear — and why didn’t the previous generation qualify?

Whatever sense of self and personal identity we have springs entirely from the constantly recomposed electrochemical symphony playing in our heads. Some find that horrifying; I find it utterly amazing. And asking where our “self” goes when that electrochemical symphony stops playing is just like asking where the music goes when an orchestra stops playing.

What a great analogy. Really, there is no more evidence or reason to believe in a soul than there is evidence or reason to believe in gods. Over time, more and more of what we have attributed to the soul falls to the wayside as scientific research finds that chemical reactions within specific areas of our physical brain are responsible for everything soul-oriented. Neurologists can even stimulate an area of the brain to cause many people to have “out-of-body experiences. Of course, they are not actually having them. The brain is just really good at deceiving.

I don’t find life any less amazing or beautiful for our lack of a soul. What do you think?

DALE MCGOWAN is a writer, editor, and critical thinking educator in Minneapolis. His satirical novel Calling Bernadette’s Bluff has been called “an undoubted triumph of satire” and “wicked funny.” He recently completed Northing at Midlife, a humorous narrative of a midlife crisis encountered on the trails of Britain. McGowan is editor of Rumors of Peace, the international newsletter of Nonviolent Peaceforce, is a board member of the Critical Thinking Club, Inc. and has taught critical thinking skills in the college classroom, the corporate boardroom, and public venues.

Dale met Becca, now an elementary educator, in 1984 when they were both members of the University of California Band in Berkeley, CA. They live near Minneapolis with their three ethical, caring kids

I read on the Parenting Beyond Belief forum that you grew up going to church. What religion were you?

We attended a UCC (United Church of Christ) dutifully every Sunday, but there wasn’t much presence of religion in our home the rest of the week. I grew up in the sort of nominally Christian home that’s so common.

Your dad died when you were thirteen years old and that event was the catalyst to a long journey of trying to discover truth about what happens after death and whether God exists. When I say long, I mean it lasted until you were about thirty three years old. Is that right? Throughout this time did you lean toward believing or not believing?

It was at Dad’s funeral that I began to feel that questions about God were important and interesting enough to pursue. Over the next twenty years I chased the answers to five questions:

1. Can I ask these questions?

2. May I ask these questions?

3. Even if I can and may, are answers possible?

4. If so, do the answers matter?

5. Am I alone in my conclusions?

For the sake of the inquiry, I had to assume the answer to the first question was yes. I gradually realized that a decent God was unlikely to care if I was honestly wrong about him, which took care of #2.

Question #3 took much longer. At last I realized that “Is there a God?” was the wrong question. “Why do people believe there is a God?” – now there’s a question I could actually pursue. If it turned out that people had good reasons for believing, I too would be justified in doing so. It was the process of learning why people believe that took most of twenty years.

I began to recognize the terribly negative effects of religious belief in my early thirties, which answered #4, and discovered (through AN Wilson) the astonishingly rich and largely concealed history of disbelief, which answered #5. At that point, in my mid-thirties, I felt I could express my disbelief with a greater confidence in its reasoned foundation.

You attended nine denominations throughout your church-going days. What were they?

The experiences varied from a few visits to several years. Let’s see if I can do it from memory: UCC, Mormon, Unitarian, Methodist, Lutheran, Baptist megachurch (five years, please shoot me), Catholic, Episcopalian. I always forget one. Uh…Presbyterian!

Which played the most dominant role?

Unitarian. I attended Neighborhood UU Church in Pasadena, California for two years in high school and actually looked forward to the services. The minister (whose name I would swear was something like Reverend Lovejoy) would talk about life, actual human here-on-this-planet life! I felt challenged, inspired, and enlightened every Sunday.

Is your wife a nonbeliever and freethinker as well?

She was a mainstream Christian when we started dating and for about the first nine years of our marriage. And though I’d vigorously dissect the service on the way home from each ordeal at our Baptist megachurch, I never set out to change her views. But she’s wickedly smart (in addition to being perfect in every other way) and eventually began to question her own way out. She now calls herself a “humanist who prays ‘to whom it may concern.’”

Parenting Beyond Belief isn’t your first book. You’ve also written two novels. What drove you to switch over to nonfiction and write for secular parents?

The novels were written when I was a secular humanist professor at a Catholic college. They were satirical releases, born out of the frustration of that situation. Calling Bernadette’s Bluff was published in 2002; the sequel, Good Thunder, is finished but not yet released. I’m very happy with them, but I really think fiction is the aberration for me. My first love is narrative nonfiction, including a humorous travel narrative I wrote while living in England in 2004 (also pending release).

PBB came about because of the crying need for it, a need I discovered while editor of the Family Issues page of the Atheist Alliance WebCenter. I simply could not believe how little there was out there for parenting without religion, so I created PBB.

I realize the book hasn’t been released yet, but what kind of response is Parenting Beyond Belief getting?

It has been overwhelmingly positive – a kind of ripple-hallelujah from people who’ve been waiting for just such a thing. And word is spreading like wildfire. Googling the phrase “Parenting Beyond Belief” on January 1 gave me 49 hits. Last week it passed 12,000. I daresay we’re onto something!

Why is now the time to publish this book?

Ooh, I like that! Makes it sound like I sat on the project until just the right moment. In fact, this is when I got around to it. But I do think the timing is unbeatable, for three interrelated reasons:

(1) Publishers are ready. Ten years ago, no mainstream publisher would have touched it, but now disbelief is coming into its own. The enormous and recent success of the Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett books showed the publishing industry that nonbelievers exist in large numbers and that they read.

(2) Our numbers are increasing. In 1990, 8% of respondents to a USA Today poll identified themselves as non-religious. By 2002 that sector had grown to 14.1%. I don’t think 18 million people stopped believing during that time; for the most part, I think 18 million people started being comfortable with saying they didn’t believe. And that’s the point when we start getting comfortable sharing our disbelief with our children, as a value, not as the absence of one.

(3) Five years from now, with any luck, the book will have competition. At the moment there is essentially none, which makes this a better time!

Do you know how many non-religious families there are, and how this compares to estimates from years past?

This can only be guesssed from other statistics. The U.S. Census in 2000 counted 37.3 million households in the U.S. with school-age children. Assuming the same rough percentage of nonbelievers among parents as non-parents, these numbers yield a conservative estimate of seven million individual non-religious parents in the U.S. today, or roughly five million families.

What do you think is the number one reason for the boom in interest in leaving religious belief behind in our culture today?

The rise of fundamentalism, both Christian and Islamic. When George W. Bush was elected for the first time, I found myself in a room full of long-faced humanists bemoaning the end of the enlightenment. “Chins up!” I said. “This is the best possible news for us.” And I was right, imho. It is difficult to get people to see religion as a cultural cancer when it is moderated and under wraps. Only when religious zealotry takes the reins of power does the evidence become overwhelming.

We’ve had a chance to see the true face of religious orthodoxy in recent years, from a president who says God wanted him to invade another country to a religious electorate that seemed willing to permit him any course of action so long as he said his prayers. We can’t see priests without thinking of the hundreds who abused their authority to molest trusting children. Nineteen devout young men perpetrated mass murder on 9/11. Some people, gratifyingly, are beginning at last to connect the dots.

Disbelief isn’t automatically morally superior. We don’t need to make such an arrogant claim to earn our place at the table.
All we needed was the removal of the assumption that belief granted automatic supremacy. Now that that is a harder argument to make, people can think for themselves — and more people than ever are thinking their way out of superstition.

Has there been any public criticism from the religious side or do you anticipate any?

Nothing yet, and a number of Christians who’ve read excerpts have expressed pleasant surprise. The book does not attack religion or attempt to “recruit” people away from religious parenting. It is intended to encourage and support those who have already made the decision to raise their kids without religion and simply want a little help in doing so. Our hope is to help create a world in which disbelief is accepted as a normal and acceptable choice. Reasonable readers of all perspectives should be able to accept that.

A major concern of AgnosticMom readers is dealing with social situations and people who may not want to associate with atheists and agnostics. Do you have a section that addresses this subject? If so, tell us about it.

It’s not a separate section, but a thread that runs through several chapters, popping up in discussions of church-state separation, “mixed marriage,” and the chapter of Personal Reflections.

Do you envision following this with another book or project on a related subject?

Yes indeed. Since this was the first major book on the subject, we couldn’t hope to accomplish everything in one fell swoop. We hoped to play out some threads that could be continued in other projects. I see three immediate needs: a book devoted to dealing with death and loss, another on being secular in a religious extended family, and a practical book of activities.

Hi Noell
I happened upon your website as I was searching for input on how to respond to as question my children seem to be very close to asking….What happens to people when they die? I think at this age (they have just turned 4) they need an answer that is more definitive than “some people believe this or that”. But at the same time I feel it will freak them out to hear the brutal honest truth that the end is the end. I was hoping you could share your wisdom with me or suggest some reading.
Thank you

I wrote an article on this subject for the Humanist Network News. It is one of my articles included in the new book, Parenting Beyond Belief, as well as an article by Julia Sweeney on the same subject.

I hope my article is helpful. It’s been a while since we discussed this subject so any comments are welcome.

I have some stories to tell plus an article to write for next week’s issue of HNN. You’ll be hearing from me soon.

Today I am going to add an additional activity to what we did last year. I’m still working it out in my brain but I think I am going to explore color with the kids as a metaphor for how all of life is made up of just a handful of basic particles. Just as all color and all its variety come from three primary colors and black and white, everything we see in the world with all its variety comes from a limited number of elements (I’m still not sure what I should break it all down to. Any suggestions?)

We’ll play with paint, beginning with red, yellow, and blue, expanding to the secondary colors, then the tertiary. We’ll add black and white for varying tone. I may use that to explain mutations and how some mutations help a creature to survive environmental pressures, allowing it to reproduce more, and some mutations make it harder to survive, preventing it from reproducing as much.

And of course, we’ll also be doing the traditional AgnosticMom stuff that I outlined in my HNN article:

Feb. 12: Introduction of Evolution through Family Book Reading
Dinner focus: The first phase of evolutionary life: shellfish, jellyfish, worms
A. Read The Tree Of Life: The Wonders Of Evolution by Ellen Jackson.
B. Dinner:
1. Very involved version: A smorgasboard of shellfish: shrimp, lobster, oysters
2. Simpler version: Shrimp dinner
3. After dinner treat: Gummi-worms (put them in cute gift bags or boxes on their
plates. The kids love that!).
C. Table decor theme: Under the sea

What are you doing today? Whether you have ever commented before or not, please leave a comment if you are celebrating Darwin Day and tell us what you are doing today! If you have a blog and have written about it there, leave us a link.

Hello Noell,

I have been reading your blog for a few months, and there are a few questions I feel compelled to ask. This is meant to be a genuine inquiry, and not a personal attack. One of the questions that reading Agnostic Mom has raised for me is: What does it truly mean to live a life as an atheist? Sure the easy answer is to live a life without religious faith or belief, but what about without -religious behavior-? Your behavior and lifestyle as
an atheist seems nearly indifferent to me from a person of faith. So that raises the question: Why do you feel it is so important to distinguish yourself from someone who is of a religious background? And, are there really substantial differences between the lifestyle of an atheist from that of a person of faith that merits being distinguished?

When you step back and look at it, Agnostic Mom, and your involvement with the HNN all revolve around religion. It is the true driving force behind your participation. It seems to me that by trying to denounce religion, and assert that you have done so, you have actually immersed your daily life in it. It also seems that some atheists are so caught up in professing their lack of religion, that they have inadvertently become reliant on it to identify who they are.

So, is it really worth the effort?

To be fair, I should state that I am agnostic to some degree. However, I feel more comfortable with not being labeled when it comes to my own position on religion. Also, I suppose it would be fair to state that I am a 22 year old college student. So even though I am not a mom myself, I really enjoy your blog and the discussions you have here.

Note:

Martin almost touches on these questions above. However when he asks, “What part of free from religion did you not understand?” my question is, are you really free?

Let me start with this observation and question:

Your behavior and lifestyle as an atheist seems nearly indifferent to me from a person of faith. Are there really substantial differences between the lifestyle of an atheist from that of a person of faith that merits being distinguished?

The first thing I want to say is that if you do not see a significant difference between religious people and avowed atheist/agnostics, then doesn’t this just show religion to be unnecessary? Isn’t that the point? Do we really need religion to be decent people? Is logic and reason not enough? If LaShawn’s observation is true for most of us, then it seems to me that religious people are just throwing enormous amounts of time and money to something completely unnecessary.

It is not my intention, though, to eliminate religion from the world. I am also not trying “distinguish myself from someone of a religious background.” I actually blend in quite well with the people in my environment, religious or not. What I am trying to do is share my ideas and gain from others who want to raise their families with humanist values. For those of us who have left religion behind, it can be scary.

For me, leaving religion allowed me to look in better places for understanding about the world and how humans got to where we are. That is a subject I have always wanted to learn more. Leaving religion also gave me freedom to direct more of my money to the places that made sense to me. And the best part is that leaving religion gave me more than an entire day, every week of my life, to focus my time on the things that are important to me, rather than on the things that my religion told me were important.

But to get to the specifics of your question, regarding day-to-day behavior and morals, I think this really varies from person to person, depending on what religion we leave behind and what we choose to value from our new worldview. I can only answer for myself. My religion was very strict. Having left Mormonism, I maintained the values that made logical sense to me. I refrain from shoplifting because I don’t like the idea of hurting or cheating someone. Plain and simple. Secondary to that, I prefer to live in a world where people choose not to steal others’ property and I know that will work out better if I do my part. Does it take religion to think that way? No.

So you are right. My life may not much different than a that of some people of faith when it comes to morals and ethics. It is more different in terms of what I devote time, money, and attention to. And specifically as a former Mormon, the details of my life are actually extremely different.

For the record, I do not push for the idea that everyone leave their religions. I am not an evangelical nontheist trying to convert the religious to become atheists. I don’t claim to know if the world would be better or not, although I am curious.

When you step back and look at it AgnosticMom, and your involvement with the HNN all revolve around religion. It is the true driving force behind your participation. It seems to me that by trying to denounce religion, and assert that you have done so, you have actually immersed your daily life in it.

Let’s get a little perspective here. I know that all of your contact with me is immersed in subjects often revolving around religion, but you have to remember that my blog and artlcles are not all there is to me. I do have a life beyond what you read here. If there is anything I immerse myself in it is art, photography and scrapbooking. That is not something I really talk about here. I probably spend less than an hour a week on average with AgnosticMom stuff. That isn’t exactly immersing my daily life in it. On the other hand, I work on my paper art between one and three hours daily. In addition to that is my 65-75 minutes of daily exercise, my household chores and errands, my volunteering at the kids’ school, and my family time.

I will grant you that despite this reality check of how much time I actually spend on AgnosticMom items, I do immerse myself in it quite a bit, especially in the past. But that deserves some perspective, too. I like writing. I think way too much and so it helps me to write my thoughts down. It gives me clarity. When I started my little blog I had no idea it would take off so quickly and get me public recognition. The writing opportunities have all come to me. I have not sought after a single one. Since the atheist/agnostic topics happen to be my niche from the blog, since I happen to have an audience, it would make sense that this is the subject I discuss.

