Freedom of the Internet!

Internet freedom is, unfortunately, an ideal we can only dream where I make my home. Try to access any number of thousands of different web sites around the world and THE GREAT FIREWALL jumps on to your screen. "GO AWAY - HOW DARE YOU TRY TO ACCESS THIS SITE, IT IS FORBIDDEN BY THE MINISTRY OF KNOWNOTHING AND IJICY."

Along comes BlackVPN, initially a free VPN with nodes in the USA, UK and Netherlands, they started charging at the beginning of the year. Suddenly all the blocked pages are accessible and we can see why we shouldn't see them. Not only that, but the big No-No of P2P torrent file sharing is available to us too. Torrents are a real life saver for this particular British expatriate in the land of the most inane TV. Ability to access BBC I-Player is a boon too. Using the Netherlands node, I get speeds almost up to my connect maximum and can stay connected for days at a time. Before BlackVPN, my ISP cut my connect speed to Zero within minutes if I started downloading any torrent. This necessitated a shut down of the computer and router to connect to the net again.

In short, Black VPN has restored my little sanity and made the evenings survivable again. I thank them from the bottom of my heart.

I do not sign my name or give my country of residence here for the simple fact that accessing overseas VPNs from here is an imprisonable offence.

If you too might be interested in restoring some sanity to your Internet, BlackVPN configuration details and files can be found here:

Windows: https://www.blackvpn.com/content/uploads/blackvpn_windows.zip
Mac OS X: https://www.blackvpn.com/content/uploads/blackvpn_mac.zip

Thanksgiving - An admirable public holiday?

Well, the annual Thanksgiving debauchery has just passed and I have turned down a smaller crop of invitations to share too much sacrificed turkey and assorted alcoholic beverages. I do not celebrate Thanksgiving and will never do so for purely historical reasons.

In the autumn of 1621, governor William Bradford, declared a three-day feast after the first successfuil harvest on American soil. This harvest of 20 acres of corn was a success only because an enslaved Pawtuxet native named Squanto had taught them how to plant corn and catch fish. (Squanto was the sole survivor of a village that had been decimated by European diseases and firearms.)

The three day feast was modeled after an English Harvest Festival and was not referred to as a Thanksgiving. Much ale was drunk and there was considerable debauchery. There was, reportedly, no turkey served.

Governor Bradford invited the Wampanoag chief to the celebration and he unexpectedly turned up with about 90 members of his tribe. They were not made welcome and were never invited to subsequent celebrations.

Squanto also negotiated a truce with the local Wampanoag tribe on behalf of the colonists. This truce lasted twenty years and gave the colonists a chance to become established.

Over the next two decades the settlement grew and usurped considerable amounts of Indian land, leading to friction between the races. In 1640 this resulted in a bounty being announced for Indians; 20 shillings for every scalp and 500 shillings for every prisoner who could be sold into slavery.

The first annual General Thanksgiving day, the last Thursday of November, was decreed by Governor Joseph Dudley in 1704 to celebrate the almost total destruction of the local Red Men and Women, the genocide of the Wampanoag tribe and the killing of their great chief Metacomet. Metacomet's young, prepubescent son was enslaved and sold to work on plantations in the Carribean.

In calling for the annual General Thanksgiving Day, governor Dudley thanked [God's] infinite Goodness to extend His Favors... In defeating and disappointing.... the expeditions of the Enemy [Indians] against us, And the good Success given us against them, by delivering so many of them into our hands...

In such a manner was the peaceful, pagan celebration of harvest time bringing in sufficient food for all for the following year turned into a celebration of a bloody holocaust.

Thanksgiving is the equivalent to a celebration of the Nazi holocaust. It is the only such major public holiday celebrating genocide and crimes against humanity anywhere in the world. It is celebrated by the planet's one superpower and “beacon of hope for freedom and democracy”.

Do you celebrate Thanksgiving?

Chances of dying from swine flu?

Just how scared should you be?

According to the European Center for Disease Control, there were 4,092 confirmed deaths from swine flu around the world up until September the 1st. If the same rate were to hold out for the rest of the year, that number would grow to 6,138 deaths from swine flu throughout 2009.

If we look at these numbers and compare them with other common causes of death:

In an average year approximately 25,000 people around the world are killed by lightning strikes. You are therefore four times more likely to be killed by lightning than swine flu.

Global deaths from malaria are estimated at somewhere between 1.5 million to 3 million -- 250 to 500 times the projected toll from swine flu.

Vehicle accidents account for an annual average of 1.2 million deaths and up to 50 million serious, crippling injuries. Thus you are again over 200 times to die on the road, than from piggy disease. This does not take into account the approximately 30% or more of the planet's population who never use motorised transport, most of whom are expected to contract the flu.

We could go on listing other more likely causes of death, shark attack, household electrocution, bee stings, jellyfish, snake bite, spider bite, dog attack are all more likely to cause your demise than piglet's little cold.

Fear is far more likely to cause severe problems than the disease itself.

That can be seen to have happened since the swine flu was first identified in 2008:

* China and Hong Kong quarantined travelers from North America, including 22 Canadian students with no symptoms, 300 guests and employees who happened to be in a hotel where a Mexican man was isolated, and everybody in Singapore who happened to have visited Mexico ...

* "Social distancing" measures included closure of 700 schools in the U.S., disrupting the education of 245,000 children

* Numerous countries restricted travel to and from Mexico and banned meat from North America, causing economic damage. In fact, Mexico's GNP declined by up to 0.5 percent in a few weeks.

* Egypt culled 400,000 pigs, an act of irrational discrimination against the country's Christian minority

* Afghanistan's only known pig was imprisoned in a room, away from visitors to Kabul zoo where it normally grazed beside deer and goats because of the public's irational fear.

Panic is, to a large degree, what makes an outbreak catastrophic. It causes individuals and institutions to act irrationally -- to cease activities that are necessary for society to function smoothly. It sends people running to emergency rooms when they get a sniffle, overwhelming health care systems at the worst possible time.

Tufts' Laws has studied people’s perception of risk -- what makes people terrified of something that is highly unlikely to hurt them, shark attacks, swine flu for example, while not worrying at all about far more dangerous activities like smoking cigarettes, crossing the road or driving a car.

"One of the most powerful factors," he writes, "is social amplification of risk. Worries can be contagious and rapidly infect people within a social group. In modern society, the mass media are by far the most powerful carriers of contagion."

And the media are getting plenty of grist for their sensationalist mills.

In April, The United States Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano called a press conference and declared a public-health emergency. In August, officials for the Centers for Disease Control warned that H1N1 could infect half of the U.S. population and kill 90,000 Americans by year’s end. CDC officials estimated that 1 in 10 New Yorkers had contracted the virus this spring.

