Greek Myths for Young Children

February 10th, 2010 by AtheistDad

My daughter recently started expressing a lot of interest in God. Some of it comes from exposure to school, I suppose, and some of it comes from her curiosity this past year about the Christmas story, which would have been aroused whether or not a substitute teacher at school had pushed the issue of the gift of the baby Jesus. I’m glad she’s asking questions, since it prompts me to teach her these things she’s curious about rather than having her learn everything from sources I don’t necessarily trust. As part of explaining the Judeo-Christian god, we’ve also mentioned the fact that other cultures used to believe in (and some still do believe in) a host of other gods. We got out an old book of Greek and Roman myths that was supposedly geared toward children, but it was awful, filled with stories told well above a young child’s level of comprehension and with pictures as dull as dishwater. My daughter has a pretty good ability to absorb even fairly complex stories — we started reading her chapter books before she was four, and she understood and remembered them — but this was beyond her. Even with frequent stops to explain the stories unfolded in gnarly prose, she’d leave a reading session with just the vaguest idea of what the story had been about. The crazy character names can’t have helped.

I decided to look for a different book of mythology more suited to a five-year-old and settled on Greek Myths for Young Children, written by Heather Amery and illustrated by Linda Edwards. The reviews at amazon were good (evenly split between ratings of four and five, with no lower ratings), and the cover looked vibrant.

I’m happy to report that the book doesn’t disappoint. It arrived yesterday, and we’ve read the first 50 pages (of 128). The text is very readable. It tells the familiar stories very clearly  in words that my five-year-old can mostly read on her own (compare to the older book I mentioned above, which was sufficiently discursive that even I had trouble getting excited about the stories or taking much away from them). But why would I want her to read them on her own? I’ve enjoyed the reading as much as she’s enjoyed it, for the book distills into the essence of simplicity these stories I had largely forgotten. Sure, I knew that Prometheus brought fire to the people, but I had forgotten that he actually made people, and that his brother Epimetheus (married eventually to Pandora, whose ill-fated opening of the eponymous box was in fact punishment of human beings for enjoying the fire Prometheus brought to them) made the animals. In just a few sentences, this book has brought the stories back to life for me and has introduced them to my daughter with a simplicity that I think she can really grok.

The drawings are gorgeous. Each page is surrounded by a patterned border, often topical (the border on Arachne’s pages incorporates spiders, for example; Persephone’s story is bordered by autumn leaves). Each story’s pages have a distinct background color, so that the stories are clearly separated from each other. Yet the style of the art and the unifying border motif ties them all together. I don’t know how properly to describe the style of the artwork, but it really is beautiful. It strives to be neither realistic nor especially cartoonish and finds a nice balance of the two, with touches of humor here and there (fickle king Eurystheus hiding in his brass pot.

At the end of the stories can be found a pronunciation guide for the names, which trip even me up here and there (say Iolaus five times fast). While I explained its function to my daughter, I’m not sure she quite understood, and I suspect that, like most of us, she’ll learn to read the names without trying to pronouncing them, recognizing their shapes and glossing over them. Still, for the grown-up trying to do something like justice to names when reading aloud, the guide is helpful.

My only beef with the book so far is minor. The typeface for the stories themselves just feels a bit off. Maybe it’s too bold-faced, or maybe a touch large (strike that — I like the size), or maybe the letter spacing is a little slim. I can’t quite put my finger on it. Perhaps it’s that the straight sans-serif typeface undercuts the pleasant whimsy of the drawings in a way (but too whimsical a font would do the same!). In any case, the gripe is hardly worth mentioning. One other thing bears bringing up, though if it’s a fault, it’s a fault of the myths themselves and their suitability for children rather than of this rendering: the book does tell stories that include death and violence. You learn pretty quickly that when Hera made Heracles go crazy, he killed his children, for example. The violence in the book is by no means central, but neither is it swept entirely under the rug or glossed.

My daughter squealed with delight when I unpacked the book (which I had told her was on the way). She’s so interested in the mythology, and this is a great introduction to it. I read it to her before dinner last night and then some more at bedtime. She tried reading a few stories to herself after I tucked her in, and, despite the difficulty of reading something a little beyond her level of solo reading, she retained some details for our reread of those stories this morning before school. This book is a good pick whether you’re trying to show your kid that gods are myths (the Christian god among them) or whether you’re just looking for an introduction to these stories that serve as pillars of our culture.