And there is a reason many of my topics revolve around religion. Because my past religion was so all-consuming I was lost and scared during those first years after leaving, especially when it comes to raising children. This blog is mostly (but not totally) for others like me who have left religion behind but are not sure how to go about filling in the holes when it comes to childrearing. So, of course, religion plays a factor in most of my posts and articles. I basically write how-to’s about raising a family without religion.

There is one more reason that I dwell on this subject. There two types of people (among the gazillion types of us!). Those that have a natural propensity to ponder life and the world and over-analyze everything about it. And those who just want to live their life. You mostly hear from those of us who like to analyze it and talk about it. That is how I am. I was like that as a religious person (so no, I do not dabble in religion near as much as I did when I believed in it) and I am still that way. It’s my nature. There are plenty of atheists who do not feel compelled to analyze and talk about it. That is why you don’t hear as much from them. I actually have a handful of friends who are agnostic or atheist, who I see regularly, but we have only discussed our nontheism a couple of times.

Your last question:

Martin almost touches on these questions above. However when he asks, “What part of free from religion did you not understand?” my question is, are you really free?

No, I don’t think I am really free. As long as I still feel I need to prove to my parents that they do not need to get me back to church, I will probably not feel totally free. As long as I feel I need to keep my ideas and perspectives to myself so as not to offend my religious friends who have no problems sharing their perspectives with me, I will not be totally free. As long as I have to worry about how adequate my children’s science education is because there are topics that those in charge do not want taught, I will not feel completely free. That’s just the way it is.

Thanks, LaShawn, for your honesty and asking such interesting questions. I’d love to hear thoughts from anybody else.

Very interesting that although you claim to be agnostic you practice yoga. You would think that such a strong self-avowed aggy would not be “saluting” and aknowledging the sun as her god. Do a little research, yoga is inseperable from the hindu religion which has a pantheon of gods. Why does every pose have the name of a prayer .Double standards people!! At least just call it stretching if you want to retain your cred.

We’ll pray for you…

Whether you like it or not.

Rob, how sad that you feel you must exclude something healthy from your life just because it’s originators wrapped it in religious hindu beliefs. I do not believe the hindu gods exist. But I can recognize the physical benefits of the exercise. When I do sun salutations I am greeting my morning and welcoming a new day. The “prayer” is symbolism and nothing more.

And why would I “just call it stretching” when it is more than that? The difference between you and me, Rob, is that you feel a need to run away from other gods and hide from them. I suppose you fear them. The gods mean nothing to me. I can enjoy my yoga and have no worries about accidentally praying to them because they’re not there.

We also discovered that if you google “agnostic” we show up on the first page of the search results. (Go ahead, try it).

Many thanks to all you readers who have linked to me or who have emailed my articles to your family and friends.

I was really nervous about the social implications when I stopped going to the Mormon church and became an atheist/agnostic. The religion I came from forces you to make a choice: Either come out of the closet so you can live your life the way you think is appropriate, or stay hidden and live the rules of the Mormon Church. I came out of the closet because my sister was about to get married in the LDS (Mormon) temple. You have to hold what is called a “recommend” in order to go in. My recommend had expired during the time that I was trying to figure out my beliefs. I could not get a new one and keep my integrity in tact because you must proclaim your belief that Jesus is the Christ and Joseph Smith was his prophet in order to do so.

By the time of the wedding I had confirmed to myself that I was not a believer. Rather than lie, I decided to tell my family that I would not be going through the temple for the wedding and the reason was that I no longer believed the church was true. And in fact, I was an atheist. (I called myself an atheist before I decided to call myself an agnostic. To me it is all semantics and a bit problematic). I suppose I didn’t have to tell the reasons why, but it has never been in my nature to act like someone I am not. I was never shy about being a Mormon and I am not shy about being agnostic.

Of course, telling my parents was one of the hardest things to do. They didn’t take it well. But after four and a half years they have seen that I am not backing down, they have seen that my children continue to hold excellent standards and principles, they have seen that I have a presence in the secular/humanist community, and they have seen that I am happy and non-disruptive to their religious lives. It has gotten better with them year after year and I now feel mostly satisfied with where we are in our relationship.

When I left religion, I also felt a need to tell my current friends. One reason was because I held many leadership positions, never missed church, and was very involved. The other was because Mormons have strict rules about clothing; rules which are absurd for people in desert climates to abide by. I was happy to be able to dress in less constricting clothes that were much more appropriate. But it was a shock to all my friends for me to suddenly expose my shoulders. It may seem silly to someone who is not from the Mormon culture, but it is scandalous for a Mormon not to abide by the dress code if they once had. People usually suspect that marriage infidelity led to the change.

So, it was awkward in the beginning feeling compelled to announce my change to my friends at their first sight of me in un-Mormonish clothing. I didn’t want them to assume the wrong things about me. The revelation of my non-belief shocked and hurt them. I received many warnings from people who had “gone astray” at one time and and regretted it. Still, as awkward as it was, I think is beneficial. It is beneficial to our community because it spreads the word that nontheists are normal people. It is beneficial to ourselves because 1) It takes us out of our comfort zone, and that is always healthy! 2) It frees us up to be who we are and not have to hide.

Thankfully, I am past that phase now, of having to come out to current friends who had always known me as religious. My main interaction now is with people who never knew me as Mormon. For them it is only about discovering that I don’t believe in any religion, period. And that is a whole different situation. We’ll come to that in a separate post.

Oh, and two articles by Agnostic Mom! And there’s my secret. This book, to be released in April, will feature two of my articles from the Humanist Network News!

I’m going to give you a link to the book on Amazon, but before I do, I’ll let you in on the plan. You can preorder now if you’d like. Or, if you want to try to propel it to the top ten, you can wait until April like many of us are doing when the book is actually released.

There is also a possibility that I may join some of the contributors at the September conference for Atheist Alliance International in Washington D.C. to be on a panel.

Okay, now here is the link to Parenting Beyond Belief.

The scientist, Ramachandran, describes this experience as literally dissolving the barrier between two people because the neurons do not know the difference between poking yourself and poking someone else. He concludes, “it provides a basis, almost a neuro-basis, for ethics.”

He then goes on to explain that many children with autism are missing these neurons, “which is one reason they lack empathy…and are unable to look at the world from your point of view.”

Here is the link to the particular session with Ramachandran. You’ll have to get through the first speaker and some discussion before the speech I am referring to. And I’ll warn you if you try to watch the first speech, none of the scientists in attendance understood the guy, nor did they seem to accept his premises. Ramachandran’s speech was quite interesting.

I’ve been watching videos of the entire conference for a couple weeks now. It is was a recent conference called, Beyond Belief, with other well-knowns, such as Dawkins, Shermer, Sam Harris, and many others I am getting to know. It’s been completely interesting. It is essentially a debate about the stance atheist scientists should should or should not take on religion. There are very many view points and it’s great to see that the scientists have no problems giving and receiving criticism to one another’s opinions. There is a lot of discussion on the morality question as well.

Note: If you click on the link to the entire conference, you will need to scroll way down until you see the big black box with titled, “Beyond Belief.”

In fact, the article may relate in some way to a comment/question that Angel posted last week. Angel: If you are still here, the article I linked to may interest you. I do plan to address your specific concern about having raised your children without religion in the next few days.

I also promise to respond to Mommy Window soon, who had a question others have asked regarding social situations as a minority unbeliever.

Enjoy!

Number one is to answer a question from MomSquared: I am curious whether the name Trinity is religious in origin or not?

The origin of Trinity’s name happens to be the movie, The Matrix. That’s it. We were Mormons when we chose that name and Mormons reject the concept of the Trinity. They refer to the three gods as the Godhead and teach that they are three distinct beings who are one in purpose, not one in being. We had a few people quite unhappy about our name choice. One personoften said to me, “But we’re Mormons! We’re not Catholic!”

There was another major concern mentioned by Angel, which I’d like to address in a separate post when I have more time.

And point of business number two, check out this video, The Atheist Delusion.

This post is to answer a question from Jennifer:

I know this question was already raised, but I don’t think answered, who teaches your daughter about God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit? (I’m agnostic, just wondering).

I know I have forgotten to answer a lot of questions. If I passed you over and there is something you’re dying to know, try it again and maybe I can get better at this!

But back to Jennifer. Trinity was really young when we left religion (Mormonism). I think she was only two. But believe me when I say I was a good Mormon mom and I ingrained religion into my children from the beginning. This means she had a vague understanding that there was a god who loved her and that when we die we go to Heaven (she was always fearful so this was important to her) and get to be with Jesus and family again.

When my husband and I made that transition of beliefs, we explained to our children that we didn’t believe all the things that Mormons believed; that there were certain things we thought were wrong with religion. The move toward agnosticism with my children was slow and gradual (I declared myself an atheist as soon as I left the Church, but not to my kids). I just couldn’t tell them there is no god or heaven.

My husband and I travel together three times a year and my kids stay with their grandparents. They go to church with them on these weekends. They go for three hours, two of which the kids are in a small class with a teacher and kids their age. The teachers do not adjust their teaching for non-member guest children (for example, “We believe…”). They just state their beliefs as facts and have my children participate as much as possible.

Trinity enjoys these visits to church and takes everything to heart. In addtion to that, our extended families pray at every gathering and there have been religious lessons at some holiday events. It has only been in the last year that I have been more clear and direct that I do not believe there is a god.

Somebody left a comment that expressed an inaccurate understanding of an earlier post. They thought I call my family agnostic because some of us have atheist beliefs and some of us have Christian ones. I want to clarify that that is not what I meant. I call my family agnostic because when my kids ask about religious doctrines, I tell them what various people believe and then say that no one really knows. I tell them no one has actually seen heaven or Jesus. Those who say they know don’t really. I never tell them unequivocally that there is no god.

Trinity’s choice to continue believing has nothing to do with the fact that our family is agnostic. It is significant only because I have chosen to put more emphasis on giving my children confidence in their right to an opinion. I do not consider Trinity a Christian. It is probable that she will eventually grow out of this belief like she’ll grow out of Santa, given the way we raise our kids. At the same time, she is the most emotionally-driven member of the family. Maybe she won’t.

I have not raised my children to be atheists, although I have that natural desire, perhaps biologically evolved, for my children to share my beliefs. My kids did not even know the meaning of the word, “atheist” until a couple of weeks ago (more on that later).

You all know me mainly by my worldview. I realize I am quite vocal on my blog. What else could I be? But in reality, as you would suspect, there is much more to me and my life than my godlessness. And while I teach my children about how to treat people, animals, and the world around us, I spend very little time talking to them about the gods. When that subject comes up, I have usually tried to explain that some people believe this, some people believe that. I often ask them what they believe. I never tell them what I believe (about gods) unless they ask. And they don’t ask often!

This is why it was such a surprise to me when Blake (age eight) announced to his friends that he didn’t believe in God. Of course, I always hoped he would come to that conclusion. But that is just the point. I wanted it to be his conclusion. Trinity (age six), on the other hand, professes to be a believer and we have never made her feel inferior for being one. I expect in time she will come around, anyway.

The important thing to me is that the kids learn critical thinking, that they learn to question things, that they look for evidence when it is needed, and that they are confident in their ability to form their own opinions.

A number of weeks ago we got our issue of Wired magazine, mainly a techie subscription. Blake saw it on the chair and yelled, “Wow, cool!”

My husband asked, “You like the design on the cover?”

Blake answered, “No, I like the topic!”

What was the headline topic that had him so enthralled? “No heaven. No hell. Just science.”

The title of the article is “The New Atheism.” We asked Blake if he knew what atheism is. When he said he didn’t I told him, “It’s when you don’t believe there is a god.”

He yelled again, “That’s us! We don’t believe in God!”

And then Trinity interjected, “I do! I believe in the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”

So there it is. We are an agnostic family and each child has the right and the information to make his or her own decisions. Of course, we influence them. There is nothing wrong with that. But each child knows we respect their ability to come to their own conclusions.

By the way, if you want to know about the article, it is an excellent one with an atheistic viewpoint. Rare, I know. The writer interviewed Richard Dawkins (evolutionary biologist, but you know that), Sam Harris (neuroscientist who wrote, The End Of Faith), and Daniel Dennett (philosopher). You can find it in the November issue.

I explained to Blake that this was a club for children whose parents actually believe that the stories in the Bible were all real. I disappointed him with the news that this club was not the right one for him.

And then came the interesting part. He said, “Do you know that all three of the kids at my table believe in God?” Now I was really interested in this conversation. How did he come upon this information? And why was he so surprised?

He continued, “I said, ‘So who here believes in God?’ And they all said they did!”

“And what did you say?” I asked.

“I said, ‘I don’t.’”

I was getting nervous now but didn’t want him to know it. If I acted anxious, or began giving him warnings, would he learn to feel ashamed? But is it okay for an atheist or agnostic child to just bring the conversation up, as many Christian children do? I have always told him that if friends want to talk to him about God, or heaven and hell, that it is appropriate to say that our family doesn’t believe in that. But here he is now, in school, introducing the topic.

I asked him, “Then what did your friends do?” Apparently one gave a loud exhale of disbelief and another let his jaw drop to the table. But that was it. Thankgoodness. So far it’s been a couple weeks there has been no fallout.

So here is a discussion topic for you. Would you give your child a gentle warning that some parents don’t want their kids around people who don’t believe as they do? Do you think it is inappropriate for a child of atheists or agnostics to ever bring up the subject? Or do you let them do their thing because they really should have that right, as children of Christians do, even though it may lead them to a friendless path?

It’s been a horrendous week. How much more blunt can I get? And to end it, now that the trauma is subsiding, the kids started their fall break so I won’t have any real recovery time until they are back to school on Monday. That is, of course, as long as we don’t have any more urgent health crises.

Trinity had a severe reaction to her medicine last Wednesday (itching hives from her ankles to her cheeks, welts that covered her entire thighs). When I called her neurologist, the secretary gave me a punch in the stomach when she informed me that Dr. Thinks-He’s-God won’t see us now because we got a second opinion. Once we got Trinity stablized and on new med’s with a new doctor’s prescription (it was a horrible three day process), I thought all was well again until Blake had an asthma attack like he’s never had before. Asthma is what killed my husband’s uncle (who is my age) a couple months ago. Blake’s breathing treatments weren’t helping so we’ve got him on a steriod for five days. He’s a little better tonight, having missed school for two days.

I tell you, every day of my life is consumed with doctor visits, pharmacy drive-thru’s, phone calls with a nurse, and the dolling out of medicine. The good news is that with both chronic illnesses, I now know the buzz-words to bypass long waits on hold: “has asthma and is wheezing” or “seizure.”

Anyway, now that I’ve started this party of pity, please don’t feel like you can’t comment on my article about ghostly fears! I’m curious to know your thoughts on the article.

I do have a story I’ve been wanting to share and I’d love to hear anyone’s thoughts on the situation. I hope to be able to sit down and blog it in a couple of days. Until then, Olga provided a link to this Freethought Media website. Go take a look around. I am still getting familiar with it but there are audio files on Richard Dawkins, James Randi, Michael Shermer, Daniel Dennet, Steven Pinker and a couple others I am less familiar with (but looking forward to getting to know). So far I have listened to one interview with Richard Dawkins.

But before you go over there, I want to initiate a little discussion on science writing. In previous debates on my blog, as well as in other articles I have read, there seems to be an issue with some popular science writing, particularly with Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, but also some others. One issue, as far as I can tell, has to do with an unclear line between general scientific understanding and the writers’ own philosophies and worldviews. The other issue stems from language. Good writing involves tools that may sometimes obscure scientific accuracy.