Meanwhile, the Observer, a British tabloid, breathlessly citing a leaked U.N. report, offered the specter of "millions" of rotting corpses and "anarchy" spreading across the developing world.

Unsurprisingly, people’s fears of the flu are growing with every sensational headline.

In May, 1 in 5 respondents told Gallup that they expected a family member to contract the swine flu; by August that number had almost doubled. Over those same months, belief that the government was able to handle the situation dropped by 14 points -- from 74 percent to 60 percent.

Exaggerated fear has potential consequences beyond overwhelming ERs with nervous patients who should be resting at home consuming soup.

In mid-July, a Health and Human Services advisory committee "strongly recommended that [HHS Secretary Kathleen] Sebelius give the green light to vaccine production by Aug. 15 -- before safety and dosing tests are finished." The U.S. government ordered 195 million doses of a new H1N1 vaccine, which is being fast-tracked through the normal drug development and approval process. Whether that proves to be a problem or turns out to have been justified remains to be seen.

The best cure for swine flu hysteria may be a healthy dose of salt.

When the news trumpets the latest fatality, remember that through the end of April, while not a single American had died as a result of the swine flu, the CDC estimated that 13,000 had already succumbed to complications arising from the plain old vanilla "seasonal flu."

Public-health officials, epidemiologists and clinicians have to worry about H1N1. As things stand, you really don’t.

(With thanks to Joshua Holland.)

Viral Claptrap "A German's View on Islam".

HatEmail.

Several misguided individuals sent me a copy of this viral email, "A German's View on Islam".

Forstly, it is important to state that the purported author, Emanuel Tanay, M.D had nothing to do with the article. Indeed he has expressed strong disagreement with both the content and tone of the writing.

The article was written by second generation Canadian Paul E. Marek and was first published in a right-wing Israeli newspaper Arutz Sheva, Israel National News. One of many such articles designed to appeal to an audience with hatred, bigotry and xenophobia carried proudly as part of their very soul.

If we take apart the original article:

• The rise of Nazi Germany was due to the huge inferiority complex the German masses felt brought about by their defeat in the First World War and the great depression and resulting disastrous economy. These combined to make people crave for self-respect. At such times, the message "You are the best. Its not your fault. Its the fault of the blacks, gypsies, Jews, homosexuals" was guaranteed to be well-received. The message allowed people to free themselves of self-doubt, self-loss, fear of failure, of inferiority by externalizing those fears and projecting them elsewhere outside into enemies that could be fought and possibly overcome. Their highly charismatic leader used every trick in the book to work his supporters into a frenzy, with the result that normal, thinking people were cowed into submission and he seized power.
• There is absolutely no comparison to be drawn between the huge, violent mass Nazi rallies of the 1930s and Islam of today. Even fanatical Islamists meet secretly in small groups.
• Again, there is no comparison between the ravages of the communist parties, who held absolute power in the Soviet Union and China, and Islam of today.
• The Japanese culture of the 1930s can not be compared to Islam or Christian Evangelism of today. The Japanese were very strictly regulated and regarded failure as a mortal sin. Much of their brutality stemmed out of their belief that failure made them, or their defeated enemy into a kind of non-person.
• Comparison with Rwanda would be farcical if it were not so tragic. In Rwanda there were two African tribes, The Tutsi and the Hutu who had been at loggerheads for generations. If a majority is held in positions of impotence for an extended period, the stress alone plus a small spark will set off a rampage.

The following is but one of the comments made by thinking people regarding this unfortunate hateful article:

I just received a rather offensive and insensitive e-mail which cited an article purportedly written by Dr Emanual Tanay, which I understand was in fact authored by one Paul E. Marek Saskatoon Canada.

I note the obvious omissions on the gross abuses of fundamentalist Christianity and democracy and the human rights record of the 21^st century crusaders of democracy - USA - a country with one of the worst human rights records of the century, that has not signed many of the Geneva conventions, does not recognise and actively lobbies against the international criminal court of justice and war crimes commissions.

Christianity was responsible for some of the worst excesses of the last 2000 years including huge loses from Calvinist conflicts in Germany, and Catholic / Protestant conflicts in Ireland, not to mention the genocides of the crusades.

More recently democracy as well as various religions have been responsible for terrible excesses against international and human rights law - including but not limited to "Laissez faire" of Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda and Balkans, abuses in Al Ghrab prison, Guantanamo Bay and massive reduction of civil and human rights in western developed countries.

One sided arguments and diatribes do not solve or heal, they inflame and aggravate. I could never condone 9/11, but it was not an isolated incident it was the culmination of years of abuse and insensitivity.

You can keep whipping the most loyal and docile dog - eventually it will bite

It is interesting that Rwanda was mentioned - this is the greatest shame on the international community's partisan views and complacency - hence the formation of Sphere and similar initiatives

I could go through the lists of expendable societies disjointed, destroyed and abused by superpowers and western arrogance .. inspired, inflamed, aggravated even supported .. and then abandoned by their superpower "agitators" and "provokers" .. but it would solve nothing and only raise xenophobic debates that aggravate often oversensitive, highly uninformed and over vocal individuals, and nationalities

Resolutions come from attempting understanding, earning respect - not one sided propaganda

I am very sad to read the like of what is written by Paul E. Marek

Eur Ing Christopher Nixon BE, CEng, CMarEng, FIMarEST, MIPENZ, MNZNDTA

for those that really want to count letters and academic qualifications:
Resident of Cambodia 15 years, husband of genocide refugee, and natural disaster IDP .. Humanitarian aid worker 15 years

But I personally think your personal attributes, personal commitment and personal contribution is more important. Criticism is easy, understanding and constructive engagement is much harder.

I really hope this could go to the same circulation as Paul E. Marek very destructive and biased comments.

Chris Nixon
(I for one do not need to hide behind other peoples names or dissociate myself from my views feel free contact me on phoenix@online.com.kh . But please be rational in what you say - so much of these types of debate break down into red-neck hate mail. I will answer any reasoned and considered factual response.)

_________________________________________________________________________

The following is rather more demonstrative of the feelings of the gentleman erroneously charged with disseminating this hateful claptrap:

Letter to the Editor of New York Times by Emanuel Tanay, M.D.

I am apprehensive when government has the right to kill citizens who are or are believed to be evil. I have good reasons to be fearful of a state that has the right to kill evil people. For five long years I was on a death row. I was one of the bad people that was State sentenced to death by a civilized State. I am a Holocaust survivor from Poland. In spite of this fact I was opposed the execution of Adolph Eichman in Israel and I am alarmed by the power of American Government to impose the death penalty.