I can hardly wait to dive back in tonight.

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Little League Pledge

February 2nd, 2010 by AtheistDad

We took our daughter to sign up for tee-ball tonight, and I signed up to help coach. I’m a huge baseball fan, and while I know this is nothing like baseball and it’s not exactly the vicarious experience of a lifetime, it’s still exciting for me to have her enrolled and to be able to share this with her. It’s making my own tee-ball memories bubble up to the surface.

We got to the tiny sign-up room and filled out the paperwork and handed over our hundred bucks, and we left with the league handbook and a sponsorship brochure in case my employer wanted to dole out some cash. On the first page of the handbook, I saw the little league pledge:

I trust in God.
I love my country
And will respect its laws.
I will play fair and
Strive to win,
But win or lose
I will always do my best.

The last four lines I’m 100% on board with. I think I’m kind of the ideal dad for helping to coach a tee-ball team because I’m very much about the nurturing and the play and the learning aspect of it and don’t care a whole lot about the winning part of it. Sure, winning is nice, but let’s have fun and learn how to play the game. The second and third lines I’m pretty lukewarm on. I guess I do love my country, or parts of it, or maybe what it could be or should have been. And I am lawful, by and large. But I’m not a flag-waver and don’t really buy into nationalism or expect a tee-baller to understand nationalism (to be fair, this handbook is for the older kids too). It’s the first line that really bothers me, of course.

Our little league is not government-funded, so this isn’t a church and state issue (I think, by the way, that a lot of things that atheists cry out about with respect to church and state aren’t in fact church and state issues). And I don’t expect the majority to kow-tow to me. My daughter and I will be in the very thinnest slice of the minority within this community, and if the vast majority of the participants believe in God, they ought to be able to say so.

Still, it puts my daughter in the position of having either to be out or having to live with a pledge or be exposed to certain things that I don’t necessarily want her exposed to. This provides all the more reason for me to be a coach, I guess. I can supervise and mitigate the proselytization, at least. But it puts me in an awkward position too. What do I say when another coach asks me to lead a prayer before the game (as I have very little doubt will wind up happening)? I don’t generally have a problem stating my position and declining politely to pray, but the transaction changes a bit when the price of not praying is outing my daughter and causing her potential hardship. Will she become the tee-ball kid over the next few years whom no coaches want on their team because she’s a little heathen? Or, possibly worse, will she be the recipient of intensified proselytization because she represents another soul to save, another notch on the old belt?

Only time will tell. Luckily, I’ve got a few weeks to figure out my strategy, which may hinge in part on what kind of a head coach we wind up with. I think we’ll start with an anonymous (for my daughter’s sake) call to inquire about the pledge and whether it’s a thing that the kids are required to recite or whether it’s just window dressing. If we draw a coach who seems reasonable and approachable, I’ll bring up the matter (especially the matter of prayer) directly.

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Why Do People Love Jesus?

December 22nd, 2009 by AtheistDad

My daughter has picked up more about Jesus from school than I knew, I guess. The other day, she told me again that she loved the baby Jesus. When I asked what made her say that, she replied that it was because he didn’t have a regular bed to sleep in. The night before, we had been at a family Christmas party, and she had been curious about a large (not lawn large, but table large) nativity scene at the host’s home in which, as always, the baby Jesus was swaddled in a humble little manger instead of a soft comfy fairy bed like her own. She’s feeling something like pity or a sense of injustice at the baby Jesus’s poverty and equating it with love. This is sweet, really, if a little misguided. She’s curious about Jesus, my little girl, and why shouldn’t she be? She’s known vaguely about him for a while now and has begun to hear more about him (more than has registered in the past, at least) in what limited media she has access to (mostly Christmas carols on the radio) and, alas, at school. Yet she’s so far been denied a clear telling of the story.