Let me explain what I mean. In my earlier discussions about some of Pinker’s writing I began to sense that he intermingles his own philosophy with scientific data in a way that is sometimes hard to tell apart. He also doesn’t always say how strong the support is for a particular theory he is basing his premises on. At some point we have to make decisions about what we believe, even when there is little evidence. So I see no issue in Pinker’s forming philosophies around new and emerging theories. The problem comes when he doesn’t always clarify the strength of the various theories.

At the same time, I understand why he doesn’t. What a monotonous book it would be to make notes for every single statement in order to clarify. As a blogger I understand this. In every post I have to decide what information to include and what not to or you would never finish reading. Pinker also has to make his writing interesting if he wants to reach a greater audience. And in my opinion, reaching a greater audience is importance for the future of science. But so is integrity.

Dawkins seems to have some issues as well, although I am less familiar with his writing. I have read three different critiques of his work, and I wish I could remember with more clarity what the exact criticisms were. In addition to these two writers, I have read a critique of science writers in general about the personification of genes, Natural Selection and such (what I mean is, talking about Nature as if it were a thinking being, even though it is not). Many of us writiers do it. It is good writing. But it does give the false impression to some that genes, or Natural Selection, or even Nature itself, have a will and a purpose. I like writing that way and I see others do it all the time. It makes for a good story. It is what pulls me in to the study of Biology. And yet, I can see how it can be misleading.

So here is the dilemma, as I see it. We have good science writers reaching the public and educating them on important issues in science. It is generating an interest unlike before. But it may be generating a lot of misunderstanding as well. It it worth it? What are the ethics in this situation? Should a science writer sacrifice wonderful writing for more scientific accuracy? Or should one keep it interesting and hope that the overall effect is more scientific understanding, not less?

Please feel free to weigh in on my question, or just provide more information and specific examples if you have them. I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this.

Yesterday’s installment of the Humanist Network News included my article, Coping With Parental Difficulties. Feel free to share your own thoughts or experiences in a comment below!

I have a feeling that, like most instances in dealing with children, your kids did not portray the real picture of the situation. What I imagine really happened is that your kids saw your relatives praying and asked why they were doing so and that is when your sis-in-law made the comment about prayer. I really wish that you would talk to your relatives about what happened (it does not sound like you did) before painting this most-likely inaccurate picture to all of your readers. Kids perception often differs from reality.

Your post about the situation was polite and respectful but still it may have painted an inaccurate picture and your readers took it negatively even though you tried not to portray it that way.

How absurd that someone like me, a skeptic even about ideas that support my own beliefs, did not consider this possibility. Sadie’s analysis never even occurred to me and it seemed she might be right. Frankly, after reading her comment, I still didn’t want to approach my sister-in-law about the situation because it did not bother me so much; I didn’t want to make her uncomfortable and have her associate negativity with having watched our kids when we were so pleased with the experience.

I have a couple principles I try to follow when it comes to relationships. If a person’s actions offend me and there is no previous pattern for the offensive behavior, then there is a high likelihood of a misunderstanding. I believe the healthiest choices in such a case are to either give that person the benefit of the doubt and disregard it, or, if nagging negative emotions arise and persist, to approach the person and give them a chance to explain. More often than not, when there has been no previous pattern of such offending behavior, I find there was just a misunderstanding.

It turns out that this is the case with my sister-in-law. When Sadie suggested I didn’t have the full story, I realized she was probably correct. My sister-in-law has never been one to interfere. I decided it made the most sense to assume that my kids had first asked her why she prayed.

When discussion continued on my blog about what may or may not have happened, I decided to pursue the matter and ask Blake. Blake confirmed that Trinity had, in fact, asked her the question. He said that their aunt was not trying to teach them to pray and he seemed perplexed that I was even asking.

I don’t like that I mis-portrayed my sister-in-law and I think it is an example of dealing with relationships where these types of misunderstandings are likely to occur when there are religious differences.

I also wanted to clear up what I saw as a misconception from Wendy, who left a comment that I accidentally deleted. Wendy seems to think I object to a “sharing of beliefs” (if, in fact, I understood her comment). I welcome the sharing of beliefs. I have always been interested in religions of all types, Christianity or otherwise, and I want my children to know about others’ religious beliefs.

What I have a problem with is when any adult teaches something to a child that contradicts with the parents’ beliefs. This is especially hard in a place where one major religion is the default belief-system and a majority of the people assume that you either do, or should, believe in it also.

My kids practically swim in other people’s beliefs about God and that is okay, as long as people do not cross the boundaries between comparing beliefs to help in understanding, and trying to convert my kids.

Likewise, contrary to what I think Wendy implied in the comment that is forever gone, I do not teach nor allow my children to “make fun” of other people because of their beliefs. But when someone asserts that my child will go to “the worst imaginable hell,” as Blake’s friend did, I think it is helpful to giggle about it with my son when the friend is not there and assure my son that that is absurd. If a person wants to be so insistent with ideas that I believe are emotionally abusive, then I have the right to help my child feel better by lightening the situation. I will not apologize for that.

Also, some religious beliefs, like talking donkeys or a woman made from a man’s rib, just naturally inspires a giggle in someone who was not raised around such stories. When this occurs in the privacy of our own home, I will not apologize for that either. I am sure there are plenty of families who laugh at the ideas of evolution. While I think that is ignorant, I don’t find it at all offensive. It’s just natural.

Giggling in private about such a belief is not the same thing as making fun of someone, which I have never seen my kids do. And there have been plenty of opportunities, considering how often people like to “share.”

I did not expect my children to receive a personal lesson, intimate instruction just for them, on why they should pray.

Let me first qualify this post with the explanation that, prayer-lesson or no prayer-lesson, I am so thankful for my brother and sister-in-law who cared for my three children (and our dog) for four long days. They refused the money we tried to pay them. They brought bags of games and activities. They made homemade play dough. They’re both mathematicians and taught the kids math.

We also came home to an immaculate and happy household. A spotless house on the return from a trip is highly unusual.

So please don’t mistake my story for a gripe. It is a story to share. I’d lose at least half my readers if I only talked about science and didn’t share my personal stories.

It wasn’t until we’d been home for a few days when Trinity informed us that their aunt taught them at a meal that, “we should always pray so that we can thank Heavenly Father for the food he gave us.”

I stopped what I was doing. I exchanged looks with my husband. And I noticed that Blake was watching me, waiting for a response.

I smiled at Trinity and asked her, “Does Heavenly Father give us our food? Or does Daddy work really hard everyday so that he can earn the money for us to buy our food?”

Trinity’s big, cute smile appeared and her giggly voice belted, “Daddy!” Her expression was as if to exasperate a comment like, “How obvious!”

I laughed with her and was glad to see how easy it can be sometimes to demonstrate reality to children.

Of course, I had to wonder if my in-law thinks we believe in prayer but are lazy and just never took the time to teach our kids about it. Or did she make the conscious decision to teach my children a concept she knows we reject?

I used to dwell on these types of experiences and let them work on my emotions and patience. In addition to my personal frustrations at such an invasion, I also worried that lessons of this nature would influence or confuse my children.

In the past year I have learned not to worry so much about these types of actions from others. They’re quite entertaining. I also realize that my own words, along with the reality that the kids observe around them, hold much more sway than the religious-speak of others. Though sometimes the kids are unsure and want to hear my opinion, they often think the religious statements people make are down-right absurd.

When the kids pass along another person’s admonitions that they should pray, a simple reinforcement from me such as, “Well, that’s their religion,” seems to be enough most of the time and they dismiss the idea.

In fact it was just yesterday that Blake’s friend (who I am distancing Blake from because his rude behavior hit its peak when I heard him make reference to certain anatomy on his mother) tried to convince Blake to become a Christian immediately after Blake told him I didn’t want them to play together any more. Blake giggled as he restated to me his friend’s lesson about the best heaven and the worst hell you can possibly imagine.

I realize these outpourings from the religious are inevitable. They will continue to happen. Now that I have observed my children’s confidence in their family’s beliefs and non-beliefs, I can look on these attempts with a little more humor and a lot less outrage.

I’ve had some time to read some of the earlier posts. I’m interested in the idea that “nature is all there is”. [I’m thinking, nature = the physical world] If I understand post #8 correctly, this is a position you hold.

I see two, somewhat different, implications:
1) the universe, as a whole, quite likely produces a consciousness; something that might be called “a god”
2) there is no meaning or value in life, other than what a particular individual attaches to it. And related: concepts of good and evil must be relative to the individual.

So, would you be interested in a conversation in that direction?

(Disclosure, if it matters: I hold a Christian worldview.)

Dan, you are accurate to sum up my position that “nature is all there is.” I am a materialist.

But when we look at the two implications you listed, I do not subscribe to either of them. The reason I don’t agree with either of the two optional implications is that I am aware of a third implication.

There is a growing science that says the human species evolved certain psychological traits. As a quote on my previous post on Darwin Day stated, our understanding of evolution is creeping into all kinds of areas. It is changing the way we understand medicine. And it is changing the way we understanding human psychology and human nature. While Evolutionary Psychology is still young in the field of science and has much work yet to do in substantiating its claims, it contributes a third implication to Dan’s list of only two; an implication to which I currently subscribe.

In his book, The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker explains:

In the study of humans, there are major spheres of human experience–beauty, motherhood, kinship, morality, cooperation, sexuality, violence–in which evolutionary psychology provides the only coherent theory and has spawned vibrant new areas of empirical research. Behavioral genetics has revived the study of personality and will only expand with the application of knowledge from the Human Genome Project. Cognitive neuroscience will not shrink from applying its new tools to every aspect of mind and behavior, including the emotionally and politically charged ones.

Later he clarifies what evolution means for psychology:

Natural selection works to homogenize a species into a standard overall design by concentrating the effective genes–the ones that build well-functioning organs–and winnowing out the ineffective ones. When it comes to an explanation of what makes us tick, we are thus birds of a feather. Just as we all have the same physical organs (two eyes, a liver, a four-chambered heart), we have the same mental organs.” (pg. 142)

What does this have to do with finding meaning in life or understanding whether concepts of good and evil are relative? Here is what a materialist view implies when combined with the view that evolution provided us a certain innate psychology:

To quote Pinker again on pg. 145:

Regardless of IQ or physical strength or any other trait that can vary, all humans can be assumed to have certain traits in common. No one likes being enslaved. No one likes being humiliated. No one likes being treated unfairly, that is, according to traits that the person cannot control. The revulsion we feel toward discrimination and slavery comes from a conviction that however much people vary on some traits, they do not vary on these. This conviction contrasts, by the way, with the supposedly progressive doctrine that people have no inherent concerns, which implies that they could be conditioned to enjoy servitude or degradation.

Do you see how this homogeny implies a certain generality when it comes to the meaning of life or ethics/morality?

We all have the capacity to feel pain and happiness. We all want to avoid pain and increase pleasure and happiness. We also all know this is true of one another (the ability to understand even that is likewise inherent in our natural cognitive abilities). These three simple facts are enough to provide us both a compass for ethics/morality and for meaning to life.

I find meaning in the fact that I can increase my own happiness and I have the ability to help increase happiness in others. So I guess in some ways a materialist point of view may imply that “there is no meaning or value in life, other than what a particular individual attaches to it.” But in consideration of a shared human nature, or the idea that humans share certain innate traits, I do not agree with the implication.

I find value in life from the mere fact that I have approximately seventy years (if I live an average life-span) of conscious existence. If that is all you think you have, and you do not imagine another life after, what can you possibly value more than life? Not only your own life, but the lives of others?

I personally find meaning in the fact that I can do things to increase my own personal happiness and the happiness of other people. The quotes from Steven Pinker above imply that this could be a universally human objective when it comes to finding meaning in life. It implies that all humans want to be free and pursue their own happiness.

But what about the other half of the implications you listed for a materialistic worldview? Dan said it was that “concepts of good and evil must be relative to the individual.”

Some materialists do hold this view, but it does not necessarily follow as the only consistent conclusion to materialistic thought. Many scientists, philosophers and atheist writers speak of an innate “moral sense” in the human species which evolved through Natural Selection.

A few of the more popular ones that I have been referring to recently are Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Robert Wright, Daniel Dennett, and James Joyce.

Wright lists a number of traits that combine to make up this natural moral sense:

Altruism, compassion, empathy, love, conscience, the sense of justice–all of these things, the things that hold society together, can now confidently be said to have a firm genetic basis (The Moral Animal, pg. 12).

I have to qualify this quote with my own statement that I would have to review his book to find out what Wright’s sources are for the “firm genetic basis” of the traits he listed. But Pinker agrees with him when he makes a similar list which he referred to as an innate “emotional repertiore–-sympathy, trust, guilt, anger, self-esteem.”

Pinker gave this explanation for the evolutionary endowed moral sense while discussing the dilemma of conflicting self-interests among individuals:

. . . there are reasons to believe that the solution to it–a moral sense–evolved in our species rather than having to be deduced from scratch by each of us after we’ve picked ourselves up out of the mud. Children as young as a year and a half spontaneously give toys, proffer help, and try to comfort adults or other children who are visibly distressed. People in all cultures distinguish right from wrong, have a sense of fairness, help one another, impose rights and obligations, believe that wrongs should be redressed, and proscribe rape, murder, and some kinds of violence (The Blank Slate, pg. 187-8).

And this is what I meant when I told Dan that there was a third implication:

The alternative, then, to the religious theory of the source of values is that evolution endowed us with a moral sense, and we have expanded its circle of application over the course of history through reason (grasping the logical interchangeability of our interests and others’), knowledge (learning of the advantages of cooperation over the long term), and sympathy (having experiences that allow us to feel others pain).

Steven Pinker, then, made a comparison of a religiously endowed morality to an evolutionary endowed morality:

How can we tell which theory is preferable? A thought experiment can pit them against eachother. What would be the right thing to do if God had commanded people to be selfish and cruel rather than generous and kind? Those who root their values in religion would have to say that we ought to be selfish and cruel. Those who appeal to a moral sense would say that we ought to reject God’s command.

. . .The history of religion shows that God has commanded people to do all manner of selfish and cruel acts: massacre Midianites and abduct their women, stone prostitutes, execute homosexuals, burn witches, withhold medicine from dying children, shoot up abortion clinics . . .(pg. 189).

But let’s also compare the theory of an innate moral sense to the theory that morality is relative and should not be part of the human dialogue at all. Pinker gives one example (among others) of why it is dangerous to disregard and deny this innate nature that provides us with a moral sense:

Feminism, far from needing a blank slate, needs the opposite, a clear conception of human nature. One of the most pressing feminist causes today is the condition of women in the developing world. In many places female fetuses are selectively aborted, newborn girls are killed, daughters are malnourished and kept from school, adolescent girls have their genitals cut out, young women are cloaked from head to toe, adulteresses are stoned to death, and widows are expected to fall onto their husbands’ funeral pyres. The relativist climate in many academic circles does not allow these horrors to be criticized because they are practices of other cultures, and cultures are superorganisms that, like people, have inalienable rights. To escape this trap, the feminist philosopher Martha Nussbaum has invoked “central functional capabilities” that all humans have a right to exercise, such as physical integrity, liberty of conscience, and political participation. She has been criticized in turn for taking on a colonial “civilizing mission” or “white woman’s burden,” in which arrogant Europeans would instruct the poor people of the world in what they want. But Nussbaum’s moral argument is defensible if her “capabilities” are grounded, directly or indirectly, in a universal human nature. Human nature provides a yardstick to identify suffering in any member of our species (The Blank Slate, pg.172).