Death penalty does not deter homicide. I am no stranger to murder. I am a forensic psychiatrist who has examined hundreds of homicide perpetrators. Among them were Jack Ruby, Ted Bundy and the Cincinnati Angel of Death who killed more than 50 helpless patients. In that case I testified for the prosecution because a wise prosecutor decided not to seek the death penalty but accepted a guilty plea to life sentence without parole. This was accomplished with the cost of few thousand dollars. The federal government spent millions to execute Timothy McVeigh. What did we gain? Some talk about closure for the families. The execution of the Nazi leadership did not bring closure to the Holocaust survivors. My father, Bronislaw Tenenwurzel, was tortured and killed in front of the entire camp Plaszow by Amon Goeth, the anti-hero of Schindlers List. Goeth was sentenced by a Polish court to death and hanged. The execution of Amon Goeth did not bring closure to me. Killing the killers validates the belief that killing solves real or imaginary problems. The arguments against death penalty as racist and discriminatory against the poor are self-defeating. They imply that there is a humane and fair way for the state to kill its citizens. The right to kill bad people is a dangerous concession to the totalitarian conception of a government.

It is bizarre that a country that does not trust the government to regulate health care is willing to entrust it with the right to kill.

Emanuel Tanay MD.
Professor of Psychiatry

___________________________________________________

Here follows the original viral email:

Subject: A German's View on Islam.

Whatever this writer's credentials might or might not be, what is written here is the way it is. No-one can afford to remain silent.

Subject: A German's View on Islam

This is by far the best explanation of the Muslim terrorist situation I have ever read. His references to past history are accurate and clear. Not long, easy to understand, and well worth the read. The author of this email is purported to be Dr. Emanuel Tanay, a well known and well respected psychiatrist.

I could find no affirmation nor denial of the validity of the letter in Snopes.com.

A German's View on Islam

A man, whose family was German aristocracy prior to World War II, owned a number of large industries and estates. When asked how many German people were true Nazis, the answer he gave can guide our attitude toward fanaticism. "Very few people were true Nazis," he said, "but many enjoyed the return of German pride, and many more were too busy to care. I was one of those who just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So, the majority just sat back and let it all happen. Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come. My family lost everything. I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories."

We are told again and again by "experts" and "talking heads" that Islam is the religion of peace, and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace. Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the spectra of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam.

The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars worldwide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honor-kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. It is the fanatics who teach their young to kill and to become suicide bombers.

The hard quantifiable fact is that the peaceful majority, the "silent majority," is cowed and extraneous.

Communist Russia was comprised of Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about 20 million people. The peaceful majority was irrelevant.

China 's huge population was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managed to kill a staggering 70 million people.

The average Japanese individual prior to World War II was not a warmongering sadist. Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across South East Asia in an orgy of killing that included the systematic murder of 12 million Chinese civilians; most killed by sword, shovel, and bayonet.

And, who can forget Rwanda , which collapsed into butchery. Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were "peace loving"?

History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our powers of reason we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points: Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence. Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don't speak up, because like my friend from Germany , they will awaken one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun.

Peace-lovinGermans,Japanese,Chinese,Russians, Rwandans, Serbs, Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians, and many others have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late.

As for us who watch it all unfold, we must pay attention to the only group that counts; the fanatics who threaten our way of life.

Lastly, anyone who doubts that the issue is serious and just deletes this email without sending it on, is contributing to the passivity that allows the problems to expand. So, extend yourself a bit and send this on and on and on! Let us hope that thousands, world wide, read this and think about it, and send it on - before it's too late.

Emanuel Tanay, M.D.

2980 Provincial St. Ann Arbor , MI 48104

Fear Society

I tend to become upset, even depressed at times by the propensity of leaders worldwide to rule by instilling abject fear in their respective populaces. Cases in point being AIDS, that huge osamabogeyman TERRORISM and illnesses such as Avian Influenza, SARS and the current mindscrewup SWINEFLU. All could so easily have been handled with a degree of honesty that did not necessitate making the populace have difficulty sleerping.

The meeter-greeter-teacher in this photograph is supposed to be standing on the school steps, welcoming the children with a polite "Wai" and ensuring all is well for the start of the school day. Instead, as you can see, she is standing as far as she can from the path they will take and wearing not one, but three masks to protect her from the current nightmare. I have no idea how she copes in the classroom. (This photograph was taken a couple of weeks ago.)

This afternoon, on the way to school, I noticed a helmetless lady riding a motorcycle, talking on the phone and wearing a mask. She obviously thought this dire disease is more dangerous than the prospect of her head contacting the road or roadside furniture in the case of a crash. (I wanted to photograph her, but decided safety was more important while driving.)

No sooner had I passed her than I noticed another similarly masked helmetless couple on a bike. During the 15 or so Kilometers to school, I counted thirteen motorcycles, each with one or more, presumably concrete-cranium-cretins in dire terror, masked in prophylaxis against contracting bacon disease.

If the powers can instill abject fear in their masses about such a relatively mild, (for most sufferers,) illness, why can they not make these people understand that skulls are softer than stone?

Dear America

Dear America

You like to refer to yourselves as a Christian nation, the greatest Christian nation on the planet.

You refer to yourselves as “One nation under God.”

When did you take up with the Devil? Why are you following Evil’s best practices instead of those taught by Jesus, your Saviour and great teacher?

In recent months and years you have shown yourselves to be true Satan’s spawn in so very many ways.

Where did your Saviour teach you to cause harm to others? Was his word not as: “Matthew 19:16 And, behold, one came and said unto him, Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life?
17 And he said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God: but if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.
18 He saith unto him, Which? Jesus said, Thou shalt do no murder, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness,
19 Honour thy father and thy mother: and, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”

He taught you to “love thy neighbour as thyself.” Do you do this?

Where did your Saviour teach you to seek vengeance for yourselves? To the best of my knowledge, all His teachings were of peace, love and forgiveness. Does your holy book not teach: “Romans 12:19: Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” Furthermore, if you are harmed, did he not teach in Matthew 5:39 “But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” Does that mean you must seek vengeance?

The Lord your God claims vengeance for Himself. Are you not doing the Devil’s work when you seek to take this from him?

You have many thousand people who did harm incarcerated in your prisons. Are they there for the protection of your society, or are you taking God’s teachings in vain and following the Devil by seeking your own vengeance.

What of those you put to death. Where does the Lord your Saviour teach you it is right and proper to take the life of another? Surely He taught: “Matthew 19: 18 Jesus said, Thou shalt do no murder.” Why then are so very many awaiting their own sanctioned murder on death row.

