Fun at the Library

This summer we're participating in a cool program at the library where we go once a week for a catered supper and book discussion. Last night was our second time going, and it was wonderful.

We read and discussed three children's books, including Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. When the discussion leader asked us some ways we can all work through bad days, the kids answered with responses like "think of happy thoughts", "go back to sleep", and "do something really fun." But a truly amazing thing happened when one of the dads raised his hand and said, "I know when I have a bad day, I fall down on my knees and remind myself that no bad day can be as bad as Jesus's final day."

Nearly everyone in the room cheered. No kidding. Kelly and I looked at each other in amazement. He whispered to me, "Shouldn't these people be at vacation bible school instead of at the library?"

A Tuesday Anti-Religious Rant

I'm self-admittedly anti-theist now, and the more isolated I feel within the surrounding religious community, the more frustrated and angry I seem to be becoming. It's summertime, which means nearly everyone I know is sharing stories and pictures from their kids' experiences at religious indoctrination camp, sorry, I mean vacation bible school. Sigh.

Why does the concept of bible school bother me so much? I suppose it's the word school. You see, there is no education going on at these "schools," only one-sided indoctrination, where the methodical stamping out of critical thought is a necessary stepping stone to making kids accept faith. They must stop asking "why" and accept "just because," and they must learn to accept interpretations from a 2000 year old Bronze Age text as superior to answers given by modern science. Rational thought and questioning, demanding proof for all assertions, must be rejected to at least some degree in order for any religious worldview to be accepted. It's really that simple. And Christian parents know this, otherwise they would not send their little kids to Sunday school and these religious summer camps. Get them while they are young, before the age of reason. Make sure they know that "because I said so" is a valid reason to keep from taking a bite of that apple. Nevermind that the apple is fucking delicious.

And of course all the Sunday school classes, vacation bible school sessions, and other children's church activities lead to announcements by people that their children have "chosen Jesus" and that they are so "proud." What exactly are you proud of? Successful indoctrination? Did you think there was a chance your eight year old was going to stand up in the middle of group prayer and announce his life-long dedication to Allah? Or Krishna? Are you surprised that he chose the only faith you've exposed him to?

I love Richard Dawkins. His words in The God Delusion helped me realize I have to be vocal about my atheism in order to show my kids the importance of leading an authentic life and questioning everything. This particular clip shows Dawkin's answer to the "most simplest question" during one of his book tours, when an audience member asks, "What if you're wrong?"

I get a kick out of how oblivious American Christians are to the fact that they would most likely be worshiping another god if they had been born in a different world location. But you can't accept both that only Christians will be saved by god AND that geography is the main reason you are a Christian, can you? Certainly not if you also want said god to be both all-powerful and merciful. Really, what's merciful about a little Muslim baby being burned in hell for having the bad luck of being born to Muslim parents? And if you accept that all people, regardless of belief in Jesus, are worthy of being saved by god, then that kind of makes Jesus rather unnecessary, so that's no good either. See? It's all very confusing when you try to apply things like reason and logic, so I can understand why Christians need to put some of these questions into a box labeled "faith," and make sure their kids know at a very young age that those kinds of questions are not acceptable, or that they can be explained away by a simple non-answer such as, "God's ways are mysterious." And what better way to get kids to stop asking the complicated questions than through fun group activities like Bible camp and Sunday school?

Summer Booklist

Life's been a bit chaotic around here, with the wrap-up of soccer season being one of the many things eating up our days. I'm struggling with this thing called balance and how to find it while homeschooling three young kids, working part time, being a soccer mom, and having all these visions of self-sustainability. For example, it's nearing the end of May and I haven't planted so much as a tomato plant. Sigh.

As the local schools are all finishing up for the summer, we've decided that our little unschooling adventures don't really call for a long break. A box from Amazon arrived last week, and look at the goodies it contained:

 

Included in our new stash of books is Joy Hakim's The Story of Science: Aristotle Leads the Way. I've been trying to find something to get Bonnie excited about science, and this series looks like it might be it! The first chapters open with lessons on distinguishing between mythology and science. The author uses examples from Genesis, sacred Hindu texts, ancient Chinese works, and others to show the difference between creation stories rooted in oral traditions and scientific theories on the formation of the universe that are firmly rooted in facts. She talks about how myths are unchanging and non-evidence based, while science is constantly evolving as we learn more about the world around us. I love it! We also ordered a little Student's Quest Guide, but the verdict is still out on that one. I like it, but Bonnie is kind of adverse to anything that involves, well, writing.