This understanding of human nature is vital in preserving the freedoms of all people. White southerners justified their actions against black people, both while they were slaves and after, by pretending blacks were less than human in order to deny them the characteristics that would make their enslavement wrong. They created stereotyped caricatures of black people to portray a difference in the nature of black people compared to white people. A universality in human nature defines this as clearly wrong, not just morally but also factually.

To summarize, theories in Evolutionary Psychology regarding innate and homogeneous needs and desires across the human species provides its own implications to the materialist. In addition to the idea that humans can find meaning in life by virtue of the fact that we exist with capacities for pain and happiness, we can assume a shared concept of the meaning of life: the pursuit of happiness, both for ourselves and others. It also means that morality is not relative. The subjugation of and infliction of pain on another being is not acceptable and good to some people in some cultures. Human beings cannot be socialized to desire servitude and pain. Human beings, no matter the environment or culture, do not want pain or servitude. Therefore ethics and morality exist in real terms as revolving around this idea: we do not have the right to purposely cause others pain or deny them their happiness and freedom.

I was reading the Sunday paper so I tried to do a little dodging. “You have to learn all the elementary stuff before you learn the college stuff. That’s why we go to elementary school first.” Then I added a classic line, “Go read a book. Reading anything will help you prepare for college.”

Yes, I was dropping the ball.

Blake contined to prod me for some type of brain-food activity. I noticed a funky multi-colored bouncy ball on the table. It reminded me of a movie Israel and I just watched, Match Point. I only need to tell you that Woody Allen directed it to give you an idea of what type of movie it was.

The story revolves around the luck factor. In tennis, there are times when your ball hits the net and bounces straight up. Where it goes from there has nothing to do with your skill, but pure luck. Chance.

As much as we like to factor our skill and talent into our successes, we often fail to note the innumerable avenues on which luck travels around us.

The bouncy ball on our table provided me an idea for an activity to occupy Blake. I told him to get a piece of paper and a pen. He dashed around the room in exhilerated bliss. He came back with the items. I handed him the ball and told him to let it drop straight down onto a line in the floor that he chooses. He was then to record the direction the ball headed after the first bounce. He would do this ten times. Here are the results:

1. Right
2. Under the line.
3. Right.
4. Under.
5. Under.
6. Right.
7. Under.
8. Over the line.
9. Over.
10. Over.

I asked Blake if he saw any kind of pattern in the direction the ball went. He said, “Not completey. But it is starting to go over the line all of a sudden!”

He was excited, as if he was onto something.

“Do you think there is something causing the ball to go in a certain direction? Maybe the way your hand drops it, or a crease where it hits the floor?” I asked.

Those possibilities didn’t interest him. He felt there was something within him that was predicting the direction of the ball, but he didn’t have his finger on it yet. This is a topic I’ve been wanting to experiment with Blake on because he thinks he can make accurate predictions based on his feelings.

He’s often asked me questions like, “Mom, what do you think the percentage is of people who go to college?”

My reply is something like, “Well, I don’t know. I’ve never paid attention to that statistic so I’d have to look it up.”

And he comes back with “I think it is . . . 60 percent. No, 63! That’s it! It’s 63 percent.”

“Interesting,” I answer back. “And what information do you base your answer on?”

“It just feels like that’s what it is.”

“Is that an accurate predictor? Your feelings of what it is?”

“Yes.”

No matter how many times I’ve explained to Blake that his feelings can’t give him an accurate answer at that type of question, he doesn’t get it yet. I realized this is something I’m going to have to show him.

So I changed the direction of our experiment with the ball. I turned the paper over to the other side. He was now going to predict which direction the ball would bounce, then drop the ball, and I would record whether his guesses were right or wrong.

Here are the results:

1. Wrong
2. Right
3. Wrong
4. Wrong
5. Right
6. Right
7. Wrong
8. Right
10. Wrong

Before showing him the results on paper, I asked him if he thought he had been right most of the time or wrong. He said, “I think I was mostly right.” This surprised me because we spent a lot of time in the middle of the experiment talking about the third and fourth tries being wrong. And the last try was also wrong. Still, this didn’t give him the lasting impression of having mostly guessed wrong. At least he has confidence in his abilities!

I showed him the paper and added them up. Six wrong guesses and four right guesses.

I then asked him, “How many possibilities were there?” His answer was four: Over the line, under the line, right or left.

My next question was, “What if this activity had 100 possibilities? Would that have made it harder or easier to make a correct guess?”

He answered, “Harder.”

“This activity only had four possibilities, making it easier to guess correctly just by chance. Still, you guessed wrong more than you guessed right. Do you think there is a pattern here for where the ball goes, or do you think it is all random chance, both where the ball goes and whether your guess is right or not?”

It was interesting because he made the connection, and yet he still wanted to hold onto the idea that he had some ability to predict the direction of the ball.

In Michael Shermer’s book, How We Believe, Shermer shared his hypothesis of a human Belief Engine. “Humans evolved to be skilled pattern-seeking creatures. Those who were best at finding patterns (standing upwind of game animals is bad for the hunt, cow manure is good for the crops) left behind the most offspring. We are their descendants. The problem in seeking and finding patterns is knowing which ones are meaningful and which ones are not.”

Blake made four “hits,” as Shermer calls them, or in other words, Blake made four accurate guesses when he was making his predictions about the balls. Sometimes it only takes one accidental hit for someone to think they are onto something. I explained to Blake that this is why some fortune-tellers, astrologists, self-proclaimed prophets and the like, think they have the power to predict. They got a hit. A lucky guess. Sometimes they get many hits. But how many misses do they also get in the process?

This activity with Blake was just a seed. I think it will take a few similar experiences such as this before he gets it. Shermer stated the following about the tendency to think the way Blake does:

It is normal. It is in all of us. Stuart Vyse shows, for example, that superstition is not a form of psychopathology or abnormal behavior; it is not limited to traditional cultures; it is not restricted to race, religion, or nationality; nor is it only a product of people of low intelligence or lacking in education. There is variance in magical thinking among individuals, or course, but all humans posses it because it is part of our nature, built into our neuronal mainframe. We do not live in a Pleistocene environment, but our minds were built there and often function as if we do.

The good news is that the more answers we have to life’s mysteries, the less we rely on superstition and errors in our pattern-seeking. For this reason, my focus in raising my children has less to do with telliing them there is no god and more to do with teaching them accurate ways of finding answers.

The unexpected death of a young person is especially tragic. The wife, sister, and sister-in-law who planned yesterday’s ceremony executed it the way every funeral should be. In my opinion. It was full of stories. Lots and lots of stories. And while this man was religious, and the tone of the funeral reflected his faith appropriately, religion was not the dominant player in this scene. The man who died was.

One of the brothers played an audio tape of my husband’s uncle from when he was just a boy. What a surprise that was. On the tape he talked about all the brothers and sisters, even a cousin, all close family who were present at the funeral. As any child is, he was funny. “And do you know what?” he started every single sentence. “Russ came over today. Sometimes he was good. But sometimes he was bad.”

Knowing Russ as we all do, we had an extra laugh for that statement, which he rephrased at least three times!

My husband’s brother coordinated the life sketch with a slide show of photos. With the exception of the few words from the church leader at the end, all of the talks were stories about the quirky personality, the unique interests, the endearing strengths.

It was a celebration of this man’s life. Not so much what he did, but who he was.

In the days before the funeral, the wife, who I am closer to than the uncle, called to ask if I would participate. “I don’t know where you’re at with the Church,” she said, “but I’d really love it if you would lead the music. I understand if you’re not comfortable.”

I was so glad that she wanted to include me in the program. I love that she was sensitive to my differences with the religion.

Leading the music would mean singing and leading the congregation in song about Jesus, life after death, and a number of other beliefs.

“I’m not a believer,” I confirmed. “But you’re my family. I want to be a part of this.”

I reminded her that none of my dressy clothes agree with the church’s standard of modesty. I wasn’t sure what she or the guests would think of me standing at the front of the chapel in slacks and a top with spagghetti straps (with 115 degree weather, it’s all I buy).

“You know he never cared about stuff like that, Noell. He would have wanted you to just be you. And if that bothers anyone else, I really don’t care. I just want you to lead the music.”

As long as she was happy I was happy. In fact, the only person who dared comment on my non-Mormon attire in the chapel was a fellow ex-Mormon family member. He is one who especially loves to tease.

Not to make such a big deal of what I was wearing! What I am trying to say is that the experience at the funeral reflected this man’s nature of openness, down-to-earth honesty, caring and acceptance for others, and having a firm stand on his principles. At the funeral I reflected on that nature and how it is typical of most every family member, both on my husband’s and my own sides.

So while I often harp on problems I see with religion, it is good to make note of the many, many religious people who want to walk their chosen paths and allow others to do the same. To my husband’s family members who read this: thank you.

Although I was sure after my hours-long quest in the temple that it was false, I had not actually been expecting that conclusion. It came as a surprise I wasn’t ready for.

So the grand finale of that six-month search became the beginning of another six months of continued church involvement, a smidgen of hope for the slightest reason to think I was wrong, along with the question of where the truth was, if not in the Mormon Church.

I wondered which Christian religion was closest to truth. Would I find one I could be comfortable in?

And then the new year came around and the adult Sunday School class began studying the Old Testament.

Our discussion and reading of the great and wacky O.T. was probably what planted the idea that it was all wrong: the Mormon Church, Christianity, the entire Bible, and God in general (that changing god who evolved from one personality to the next depending on the culture and popular understanding).

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

But let me back up a bit. If you’ve ever studied the Old Testament with Mormons then you know that the introduction of every O.T. class is not actually on that particular book of scripture, but on one of the Mormon scriptures, The Pearl Of Great Price.

Part of The Pearl Of Great Price is, according to Joseph Smith, a “complete” version of certain scripture that supposedly went missing from the first five books of the O.T.

Another part of The Pearl (excuse my shortcut-nickname) is the writing of Abraham, himself. It was this part of our gospel study class that got interesting. Actually, it is where I began to get angry.

We started our study of the writings of Abraham with a review lesson on how Joseph received it. The teacher reminded us that some guy came traipsing about Mormom-Town in Illinois selling ancient rolls of papyrus and mummies from Egypt.

Joseph Smith took a look at them, and God told him the rolls were the writings of Abraham himself! So he bought them and “translated” them.

Now I realize God may have maneuvered this transaction. But it all sounded so very opportunistic to me. It was the kind of line I would have pulled out as a kid when I used to tell my friends I wasn’t really Noell, but her twin Dutch sister.

I went home feeling angry that I hadn’t seen through this story before.

It was no more than a couple days later when my son, Blake, brought me a kids magazine he was reading and he asked me to explain a page to him. I looked at it, and my jaw dropped open. It was a picture of papyrus with drawings of ancient Egyptian burial rites. It was almost exactly the same picture as this one in The Pearl.

While Joseph Smith explained that the drawing was that of Abraham almost to be sacrificed as a child by his father who was a priest, the authentic one in the magazine explained very well what these drawings really were.

What made this experience all the more enlightening was that I had seen pictures of these before, probably in high school. And I never made the connection between them and the drawing in the Pearl.

Many ex-Mormons know all about this doctrinal dilemma. I am leaving out all the many details of how wrong Joseph’s make-believe translation is, now that Egyptologists have a greater knowledge of those ancient artifacts. And many Mormon apologists have given bizarre justifications for it. But this was all new to me. It was almost like divine intervention. An answer from on high that all of it was. . .stupid.

By this time, though, I was done with thoughts of a Being from on high. Over the previous months, since that last temple visit, I watched my relationship with what I thought was Heavenly Father slip away. I had grown far distant from that god who had seemed always at my side.

I didn’t see this as tragic or lonely. It was empowering! All the strength that I had derived from this imaginary god-partner growing up had really come from within myself!

For example, I have always been a happy person. It takes a lot to get me down. And I bounce right back. When I was younger people often asked me how I was so happy. This is embarassing now, but I actually used to tell them it was because I was a Mormon. And because I had such a close relationship with God.

I felt a little guilty saying this because I knew plenty of devoted Mormons who were miserable. But I continued with that story nonetheless. It was my missionary tool.

When God disappeared from my side, I realized I was still the same me in every way. I was still a happy person. And all the sides of me that I thought were God supporting me, or God’s gifts to me, were actually me.

I had now come to know myself and appreciate myself more than ever before in my life.

It was good.

This affected my interpretation of things people would say at church. I remember when a member of the bishopric, who apparently didn’t know about my waning spiritual state, expressed to me how I had inspired him with something I said and that I “had such a strong testimony.”

I smiled and thanked him but knew inside that it was just my happy nature that he was misinterpreting as my testimony shining through. There was no testimony.

My new paradigm of self also contrasted with the guilt and self-criticism I witnessed in many of the women at church. They never felt they were good enough. They could never meet the demands and expectations of religion.

It got to the point where I left every church meeting angry about something someone taught. I had resigned to continued church attendance, not out of belief, but out of a desire for spiritual sustenance. Instead, church was becoming a spiritual vacuum.

At one point, our congregation split and a small handful of us, including only one of my real friends, got reassigned to a different one. I knew almost no one in church now, which made it easier for me to become more anonymous and less involved. My one remaining good friend, who I really admired (because she and her husband were extremely intelligent and the only Mormons I knew who went to prestigious universities) inspired new hope in me. She told me she wanted to go to the temple with me, and asked me to get my recommend.

This friend was normally so busy, I was thrilled to have an opportunity to spend time with her. This really motivated me. At the same time I had a sister whose temple wedding was coming up the following month, so it really was vital for me to get a glimpse of a testimony back so I could get a temple recommend.

My new motivation drove me to a two-week, two hour-a-day scripture study and prayer obsession. That’s right. I read and prayed for two hours. Every day. In the process I lost any remaining hope that it might be true. I couldn’t believe it when later my mom suggested I didn’t show enough faith to get an answer from God. Two hours a day for two weeks isn’t enough? How about a year of desperate searching?

Around this two week period I flew up to Utah for a weekend to meet with my parents and family. We took a trip to the center of the Mormon organization in Salt Lake City, Temple Square. We ooh’d and ahh’d at the new Conference Center. It was an amazing and magnificent building. The woodwork was unmatched. And while my family interpreted the building’s beauty as another testament to the truthfulness of the Mormon Church, all I could think about was the money it took to build the thing.

I remembered when my husband and I were struggling with a baby, sometimes unable to buy groceries. Yet there was the obligation to give an entire ten percent of our income to the Lord. So that he could erect this building. Nevermind the many poorer families who don’t have money for food or medicine. They need to help provide for the Church’s desire to build more buildings.

We left the gorgeous wooden money pit and went outside where my parents showed me that the Church convinced the Mormon-dominated legislature to give them the city’s main road so that they could build over it. The main road through temple square is no longer a road. Commuters now have to circle around Temple Square and then veer back to the road, as I understand it.