There is one dying man in prison in Scotland. He performed an admittedly evil deed. What do you think the Devil wants you to do? What about your Saviour? Who would prefer you to show kindness or forgiveness and allow him to return to his home to die in the arms of his loving family? Which of the two is gleefully witnessing the hard-hearted screams for continuing vengeance?

America – Throw out the Devil. Forgive your transgressors. Incarcerate those who pose a danger to your society but help the others. Seek no vengeance. Leave that to the judgement of your God. Prove to yourselves and all that you are truly “One Nation Under God,” and all will look up to and respect you again.

Religion:

Religion:

A good definition is as follows - Noun. A strong belief in a supernatural power or powers that control human destiny.

The most important parts of the definition of “Religion” are the words Belief: Noun. 1. Any cognitive content held as true or 2. A vague idea in which some confidence is placed. and Supernatural: Adjective. Not existing in nature or subject to explanation according to natural laws; not physical or material.

Thus Religion is the process of placing a strong confidence in a vague cognitive idea that a power, not physical or material, that does not exist in nature, nor comply with the laws of the universe, is controlling a person’s destiny.

Hmmmmmm!

I have been asked, on several occasions, to explain my own religious beliefs. This normally occurs when I have been debunking fundamentalist Christian, Islamic, Jewish or other myths to their, frequently psychotic, adherents. A case of, “I’ve shown you mine, you must show me yours.” My companion at the time objects to my “attacking” their base superstitions if they do not know mine to attack in exchange.

Firstly and most importantly, according to the definition of Religion as above, I do not follow any although if I did, I would most probably chose the Bahá'í Faith as the most honest and logical of the religions practiced today.

In all probability, there is no airy-fairy supernatural being. There is no evidence for the existence of one and no logical reason why there should be one. The Bible is a collection of myths, legends and stories, the product of overactive imagination and, frequently, strong vested interest; altered almost beyond recognition by further vested interests over the millennia and more since it was originally penned.

Einstein explained the truth most succinctly in a couple of letters he wrote in 1954, the year before his death:

• This first, open-letter was written to those who falsely attributed religious and creationist beliefs to him: “It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”

This next abridgement of the letter to Eric Gutkind from Albert Einstein at Princeton in January 1954, (translated from German by Joan Stambaugh) is particularly telling regarding his beliefs, his thoughts on the Bible and Judaism. It was sold at Bloomsbury auctions in May 2008 for a record sum for a single Einstein letter of £404,000. Professor Richard Dawkins was one of the bidders who failed to purchase it:

· “... The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. . . For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them.”

I personally regard the modern-day Abrahamic religions as evil, using base fears and superstitions designed by a ruling elite to instil fear in the masses as a method of control. In this group of evil movements, I include not only the purported monotheistic, Abrahamic triad of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, but also non-theistic religions such as Stalinism, Maoism and personality cults such as those practiced in North Korea, Zimbabwe, Jonestown and even Thailand. There is so little difference between these religions and cults that I am sure an alien, coming from another galaxy, would be hard pressed to tell them apart. They are just different faeces on the same die.

Let us go back to basics to try to discover the natural, logical truth behind the mumbo jumbo, mythology and ceremony surrounding the modern versions of the religions practiced today.

All modern religions either started either as the result of the teachings of a leader, or they were distilled from stories and legends, handed down from their original adherents, from their history and that of people they came in contact with. Hinduism is a classic example of a religion derived from myth, as is Judaism, which was distilled from the beliefs of the ancient Cretan conquerors and civilizers of the Hebrew peoples, with input from teachings that originated in Persia, the Indian subcontinent and further afield. Hinduism is falsely regarded as a polytheistic religion when in actuality all the “gods” are simply different incarnations or avatars of the same being, making it maybe the first monotheistic religion.

Christianity and Islam were both founded by teachers who altered the Judaic and Zoroastrian myths to their own purposes, (mostly with good intent). Buddhism was also started by a teacher, although true Buddhism makes no claim for any supernatural power, so it can not strictly be called a religion. Zoroaster (founder of Zoroastrianism), Siddhārtha Gautama (The Buddha), Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji (founder of Sikhism), Lord Rishabha (founder of Jainism), Mírzá Ḥusayn-`Alí Nuri (founder of the Bahá'í Faith), Mohammed Christ and other exceptional teachers were all entirely natural, fully mortal human beings. They existed in nature and complied fully with all her laws. All supernatural claims, if any, made for any of them were made by followers, frequently centuries, even more than a millennium after they died. There is strong evidence that all these leaders lived and taught, however none of the claims of supernatural events or miracles attributed to any of these teachers have any contemporaneous historical evidence of any kind, despite the evidence of their existence. This leads to the logical certainty that they were each exceptional, albeit normal, mortal teachers most of whose lessons and life stories have unfortunately been edited, altered and bastardised by multiple generations of highly vested interests. Mírzá Ḥusayn-`Alí Nuri and the Bahá'í Faith being a notable exception because he and the other leaders of this young faith distilled the most important teachings from other religions to build a teaching based on peace, compassion, understanding and the “Golden Rule.”

Most religions, particularly the Abrahamic triad, serve two main purposes in society.

1. They tell people how to live their lives and have a risk/reward system, the reward often being promised for some time after death. (Control.)
2. They separate believers in society from non-believers.

Senior members of a religious society promote a culture of fear, which can only be alleviated in part by unquestioning acceptance of their authority. They bind a people together in a multitude of ways and “protect” them from “unbelievers”, keeping them at a safe distance. These unbelievers may be those of a different race, tribe, caste, class or even gender or sexual persuasion. Note the many religious prohibitions against adherents of one faith taking a spouse from a different one. Some who dare flout such a prohibition are likely to be killed, often with extreme brutality, even in the current new millennium.

If we throw aside the fear, superstition, mumbo jumbo and childish stories that hold most religions together, we need to begin with a clean slate and offer a true alternative, serving a similar, but more humane, purpose in our modern society. Our new way of living and teachings should:

1. Be based on logical, repeatable scientifically provable evidence.
2. Help people to lead happy, productive lives, allowing moral and intellectual enrichment motivated by concern for the alleviation of suffering.
3. Remove their fears, including that of death, without replacing them with deceit, false hopes or sham promises.

Let us take these in order:

The first is easy. We need to teach our society to question what they are told. Any individual beliefs they may have must be based on evidence. Frequently evidence means an observable fact, something you can actually see (or hear, feel, smell, taste etc... ) that something is true. Other types of evidence fit the description that they are the only or by far the most likely logical explanation for something. Examples would be evolutionary theory or the theory of relativity. All the observable facts fit and give veracity to the theories. If later observations using your equipment, your hearing, sense of touch, smell, taste etc show the theory to be wrong, then the theory will be reworked to account for them. This is scientific method and it explains the world we live in. No facts should ever be altered or ignored to fit a pre-existing theory or belief system, as they are so frequently today by those who chose to follow illogical religious teachings.