So I sought this weekend to tell her parts of the Christmas story, and let me tell you, it’s harder than you’d think, especially if you’re trying to balance skepticism with a healthy and courteous sense of respect for the fact that others believe this kooky story and its sickening baggage. To talk about why people feel as if they love Jesus, you have to talk about why Jesus is such a big deal in the first place, which means talking about his gift to the world, which means explaining that his father sent him to earth so that he could then have him tortured and killed in one of the most brutal ways imaginable. It’s not exactly a great story to tell a five-year-old. But tell it I did, more or less (with interruptions for questions and further explanation and reiteration of my belief that this is all just a story anyway) as follows:

People who love the baby Jesus tend to believe in a place called Hell. Hell is (according to the story) a really awful place. It’s like the worst timeout you could imagine, but a million million times worse. There’s also (they believe) a place called Heaven, which is like the nicest place you can imagine, but a million million times better. People believe that you go to one of these places when you die, and they want to go to Heaven and stay out of Hell. We believe that your body just stops when you die, that there’s nothing after live. Your body goes into the ground and rots, sort of like our compost.

A lot of people believe that people are bad. Now that’s kind of a weird thing to believe, I think. I prefer to think that people are mostly good and that some people do bad things. But it’s what a lot of people believe. These people also tend to believe that God created everything, including people, the earth, Heaven, and Hell. And they believe that God has to punish people for being bad. That’s another thing that doesn’t make much sense to me. Why would God create people who were bad and then punish them because of the way he created them? Doesn’t make much sense, does it? Anyway, the punishment God chose for bad people was to send them to Hell for forever after they die. And since everybody is bad, that means that everybody is going to spend forever in this horrible place called Hell.

But the story says that God decided to send his son to earth to be punished for us so that everybody in the whole world wouldn’t have to be punished. Now, Jesus was God’s son. So imagine that all the kids in the neighborhood were behaving really badly, and I decided that in order to keep all the kids from getting punished and losing their toys and stuff, I’d just punish you really badly instead. That’s sort of what happened with Jesus. He agreed to be punished so that the rest of the world wouldn’t have to be punished. If you think about it, that’s really a very nice thing for Jesus to have done. It’s no wonder people like Jesus, right?

The punishment God made Jesus endure was to be hurt really badly and killed. He came to earth and then, when he was just about my age, a bunch of people hurt him and killed him. Afterward, people didn’t have to to to Hell anymore. But think about it. Of course I’d never ever do anything like this, but imagine I punished you really really badly to keep your friends from getting in trouble. Well, they’d think you were awfully nice to take the punishment for them, and that’s why people say they love Jesus. People who believe the story is true believe that Jesus saved the whole world from a whole lot of pain and suffering. So of course they feel something like gratitude or love for him. It was a nice thing for Jesus to do.

But the other side of the story is the part about God causing all of this to happen. I wouldn’t be a very good father if I made you suffer to keep all your friends from being punished. I don’t believe that a god who’s able to do such an awful thing as torture his son or to create a place like Hell in the first place is a god capable of or worthy of love. Of course, I don’t believe in any gods at all because they’re just characters in stories, but I mean that if I did believe in them, I’d have trouble finding this one to be especially lovable. So I can understand why people have nice feelings about the character of Jesus, but I think the whole story isn’t all that nice.

I’ve tidied it up quite a bit and tweaked the sequencing of it all. I still feel like I’m missing something important about the flavor of how the discussion went down. I also removed a lot of redundancy. I kept looping back to a very broad explanation of the problem of evil and its irreconcilability with a loving god along with the aforementioned reinforcement that this was all mythology anyway.

My daughter sat rapt for probably 15 minutes while I went through all of this, but eventually, she redirected by asking an unrelated question about a craft we had started working on. On the whole, I was impressed with her level of engagement, the intensity of her focus on what I was saying, which was pretty heavy stuff for a five-year-old.

In an ideal world, I would have had my wife with me for this and we would have gone through it together. I don’t know if I went too far by talking about the torture and death of Jesus, for example. But the opportunity arose and she was so tuned into me that it was hard to stop and wait for my wife to get home.

I don’t want my daughter to be derisive of religion, certainly not at her young age and in a local culture that would make life hard on her for doing so. But neither do I want her to believe this stuff. I think that helping her to understand some of the inconsistencies and just plain horribleness of a lot of what religion says is important to helping her understand why we don’t believe the stuff. At the same time, I don’t want her going to school and talking to her classmates about how awful God is because he killed his son. We’ll see what comes of it.

I think I’m going to try to find a children’s Bible to see how Christians teach the story to their own kids. This may inform how I go forward with my own teaching, whether it does so by example or by anti-example.

