Alpha Scrawl

I love teaching trigonometry, because of the stuff you can do with it. Today we used it to measure the size of the moon, and I pressed the momentum home, talking about Eratosthenes using trigonometry and shadows to measure the size of the Earth. I love that story, and I think it lights up some light bulbs to get into the history of it, and show how an observant and creative person, with some very simple tools, could measure something so vast with such accuracy. To me, it’s an affirmation of human ingenuity.

So I’m really getting into the narrative, and to wrap it all up at the end, I conclude: “…so to me, it’s so cool that an ancient dude in Egypt with a stick–”

And one of my students shouts out “oh, oh! do you mean Moses?”

This is not a serious question, because I very clearly have been talking about a different person, but this student is so insistent to make the joke that she keeps repeating it, to the point where I am clearly not going to get through the rest of class without acknowledging this student's humor. Which I did (as deftly as possible, in the moment) by making a flip little joke about how “all ancient dudes in Egypt probably had sticks; it was like their equivalent of the iPhone.” And we all got to laugh about the iStick, and move on.

But this sort of thing really frustrates me, because I was building up momentum to sort of a huge conclusion– that it doesn’t take a lot of tools to make great discoveries, just creativity and the math you already know– and I get totally derailed by an off-topic joke which I can’t move on from until I acknowledge Moses in some way, and that puts me in a dilemma, because I don’t want do address religious topics in class. There shouldn’t be any reason to do so. I know Christian teachers in the area do so with fair frequency, and I’ve occasionally heard it happening, but they shouldn’t, and neither do I.

My instinct as a teacher is to affirm students and their interests, but I can’t do so in this case without somehow suggesting that Moses was on an equal level with Eratosthenes, or at the very least, indicating that I think the Exodus story is actually real. And I also can’t address the Moses topic in any honest way without seriously derailing a math lesson (unacceptable) or trampling a student’s religious beliefs from my position of classroom authority (also unacceptable, and pretty gross). There’s not a really good solution to this sort of dilemma, other than frantically changing the subject and hoping nobody notices.

I often get frustrated with other atheists and skeptics for making arguments that I feel are ineffective. Having been a Christian for 25 years, I know the mindset I had when I was a believer, and I know the kinds of arguments that would have legitimately given me pause, and I know the kinds of arguments that would turn me away. Many atheists' arguments from the Bible fall into this latter category for me, seeming like petty nit-picking or pointless semantics. Matt Dillahunty's deconstruction of the Sermon on the Mount is one of those things that qualified for me for a long time. Surely no one took these passages of phenomenally "bad advice" literally, right?

But I'll get to that. Today I want to talk primarily about spending the weekend with my awesome in-laws in rural Kentucky.

I lucked out and got fantastic in-laws. As chance turned out, this weekend I got to spend a lot of time with my wife's father, Eric. Eric lives on a small hobby-farm and spends his days gardening, tending livestock, and being rad as hell. He is close friends with a lot of the Amish guys who live near him, especially the guy the runs the Amish butcher shop where Eric has his livestock processed.

Saturday, Eric and I drove all over, visiting various Amish farms trying unsuccessfully to find a place to buy fresh asparagus. While out and about, we passed several horse-and-buggy getups, quite unsurprisingly. They're all over the area. So as we're driving past this hill, Eric's telling me about some people he knew who were rear-ended in their buggy, by an uninsured motorist who was going too fast over a blind hill. They had to eat the cost of medical care, fixing their ride, and replacing their horse, who was badly injured and had to be put down.

Apparently, the Amish in this community will take your insurance information if you get in an accident, but if you don't have insurance, they won't sue you for any sort of compensation.

I asked Eric about this because the distinction seemed weird. (It's fine to accept restitution passively, but not to seek it actively?) He reiterated this point and added: they also don't accept income tax refunds. According to my father-in-law, the Amish in this area pay taxes, pay extra taxes they owe if it turns out they've underpaid, but won't accept a refund if it turns out they've overpaid.