We must take no account of teachings based on tradition, authority, or revelation, the three evil cornerstones of religious belief systems.

• “Tradition” means beliefs handed down through the generations or from books handed down through the centuries. Most of these beliefs start because somebody just made them up, normally to gain some kind of advantage over others or to explain some observable fact that they found inexplicable at the time. Santa Clause, monster under the bed, tooth fairy, sun god, god of thunder, even the Abrahamic god all fall under these traditional belief systems. Do not believe something just because it is in a book or tabloid newspaper. Look for provable evidence.
• “Authority” means believing a story simply because you are told to believe it by somebody more important or knowledgeable than you consider yourself to be. That person could be somebody older than you, a teacher, a parent, a man with a big gun, or a religious leader. For them to use only their authority to try to make you believe something is truly evil. They must provide access to provable, reproducible evidence. Some claim that scientific texts are simply an aspect of “Authority” teaching, but this is not the case because you can use the texts as a basis to prove the truth of what is written. I can tell you here that light speed is approximately 298,000 Kilometres per second and you could easily find out how to prove that experimentally. However, if I tell you that a man can walk on water, you could never reproduce it without trickery, illusion or thick ice.
• “Revelation” means that somebody claims something to be true simply because they thought it to be so themselves. They sat and prayed, or meditated or dreamed or had a hallucination because they ate some bad grain or fungus or nasty drugs and this idea came to them that they want everybody else to believe. Alternatively, they felt left out of their society and made something up to make themselves feel important. You see people like this all the time. There were thousands waiting for the start of the year 2,000, claiming God had told them the world was going to end. (As far as I know, the evidence would seem to prove it is still here as I type this.) Another example of a “Revelation” can be seen at Lourdes in France and other “miracle” sites. Millions of people go there hoping against hope to be cured of their ills, but it never happens. The only claimed cures are far more likely to be pure chance or to have entirely natural explanations. “Revelations”; do not believe them whether they are yours or anybody else’s. They are mostly just the symptom of a mind temporarily short circuited.

Secondly we must help people to lead happy, productive lives, allowing moral and intellectual enrichment motivated by concern for the alleviation of suffering. This is also not too hard if we have already accepted the first part, that all teachings must be based on logical, repeatable scientifically provable evidence.

In this regard, the “Golden Rule”, slightly rephrased and taken back to an earlier version here, is all important: “Each person should love their fellow beings as a mother loves her children.” Or phrased in a more recognisable manner: “What you do not like when done to yourself, do not do to others.” In this simple but profound rule can be found the true meaning of good, the basis for most of the philosophy by which we should all strive to live our lives. In contrast, the absence of the Golden Rule is the very epitome of devil, when people commit acts on others they would never like to be committed on themselves.

Good and devil are both alive and well and fighting a constant battle in our hearts and minds. Some truly good people naturally follow the “Golden Rule”, unfortunately other devil members of society prefer to totally ignore it and always follow the opposite course of action, cause pain or suffering where they can. Most of us are caught in between the two.

Devil pokes us in the ribs and persuades us to be selfish, lie or cheat or steal, he promises so much happiness, wealth or power but always, eventually leaves us or another with a bitter pill to swallow and a nasty taste to go with it. Good, on the other hand, keeps us awake at night if we have done something wrong, but he also rewards us with a feeling of absolute joy and happiness if we do something truly good and selfless. This can all be proven by simple experiment. If you dry a child’s tears or return lost or stolen property, you will always feel good about it. If, on the other hand, you cheat an old lady or knock her over, you will be guaranteed to stay awake at night or feel unhappy because of it. Unless, of course, you choose to mostly follow devil’s ways.

So, to recap number two: It is necessary to follow the “Golden Rule” and to base all our teachings on logical, provable, scientific evidence.

Lastly, we must fears, including that of death, without replacing them with deceit, false hopes or sham promises. If our teachings are based on logical, provable, scientific evidence, there will be no deceit, false hopes or sham promises and the only real remaining fear will concern the unknown, death or the afterlife. All others can be overcome by simple honesty.

Fear of what happens at the end of life is more difficult. It is after all “After our Life” and nobody has ever passed through and returned to tell the tale. However we each have a spark of consciousness within us that is not extinguished, indeed it returns to us after we sleep or enter alternative states of unconsciousness caused by accident, (coma,) or medication such as anaesthesia etc. There is a logical probability that this spark could well continue after our mortal remains have been cremated or rotted away as food for worms. If this spark is indeed reborn in a different body, as some believe, we could have no evidence of it. Memory is, after all, a function of the neural networks of the brain we left behind in our past corpse. We simply do not know, and can never do so. So there is really no point in worrying about it. At the end of our days we will simply go for a long, comfortable sleep from which we will not awaken in the same shell. This is something to look forward too, not fear.

As I wrote above, I feel a great affinity for the Bahá'í Faith. Their teachings of peace, harmony, the unity and equality of humankind are entirely logical except for their belief in a supernatural being, although their belief that God, if there is one, is too great for human comprehension, has its merits too.

Einstein, Spam & Religion.

A deeply troubled, evangelical friend recently forwarded me a chain email purportedly quoting a confrontation between an un-named atheist professor and a deeply religious student by the name of Albert Einstein. In this confrontation Einstein was reported to have dumbfounded his professor with his logic and essentially proven the existence of god.
The story was untrue. Einstein never engaged in such a conversation. Indeed, Einstein is reported to have become deeply disillusioned with both the teachings of his Jewish background and the Catholic schools he attended before he reached his teens.
Throughout most of his life he was very circumspect about his views, not wanting to antagonize either the believing or non believing camps. However in 1954, a year before his death, he wrote a couple of letters that make his beliefs plain:
In an open letter to those who claimed he worshipped a Judeo/Christian God he wrote:"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."

The following abridgement of the letter to Eric Gutkind from Princeton in January 1954, (translated from German by Joan Stambaugh) is particularly telling. It was sold at Bloomsbury auctions in May 2008 for $404,000, a record sum for a single Einstein letter. Professor Richard Dawkins was one of the bidders who failed to purchase it:

"... I read a great deal in the last days of your book, and thank you very much for sending it to me. What especially struck me about it was this. With regard to the factual attitude to life and to the human community we have a great deal in common.

... The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them.

In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew. As a man you claim, so to speak, a dispensation from causality otherwise accepted, as a Jew the priviliege of monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer a causality at all, as our wonderful Spinoza recognized with all incision, probably as the first one. And the animistic interpretations of the religions of nature are in principle not annulled by monopolisation. With such walls we can only attain a certain self-deception, but our moral efforts are not furthered by them. On the contrary.