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Principal Followup

December 15th, 2009 by AtheistDad

I wrote the other day about my daughter’s coming home from school talking about Jesus. This morning, we went to a meeting with the principal to deal with the situation.

To prepare, I shaved my head and inked a fake tattoo reading ANTICHRIST onto my forehead, put on a mesh muscle shirt, and made sure to bring along a copy of the Satanic Bible. My wife did the same.

Um, no. We dropped our daughter off at school as usual (so as not to arouse her suspicion that anything farther out of the ordinary than her mom tagging along for the ride was going on) and then parked and walked in. We had to wait just a couple of minutes, and then the principal came out to meet us and ushered us into a conference room. My wife did the talking because I get tongue-tied in situations like this. I was there mostly to show solidarity and help impress upon the principal, because of our joint attendance and our wanting to handle this in person, the gravity of the situation. When we told her what happened, she was shocked, said right away that she’d take care of it, that she agreed with us that it wasn’t the school’s place to teach religion. The offending person turned out to be not the music teacher as I had at first thought, but a substitute teacher, and the principal knew right away which one it was. The principal thanked us for letting her know, since unless parents report this sort of thing, she really has no way of knowing it’s going on. And that was that.

So it went well. We were courteous but direct, and the approach seemed to pay off. It’s impossible to say whether the principal really meant all she was saying or whether she just kind of had to say it for the sake of avoiding a liability issue, but she seemed sincere enough and, in a way, scared enough (not really scared, but it was clear that we had her attention), that I’m optimistic that it’ll resolve at least this issue, which will no doubt be the first of very many over the next 15 years of our lives as parents.

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My daughter’s favorite thing about Christmas is Jesus

December 12th, 2009 by AtheistDad

Ten years of maintaining this site, five-plus years of having kids, and finally I have a relevant issue worth posting about. My daughter has come home from kindergarten saying that her favorite thing about Christmas is Jesus. Apparently, her music teacher, whom my daughter calls the magic lady because she does magic tricks, is spreading the word.

It’s surprisingly hard to get information about school out of our daughter, so it’s hard to know how reliable a source she really is. After probing a bit today while trying not to make her feel put on the spot, I learned at least part of what has happened.

First, the teacher did a magic trick with a little bag that you can put stuff into and make it disappear or change into something else. She had some kind of card with a (presumably secular) Christmas message on it and tore it up, then put it into the bag. Then, presto chango, she pulled it back out and it was an undamaged card proclaiming something about Jesus. I forget what, even. This seems like a breach of what a teacher should do, but in the bigger picture of what she could be doing, it’s really kind of minor.

But then she apparently also read a story about a little boy who figures out that his favorite thing about Christmas is Jesus. And now my daughter’s repeating it.

I had a weird moment a few weeks ago when going to volunteer in my daughter’s class. I had forgotten that students say the pledge of allegiance before class starts, and I stood with the class and was oddly shocked to hear the god reference. It’s been so long since I’ve said the pledge that I had almost forgotten god was in it. To hear it recited mindlessly by all these little drone children — of which my daughter was one — was super weird, but ultimately not something I was all that torn out of the frame about. At this point, my daughter doesn’t understand the words, and I’ll have plenty of time to talk to her about this stuff before she does. This is a predictable, more or less controllable situation. I can teach my daughter not to say the offending words, to remain silent through the whole pledge, whatever.

But rogue teachers reading stories and proselytizing in ways that I can’t know about unless my daughter tells me about, that the school authorities may not (I sure hope not) even be aware of — that’s another thing altogether.

And so now, dear folks, after a decade of maintaining a site I set up to prepare me for just this sort of scenario, I have to enter the fray for real.

I’ll start with a firm but direct talk with the principal (may have my wife do it; she’s a former schoolteacher and so may be better equipped) in which I don’t show my hand completely. No need to poison the well with the A-word just yet; if the school wants to think I’m a fundamentalist who doesn’t want the liberal school system (ha) to stain my daughter’s religion, I’m fine with that. I have to safeguard against alienation of my daughter, after all. I’ll just say that it’s not the school’s place to teach my daughter about Jesus and that the music teacher should stick to the curriculum. She has an hour a week to teach my daughter about music, and that really leaves no room at all for stories about Jesus. I’ll ask that it be handled without dragging my name or my daughter’s name into it, so that the teacher won’t know who complained and so can’t alienate my daughter (or ramp up the proselytization). And we’ll see what develops from there. Then we’ll monitor what our daughter says about music class going forward.