I also picked up the National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Fossils, so that Jack and I can identify the trilobites and other fossils we find together.

We're not quite finished with The Story of the World: Volume 3 , but will continue a chapter per week during the summer and start with Volume 4 as soon as we've finished. The authors really try to make the books non-Western centric, and though they don't always succeed, Bonnie loves the narratives and I find them a great starting off point for moving through history chronologically.

To help counterbalance some of the history according to Dead White Men, we picked up Howard Zinn's A Young People's History of the United States, which shares the too-often untold stories of women, slaves, immigrants, Native Americans, and workers. It came highly recommended by Jennifer at Home for Good, and we look forward to reading it. She also suggested The Book of Perfectly Perilous Math: 24 Death-Defying Challenges for Young Mathematicians, and I'm excited to work through that right away.

Bonnie just finished reading Kids at Work: Lewis Hine and the Crusade Against Child Labor, a photo journal depicting child laborers in the early nineteen hundreds. She flew through it, and it's hard to described how moved she was seeing pictures of those children, some of them even younger than Fred (who is only four.) This book should be required reading in every middle school. I want my children to know that we don't have to wonder what will happen if workers' rights and labor laws continue to be attacked.

The last book in the box isn't for the kids: Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality. Though we rarely attended church when I was growing up, my parents were raised as staunch Catholics, and I received a hefty dose of trickle-down guilt. This should be a fun read.

What's everyone else reading this summer?

Three Good Books

I try to surround Bonnie with lots of good books and let her choose what interests her. Sometimes her choices are right up my alley too, such as is the case with the following three.

Lynne Kelly's  Skeptic's Guide to the Paranormal does a great job of debunking popular superstitions and mysteries, including psychic readings, Nostradamus, telepathy, alien abductions, crop circles, astrology, and more. I like that the book gives practical advice to the reader on ways to think through and debunk the superstition for herself. One of my favorite chapters is the one on ESP, in which the author discusses the dangers of using anecdotes as evidence for anything. My kids will be faced with all sorts of anecdotal "proof" from religious folk trying to persuade them into believing in a supernatural god. It's good for them to realize that they need to find their own evidence in these cases.

Sugar Changed the World: A Story of Magic, Spice, Slavery, Freedom, and Science by Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos, does a wonderful job of helping us understand the vast and brutal history of the sugar cane industry, with a focus on the institution of slavery. It talks about how the farmers who grew sugar cane and planned on making sugar faced special challenges that caused the growth of a new form of farming: the plantation.

The only way to make a lot of sugar is to engineer a system in which an army of workers swarms through the fields, cuts the cane, and hauls the pile to be crushed into a syrup that flows into the boiling room. There, laboring around the clock, workers cook and clean the bubbling liquid so that the sweetest syrup turns into the sweetest sugar. This is not farming the way men and women had done is for thousands of years in the Age of Honey. It is much more like a factory, where masses of people must do every step right, on time, together, or the whole system collapses. (Sugar Changed the World 27.)

I want my kids to fully understand our nation's special history with slavery. Most of our founding fathers owned other human beings. What does that say about everything it means to be an American? I'm not sure how to get past all the questions that are raised through in-depth research into our history. But I know we have to ask them.

Finally, Bonnie loved Susan Campbell Bartoletti's Growing Up in Coal Country, the story of children growing up in the coal country of Pennsylvania in the early nineteen hundreds. The author was able to offer glimpses of hope and happiness while conveying the incredibly difficult, dangerous lives these children and their families lived. I love that Bartoletti discusses the banding together of miners to form unions. This book, perhaps more than any discussion I've ever had with Bonnie, has shown her exactly why we have unions today and why we must continue fighting for them. Though set in Pennsylvania, this is Kentucky's coal history too.

Jack Out of the Box

Of course, a child may not know what he may need to know in ten years (who does?), but he knows, and much better than anyone else, what he wants and needs to know right now, what his mind is ready and hungry for. If we help him, or just allow him, to learn that, he will remember it, use it, build on it. If we try to make him learn something else, that we think is more important, the chances are that he won't learn it, or will learn very little of it, that he will soon forget most of what he learned, and what is worst of all, will before long lose most of his appetite for learning anything. -John Holt, Teach Your Own

Jack and I spent the evening meandering through fields and scouring our driveway for trilobites. (No luck this time, but we found some fossilized clams and coral!) I love our quiet walks together, because sometimes he gets a little overshadowed by his very vocal older sister and younger brother.