Now that I have quite openly stated our differences in intellectual convictions it is still clear to me that we are quite close to each other in essential things, ie in our evalutations of human behaviour. What separates us are only intellectual 'props' and 'rationalisation' in Freud's language. Therefore I think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete things. With friendly thanks and best wishes

Yours, A. Einstein"

Learn Without Fear

I felt this should be blogged, as well as forwarded:

I have children, know children of friends and have friends who themselves have suffered abuse, bullying and corporal punishment at school despite such being illegal throughout much of the modern world. This needs to stop.

No child should be afraid to attend school because of the threat of sexual abuse, corporal punishment, or bullying. But every year 350 million children face violence in schools – and with devastating effects. Please help us achieve violence-free schools by signing our petition urging the United Nations to encourage every country to take immediate action so that every child has the right to Learn Without Fear.

The wording of the petition to the United Nations is as follows:

I believe that every child has the right to attend school without the fear of violence. But right now children around the world face sexual abuse, corporal punishment, and bullying in their schools each day. We must put a stop to this cycle of violence against children and make schools safe places where they can learn without fear.

I urge the United Nations to help end all forms of violence in schools by encouraging every country to:

• Work with non-governmental organizations and governments to establish data-collection systems so we can better understand the severity of violence in schools;
  
• Work with teachers and education authorities to develop and implement plans of action for achieving violence-free schools; and
  
• Establish a procedure for children to report violent incidents.
  
  

Please declare that the United Nations supports the right of every child to attend school without the fear of violence.

Please go here to view the a short video, "Learn Without Fear," and sign the petition.

http://www.planusa.org/learnwithoutfear/takeaction.php?tp=VE1HUj0xLHRpZD0xMDA3MDQ1LA%3D%3D

Thank you

What can parents use in the battle against religious indoctrination?

"Daddy, why did Jesus invent butterflies if they die after two weeks?"

I just about hit the panic button when my six-year-old son Theo put this question to me not long ago. His mother, who is a Christian, had taught him that Jesus was God. When Jesus's visage appears in a painting or on television, Theo sometimes exclaims, "That's God!" In his butterfly question he seemed to reason, syllogistically, that if Jesus was God, and God created the world and its life forms (butterflies being one of them), Jesus "invented" the winged creatures. Either that or God and Jesus are simply interchangeable in his mind.

"First, Theo, your question presumes that Jesus was God," I responded. "Many people, like mommy, believe he was, but many others don't. It also presumes that there is a God - we don't know for sure that there is." "I think there is," he retorted. "There may very well be a God, Theo. But not everyone agrees on that - there are many people who doubt there is a God. We might never know for sure if there is or not," I told him. "When we die we'll know," he came back. "Maybe," I said. "But maybe not."

The literalism packed into Theo's question alarmed me, but this was by no means my first encounter with the influence of religion on my progeny. My ten-year-old son Elijah enjoys going to church with his mother - not every Sunday, but not infrequently. I've never discouraged it. One Monday morning a few months ago, though, I saw him reading the Bible, a children's Bible he'd been given at his mother's church. In no way did I discourage him from reading it. But I confess (as it were) that I went to work that day a bit preoccupied.

To be sure, I'd always been comfortable with our familial arrangement: our boys have parents with very different views on religion - their mother a Catholic, their father an agnostic humanist. This is only one of the several ways in which our family is "mixed": Nilsa is from Puerto Rico, I from the Midwestern US; she grew up in a working-class family in the countryside, I in a middle-class one in the suburbs; she speaks to the children in Spanish, I in English. Our differences regarding religion must therefore seem, to the kids, par for the course, no?

I've also sensed (hoped?) that having one religious parent and one secular one could be healthy for the boys ("hmm, if mom believes x but dad doesn't, I guess there are multiple perspectives to consider, and who knows which one is right? Maybe none has a monopoly on truth...").

Nonetheless, the sight of Elijah reading the Bible that morning did leave me with an uneasy feeling. Of course it was wonderful to see him reading. And the Bible is in any case a seminal world-historical text: familiarity with it is an essential form of cultural knowledge. Churches, however, don't typically dispense Bibles merely as cultural texts but rather as the Word of God. It was in this register that I worried a bit about Elijah's engagement with the book. And it made me ask myself what exactly I was doing to share, or impart, my secular worldview to Elijah, as a counterbalance to the Catholicism he was imbibing from his mother. She takes him to services. What do I take him to? She has him reading the Bible. What do I have him reading?

I have read all sorts of books with Elijah that I think of as humanistic, broadly speaking: lots of poetry (particularly Pablo Neruda, whose Book of Questions is ideal for children); books like David A White's Philosophy for Kids, and its sequel, The Examined Life: Advanced Philosophy for Kids. I recall feeling especially proud one evening after doing a chapter of Philosophy for Kids, which is designed for discussion between parent and child - I think it was a chapter on the meaning of friendship - followed by some verses of Neruda. I put Elijah to sleep that night thinking to myself, a diet of Aristotle and Neruda for my eight-year old - how cool is that?

Cool though it may be, does it actually counterbalance the influence of the churchgoing and Bible-reading? Or does it operate on a parallel track from it altogether? Does Elijah juxtapose whatever he may be taking away from the philosophy and poetry with the stuff he hears at church? Does he consider one in relation to the other at all? Seeing his head buried in that Bible that morning really made me wonder if I was perhaps approaching the matter too sideways. Maybe I needed to tackle the situation head-on.

But how? Are there any children's books, I wondered, that directly address religious questions from a humanistic point of view? Not necessarily an anti-Bible, but a strong alternative or counterpart in a secular key.

I called a friend of mine, who works for a humanist charity and is a parent too, feeling sure he would have some sage advice. His response surprised me. Not only did he not know of any good humanist children's books, he said, he didn't like the idea of such a thing. Rather than attempt to counter-indoctrinate kids with explicitly anti-religious messages, he argued, far better simply to expose them to the widest range of reading as possible - weren't Roald Dahl and Dr Seuss essentially humanistic? - and expose them to the manifold religions and philosophies in the world in order to nourish their imaginations and sense of wonder about the Universe, and help them view religion in a comparative context. The antidote I was seeking, he suggested, was to be found in books of evolution and science fiction, not didactic manifestos.

Sounded wise, though I didn't expect to hear it from a full-time, professional humanist. And I was disappointed that he didn't have a ready-made list of books of the sort I had in mind.

The dilemma remained: what if all the science and fantasy and comparative metaphysics fail to do the trick, and Christian literalism, despite my efforts, works its magic on my children's minds? Call me intolerant, but I'll admit it: I don't want to tell my children what to believe or not to believe, but I would be displeased and disappointed if they were to embrace conventional religious views. I just would be. Isn't there a more direct way, I thought, to militate against that outcome?