I’m hopeful that the principal will be reasonable an will handle this properly, though frankly I’m not optimistic, and I’m already steeling myself to take more drastic action. Might as well try to be nice about it for starters, though.

I linked to this post in the forums, where there may or may not wind up being further discussion. If you’re a new site visitor and haven’t checked out the forums yet, please do, and feel free to comment there.

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Skeptical Parent Crossing #9

June 21st, 2009 by AtheistDad

I had to wade through a lot of spam to bring you Skeptical Parent Crossing #9, but there was plenty of good reading too. This is my first time hosting a blog carnival. Be gentle.

New mother Elisha questions the notion of the mighty supermom and takes this veteran parent back in time to revisit the folly that so often surrounds childbirth. And Brad at Skepdad discusses letting your children slide (or not?) when it comes to independence — sometimes doing things that make you seem less like a superparent on the surface can be ultimately beneficial.

Rabbit is stimulated by an Oprah segment about buying vibrators for your daughters to weigh in on talking to your kids about sex. The money shot (er, sentence): “The beauty of healthy sex cannot be taught by an orgasm machine.” If talking to your daughter about vibrators makes you uncomfortable, there’s still a discussion to be had, courtesy of Pop Tart, about the pragmatics of wearing risque clothing even at the cost of being marginalized. Alessia also skirts the topic of victim marginalization while reacting to a study of online avatar selection as a risk factor for abuse.

Babylicious considers the benefits and potential harms of breastfeeding a child while pregnant, and Rose gives us her humorous perspective about raising a heap of kids in the spotlight of reality TV.

We’re throwing my daughter a science-themed birthday party next weekend. Just in time for it, one anonymous Dad blogger (hey, just like me) pitches in a great idea for demonstrating camouflage as an advantageous adaptation. Gwen gives some great examples (complete with illustrations) of how conformity to seemingly harmless assumptions underlying educational exercises can really undercut critical thinking.

Get tired of your kids’ music? Amber has some suggestions that bridge the gap between the standard (often good, but old after a million times) kids’ tunes and things that might be more appealing to some parents’ own musical tastes. (I know, I know, this one isn’t especially skeptical, but I dug it, so it’s in.)

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Following the Leader

May 18th, 2009 by Recovering Catholic

As a Metro-Detroiter, I suffer from a fair share of anxiety regarding the economic crisis facing our country these days, although I find myself increasingly annoyed at people complaining about the lack of governmental ability to create and implement a quick fix to the crisis.  Don’t get me wrong… I realize that things are bad, and people feel helpless in the face of home forclosures, rampant unemployment, skyrocketing healthcare costs and credit crackdowns.  In her State of the State address on February 3, 2009 Governor Jennifer Granholm stated:

As we gather this evening to take stock of our state, I will not sugarcoat the severity of the crisis we face. This past year has been brutal. Like few others in our history. The nation’s financial system teetered on the brink of collapse. Our auto companies fought for their very existence.

And as the bottom fell out of the national economy, the job situation in Michigan has gone from bad to worse. Families across our state can only wonder and worry what new threat tomorrow will bring.  Breadwinners worry they’ll find a pink slip in this week’s pay envelope or empty packing boxes on their desk on Friday morning.  Any honest assessment of our state’s economy has to recognize that things are likely to get worse.

Wow.  To think that we have all been under the assumption that the big brains in Washington have been hard at work thinking up new ideas to save the nation from economic ruin.  We turned to our elected officials and eagerly hung on their eloquent yet technically meaningless assurances that everything is moving along swimmingly. We called upon our leaders to stand up and lead.

Did they fail us?  Perhaps, but I think it is more accurate to say that we have failed ourselves.  By turning to elected officials to lead us out of crisis as if they are some sort of omnipotent Pied Piper, we abdicate all personal responsibility for the crisis we are in while also relinquishing our own opportunity to facilitate change and progress.  The crisis facing our nation is awesome.  There is no quick fix, soundbyte, tax incentive, or socio-economic program that will save us from the responsibility and committment we must all plegde.  That our elected officials will fail to save us is a foregone conclusion.  Those criticizing the Obama administration (and Governor Granholm) for not solving the economic crisis need to reconsider what it is to be a leader.