Of all my kids, I think homeschooling suits Jack the best. He is very much an introvert, and needs his connection to nature the way most of us need oxygen. Some days he's outside before I'm out of bed, and it's unusual for him not to be covered in dirt. I honestly cannot imagine him in traditional school right now, as I think an integral part of him would be lost being forced to sit inside all day, five days a week. Short recesses on some manufactured plastic playground could never replace trees for that boy.

Jack is one smart six year old, and the questions he comes up with show the beginnings of great critical thinking skills. He will discuss subjects at great length and listen to books all day long, as long as the subject interests him. Interest is really key though, because as soon as I try to work with him on something he doesn't like, such as reading, he tenses up and it becomes a battle.

John Holt says that there are no teachers, only learners, which I am seeing more and more with our little homeschooling endeavors. I know there are hundreds of books about teaching your kid how to read (and I've tried several of them) but I really think it boils down to the kid wanting to learn for it to happen. I have NO doubt that by instilling a love of reading in our family and by the kids seeing Kelly and me read all the time, that Jack will also be a reader. But it's going to be in his own time. (Potty training analogies do not seem out of place here.)

Given all of that, as well as believing that it's not necessary for a child to read young to be a good reader later, doesn't totally take away from fact that, especially as a homeschooling mom, I feel pressure to have my six year old reading. It's kind of this benchmark that we all use to judge elementary kids, isn't it? And it doesn't help that Kelly (who incidentally was a very late reader who became a very good reader) isn't quite on board with all of this unschooling stuff, or that Bonnie is an amazing reader who picked it up very easily at a young age.

So, while pocketing fossils, picking wildflowers, and rescuing a box turtle from the dogs, I said to Jack, "I'd really like it if you'd let me teach you how to read."

He thought about it for a moment and replied, "I'd really like to learn how to swim."

Unschooling Fun

If you are like me and love unschooling as well as Gotye's "Somebody That I Used to Know", this is better than crack. I dare you to watch it and not laugh.

Bailing on Screen-Free Week Before It Even Starts

So, Screen-Free Week is fast approaching, and I have come to realize that I just can't do it this year. I can't. This is the first time in my life that I have been connected with other Freethinkers, almost all via the internet, and I can't let go of it, even for a week.

Just today one of my dear relatives posted a comment on one of my Facebook links (one that was incidentally not about atheism, but simply about teaching children to question what they read. OK, so maybe that is about atheism after all.)  She ended with the statement that she wants to save me from a "miserable future and an everlasting punishment." That's right. I posted about teaching children to question everything, and she said she's worried I'm going to hell. And you know what? She is being a good Christian in saying that, isn't she? Because if you genuinely believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God and our savior on earth, then you must also believe I am in some serious need of saving.

Here's the horribly offensive photo that incurred such venom, by the way. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I had also posted a horribly offensive picture of our President with a quote in support of women's rights the day before.)

Even my most supportive, liberal, and kind Christian friends and family (who I am incredibly thankful for) dodge the questions of why priests and ministers don't talk about how it's possible to be both a good person and an atheist. And as much as I love those friends and family of mine, I also wonder how they address atheism with their own children. I've said it before, and I will say it again, and I'll also probably say it even another time in the future: "Jesus is the only route to salvation" and "You can be an atheist and be a good person" can't really both be true. (Unless I am missing something.) So you're probably not going to hear a lot of Christians, even kind, liberal ones, loudly stating and teaching their children that it's okay to be an atheist. And certainly no church that survives on tithing is going to make such a statement either, is it?

I read once about a survey that revealed that people trust atheists LESS than known rapists. And while I really hope that isn't true, it wouldn't surprise me if it were. I've seen people seeking childcare that put the sole qualifier "has to be Christian" on the ad. Really? You think I'm going to eat your kid because I don't believe a fairy tale that was written two thousand years ago? THAT is what makes someone a good person?

In case it's not abundantly clear into paragraph six here that I'm a little frustrated about the whole atheist stigma thing, well, I'm a little frustrated with the whole atheist stigma thing. I feel some comfort knowing that various friends and family members have approached me in private confiding their atheism to me. My big mouth did that! Woo hoo! And I am going to keep on being loud as long as there are people who face fear and shame in admitting their atheism.

Oh, and back to the Screen-Free Week thing, since I started with it. We'll still do something to honor the spirit of the week, like maybe adding some more screen-free chunks of time, including a few screen-free days. I just can't lose this connection with the online atheist community.

One last thing.