I turned to Amazon and found that there are several books in this register. Many of them are published by Prometheus Books, an American press with a long history. Within minutes I had found books such as Humanism, What's That? A Book for Curious Kids by Helen Bennett and Dan Barker's Maybe Yes, Maybe No: A Guide for Young Skeptics. I particularly liked the title of this one. Could I have found what I was looking for?

I had liked the idea about exposing the kids to the array of religious traditions. Wouldn't this naturally tend to weaken the notion that any one religion holds the key to Truth? Another friend of mine had challenged this idea - wouldn't this, he asked, merely sanction or naturalise the religious frame of understanding the world? Isn't the message, in effect, "Look at these various religious beliefs and practices - you are free to pick among them"? "What about the millions of people who live without religion?" he asked. "Why not present secular modes of thought alongside the religious traditions?"

He had a point, but since I was already getting some explicitly secular books I added The Kids Book of World Religions to my shopping cart.

Well, we've read the books, but I'm afraid there's nothing terribly interesting to report either about the texts as such or about my children's reactions to them, which have been rather quiet, if not altogether bored - tough to tell, and I'm strongly disinclined to go fishing for their thoughts. I've been tempted, but better, I think, to let them process it all in their own way (assuming the books made an impression at all). The books themselves are a mixed bag: at turns poignant and clunky, clever and awkward. I might re-read them with the boys at some point. Or maybe they'll pick them up themselves and read them on their own. We'll see.

And I might look for other humanist books that engage my children more than this first batch did. Raising my children as a secular father in a society saturated with religion, and in a home that is itself mixed (up?) on the religious question, creates anxiety. But maybe I should just relax. "Kids mostly just want to play with their friends, and religion isn't that big a deal - though it is, unfortunately, to parents," writes Emily Rosa, one of the contributors to the book Parenting Beyond Belief: On Raising Ethical, Caring Kids Without Religion, in an essay evocatively titled "Growing Up Godless: How I Survived Amateur Secular Parenting".

Danny Postel ansd his sonsAll parents must confront the prospect that if we raise our children to be free, self-confident individuals, they may make choices that we don't like. Tough. The companion volume to Parenting Beyond Belief bears the title Raising Freethinkers. Sounds appealing - I'd like to raise freethinkers. But what if raising my kids to be truly free in their thinking results in their becoming religious? What if my efforts to instill scepticism in them lead them to become sceptical of my humanism? So be it.

"Teaching" your children (about) humanism can be a fool's errand, plagued by some the same pitfalls involved in raising children "in" a particular faith tradition. Richard Dawkins has provocatively argued that indoctrinating children with religion is a form of child abuse. But couldn't secularism, as Jeremy Stangroom recently wondered, constitute its own form of indoctrination? Might the attempt to impart one worldview or another to one's children - whether religious or secular - itself be ill-conceived?

And yet one doesn't want to be passive, especially in the American context, in which religion in one form or another constitutes a kind of default position. One can certainly understand the impulse behind the humanism-for-kids books, whatever their faults and limitations, and the desire of secular parents to get their hands on them. They arise from and speak to a very real hunger, whether they satisfy it or not.

__________________________________________________

Parent & Child Reading list:

(With thanks to papers at: 74.125.155.132)

Julia Sweeney - Navigating Around the Dinner Table

In an essay at turns hilarious and touching, comedian Julia Sweeney recounts her own experience of growing up happily Catholic, gradually giving up her belief, then struggling to raise her adopted daughter without the convenient answers and simple religious comforts she had as a child.

Norm R. Allen, Jr. - Thinking My Way to Adulthood

Norm Allen, Executive Director of African American Humanists, tells of growing up in a Baptist home with one unusual feature: an open invitation to question anything, even the existence of God, and an assurance that he would be loved and accepted no more or less based on his answers.

Richard Dawkins, FRS - Good and Bad Reasons for Believing

On the tenth birthday of his daughter Juliet, Oxford biologist and ethologist Richard Dawkins gave her a letter describing something of singular importance to him: the value of evidence and honesty as the basis for our beliefs.

Emily Rosa - Growing Up Godless: How I Survived Amateur Secular Parenting

Emily Rosa (now a college student at CU Boulder) describes her own upbringing as a child in a secular family, including an usually public introduction to skepticism and the scientific method.

Bertrand Russell - from The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell

Philosopher Bertrand Russell lost his parents as a very young child. The courts ignored the instructions of his freethinking father to have him raised without religion—despite which, he became one of the foremost freethinkers of the 20th century.

Anne Nicol Gaylor - I’d Rather Play Outside

Freedom From Religion Foundation founder Anne Nicol Gaylor remembers her upbringing in a freethought home and her interactions with religious neighbors and friends.

Dan Barker - My Father’s House

Dan Barker’s “de-conversion” from fundamentalist minister to freethought activist provides a fascinating backdrop for his reflections on parenting. Dan first raised children in a Christian home and now raises a daughter in a freethought home.

Pete Wernick, PhD - Parenting in a Secular/Religious Marriage

Marriages between partners of different beliefs present special challenges. For parents, the challenges are further increased. Pete, a humanist, and Joan, a Catholic, are both seriously engaged in their belief systems, yet by conscious planning and hard work, they’ve made a solid and lasting marriage and parenting team.

Roberta Nelson, DD - On Being Religiously Literate

Rev. Nelson suggests that knowledge of religion is an important part of cultural literacy and provides a number of ways to achieve that literacy without indoctrination.

Stu Tanquist - Choosing Your Battles

When Stu Tanquist married his wife, he was an apathetic agnostic and she was a devout Catholic. Over the years he became more skeptical of religious claims, which introduced friction into their relationship—especially related to their daughter. Eventually the dissonance became too great, the marriage ended, and Tanquist was raising his daughter with limited support, confronting many issues including religion in the public schools.

Margaret Downey - Teaching Children to Stand on Principle—Even When the Going Gets Tough

Margaret Downey’s son had no problem identifying as a nonbeliever in his New Jersey Boy Scout troop—but when the family moved to Illinois, the new troop leader confronted the family and expelled Margaret’s son. Margaret’s essay describes her family’s experience, placing it in the context of her own upbringing in a mixed-race family.

Ed Buckner, PhD - Secular Schooling

Why should secular parents support public schools (or oppose “vouchers”)? Is moral education possible in secular public schools? Why should parents of all perspectives support the separation of church and state within public schools? Ed Buckner proposes answers to these questions and more, describing what separation is (and is not), and notes that secular schools are not the same as “atheistic” schools.