Now, there's apparently a whole bevy of strange ways the Amish community has partial participation in government systems, but these areas of non-participation really strike me as strange. Suing an uninsured driver who's hit you is supposed to be a last resort way of recouping expenses from that accident, right? And those expenses can of course be very steep. I find it really baffling that you're fine with the idea of compensation (because you'll take an insurance payout) but only if it's offered. If someone hits your buggy and doesn't have insurance (or simply claims not to have it, presumably, because do you check?), then they just drive off and you're stuck shouldering a massive expense on your own?

I guess that's how it works, if you're Amish.

Which brings me back to the Sermon on the Mount, because here's confirmation that the destructive "go ahead and be a victim" mentality that some argue the Sermon advocates, which I assumed didn't really actually exist, was being adopted by a whole community in illogical ways that don't seem to serve their best interests in any way. 

Being a teacher has always meant having to think quickly on your feet, improvise, and adapt. 

I’m a skeptic teaching high school in the Appalachian South, and though I love my job and my kids, sometimes I feel I’m navigating a minefield.

A while back, when I was observing a class taught by another teacher, the subject of mountains came up. We live in the mountains, and it seemed an obvious metaphor for talking about maxima and minima of functions in a math lesson. When a student brought up the fact that our mountains, the Appalacian ones, are among the oldest on Earth, because they’re smaller and more erosion-rounded than the Rockies or Himalayas, the teacher I was observing undercut her affirmation: “That’s right, supposedly.” The “supposedly” bothers me a lot. 

I told that story so you’d know what kind of an environment this is. It’s a high school not very far away from the one where that brave student last month fought for her legal right to start a Secular Student Alliance chapter at her high school, only to be dissuaded from exercising that right by harassment, intimidation, and death threats against her family– mostly by other students.

Some other time, I’ll tell the story about the time a student asked if I believe in ghosts. It’s a good story, but today I’m telling the story about the time a student asked me if I believe in dragons.

We were towards the end of class, working on projects in small groups, so some chitchat was going on quietly in various corners of the room. And a student asked if I believe in dragons. At this point, a second student noted: “Did you know that the word ‘dragon’ just means ‘dead lizard’?” So I said: “If we’re talking about the ‘dead lizard’ definition, I’ve seen those before, so I definitely believe those are real.” The original question-asker clarified, so I said I didn’t believe in “big, flying, firebreathing dragons.”

So the student says: “Don’t you think it’s interesting that all these ancient cultures in different parts of the world have stories about dragons that are basically the same thing? And dragons are even in the Bible, and called ‘dragons’ in the Book of Revelation.”

This isn’t the first time I’ve encountered this apologetic. Maybe you’ve also heard Darek Isaacs talking last year about dragons coexisting with humans in Biblical times. So I’m kind of familiar with this line of thought, and if I were having this conversation with some dude down at the coffeeklatch I’d respond differently. But the students are people I care about establishing a working relationship with, so that we can get along in class and they’ll be favorably-enough disposed toward me to do the homework I assign, so I have to be really careful about how I respond to their religious assertions. Even if I weren’t a little nervous about protecting my own job in those situations, which I am. 

But the student with the dead-lizards definition bailed me out again, by changing the subject to dinosaurs. After the two of them went a few rounds back and forth about whether or not dragons counted as dinosaurs, or could have been a species of dinosaurs, I was able to comment: “Well, dinosaur remains have been found and studied, so I accept that dinosaurs are real. But as far as I know, we’ve not found any dragon bones, but if we ever do I’ll reassess my opinion about dragons.”

At that point, all participants in this conversation were able to set our other differences of opinion aside and agree that if dragons were in fact real, that would be “really awesome.” The bell rang shortly after.

(Originally posted Feb. 5, 2014. The original post can be accessed at alphascrawl.wordpress.com.)

I have some family members– my cousin, his wife, and their two young children– who are very good at keeping up with the mail. It’s a talent I’m a bit envious of. I’ve never been all that great at keeping in touch, but this family is always sending cards and letters to all their relatives, which is especially nice since they live on the other side of the country and I very rarely get to see them. 

I got a “love letter” from them on Valentine’s Day. You know this kind of thing, it’s a typed up “what’s going on with our family lately” update, with photos of the kids and all. Very cute.