“Were a lot of the non-members around here furious when they did this?” I asked.

“Oh, they just need something to be angry at the Church for. It’s really nothing,” was the response of one of my family members.

Seemed like quite a lot to be upset about to me.

This trip to the new and improved Temple Square both impressed and disgusted me.

Between that experience and my two-week devotion to get an answer once-and-for-all, I was now ready to accept the facts: it was all bogus. I was ready to add the “ex” to Mormon.

It was exhilarating. Life was exhilarating. So much to learn! So much to explore! New paradigms to view my world through. New questions to ask.

I walked into the most exciting time of my life.

And everything about it became better. My husband and I are stronger friends, closer than we’ve ever been.

I appreciate the fragile lives of my children more.

I can accept people for who they are.

I can be honest about who I am without pretending to live up to another person’s ideal. Because of this I am finally able to make real friends. I hadn’t had real friends since high school. You can’t be a real friend when you have a picture you have to portray.

I was a happy Mormon. I am a happier agnostic.

I have been checking out your site. I have a question for you, do you know how old you will be when you die? Will you be 70 or 45?

Did you know 155,000 people die every day. That is right ten out of ten people die. The truth is you don’t know when your day will come. One second you are here, the next, you step into eternity. Your life is like a vapor here today and gone tomorrow.

Do you know what the Bible says? The Bible says it is appointed once for a man to die and then comes judgement. To be asbsent from your body is to be present before the Lord. When you die and stand before the Lord do you know if he will send you to Heaven or to Hell?

I thought Bishop Rick gave a fine response, one that exemplifies why Christianity makes absolutely no sense, whatsoever, to me:

Do you really believe there is a Hell…a place with fire and brimstone and eternal agony? If there is such a place, would you send one of your children there?

Do you really believe there is a devil…a being that can influence your thoughts and lead you to do evil?

Would you send your children to a totally foreign place/family after robbing their memory, and leave it solely to chance as to whether they join the right religion, and learn the right principles, and depending on whether they get the test questions right, they get to come home (heaven) or go to Hell?

I have little interest in attacking the validity of Christianity in order to deconvert the religious. I prefer the conversations with Christians on this blog regarding philosophy, ethics, and science. But when a Christian comes to me with dire warnings of a vengeful god, I have no qualms saying I don’t buy into the threats and it’s not worth more than a sentence of response. Like Bishop Rick, I want to ask, “You really believe that?!”

But Cody inspired a topic that I think will be interesting for my atheist, agnostic, and deist readers: Do you wonder if you will return to religion in a time of desperate need? Would a fatal accident involving one of your kids put you back in church? Will a heart attack at 50 years old make you reconsider religion? When you find yourself terminally ill will you be one of those “death-bed converts” that Christians love to talk about?

I used to wonder these things.

We have experienced some close-encounters recently. Last year my brother-in-law pulled my two-year-old from the bottom of the pool. None of us saw him fall in. How close was Aiden? Two minutes?

Not much later he ingested an unknown amount of Advil. And two weeks ago my six-year-old fainted and was unconscious for about twenty-five minutes. I spent a day in ER with both kids.

All of these experiences knock a parent to their senses. It brings us to an appreciation for what we have. Perhaps it brings some to their knees. I have never, in all of these near-tragedies, felt a need to invoke the help of a god. I can’t compare this, though, to the devastation of actually losing a child or spouse.

Last week my father-in-law seemed to imply in a conversation with me that I might change my world-view if I did have such an experience. It’s hard for me to imagine, but maybe he is right. If I did, would that emotional desire to hope for an after-life equate to the actuality of an after-life? Does this type of conversion give us any evidence of God’s existence?

Is the willing sacrifice and personal conviction of a suicide bomber evidence of the existence of Allah and his gift of virgins? No. It is just evidence of his conviction.

And conversions from tragedies are only evidence of the hope that exists within humankind. They do not give an ounce of evidence of truthfulness. While I used to wonder if I would convert during a time of crisis, I also felt that I would know inside that my conversion had nothing to do with belief. Only desperation from loss.

I stopped asking myself these questions a couple of years ago. I found a lump under one of my breasts. While this lump worried me, I procrastinated day-after-day, never getting around to scheduling an appointment with the doctor. All of a sudden one day the lump felt different. It had hardened and was larger. This was the motivation I needed to finally pick up the phone. Why had I waited so long?

When I described the lump and the sudden change to the nurse her voice took on an urgency and she insisted I come in right away. Never have I been able to get a same-day appointment with my doctor before. But I had kids in school who needed me to pick them up at different times and I couldn’t figure out how to manage that with their available times. Since it was Friday, the nurse made an appointment for me the following Monday. I’d have to wait the entire weekend.

Because of the surprising urgency of the nurse, and because I had let so much time go from when I first discovered the lump, I came to grips with the possibility that I may have breast cancer. Not only that, but I realized I may have waited too long. During a slow and pensive shower I accepted the possibility that I may not be around very long. It was a drawn-out two-and-a-half days as I considered everything about my life. Have I lived a fulfilling one? Am I happy with what I have done? Am I at peace with my belief that there is no god or an after-life? Do I feel good about the way I raised my children? Would I wish I taught them something else if I die early?

These questions gave me a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment I could never have enjoyed without the very real thought that I may not be around much longer. I was happy with who I was. I have lived out a number of my life-long dreams. I have experienced life beyond the easy world of a modern spoiled American. I have chosen my beliefs and non-beliefs with careful analysis and they are more beautiful to me than religion ever was. I am satisfied with what I have taught my kids. I wouldn’t change a thing except to focus more on my family than I do.

On Monday I went into the doctor prepared for any diagnosis. Thankfully, my lump was not cancerous. It was a build-up of fatty tissue. But I do not regret the weekend of preparation for a possible end. It gave me new confidence and gratitude.

Not long after that I watched what became my favorite movie, Touching the Void. It is a documentary/docudrama of two mountain climbers who ascended the Peruvian Andes in 1985. When one of the climbers, Joe Simpson, found himself in a position impossible to survive, hanging alone with a broken leg in a crevasse with no apparent bottom, I related when he said that while waiting for death to come he confirmed his own atheism as he felt no inclination to return to his Catholic upbringing and pray for help.

Thank you, Cody, for the reminder that life is short. For some of us it could end decades shorter than we anticipate. And while I am really not concerned about what the Bible says my fate will be, I agree that it is good to contemplate whether we are ready for a possible untimely end.

I have an idea of what you can do to celebrate it. Some of my articles are now up and running on ClubMom. You can rate them and leave comments at the end of each article. All of them have appeared on this blog at some point but I have edited the ClubMom versions. Some have only slight changes while others are very different.

Make your statement to the mainstream folks by rating my articles and leaving a comment about why these topics are important to you!

Note: If you want to find my articles from the homepage, look under the main box to find the button, “Expert Writers.” Then click on “Religion and Beliefs” (yes, that is how they classified me) for a list of all the writers in that area. Scroll down until you find me, Noell Hyman.

I would be interested in hearing here from anyone else as to how they approach the subject of death with their children. How do you do it? If you don’t have children, what is your own view?

I would be interested in hearing here from anyone else as to how they approach the subject of death with their children.

So far in previous comments on my blog and in my article, only Jen, Hifi, and I have shared what we say to our children about death. This is probably our most difficult task. I, myself, would like to hear more thoughts.

Currently AgnosticMom gets about 80 individual readers a day, so I know there are lurkers out there who have dealt with this. Please share!

Anyone? Anyone?

I quoted two AgnosticMom readers who contributed to the discussion about death in the comments section. Since it would have broken the flow of the article to name them, I wanted to acknowledge Jen and Hifi in this blog entry and thank them for their insight.

To begin reading HNN from the beginning, click here (and make sure you subscribe if you haven’t already!).

One of the other regular columnists, Doug Thomas wrote an article on ethics called, The Evolution Of Kindness, that is another version of the arguments I have been making about morality (no, Hifi, I have not had time to respond to your last three or so comments. I hope to get to them soon). Thomas uses slightly different wording than I do, words like “love” and “kindness” which he lifted from Bertrand Russell, where I prefer to use words like “empathy.”

But utlimately Thomas is making the same claim I made: that evolution provided us with some helpful characteristics in addition to some hurtful ones. We can use another of our evolved traits, rational thought, to choose the helpful characteristics (love, kindness, empathy) in our dealings with others. Here is a quote:

How do humanists explain their need or desire to perform charitable acts? Oh, of course, there is the pragmatic argument — what goes around comes around — a kind of “What’s in it for me?” approach. However, that does not explain the altruism performed without thoughts of pay back that I notice among my fellow humanists. I think it goes beyond a secular belief in “karma.”

Go enjoy some time with other humanists reading this week’s HNN. Feel free to start a discussion on one of the article topics in my comment area.

Note to the fans of my “Leaving The Church” series. I am glad that a number of you have been enjoying it and have expressed anticipation of part 3. Please be patient as I have a few topics to work on first. It’ll come, I promise.

Ben is right. Religious leaders did (do) not just throw a dart on the wall to randomly pick rules of conduct. But many of the rules sure seem arbitrary, especially when you see headlines like this one from the Los Angeles Times:

“Reverend equates kneeling at wrong time to ‘mortal sin.’”

Surely there is more to this story than what the title says, I thought when I saw it.

Well, there is! It’s not just a story of one power-hungry ecclesastical leader who believes that kneeling during the service “is clearly rebellion, grave disobedience and mortal sin.”

The Diocese of Orange is in on it, too! There are two of them!

According to the article, members of a dozen different U.S. parishes are committing a mortal sin RIGHT IN CHURCH despite the Vatican’s new instructions of four years ago allowing bishops to play god to decide whether worshippers should kneel or not.

The article begins, “At a small Catholic church in Huntington Beach, the pressing moral question comes to this: Does kneeling at the wrong time during worship make you a sinner?”

What lies at the heart of this problem is change of time and culture. What may have seemed appropriate at one time in one culture can be inappropriate to another because of customs and associations.

And I’d add the power-hungry need to control dominions is also responsible for the standing dilemma.

So while rules of conduct may have made sense at one particular time in history and were not actually arbitrary at conception, they can sure appear arbitrary to an outsider. At the very least, they become meaningless over time. This is especially problematic since we have become a global society. Many of the rules of various sects conflict with each other.

Plus, some people become obsessed with rules. Why is the pressing moral question of any group something as miniscule as kneeling versus standing? Are there not more critical crises to worry about?

Many people lose sight of what is important because they are so worried about the rules.

And it is not just specific rules that cause a problem. Even more general principles about lying, gossiping, “going the extra mile,” etc. can, in certain situations, do more harm than good when we place them in a context of morality. We have to make all kinds of exceptions for those principles.

For example, we have no qualms about publicizing the residence of a child molester even though to do so is public gossip that causes real social and financial harm to the perpetrator. How do we justify this gossip when religion says gossip is a sin? Because it helps decrease instances of even worse harm to innumerable innocent children.

Even not-so public gossip can be important and helpful in personal situations and small group communities.

These rules, and even principles, do not stand the test of time or specific situations.

This is why I propose a system for morality that is based on situational analysis rather than rules.

We can teach our children to use their powers of reason and empathy to evaluate whether their choices would increase overall happiness or pain. Including their own. (There is a balance).

So going back to the topic of this post: Religious ideas of morality can become irrelvant and meaningless. But was my use of the word “arbitrary” inaccurate, as Ben suggested? I think so.

Can anyone come up with a better way to phrase it so I can improve my article (before I submit it to ClubMom)?

Leave your ideas (about a better word choice, or about the concepts of this blog entry in general) in a comment, please!

What finally motivated me to get it done? The great founder of COTG, Brent Rasmussen of Unscrewing the Inscrutible (Brent, what do you call yourself in relation to COTG? Probably not the founder?) commented on one of my recent posts and wrote up a little blog entry on AgnosticMom.

That was all the motivation I needed.

Amazing how all this time I’ve considered submitting an article but it just seemed like work I didn’t have time to do. It took, oh, about three minutes to pick the post and send the email.

So maybe I’ll get on the ball and submit all the time.

Anyway, if you don’t know what a blogging carnival is or you’d like to see one that is godless, click here and go have some fun. Get to know some of the other godless bloggers out there.

I am convinced that all religious people experience cognitive dissonance at multiple points in their lives. This is where a belief we regard as truth does not match up with the reality we are witnessing or experiencing. During the time that Israel contemplated the truthfulness of our religion, cognitive dissonance became the pesky telemarketer who failed to take my name off the calling list.

For two weeks I watched Israel read scriptures and search for an answer. And yet, after the two weeks were over, he was more sure than ever that he was not a believer.

I never imagined he wouldn’t get the answer he was supposed to. God had promised to answer prayers about the truthfulness of his church. It didn’t happen this time.

Cognitive Dissonance.

Now we had to decide what to do about Israel’s nonbelief. I was suddenly reeling at the idea of him not baptizing our children or attending their temple weddings. And what would it be like for the kids to grow up with one of those “inactive” dads?

If there was one thing religion taught me how to do, it was to use guilt to manipulate. I reminded Israel that despite what he believes now, I married him with the understanding that we were going to be a Mormon family. He couldn’t just walk away from that.

We agreed that he would continue to go to church. Meanwhile, the doubts that had crept into my heart years earlier began to bear their ugly teeth at me. The more I read from the scriptures, the more contradictions I saw. It’s not that the contradictions were new. It’s just that I had always told myself that God would someday explain it all to me. I compartmentalized every contradiction into its own individual hiding place in my brain, all to come rushing out at the same time when God didn’t answer Israel’s prayers.

Extreme Cognitive Dissonance.

I began my own effort to receive an answer from God that The Church was true. I didn’t realize at that time that it was too late. My paradigm had shifted. For the first time ever I had already peeked through Door #2, the door marked “It’s Not True!!!” Once you’ve looked through that door, going back is like trying to pretend that Santa is real once you know he’s not.

It would be a year before I was willing to give up, though.

Just a month or two into this life-changing phase, we moved to Scottsdale, Arizona to be closer to Israel’s job. We attended church the first Sunday. Israel came with us, as usual. Sitting in the chapel that day was a pivotal moment for me. Israel dislikes church hymns, but you would never know it for the zeal with which he sings them!

I kept looking from him to the bishopric on the stand. They were ecstatic at seeing a new family. A family of four. With a husband who loves the hymns! As soon as the meeting concluded the entire bishopric was at our seat, introducing themselves and sizing us up for new callings (volunteer positions).

At that moment I knew I shouldn’t have Israel going if he didn’t believe. On the way home I told him I preferred it if he stopped accompanying us to church.

For months I would become the mom who had “the courage” to bring her two little ones to church on her own.

Part 3 to come.

If you are not subscribed to the Humanist News Network, this week’s installment hit our emails yesterday. You can read my latest article, A System For Morality.

Just make sure you come back here and comment.

May 4th, Thursday, was the National Day of Prayer.

While The Atheist Mama and I don’t always agree on certain philosophies or tactics of social action, she brought this day to my attention, and in this case, we came up with the same idea: to make it a day of action.

I had planned to declare May 4th a Humanist Day of Action. I had ideas, and meant to write an entry last week, right after my Public Image Makeover posts. But what often happens when I have ideas? Other urgent items get in my way.

So we’re forgetting about my ideas for now and maybe I’ll get to it on time next year!