True leaders do not walk ahead and expect others to follow.   True leaders inspire human greatness.  They call upon the innovation, tenacity, and determination of all citizens.  The power to survive this crisis is within us.  As stated by Ayn Rand, “The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.”  President Obama has called Americans to action.  It’s time to answer.

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Reason vs. Heaven

March 26th, 2009 by Recovering Catholic

When my father was diagnosed with emphysema, he required oxygen therapy.  The kids took it in stride, stepping over the oxygen tubing, waiting patiently while grandpa’s coughing fits subsided, and even helping him with his nebulizer treatments.  They drew him pictures, chatted with him about their day, and brought their coin collections to share with him.  When it became apparent that Grandpa was dying, I was faced with the heart wrenching dilemma of how to break it to the kids.

As it turns out, the kids already knew.  Unlike adults, children are not conditioned to deny death and suppress their grief over the process of dying.  When I told them that Grandpa is in the hospital again, they asked incredibly mature questions. Is grandpa hurting?  Is he sad?  Will he miss us?

           

I waited for The Heaven Question, but it never came.  Perhaps I should have prepared the kids prior to the funeral, as well intentioned family and friends reassured my children by telling them that Grandpa is in heaven now, happy, pain free, and fishing with the angels.  My older children simply nodded politely and walked away to hang out with their cousins; but my six year old paused, confused, wondering why mom and dad never told her that death is an extended recess from pain and suffering.  Grandpa isn’t dead, she assured us.  He’s with Jesus.

           

Enter Evil Atheist Mom, dragging them back to the cruel realities of life and death.  My children have experienced loss.  When their pet hamsters and beta fish died, we didn’t minimize their grief, we didn’t encourage them to move on, and we absolutely did not do a bait and switch with a look-alike pet.  My son sobbed for four hours over the loss of his fish.  As I lay in his bed with him, listening to stories of how Sandy had been his best friend in the world, the rational part of my brain calculated the number of times my son had actually cleaned the fish bowl: zero (Mom: 51), while my emotional side came up with comforting words as I held him and validated his grief, fear, and anger.  By making it through this difficult time, my son learned that while grief hurts, each day is a little easier, until he could speak of Sandy without tears, reminiscing about the joyous day he brought him home.  The next day, as he shared the news of his loss with friends and family, somebody told my son that Sandy is in fish heaven, giving him a brief moment of hope and comfort until I gently brought him back to reality.

Perhaps I should have used these opportunities to discuss heaven and angels with my children before Grandpa’s funeral.  The concept is so alluring.  My dad loved to fish, and there certainly is comfort in imagining him hanging around with celestial spirits fishing for muskie and debating the merits of the NHL overtime shootout.  “What’s the harm if it gives them comfort?” relatives would ask during the funeral.  As parents, we want to make life easy for our kids, and we want to spare them as much pain as possible, knowing that the Real World won’t hold back on them.  And therein lies the answer: if we, as their parents, hold back while they are young, too weak to prepare them for the reality of Life, we set them up for greater anxiety and heartache in the years to come.  While my children are devastated at the loss of their beloved Grandpa, their ability to navigate through their grief and loss will be an invaluable experience later in life.  Knowing that Grandpa died so young, with so many dreams unrealized, will drive my children to achieve their dreams.  They won’t be passive participants in their own lives, they won’t fall victim to the empty promises of celestial immortality, and they won’t ever have to worry about whether or not they are pious enough to deserve what they have worked so hard to achieve.  I have given my children the gift of reason.

Within a week of the death of my son’s fish, we were at the fish store for a new pet; my son a little wiser, understanding that although the loss of his pet was devastating, there is enough room in his heart to love again.  Two hamsters, one gerbil and four fish later, my children have learned enough about life and death to appreciate their final moments with Grandpa, knowing that in spite of their grief, they can cherish the memories they have of him.  It is in how people remember us upon our death that our legacy takes shape.  My father will be honored in the memory of his grandchildren, and that will be his afterlife.

 

 

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Goddamn It

February 28th, 2009 by AtheistDad

I may not believe in God, but that doesn’t keep me from using that divine critter’s hallowed name in vain frequently. Ever since my daughter could speak, my wife has warned me to watch my language lest we hear our sweet little daughter holding forth like the stereotypical sailor we always hear about. I’ve usually laughed it off, and it hasn’t really bitten me. In fact, my wife has inadvertently taught my daughter more swearing than I have. Today, it bit me.