So why write about it? The biggest news in the letter, that these parents were so glowingly proud about, is that both children have decided to adopt the religion of their devout parents, and have become Christian. Their ages are 4.5 years old, and 3 years old.

Now, I could write a lot here about Christian privilege, and how unfair it seems to me that my cousin and his family doesn’t have to think twice about mass-sending a two page letter crammed with effusive praise for God and all the good work He is doing for our extended family while I feel even mentioning my own atheism to the same relatives would provoke a fight, but I did my whole last post about Christian privilege. 

So instead I’m going to talk about age. 

Do you remember what you were doing when you were three years old? Do you remember what your thought processes were like? I do, sort of. I remember coming back from preschool with ink on my nose because they had these scented markers that I thought were goddamned amazing, and being allowed to sort colored tokens into the compartments of an egg carton only because I was such an advanced child. (In hindsight, now I’m pretty sure my preschool teacher was playing me, with that one.) I remember refusing to wear turtlenecks because I thought I was going to choke. I remember being terrified of dogs, vegetables, and the dark.

I’m bringing this up to make a point: I certainly don’t think that as a three-year-old, I was cognitively with-it enough to make weighty decisions about metaphysical issues. I believed whatever my parents told me to. (See also: Santa Claus.) I couldn’t be trusted to pick out my own clothes and not look like a clown, much less to choose a religious outlook (and presumably, and afterlife destination.)

Leaving aside for a moment the statistics that overwhelmingly correlate your religion with your parents’ religion (implying that, more than anything else, what you believe depends on what you were raised to believe), I think it’s absurd to take these kids’ decisions at face value for anything, especially something as life-or-death serious as religious people believe their religion is. In their minds, hell itself is at stake here, which is why I suppose they indoctrinate so thoroughly so as not to leave their progeny’s fate to chance. But let’s not pretend children have any idea of the scope and consequences of their own religious choices, much less the intellectual and rational reasons to believe or disbelieve. 

You know, I’ll go one better– let’s not pretend the children are making a choice.

I was seven when I decided it was time to be baptized and join the church. I think that’s too young, too. Everyone around me was Christian (or if they weren’t, they were thoroughly closeted– this was the bible pants of North Carolina, after all), I had been told about God and Jesus for my whole life, I knew about the horrors of hell, and I was being given the hard sell at church. Of course I decided to join the church. Seven-year-olds in general are not known for their independent critical thinking skills, and I was one of those compliant kids who craved to please parents, teachers, and other authority figures. I was in my mid-twenties before the indoctrination started breaking down.

(Originally posted Feb. 15, 2014. The original post can be accessed at alphascrawl.wordpress.com.)

Yesterday, I went to visit a friend and his partner in this hospital. Topics of conversation ran the gamut, but these two individuals– who have to deal with serious chronic illness on a daily basis– quickly led the conversation around to Christian privilege, and I didn’t resist.

Normally, it’s nigh-impossible to get me to shut up for very long, but this couple clearly had some serious venting to do, so I let them get to it. They had a lot to say about support groups for chronic illness, and the presumption that the help and encouragement patients need should be Christian in flavor. 

It’s complicated, because a lot of these support groups are held in church basements and fellowship halls, and I get the strong sense that this is often out of necessity. You need space to hold a support group meeting, and churches have space they’re frequently willing to rent or donate. I think that, in general, that’s a noble use of those facilities. 

The problem is that it strengthens the “everybody’s a Christian by default” cultural assumption that passes for standard here in the U.S., particularly here in the bible pants region. (Let’s get real: it’s more than just a belt.) When I walk into a church basement to go to a chronic illness support group and help raise some funds for suffering patients, the message I intend to send is that I support my friends and other patients in their long and difficult health struggles. One of the side-messages I am actually sending is that I’m going to church. 

This is really difficult for me, and it hangs me up.

Everybody’s closet is contextual. With my friends, I am openly atheist, a secular firebrand. With my family, I’m openly atheist, but it’s a subject nobody can talk about because of my mother’s emotional denial of my nonbelief. (Holidays are a mess.) With work, due to the nature of my working conditions, I am completely closeted and avoid all mentions of religion, except with co-workers who get moved into the “friend” category (in which case, see above). My contextual closet is open or closed to different degrees based on where I am and what role I’m playing. When I’m at an event hosted at a church, I’m going to hold my tongue.