If you’re interested in continuing the thread on public image and “campaign” strategies, here is a topic to debate between ourselves: Should we fight to remove crosses with historical significance for a city?

Hifi provided this link about the Mount Soledad cross in San Diego. An atheist has been fighting to have it removed from city property for 15 years and has finally won.

Is this a fight worth fighting? I would say it definitely is if they were erecting a new cross. What about a historical one? I haven’t decided. What are your thoughts?

I thought I’d start off with a bit of drama. Just to get your attention.

We can find a legitimate answer by taking the emotion out of it and giving it a good analysis. Do they hate us, or do they FEAR us? And do they fear us, as individuals, or US as a whole?

AgnosticMom reader, Hifi, twice emphasized an important distinction we have to remember as we discuss how to improve our atheist/agnostic image:

Speaking of the UofM study about the negative view and distrust Americans have for atheists one commentator had this to say, “Agnostics like myself…would very much like to be considered full citizens and participate in American public life. The study found that “negative views about atheists are strong,” but that “survey respondents were not, on the whole, referring to actual atheists they had encountered.”

I reiterate my earlier statement, “In that light, personal revelations will do little to change the dominant view of atheists as the least trusted demographic in America – including the way our friends vote on religious issues. The last thing they will do is consider how promotion of religion by government is going to affect us.”

While you and I may be (or become) successful at winning our neighbors’ hearts, friendship, and even trust, it’s an entirely different story if we are ever to consider a fellow secularist gaining the presidency, or even lower-level government position. A successful “coming-out-of-the-closet” will hardly help us make gains when it comes to public policy that affects us.

It is time to dissect the problem. What do they fear about a secular society and secular influence? I think it is three things.

1) They fear the “removal of God” from the public domain as an abandonment of God, which will result in either his wrath, or in a loss of his protection.
2) They think anger motivates us more than charity, and fear a loss of goodness and good actions.
3) They fear a decrease in morality in our country.

It is the bottom two fears that we have the most control over. If we focus our efforts to improve our image in these two areas first, if we can convince the religious public that the non-religious can maintain a charitable and moral society, the first fear may prove less difficult to overcome.

I want to address morality in a separate post. In fact, I may initiate the topic as my next article in the Humanist News Network. It is a massive topic and I hope to address it over a few different blog entries. Let me just touch on the subject with a skeleton overview and the statement that we need to have a system for identifying moral choices. I cannot think of many other things that anger and scare the religious more than the idea of “Moral Relativism.” Therefore, Moral Relativism is just as much our enemy as it is theirs.

Moral living makes sense for two basic reasons:
1) Humans feel pain and suffering (as well as joy)
2) Humans have a capacity for empathy

We can choose to be moral, not because we hope for eternal blessings and fear eternal punishment, but because we can relate to and empathize with another person’s pain.

We should base our moral choices, not on arbitrary rules from an old book (a few that come to mind: don’t eat pork, don’t drink coffee, don’t flip the lights on the Sabbath, don’t expose your shoulders except when swimming); we should base our choices on whether they will cause others pain. To take it further, we should ask ourselves whether the action we want to take, if everyone were to take the same action in similar circumstances, would increase the overall happiness or the overall suffering in the world.

We will discuss this in detail later, but ultimately we have to show the world that we have a reliable system for making moral choices, a system that will agree with and make logical sense to all people, no matter the religion. We won’t all necessarily agree with the exact choice in every situation. The important thing is that we can show that there are reasons to be moral which extend beyond arbitrary religious rules.

The other image problem has to do with the inaccurate portrayal that some of us project on a regular basis: Anger. I see it in some atheist blogs: Cries for the termination of religion altogether (is that really going to convince religious people that they are safe with us leading?). I see blame against the religious for all of the world’s problems. I see hyperbolic claims about religious people that are simply not true.

Some atheists also project a lopsided amount of anger in the way they choose to demonstrate. The recent “War On Easter” was an example. One blogger I read said she was treating Christians to a taste of their own medicine by putting anti-Jesus literature in the church pews for Easter Sunday. I have never known a Christian to defame another religion’s god in the other religion’s holy chapel. The War On Easter was not a tit-for-tat pay-back game. It was an outrageous assault unlike any actions I have ever seen a Christian take.

It reminds me of a recent “Smut for Smut” campaign where college students set up a booth where they offered to trade smut for smut: They handed porn to anyone who would give them a Bible. The idea was to bring awareness to smutty passages in the Old Testament regarding women, sex, and war. While a genuine discussion with the religious regarding these problems with the Bible could be enlightening and educational to many people, offering pornography in exchange for Bibles only make us look crude and hateful.

On the other hand, we have people like the Ebay atheist, who is actually reaching his hand across the aisle of differences and having a real and positive affect. He is showing concern and striving to understand the religious. In return they are trying to understand him. He is taking a non-offensive, but very bold approach to bridging the gap between us.

Just look at what this article had to say about Hemant Mehta, the Ebay Atheist:

The stunt has racked up several ad campaigns’ worth of exposure for the product he was actually marketing: atheism as a wholesome American way of life.

A dedicated nonbeliever, Mehta auctioned his soul on the following terms: For every $10 bid to win, he would attend an hour of services at a local house of worship of the winner’s choosing. He promised to keep an open journal of his experience and an open mind to the possibility of conversion. The bait was the chance to win him over for God, but only the purest of souls could fail to see the hook in Mehta’s own bid to sell atheism as just another strand in our glorious tapestry of beliefs.

I also liked the friendly “demonstration” that gay and lesbian families held for the Easter Egg Hunt at the White House. It was hardly a demonstration at all. No shouting, no accusations. All they did was announce that gay and lesbian families would have a large showing at the White House for the Easter Egg Hunt. And they did! They showed up early to get in. They wore the rainbow-colored flower leis to identify themselves. They were happy and friendly and participated like any other family. They put a good face on gay families. We need to do something like that.

I have an idea of something we can do right away. Something to identify us with our real values. Something that will show that we mean business when it comes to working to solve the world’s problems. And it will be positive! Just give me a few days to present it to you.

In the meantime, clear your calendar for May 4th. Pencil in a two or three hour block for an activity which I will later disclose. Begin thinking about a cause you feel passionate about. I’m not talking about a cause for atheists/agnostics/freethinkers etc. I’m talking about a real problem in the world: hunger, abuse, the child-sex industry, disease. Which one moves you the most? Hold onto that thought and that date. I promise I’ll get back to you later.

I have been struggling to find a reasonable answer to this question. How do atheists/agnostics get people to not despise us? In Texas I merely tell someone I am an atheist and the stereotypes just start coming. Not always, but it takes the liberal/open-minded person to hear me out and then realize that I am atheist for good reasons. Texas is conservative though so that is not typical. My question(maybe a topic) is how do we get xians to just shrug their shoulders when they hear that someone is an atheist/agnostic? As if that proclamation is immaterial and irrelevant.

I’m going to answer this question in two posts. This first one will deal with the personal situation of “coming out” to our friends, since this topic has come up a number of times recently. In second post I will talk more about a long-term plan for improving our public image as a whole.

There are definite things that we, as atheists/agnostics/freethinkers, like to do as activists (some more than others) that will continue to make things worse for us. Trust me . . . having been a religious, political conservative (among mostly other religious, political conservatives) my entire life, I know that some of the things we do only confirms the religious people’s belief that atheists are evil and could bring down the entire stability of the United States. I am confident that there are certain ways for us to communicate, demonstrate, and work for our rights that are more likely to have positive results. That topic will be for next time.

On a personal level, as far as I know, most everyone who knows me is acquainted with my secular stance. To one degree or another, they know some or all of the following about me:

I am raising my children without religion
We are agnostic
I do not believe in the existence of God at all
We do not go to to church on principle
I do not agree with religion
I play a public role in the non-religious community as a writer and a blogger.

Though I live in a conservative, Christian city (with a high Mormon population), I have never had a friend or associate shun me, react negatively (with the exception of a few Mormon friends in the very beginning who expressed sadness, and a couple who offered to take my children to church FOR me . . .grrr). But as a whole, my friends have continued to pursue friendships with me despite our religious differences.

Many AgnosticMom readers have expressed difficulties in this area. They have shared experiences of people losing interest in the friendship as a result of the atheist/agnsotic revelation.

I have no idea if what I do is any different from others who have had problems. Maybe we just interpret our friends’ actions in different ways, effecting the way we treat them? Maybe I am fortunate to live around tolerant people?

I will tell you how I “come out,” and you can decide for yourself if the difference is between the way we say it, the way we interpret our friends, or the friends themselves.

First I need to acknowledge what I DON’T do, which might make a difference. Although my personal beliefs are atheistic, I call myself “agnostic” because it seems to me more philosophically sound. Therefore, I never tell people, “I’m atheist.” Perhaps if I used this label I might get a different reaction because of the stigma associated with it. My previous experiences make me doubt it, though. Still, I am going to use my next few opportunities to tell people I am atheist, just to see if I get a different reaction. After I’ve had a chance to try it a few times, I will report my results!

Let me tell you what I DO do. It varies, depending on whether I am with good friends, or acquaintances whose conversations with me never reach beyond topics of the weather. The situation doesn’t allow for in-depth discussion, making a chance for follow-up questions and understanding difficult. With these acquaintances, I short-cut with, “We are not religious.”

For example, I have a gun-toting, militant-type of Christian neighbor. He has the products of his animals hunts mounted on his living room wall. He skins his prey right on his front driveway. He patrols our suburban neighborhood with a gun on his belt. He is a young Christian father and, except for the animal skinning on the driveway, a good neighbor.

Recently, while making mundane neighborly-talk with Mr. Gun-Rights Conservative, he asked me, “What’s the deal with all the religious names in your family? Israel, Noell, Trinity? Is that coincidence or does it have something to do with your religion?”

I answered with a smile (always with a smile!), “NO, it’s just a coincidence. We’re not religious.”

Surprised, he needed a confirmation, “You’re not?”

Again, with that all-important confident smile, I gave him the confirmation he sought, “No, not at all.”

On the other hand, when my friends are socializing (I am part of a MOMS Club with an evolving membership), I go into more detail when the topic comes up. Again, with that smile, I say, “I am agnostic. I don’t believe in God or religion.” If I get the chance I make sure to tell them my issue with religion is only a matter of beliefs and not a personal grudge for past offenses.

I also make sure to show the same amount of interest in, and respect for, the religious beliefs of my friends as I expect them to show me.

Responses to me are often surprise and curiosity, which I interpret to be positive responses. When there are so few of us, and even fewer of us who are open about our non-beliefs, we have to understand that people have very little exposure to atheists and agnostics. What else can they be but surprised?

I cannot think of a time when someone seemed uncomfortable at learning my stance. Is it because they have enough exposure to me to know I am not a threat to them, their children, nor to society? Is it because of the confidence and smile with which I communicate? (It took me coming out a couple of times before I lost my fear). Is it because I am with a circle of exceptional friends who are comfortable with religious differences? Maybe I interpret certain reactions as positive where others might interpret them negatively?

What do you think?

I am sure that one of the most important things we can all do to improve our image is to start telling our friends, in an positive way, that we are atheists and agnostics. How else will people ever be able to form a positive view of us if they don’t personally know any moral, happy freethinkers? If they know one, they will have their first experience of cognitive dissonance. They will see that, in the case of that one person, the reality does not match up with their view of what an atheist is like. If they know two or three of us, they will have to learn to change their view altogether.

Today his wife, Cori, of Cori’s Blog left a comment on one of my posts. Not knowing who she was, I checked out her blog. From what I could tell from my quick browse, she’s an intelligent, liberal Christian. It might be worth taking a good read.

Before I had time to really dive in, I figured out she might be married to Kevin. I clicked on a link where she referrenced him as her husband, and sure enough, there he was.

I have to direct you over to his April 13th post, Consistency of Thought. It is short and concise and makes a great point. I wanted to copy a part of it and quote him here, but felt a need to copy the entire post. Instead, I decided to just point you in his direction. Go enjoy! (And of course, come back here).

Fran was the first to mention “peer pressure for Jesus”, and then Cassandra, from The Atheist Mama, expressed one of her fears:

But when you have 14 year olds (for example) asking to go to church with their friends – well, I’m not so sure how I feel about situations like that. Young people are so easily drawn in to things, especially when it looks like a good opportunity for “happiness” and “acceptance” and “forgiveness.”

When teenagers are starting to search for their beliefs, and themselves, I think that stepping in and steering them in the right direction may be important.

I watched a 14 year old boy join the Mormon church. His family (xian, but not really church-goers) was dumbfounded. It all started when he stayed at a friend’s house one night and went to church with them the next day, just to hang out…

I know that in the past, some have suggested exposing our children to other peoples’ religions. I can see the benefits of this, especially when our kids are young and we are there with them to explain it the way we see it. But what about sending them with their friends? Cassandra is right that those formative teen years give the child a desperate need to find a cause that is separate from their parents’. They need to belong somewhere where they will feel accepted. The “acceptance” they will encounter at churches will be alluring, but deceiving, because the acceptance comes with unrealistic and manipulative conditions.

Having been a Mormon teenager myself, I have witnessed numerous times how teens take on a martyr-complex when their parents don’t allow them to get baptized. I’ve seen how the church members feed that complex; how church members pit the child against the parents by insinuating that the parents are fighting alongside Satan against God’s will.

I had already decided that I would never allow one of my children to get baptized in a church of their choosing as long as they are not legal adults. I already anticipate this problem because Mormons dominate our city (Mesa, Arizona). I have already told my son, Blake, who asked about getting baptized when he attended his cousin’s baptism, that joining a church is a decision for mature adults, not children and teenagers. I had not really thought about the inevitable times when their friends will invite them to church after sleepovers, or to activities during the week.

Do we outlaw all participation in church services and activities? Will that seem paranoid? Does that matter? Do we let them go and then talk about it with them afterwards?

After thinking about my experiences as a teen, I feel inclined to not allow it at all. But maybe I am reacting to the anger I am starting to feel at my memories.

What are your thoughts and experiences on the matter?

Do you point out “In God We Trust” on coins and make an issue of it with children? How do you tell your children to react when they go to school and are asked to pledge allegiance to “one nation, under God”?

I prefer to pick my god-battles, and a statement of supernatural diety on our coins is not one of them. I won’t be pointing it out, and if my children ever ask me about it, I would just explain that our country has a religious majority and a history of both religion and Deism.

I already have two children in school, and they do say the Pledge of Allegiance. Remember, my kids still figure there is an existing god, although whatever that god is like in their minds, they can’t possibly feel it is a great significance in their life. I guess I am approaching the Existence-of-God topic the same way we approach the sex-subject: Give honest answers as their questions come up or as our experiences point in that direction, and in the amounts that they seem ready to digest.

At some point I will teach them the history of The Pledge and how the “Under God” phrase was added in in 1954 I will ask them, “How do you think it made many Americans,who believe in more than one god, feel?” And, “What message did that send to all the families who don’t even believe in a god at all?”

Rather than push an issue onto my kids, I prefer to follow their lead on this. If they want to say The Pledge, they’ll continue to say it. If at some point they want to opt out, I’ll be happy to inform their teachers. If they want to write letters to the local newspaper, the school, or the school board, I’ll help them find the addresses and proof-read their letters. But these actions would stem their own desires, not mine.