Jane Wynne Willson - Humanist Ceremonies

Though religious expressions have come to dominate rites of passage and the marking of other important life events in much of the world, there are meaningful and emotionally satisfying ceremonies available to serve these intrinsically human needs without supernatural overtones.

Dale McGowan, PhD - Losing the “Holy” and Keeping the “Day”

The calendar of holidays need not be diminished in the least when a family moves beyond belief. Most formerly religious holidays have a fully secular parallel expression today, with meaning intact. Add to that an array of new secular holidays to select from, and the possibilities are endless.

Tom Flynn: - Put the Claus Away

Dale McGowan: - The Ultimate Dry Run

Noell Hyman: - To Easter Bunny or Not to Easter Bunny?

It isn’t the most urgent issue in the secular family, but the question of intentional childhood myths taps many of our central concerns, including honesty, fact and fiction, reward and punishment, and trust. Tom Flynn suggests we do away with the mythologies of childhood, while Dale McGowan and Noell Hyman find reasons to keep and even cherish them.

Gareth Matthews, PhD - Morality and Evil

Secular parents may think they can avoid discussions of the problem of evil, but Gareth Matthews suggests otherwise. Making sense of the problem of evil, and the fact that evil often comes from good, is one of the central intellectual struggles of childhood.

Jean Mercer, PhD - Behaving Yourself: Moral Development in the Secular Family

Jean Mercer describes Kohlberg’s six stages of moral development and the interplay of emotion and moral reasoning.

David Koepsell, JD, PhD - On Being Good for Good Reasons: Commandments vs. Principles

David Koepsell distinguishes between “commandments” and “principles” as the underpinnings of moral behavior. Rather than choosing between them, Koepsell suggests that morality tends to be grounded in a combination of the two.

Shannon and Matt Cherry - Double Vision: Teaching our Twins Pride and Respect

This essay, along with “Seven Secular Virtues” (McGowan), draws a distinction between pride and arrogance. Pride, properly understood as self-esteem, has long been recognized as an important human virtue. Shannon and Matt Cherry go on to a nuanced description of respect, noting a difference between respect for a person and respect for that person’s ideas—an understanding they hope to instill in their twin daughters.

Dale McGowan - Seven Secular Virtues

Dale McGowan offers a list of seven “secular virtues,” not as a comprehensive list of human virtues, nor as a list that applies only to secularists. Like the traditional virtues, they are qualities to which we aspire – often with great difficulty.

Donald B. Ardell, PhD - Supporting Your Children in Their Quest for the Meaning of Life!

Life without meaning and purpose would be unbearable. But there is no universal, inherent meaning that applies for everyone. What is called for, says Dr. Don Ardell, is a conscious quest for meaning.

Annie Laurie Gaylor What Your Kids Won’t Learn in School

Freethought scholar Annie Laurie Gaylor presents a flying overview of some famous religious doubters, including many probable surprises. Such a list can serve as a counterpoint to the common assumption that the great figures of the past and present are believers.

James Herrick - Parenting and the Arts

“If you are looking for comfort, if you are looking for consolation, if you want the meaning of life handed to you on a plate – don’t go to the arts. Whether it is for parents or children, or their interaction, the arts can disturb and should not avoid the difficult areas of life. But art is not to be feared, for it can also stretch the imagination – art is wonderfully elastic, and it can stir creativity. Art is a wonderful stirrer, and a stirrer of wonder.”

Noell Hyman - The End, As We Know It

Noell Hyman reflects on the difference between the conception of death she held as a Mormon and the naturalistic conception that now frames her discussions with her own children, whom she is raising without religion.

Kendyl Gibbons, DD - Dealing with Death in the Secular Family

In a wide-ranging essay, Rev. Kendyl Gibbons gives practical advice on how to help children understand and cope with death without recourse to supernatural illusions.

Mark Twain - Little Bessie Would Assist Providence

Many of Mark Twain’s late writings were explorations of his own disbelief and of the influence of religion. Little Bessie was a satire in several chapters that went unpublished during Twain’s lifetime. It tells of the impertinent religious questioning of a wildly precocious little girl and her devout mother’s appalled attempts to answer.

Robert E. Kay, MD - Thoughts on Raising a Creative, Curious, Freethinking Child

Child psychiatrist Dr. Robert Kay offers fifteen thoughts on raising children without religion.

Amy Hilden, PhD - The Family Road Trip and the Self Behind My Eyes

Wondering is a formative experience for the growing human mind, says philosopher Amy Hilden—and the more unstructured and self-directed, the better. She describes her own wonderings as a child staring out of the car window on family road trips as her first sojourn into the philosophy of mind.

Margaret Knight - Excerpt from Morals Without Religion

“In January 1955 psychologist, broadcaster and humanist Margaret Knight stunned post-war Britain by suggesting in two talks on the BBC’s Home Service…that moral education should be uncoupled from religious education.”1 This brief excerpt from that talk is intended primarily to recommend a closer look at Knight’s elegant and thoughtful writings.

Stephen Law - Does God Exist? from The Philosophy Files

The arguments for and against belief in God are many centuries old. Stephen Law presents all of the major arguments in the form of an accessible dialogue among friends.

Dale McGowan - Teaching Kids to Yawn at Counterfeit Wonder

“A lot of people believe that you can’t experience wonder without religious faith,” says Dale McGowan. “If that were the case, this book would have to sound the alarm. Childhood, after all, is our first and best chance to revel in wonder. If parenting without religion meant parenting without wonder, I might just say to heck with reality.” But the wonder inherent in a scientific worldview can positively eclipse religious wonder—if we consider implications along with facts.

Amanda Chesworth - Natural Wonders

Amanda Chesworth continues the contrast between fictional and scientific wonder, suggesting that one of the primary privileges of a parent is the opportunity to provide children with “brain food.”

Kristan Lawson - The Idea that Changed the World from Darwin and Evolution for Kids

Kristan Lawson presents the theory of evolution in a nutshell, along with several activities designed to illustrate the principles of natural selection.

Pete Wernick - Building the Secular Community–However Slowly

Pete Wernick describes his own attempts to build humanist community by creating a sort of “church without God”—and shares some honest critiques of the current humanist infrastructure.

Amanda Metskas and August Brunsman IV - Summer Camps Beyond Belief

More than ten years have passed since Camp Quest, a summer camp for the children of freethinking families, first opened its gates in Kentucky.

Penn Jillette - Passing Down the Joy of Not Collecting Stamps

Penn Jillette has been a nonbeliever for a long time but only recently became a father. He reflects on raising his kids without religion, noting that you don’t have to “teach Atheism.” An absence of religious indoctrination, he says, is enough to give kids room to think for themselves