And maybe that’s a personal failing. Maybe it’s cowardice to sidestep uncomfortable questions and deliberately let people make assumptions I know are wrong. Maybe my ingrained manners are helping prop up a lot of shitty Christian privilege, and the myth that the only want to cope is through faith (in this case, because churches have the free meeting space).

Because here’s the thing: I don’t know how many other people in that room are doing exactly what I’m doing– biting their tongues, biding their time, playing nice in church because they’re too polite or too scared to be secular at a secular event that happens to take place in a church. It looks like 100% of us are believers, so I really can’t express much surprise at this next bit.

People make a lot of assumptions that anyone who’s got a chronic illness is a Christian. This is a subset of the “Christians assume everybody else is a Christian” thing, but illness amplifies this. It’s assumed that everybody prays, or wants prayer, or wants to be reassured that it’s all part of God’s plan, or believes that they’ll find comfort in heaven, or thinks that magical healing is possible if you’ve got enough faith. Sometimes speakers show up at these events, and they’re almost always Christian. Often, pastors make a brief speech or a prayer. (Maybe they’re included as part of the package when you rent the space for your meeting? Maybe they figure that if an event is happening in their church, it looks bad if they don’t make an appearance?)

While we were chatting yesterday at the hospital, my friends mentioned that at a recent event, they had a Buddhist speaker, who at one point referenced a quote (which I’ve failed to locate) about “the universe being an ocean of light” and “life and death dancing on the waves”– a metaphor notable both for its novelty and for its positivity. Let me be clear that I think it’s poetic nonsense, pretty fluff that it’s impossible to tease any kind of meaning out of, but as nonsense goes, it definitely beats the bleak and somber brand of nonsense associated with Christianity and its sanctimonious, hypocritical deity.

(Originally posted Feb. 6, 2014. The original post can be accessed at alphascrawl.wordpress.com.)

I want to take a minute to talk about Ryan Bell. Specifically, I want to publicly change my stance on Bell’s experiment.

For those who aren’t aware, Ryan Bell is the former Adventist pastor who announced that, in 2014, he would be “trying on atheism” for a year. Here’s the blog he’s writing about the process.

When I first heard about the Year Without God, I thought: “this is a publicity stunt, by February 2015 he’ll be back in the pulpit with a book deal.” And then I forgot about him.

When I was talking to Cash about ReAsonCon* and he announced that he’d added Ryan Bell as a speaker, I may have rolled my eyes. And then I heard Bell’s interview on Cash and Love’s show. This guy is thoughtful, well-read, sincere… even before, while a member of the church, he agitated against their more conservative policies as a critic from within, which I can relate to and respect. I think that’s really telling.

I don’t think his Year Without God is a stunt anymore. I think it’s an honest search for a better way to be– a search like many of us have undertaken in the past, or will someday– and it’s incredibly gutsy of Bell to undertake such a personal journey so publicly and at great financial risk.

(Originally posted Feb. 5, 2014. The original post can be accessed at alphascrawl.wordpress.com.)

A lot of people are talking today about last night’s Nye/Ham debate. Some people talked about it with pen and paper. I’m more interested in this than I am in the debate itself. These are the types of people we interact with and talk to; these are the things people say when science and religion are discussed.

There’s a lot to dig into, here. These 22 responders have condensed their whole arguments into one-sentence zingers– a kind of brevity I have a hard time achieving– because of the constraints of their internet photo gimmick, but that’s a thing that people do in real conversations, too. Get into a conversation with somebody who has something to prove, and they’ll often deliver a one-liner they think is too good to dispute (and by the smirks on some of these faces at the link, they’re pretty proud of their cleverness).

I think this is fascinating. This process of boiling down a point of view to a single sentence does some interesting things– it shows you what a person thinks is important about their reasoning, what they find convincing, and what they’re really aiming to disprove. It cuts through a lot of obfuscating language and can reveal thinking errors really clearly. (If you like to hunt down logical fallacies, the one-sentence responses in this link are easy prey.)

Because I saw it asked about elsewhere, I want to talk about comment #5: “How do you explain a sunset if there is no God?”