I personally would not turn what might be MY issue into my children’s issue, placing a burden on them for a stand they might not be passionate about. The Pledge is an issue I would prefer to let my children decide on their own when they are older.

How should they react when asked to pray for a friend or relative?

Usually a person asks others to pray for them because they are in great distress. I do not feel this is a time to voluntarily vocalize a disbelief in the very thing the distressed person is relying on for help. At the same time we must maintain personal intregity. An appropriate response is, “I am sorry for your difficulties. You will definitely be in my thoughts.”

Rarely would it extend beyond that, but if the person wanted to press the issue, get an actual prayer commitment, then an explanation with an offer for actual help (if applicable) should be enough. “I’m sorry, but I don’t practice prayer or religion. But I would love to help out by (fill in the blank).” I would teach my children to respond the same way.

“I was envisioning a situation wherein you might be at someone’s home for dinner and before the meal, someone says, “Shall we thank God for this food?” and one of your children “blurts out, “We don’t believe in God”" Of course it could be any situation in which someone wishes to invoke some type of reference to God.”

We experience prayer situations a couple of times a month when we have dinner with my in-laws. Two thirds of the family bow their heads and close their eyes, while a third of us (my husband and I are not the only ones who don’t participate for various reasons) stand there quietly watching the group. And sometimes Israel and I wink at each other.

Once in a while the kids fool around and we have to remind them to be quiet while others are praying. That is precisely how I would have my kids behave in all situations in others’ homes or churches while they pray; to give others respect by allowing them to pray without making a scene.

I think respect is the key. Not respect for religion, but respect for other people and their choice to believe in it. Some very intelligent and well-educated people are religious. Also, people we love, like our extended family members, are religious.

As another example, in the Mormon religion, the phrase, “Oh my God,” is almost as offensive as the F-bomb. It can be jolting to the senses for many Mormons. We teach our children not to say it for their grandparents’ sakes. I told them that even though it doesn’t mean anything to us, and so many of their friends say it, we would prefer they don’t because it would really hurt their grandparents if they accidentally said it around them out of habit. It is just our request, not an order. They don’t get in trouble when it comes out by accident.

On the other hand, if my children ever blurt out, “We don’t believe in God,” I can’t imagine being worried about it unless they did it in a manner to make fun of someone else who does. I think I would just smile.

Here is a variation on the subject of prayer and references to God: Blake has a best friend named Zach. Zach spent the night at our house once. When it was time for them to go to bed, I heard Zach telling Blake that they had to say their prayers. Blake told him, “I don’t pray,” but Zach became insistent that Blake wouldn’t go to heaven if he didn’t pray. And Blake was insistent that he doesn’t pray, but he couldn’t get Zach to leave him alone.

I poked my head into the room and said, “Zach, it’s really nice that you want to say your prayers. Our family doesn’t believe you have to pray to go to heaven,” (I said this to reassure my son), “but I understand your family does, so you should go ahead and say your prayers. Don’t worry about Blake.”

So far these types of situations have not caused my children any anxiety. Blake is very confident with how we choose to live our lives. And while we have giggled at a few religious beliefs (he thought it funny that the Bible says God made Eve from one of Adam’s ribs), I have never seen him show disrespect for other people’s choices to worship.

I have one more question to address, regarding Easter, which I will do in a Part 2 post.

My husband, Israel, found this post on a blog called, “Panopticist: Cultural Surveillance,” that announces an amazing documentary recently aired in Britain. Richard Dawkins narrates the documentary titled, “The Root of All Evil?”

You have to go check it out. If you click on the picture of Richard Dawkins, you can see a short segment of the two part film. There are also links on the post for you to click on to go download the entire documentary. Israel and I are going to watch it tonight on his laptop after the kids are down for bed. I guess it’ll be our educational at-home date-night.

Come back here to AgnosticMom once you’ve watched it and share your thoughts! We could have some lively discussion over the next couple of days.

How do we celebrate Darwin’s Day? AgnosticMom is creating some family-oriented traditions for our families to adopt, because from all I have seen, the current celebrations are adult in nature. If you don’t have kids, look at this page of events. It is a world-wide list with links, ranked by country alphabetically (U.S. celebrations are down toward the bottom). The lists give a description of the event, and all the information. Most events have speakers. A humanist organization in my hometown, is having FISH at a restaraunt (as in the Darwin fish). The organization pushing the Darwin Day movement describes having a “Phylum Feast”, a feast with an enormous variety of meats from various phylum.

Some groups celebrate for one day, on the actual birthday. Some groups extend the celebration out for the entire week.

As I mentioned before, I have been formulating ideas for a family holiday, celebrated in the home, as a yearly tradition. My kids are on pins and needles. It should be a fun, highly anticipated, but also educational holiday for the kids, a cornerstone holiday for secular families.

Over the next few days, I will give you some ideas so you can decide how you want to celebrate it. These ideas will range for toddlers, to elementary ages, to young teens, whether you want a one-day celebration, or a week-long one. I will give food and actvity ideas. It’s going to be FUN! I can’t wait.

Why do I think Darwin’s accomplishment is important enough to warrant a holiday? What basis would there be in testing animals for disease research if we are not related, according to the theory of evoution? We have Darwin to thank for so many of our life-saving and life-extending accomplishments. One of AgnosticMom’s readers, Ed Darrell pointed me to an anti-evolutionist’s blog where Ed commented with a list of the many ways Darwin’s discovery of evolution has blessed our lives. I copied it for your reading pleasure.

“It’s the theory behind infectious disease control, crop development, animal husbandry, cancer treatments and cures, diabetes diagnoses, treatment and hope for cure, treatments for cystic fibrosis, the fight against crop pests (notably cotton boll weevils, wheat smut and wheat aphids, and imported Argentine fire ants), wildlife management, and flower development”.

Here is what you can expect at AgnosticMom over the next few days:

#1 A review of a children’s book which explains the evolution of life from the beginning lifeless days of the world, to the world in which men and women walk. I will be using this book as the guide to our weeklong celebration.

#2 A map of my weeklong celebration, with meal and treat ideas.

#3 Game and activity ideas for toddlers, elementary-age children, and teens.

If you have children’s books about Darwin, or activities to recommend, post your comments please!

One last thing. You can help move this cause forward by writing letters to your news editor to announce the upcoming holiday. AgnosticMom readers span the country, from Pennsylvania to Washington to California. Let’s get the word out.

Happy upcoming Darwin Day!

There is still unchartered territory, though, to which I have been too timid to venture out. It is the territory of past friends who are still Mormon. I have actually dodged an old, good friend, who I saw at the store, because I was wearing a sleeveless shirt. A Mormon wearing a sleevless shirt might as well strap on a neon-light that says, “Hey, I’ve really gone downhill! I’m living a life of hedonistic sin and I need your pity.”

So, instead of reuniting myself with this dear friend, who worked with me as a Primary President (Primary is the children’s organization of the Mormon Church), I walked the other way.
At Christmas I received the traditional holiday newsletter from one of my old college roommates. As far as I know, she has no idea I ever left the church. Her letter was full of Mormon accomplishment, as usual. I must say, I was very impressed. Every year she catches me up on what her new positions are within her congregation. For the last few years, my email responses to her have been silent with regard to my own non-existent church responsibilities. I have talked about what I am doing with the MOMS Club. Being part of another organization outside of church should be enough to send up red flags. Mormons rarely have the time or need to join another group. But as far as I know, she is not aware that I left.

I have been contemplating sending her an email to catch her up on what I am doing. Will she email me back to ask what my current church calling is? This idea has made me hesitate. But I think I am ready to face the question. If she asks, I will tell her how happy we are, and that we have chosen a different path. I’ll tell her what that path is, and even send her a link to my website if she is interested in hearing the finer details of my life and thoughts.

So I fixed his yucky nose (the “yuck” was all over his face). Couldn’t fix the eye, but of course, it fixed itself with my attention. I gave him a drink, and laid down with him in bed, where I found Blake curled up at the bottom, instead of in his own. So there I lay, in an awkward position, waiting for Aiden to fall into a deep enough sleep for me to slip out.

My sleep deprivation is catching up to me. Being tired makes me obstinate. Being obstinate makes me want to make fun of someone in my post. Pat? Pat? Where are you, Mr. Robinson?

Alas, I have been too busy today to get to any research. I don’t have any making-fun-of-someone material. In fact, this post will be my least edited of all posts. So forgive me.

What I DO have to talk about is television, starting with Battle Star Galactica. Have you been watching it? I haven’t, until recently. Actually, the original series was part of my religious upbringing as a child. It was created by a Mormon, you know? My family watched it faithfully. But I never watched the new series, until someone convinced Israel to buy the first two seasons. So we’ve been catching up from the beginning.

Of course, it’s got all kinds of Mormon code in it. I knew it would. And that’s fine. What is NOT fine, is their portrayal of the one and only atheist. He’s spineless. He only cares for himself. He compromises the cause and future of the fleet to take care of number one. Typical portrayal of an atheist. Only when he finally begins to believe in God (only sort of, though) does he grow a little back-bone. Still, his faith wavers, so I stress that his back-bone accumulation is slight.

I remember a couple novels I read last year. Sorry, I didn’t write their names down, and because of the way my brain functions, I have no idea what they are called, or who wrote them. Not matter, they weren’t that great. In both, the murderers were atheists. One, a Bioethics professor, who wants to rid the earth of its handicapped people. The other, a young man who meditates, and from meditation finds the strength within to kill others when it will result in his gain. Ay-yay-yay.

On the other hand, last week’s episode of Lost ended with a touching baptism of a mother and her baby. They wanted to insure that if either of them die on the island, they will be together in Heaven. Those are the characters’ words, not mine. I am not simplifying it to poke fun.

These are just a few examples of biased portayals of atheists, and positive leans toward religion. And the Christians are complaining that they don’t get enough representation?

Also, Ron wrote a letter to the Humanist News Network, praising them for giving a column to AgnosticMom. He copied it in a comment here. What a huge compliment. He made some points that I want to focus the rest of this post on:

Ron said:

“The easily cited presumption by the religious culture is that we do not thrive because we lack the moral fortitude to be strong, joyful, loving families. Humanism in all its forms must not be invalidated as a fringe group of rebelious students, or codgers with too much time on their hands and bad experiences with the church.”

This comment interests me for two reasons. First, I have heard and read comments in the newspaper and on the radio, such as, “You never see any athiest charitable groups!”

Clearly we have an image problem. And we lack visibility. There are, in fact, athiest/agnostic, humanist, and other secular groups, doing charitable work. Charitable work is one of the foundations of the humanist philosophy, since we cannot wait for a god we don’t believe exists to solve the world’s problems. We have to do it ourselves.

But we are a minority. People don’t know of our organizations. Also, Americans are still scared of athiests. So our tiny groups don’t get the news coverage of, say, the Salvation Army.

I will admit, there is also some in-fighting. Secularists are individualists. We fear being locked into a box where we won’t agree with every stand an organization takes. The result: either we stay isolated, or in rare instances, we make a new organization. This fact comes to light with the various names and groups representing secularits: “Brights,” “freethinkers,” “the godless,” and “existentialists” are just a few to add to the typical list. And then there is the spectrum of athiesm and agnostism: strong athiest, weak athiest, positive athiest, athiest-agnostic, etc. Why do we care about these minute details? We are all secularists and we are dealing with the same issues.

In the past, this spectrum of secularist groups allowed the concern of defining themselves override the idea of banding together to unite in purpose. Only recently, in light of the growing power of the religious right, are these groups beginning to set aside their differences, start pooling resources, and work together.

It is time that people get to know us for the good we want to accomplish: strong families, strong democracy, strong ethics, and the freedom to exercise a moral choice based on our own beliefs, not to be compelled by someone else’s.

The other reason I am interested in Ron’s comment: he mentioned how religious folks dismiss us as people with bad experiences in the church. AgnosticMom has received a few comments from religious readers, apologizing for bad experiences they thought I had. Maybe they have made an assumption. Or maybe I have portayed myself with some inaccuracy. As Ron implied, not all of us are here because of bad experiences with religious life, myself included. I am in here because I wanted truth.

A few people have referred to the “oppressive religion”of my past or “strict childhood.” I am sorry I gave the wrong impression. I say this, both to clear up any misunderstanding about myself, and also to give the Mormon church a little slack. I was a happy Mormon. I loved being a member of the church. I loved my religion enough to make the choice to serve a mission for a year and a half when I was twenty-one. I accepted, and sought after, responsibilities within the church. I held a number of leadership positions in my congregations.

Over time, contradictions and issues I didn’t agree with, accumulated to a degree that I had to face the existence of my serious doubts. Confident that God would answer my prayers and bring me back to complete faith in his church, I set out to get some answers. The more scripture I studied, the more inconstinencies I discovered. Six months later, I felt sure the LDS church was not true. Still, I could not walk away. I hope this demonstrates how much I loved being a Mormon. It wasn’t until another six months later that I was ready to leave. It is only in retrospect that I have since become aware of what I now regard as the silly little insanities of Mormonism, which I sometimes refer to in my posts.

I know that some Mormons who leave say they felt oppressed, or that they couldn’t live up to the standards. I implied this when I referred to my childhood hero, Nephi, in the post, “What’s Missing Is A System.” I was mostly joking when I made the comment, “No wonder I have overwhelming and unrealistic expectations of myself.” Nephi didn’t really cause me anxiety. I expect my perfectionism is related to some degree, but I give most of the responsibility to my genes. And I am not complaining about my over-achieving tendencies. I never had feelings of inadequacy as a Mormon.

Some concerned religious readers lamented that I wrote off all religion as a result of my Mormon experience. This was not the case. After questioning the Mormon church, I naturally sought after Christianity in general. In my studies, I found the Bible to be just as problematic than the Book of Mormon. I learned about the history of the various and evolving manuscripts that became the Gospels. I also noticed the changing personality of God from the Old Testament to the New, to modern times, including the very American Jesus so popular right now.

Religious readers: I appreciate that you come to my blog. I appreciate that you are not afraid of us agnostics here. I appreciate your willingness to understand us. That is what we want. I appreciate your concern for my family and me. I don’t want to persuade you that your religion is wrong. I just want you to understand where I am coming from. My agnostic readers are here to support each other, to make a place for their families, and to help each other to leave a positive mark on the world.

I received my first correction! After reading, America In Decline, Skysinger clarified for me that we do not have a cure for polio, just a vaccination. Well, that makes sense, doesn’t it? I’m sure I’ve got many more corrections coming in my blogging future, so I am glad the first one came in such a nice manner; a warm-up. Thanks for your input, Skysinger!

Mary said:

I enjoy reading your blog because, regardless of my religious leanings (I’m still trying to figure that out), I most definitely believe in science as the basis of humanity.

Because my children are not yet in school, I understand that I am now free to remain “blissfully ignorant” of the extent to which religion is impeding true learning in our public schools. But at least I know where in the world (here! and your new column!) to go for an opinion I can respect.

Mary, I’ve wondered if you were even agnostic and what motivates you continue to read my blog! Now I know. I am glad that I don’t offend (at least too much?) my thoughtful and reasonable religious readers. I harp on religion, mainly when it infringes on my life as a secularist. And sometimes I tease and make playful jabs, but I am not trying to convince anyone to leave their religion. I just hope they will understand the plight of the secularists.