This is a version of a pretty standard street-level apologetic. The assertion is that everybody should know that God exists, because the splendor of the natural world counts as evidence. (I’ve heard this called argumentum ad arboretum after the common form: “Look at the trees….” Man, I wish I had come up with that first.)

It’s often related to a serious problem for believers: what happens to people who live and die without ever having heard of their religion, and who have never had a chance to either accept or reject its claims? Do they go to hell by default, and if so, how is that fair? This motivates a lot of proselytization, this idea that evangelizing in the farthest corners of the world saves people from hell by default. But Christians must also surely realize (as I did in Sunday school, to the consternation of my teacher) that even if it’s possible today to reach 100% of the population with your message, for most of history it has been totally impossible.

If Christian doctrine is correct, Hell is full of people whose crime is being born in the wrong place and time– anyone born before Jesus’s ministry, or in any part of the world before Christian missionaries could reach that region. Never having had any chance to consider a religion they’d never heard of, they’re eternally tormented by default, and that makes the Christian God look like an asshole.

This is an uncomfortable problem for Christians, and apparently unsolvable without making stuff up. So we get to this idea that the natural world counts as enough evidence to get you to the right religious conclusion, and anyone who still winds up in hell, well, it’s their own damned fault for ignoring all the very clear signs. Of course, if I’m Chinese in 50 C. E. or a Native American before any European reached America’s shores or a present-day member of an isolated tribe with no contact with the modern world– I should still be able to look around at trees and sunsets and logically deduce not just the existence of a god but the correct god, deduce sin and the need for atonement, deduce Jesus, deduce that I should pray in a highly specific way to ask for salvation, the whole package.

I should be able to figure all of that out on my own, based on trees and sunsets. And if I can’t, then it’s hell, forever. (“Ignorance is no excuse. Why weren’t you paying attention to the trees and sunsets?”)

At its most basic level, this “sunsets equals God” sentiment is tacky, high-gloss spirituality, saccharine and shallow. Follow it back to its root, though, and you get this sinister justification for hell– everyone ever born has seen plenty of evidence for God, according to this claim, and if you’re not a proper believer then you’ve seen all that evidence and rejected God anyway.

In this way, argumentum ad arboretum fuels theists’ misunderstandings of atheists. After all, in their worldview, there’s irrefutable evidence of God all around us, every day, and we’ve all seen it– how can it be possible for someone to just not believe? I think the common misconceptions about atheists– that we’re “mad at God,” or that we “know God exists but are deliberately rebelling because sin is so much fun” or whatever– come from this idea that disbelief is impossible because God is so obvious.

It’s a dangerous idea that fuels hostility, because when atheists say we don’t believe because we don’t see any evidence, they conclude we must be lying. And once you’ve decided that someone’s lying about their position or their reasons for holding it, it’s easy to fill in the blanks with whatever horrible narrative about evil infidels your culture has supplied.

One last point before we file this one away: I mentioned near the top of this post that these messages are dense in logical fallacies. So for message #5, “How do you explain a sunset if there is no God?”, I’m going to pick out two separate fallacies (not counting the whole argumentum ad arboretum business we’ve discussed already).

First, it’s begging the question– the writer asks the question in a way that presupposes the answer she wants. Who’s to say sunsets need a divine explanation, or any explanation at all, or that “God made it” is any kind of useful or satisfactory explanation?

Also, I’d be prepared to call this either an argument from ignorance, or an argument from personal incredulity, depending on which way you want to try inferring the writer’s premises. A subtle distinction, but interesting to me, between the argument from ignorance (“We don’t know why sunsets are the way they are, therefore God”) and the argument from personal incredulity (“I can’t imagine something so beautiful without a God who made it, therefore it’s not possible without God”).

Thanks for your patience with a brief lapse of service. Now that I better understand the way tumblr handles multiple accounts, I deleted my previous alphascrawl tumblr to recreate it as a separate, primary account. Now I'll be able to follow and reblog with alphascrawl, the better to share the love.

Previous content will be reposted shortly, so that it won't be lost to the void. In the meantime, you can access the mirrored content at alphascrawl.wordpress.com, as always.