As for religion impeding learning in public schools: maybe I’m wrong, but I doubt you will find your California schools as affected as in places like Kansas and Dover. Regardless, the lack of a basic understanding of science is a national dilemna with national consequences to come if we don’t turn it around. I’m glad you and I have a common respect for science.

Speaking of science and American culture, Ron made an interesting observation at his local Barnes&Noble:

I was at Barnes and Noble today – and they moved the Science section, they also reduced it in size. They moved it over near blank journals – where no other literature exists – somewhere west of the bargain books!
There is ONE shelving unit of science books (not including the specific section on physics)! That is 33% the amount of space they give to ‘religious fiction’ (possible oxymoron) – and roughly 20% of the space ‘devoted’ (literally?) to religious books. At Barnes and Noble! The religion shelves are all centrally located in the store, as well – with a good 6 or so signs leading you to them.

It’s unnerving to enter a huge ’secular’ bookstore and see that the history, and science sections barely add up to the amount of space allotted for religious books.

I am so glad you brought this to our attention. Tami and I were there last night, and realized that ours has an extremely small science section as well. I doubt it reflects Barnes&Noble’s values, rather the demands of the customers. Nobody’s buying science-related books! We have a long way to go. Do you all feel our country is taking giant leaps backwards? (Oooh, wait until you see what I have to blog about next! Look for a future post regarding women. We’re going backwards, people).

Well, I have a few more comments to respond to tomorrow. Thanks for being patient with this unusual weekend format. We’ll be back on track next week lots of hot topics.

Silence filled the space that my loss for words left. I stared at Blake for a minute. What other heroes have I introduced to him? Rosa Parks died not long ago, and we discussed her. Black again. I searched my brain files for any other heroes I must have introduced to him.

A-ha! Benjamin Franklin! We have a video about Benjamin Franklin learning how to harness electricity. In the movie, Franklin had to battle a religious fundamentalist who was trying to impede his research. It took much perseverance and faith in himself to finally prevail. Blake loved that video.

“Well, they’re not all black, honey. Benjamin Franklin was a hero, and he wasn’t black.” It was a step in the right direction, but clearly I had failed to provide my son with more than three or four examples of excellent human beings.

Growing up, the hero of my childhood was Nephi from the Book of Mormon. Nephi was a perfect person, with the exception of one tiny flaw. Nephi’s one sin was that he sometimes felt anger toward his wicked brothers who were trying to kill him. No wonder I have overwhelming and unrealistic expectations for myself: the biggest childhood hero of my life was AT LEAST as perfect as Jesus.

When I had kids, and especially when I left my church and all of its out-of-this-world heroes, I vowed I would expose my children to the world’s many great real heroes. I am now facing the reality that I haven’t done so well.

Yesterday, as I analyzed, and over-analyzed, the situation, I realized what is missing. I realized one of the reasons we, as agnostic parents, are feeling such a great need for a guiding source. We are missing a system for imparting our values to our children, that religious families normally get from their church.

The Mormon Church is the master of systems for teaching children. This is why the community is so tight, their familes are so strong, and such a large percentage of them actually make it to marriage in pure and complete innocence!

Let me show you how structured the Mormon community is in regard to teaching their young:

• Weekly church and Sunday School lessons
• Weekly Monday night Family Home Evenings (lessons)
• Daily family prayer and scripture reading
• Monthly visits from Home Teachers (each family is assigned two men who come to the home to give a lesson.)
• Weekly activities for teens, monthly activities for the children
• Monthly children’s magazine with lessons, stories, and learning activities
• Multiple free handbooks for family lesson plans on various moral and doctrinal topics

It was SO EASY to be a Mormon parent. The church put material directly into our hands. Agnostic and athiest parents have to conceive our own system for providing “lessons” to our children. Even more difficult, we have to do our own research to find the material. No one is giving us free handbooks with activities to demonstrate our values, arranged in formats that appeal to children of all ages.

I actually have been developing a system of timing. I’ve been using holidays as a sort of schedule to trigger ideas.

Some examples of holiday-triggered values:

• New Year- goals, ambition, ability to change and improve
• Civil Rights Day- courage, accepting others, forgiveness
• Easter- nature, spiritual rebirth
• Independence Day- patriotism, democracy, liberty and freedom
• 9/11- awareness and gratitude of our local firefighters and police officers and their families, community

I think the holidays, regular reading time, play groups, and other day-to-day experiences provide an adequate scheduling system to cover all the important things we want to share with our children. The difficulty is coming up with the tools for sharing the ideas, such as activities and books. That is the part that requires so much research when you don’t have a handbook given to you from church.

Civil Rights Day was so easy, because the school recommended books. The other holidays will require much more research. And since many of those other holidays also demand planning for giant feasts, extra shopping, and other activities, that just doesn’t leave as much time for educational research, does it?

I am going to continue what I started this month, which is to share my ideas and resources for educational and values-sharing activities and books for our children. They will mostly happen around the holidays, but I will add some other topics in here and there. I hope some of you will share your ideas as well.

HNN is part of the Institute for Humanist Studies. The Executive Director found my blog and saw a need for a column on humanist parenting. He contacted me last Friday and asked if I’d do it.

When I began blogging last summer, part of my intent was to see if I could be a writer. I have always had a secret desire to write, but since having children, the most I’ve written is a few published letters to the editor. I entered the blogosphere with cold fingers.

In hopes of extracting some talent from within, while at the same time filling the void that agnostic parents have been staring into, I have wondered if I could blog my way into a book. That still remains to be seen.

My new column with the Humanist News Network does not bring me to professional status. But I am so excited to have a shot at a little more experience and exposure. You can subscribe to get the e-zine here.

I’m going to take advantage of this opportunity to thank some blogger friends who, though may or may not necessarily be agnostic or athiest, are great bloggers who have helped AgnosticMom increase visibility by referring and linking to my blog.

Mary Tsao at Mom Writes
Jane at Average Jane
Zoe at A Complicated Salvation
Larry Keim at Larry Keim’s Blog
Laura at LolaFromOz

I hope I didn’t miss anybody. Thanks so much!

“Then what DO you believe?”

At the time I was still trying to figure it out. Agnosticism is all about what we CAN’T or DON’T know. Agnosticism on it’s own is empty.

Through my studies of science, I grew fascinated with the nature of the human mind and our enormous capabilities. I began to consider how in a very short amount of time, humans figured out how to fly across the world, how to communicate with anyone in real time, how to cure all kinds of diseases.

The tsunami that affected so many millions of people last year? We knew about it here, on the opposite side of the world, within minutes of its occurance. Nations were able to gather resources and get them to the countries in need within days. We still have improvements to make (and we WILL make them), but imagine this same tsunami occuring only 100 years ago. How long would it be before anyone who could help would even hear about it? How much longer before we could get that help to the people? How much less help would we have to give?

Becoming agnostic, and reexaming my beliefs gave me greater hope in the amazing capabilities of human beings. I came to believe that we have the potential to solve the world’s greatest problems. Searching the internet for other secularists, I found a name for my faith in humankind: Humanism. Specifically, Secular Humanism.

Here is a definition from wikipedia:

Secular humanism is that branch of philosophy that advocates the use of reason, compassion, scientific inquiry, ethics, justice and a presumption of equality within a worldview centered upon human beings. The term was originally coined in the 20th century to make a clear distinction from “Christian humanism”. A perhaps less confrontational synonym is scientific humanism, which the biologist Edward O. Wilson termed “the only world-view compatible with science’s growing knowledge of the real world and the laws of nature”.

Its basic tenets may be simplified as:

* Humans have value and can solve human problems;
* Science, free speech, rational thought, democracy, and freedom in the arts go together;
* There is no proof for anything supernatural.

Below are some organizations that work toward the humanist ideals listed above. Their mission is to educate on humanism, and also work to affect public policy. The last one has links to local chapters who meet regularly. Maybe you have one in the area you live!

The Institute for Humanist Studies

The Continuum of Humanist Education

Council for Secular Humanism

American Humanist Association

Maybe I’m naive. Maybe I have too much faith in the human race. Or maybe some people just don’t have enough of it.

The charge: because of a lack of religion, which would otherwise instill higher values in me, Physical Health has risen to one of my greatest values of all. Dennis says health becomes like a religion to the secularist and he speaks truth. After Family and Loving Others, Health really is my next greatest value.

Perhaps it is because my healthy habits give me more energy to make it through the day, to feel happy around my children and husband, even providing me greater ability to serve others. I want that fix. But it’s a vile habit, this constant concern over my health.

In December, Jesus’ birthday swept me toward religious gluttony, as I was spending most of my days shopping for presents and baking unhealthy Christmas goodies, of which I would normally not partake. I was moved by the spirit of that holy day, and turned away from my health-vices.

But now that the spirit of Christmas has subsided, I find myself ever more enticed to return to my old ways of daily exercise.

Paganistic traditions are calling me with a sweet, subtle temptation to return to Mother Nature and take the time to prepare meals from whole foods for my family.

I am finding a desire to allocate half my meal portions (you heard me, HALF) to the vegetables. Only one quarter of my plates contain an animal, which we know from the Holy Bible was given to man to have dominion over.

So yes, dear Dennis, you are correct. The loss of religion has rearranged my priorities, making a value as lowly as Health, one of my great priorities. Please forgive me.

Since that initial writing, he has had a paradigm shift (thanks, I think, to the book, “End of Faith”) and absolved me of my responsibility to respond any further. I intend on writing about the morality issue, anyway. It is a legitimate fear that many people harbor, both religious and non-religious. I’ve also had a similar verbal debate with my dear, soon-to-be-lawyer brother-in-law. He doesn’t think it makes sense to be moral if there is no god. So I need to formulate these thoughts in writing!

Now, to the topic of tonight’s post. I’ve been wanting to start collecting the outrageous comments people make in letters and phone calls to my newspaper editors about evolution. DarkSyde from DailyKos beat me to it with a collection from chat rooms, IM’s, etc.

Go there to get a little entertainment, but also to remind yourself of the sad, sorry state of our country and its failed science education.

Didn’t I tell ya? By the comments he copied and pasted, it is clear that these people don’t understand science or the theory of evolution. One person thinks that what you eat changes your DNA (Oh my gosh!).

And I will have to eat my words, just a little. I have been blaming science for not educating in a way that will grasp the attention of us non-science-oriented types. I still blame them partially, but after reading those comments, I also realize there’s more to it. How can you educate someone on a subject to which they won’t listen?

Israel and I both grew up with Christmas. Even though I don’t believe Jesus was born of a virgin, or that he rose three days after his death, I choose to celebrate Christmas because I believe traditions are healthy for the soul. I also recognize the power of ritual and symbolism, which religions capitalize on. What is it about the human mind that is so effected by ritual and symbolism? Christmas is rich with symbolism.

As a child, this memorable holiday provided benchmarks for my life. It added a magical, mysterious element to my world that I would never deny my children. Christmas gave me evenings with my family, playing games, trying new foods, bringing treats to friends and neighbors.

As an adult, Christmas has taught me to be more aware of others. I am not a natural gift-giver. To some people, nothing says “I love you” better than a gift. I am more receptive to gifts of praise! While I enjoy receiving a present, it’s not important to me. This is why, I have also never been good at thinking of what someone else might want. Over the years, because of Christmas, I have worked on improving my gift-giving skills. Preparing for Christmas has taught me to pay more attention to others and the things they enjoy.

I want to extend an invitation to my readers. I am curious to know how many athiests, agnostics, and other non-religious types, celebrate a religious holiday for this season. Whether you know me personally or not, whether you have commented before or not, I hope you will participate and give the following information:

1. Explain your non-belief or beliefs (example: I am agnostic).
2. Tell us whether you choose to observe one of the religious holidays of the season, and which one.
3. Explain why you justify celebrating or not celebrating.
4. Tell us if you have adapted the holiday a certain way to accomodate your secularism.

In Larry’s Apology/Surrender/Rebuttal/Challenge, he fakes concession. Larry concedes it might be (arguably) appropriate for an agnostic to acknowledge spirituality, but not for athiests. What my readers may not realize, is Larry is taking a jab at me. He knows that I am on the athiest end of the agnostic spectrum.

Larry believes it wrong for an athiest to acknowledge a spiritual aspect of life, because he only regards spirituality as being supernatural; as transcending the human experience. This is why he thinks it intellectually inconsistent, whether athiest or agnostic. Once again, I have to disagree with my good friend, Larry Keim. Religious people have misunderstood spirituality. It is a human experience, purely physical, transcending nothing except the mundane. This is why even a strong athiest is intellectually consistent in his or her search for a strong spiritual life. I will explain.

Larry wants to separate a human being’s “vital core” and “moral nature” from “brain function” and “genetic proclivities.” Larry knows that I believe everything we think and feel is simple brain function. What he doesn’t seem to get is that spiritual feelings are part of brain function and nothing more. It doesn’t make it any less desirable, wonderful, healthy, and necessary. Spirituality only transcends normal day-to-day feeling. It does not transcend the natural.

For example, one thing I do to tap into my own spirituality, is to run on my treadmill. Running is meditative and calming for me. It allows me to regroup; to focus. It is my time to take a step back from the daily grind, evaluate it, and get new ideas. Running also releases endorphins, and I get to experience a high. During and after my run, I feel accomplished, empowered, and confident. I am ready to return to my world with clarity and cheerfulness.

For all these reasons, running, for me, is a spiritual exercise. The feelings and thoughts are also purely physical.

Another reason I think spirituality is physical, has to do with the experiences I have had when learning new ideas. When I was religious, I had spiritual feelings as I read scripture. They were “A-ha” type moments, that made me feel elated when I learned something. I considered those spiritual experiences to be a kind of communication between God and myself.

Since becoming agnostic, I can read things entirely contradictory to scripture, and still have the same “A-ha” moments. I have come to the conclusion that the feelings are just a part of human experience; it is a type of brain function to feel elation when learning something new, or when making a cerebral connection. The idea doesn’t even have to be true. It just needs to connect with your experience. This would explain why people, all around the world, with different beliefs, can have such strong convictions.

Perhaps we evolved this ability to experience a high at learning a new idea. It would increase our chances of survival, because it would compel us to more learning and understanding. It drove the human race to the level of knowledge and technology that we are at now.

Once again, this physicality of spirituality, or the idea that it is a product of evolution and natural selection, doesn’t make it any less wonderful or valuable.

Since I am a proponent of using scientific evidence, rather than relying on pure philosphy, I found a few articles you can read regarding the subject of spirituality and the brain.

Steven Pinker is probably the greatest living genius that my studies have exposed me to. He wrote an article about how the brain and the soul are one and the same.

Here is an article about research on brain function and spirituality, specifically regarding seratonin levels and how they effect our individual spiritual natures.

I also found this amazing article about a type of research called “transhumanism,” that seeks to understand the biological, physiological, and physchological causes of spirituality, independent of religion. This article is very long, and slightly academic, but I definitely recommend it. The farther you read into it, the more relevant the article it becomes to our discussion. (Larry: I think you, in particular, will find this article valuable, considering your sensitivity to “memes”).

I want to answer Larry’s charges on “moral nature” in a part two rebuttal. This may take me another week, since the next seven days will be filled with cookie baking, Christmas parties, present wrapping, etc. In the meantime, I will be posting articles that require less brainwork than the part two rebuttal!