We were sitting in the car waiting for my wife to join us before heading off to a child’s birthday party. I forget exactly what my daughter found frustrating, but she calmly (but with an edge to her voice) said “goddamn it.” My wife was less than pleased when I told her. For her, it’s not a matter of thinking there’s anything really wrong with words themselves but the fact that it’s unseemly for a kid to swear; it points to a lack of innocence. For me, it’s mostly a matter of pragmatism and consideration for the company you’re keeping. (And I agree that hearing a little kid swear just feels a little wrong.)

As a grown-up who’s pretty hyper-sensitive about my environment and who I might offend or inconvenience through my behavior, I have a pretty well-tuned sense of when it’s appropriate to use certain language (with, apparently, one big blind spot occupied by my kids). Why make a neighbor or acquaintance uncomfortable by swearing for no good reason? In the comfort of my own home, though, I do like to swear. It adds emphasis. I don’t subscribe to the tired old notion that swear words cheapen the language or show a lack of creativity of expression (I can do some pretty creative swearing). But I do know, typically, when to hold my tongue.

My daughter (nearly five years old) doesn’t yet have that sense, and she’s at an age at which she’s exploring this sort of boundary. She delights in trotting out a poopy reference in front of her granddaddy, and I could tell from the look in her eye after she dropped today’s goddamn that she thought she might be pushing a boundary.

So how to handle this? I certainly couldn’t be upset with her for using language that I use around the house. It’d be inconsistent and confusing for her. And, unseemly as it did sound coming from her, it didn’t actually upset me. Yet I don’t want her to talk like this around her grandfather or around other kids whose parents would find it a turn-off. This sort of talk stands very much to be a social turn-off. I explained to her that she wasn’t in trouble and I wasn’t mad at her for saying the word but tried to convey to her that it was the sort of word we might use at home but not in public, since that word in particular is one that might hurt some people’s feelings. For example, I told her, granddaddy would be very upset if he heard her say that word. There’s nothing wrong with words themselves, but some words are appropriate only in certain company and rude or hurtful in other company.

She seemed to grok it, but we’ll have to wait and see how well her understanding holds up and whether this is a boundary she tries to push. In the mean time, I suppose I should keep my goddamning to a minium.

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Dealing with Garbage

January 19th, 2009 by AtheistDad

I was reading my RSS feeds today and found this story about a college kid whose path to atheism was sparked by the evangelism of a campus group. It made me think back to an experience I had with such a campus group when I was in school.

It was just a regular afternoon, I believe on the weekend. I was alone in my dorm room, probably reading a book. Unexpected visitors to my room were rare, so I was probably caught a little off guard. When I opened the door, the guy standing there asked if I wanted him to take my trash out or anything. I’m sure I thought it was a little weird, but what are you gonna do? If some weirdo wants to take my ravioli cans and handi-snacks packages and pizza boxes out, so be it. Because my roommate was visiting home most of the time (he had his schedule loaded so that all classes were on Tuesdays and Thursdays), I tended to have a lot of trash around. So I handed the guy a couple of bags of it and thanked him and went to close the door. But there’s no such thing as a free lunch (or, it turns out, a free garbage pickup). He invited me to attend some church thing and handed me a little brochure. I don’t remember how I reacted. Ever nonconfrontational, I probably just said thanks (or thanks but no thanks) and shut the door.

This kind of transaction is really underhanded. It’s like when some charities send you a sheet of address labels (pre-printed with your address, of course) along with a pitch to get you to donate. It makes you feel like you’re a thief if you don’t hold up the end of the transaction they’re implying you should hold up.

I had yet another similar experience recently. We get Mormons a few times a year. I guess we’re pretty lucky in that evangelists don’t descend upon our neighborhood too terribly often. But a few times a year, you see the bikes parked at the front of the neighborhood and see the boys in their white shirts and black pants and name tags going from door to door. I value time. I don’t want you to waste mine, and I don’t want to waste yours, even if I think you’re nuts or think in some way that I’d probably be doing the world a favor by occupying a few minutes of your time. So I don’t argue with the Mormons. As usual, I just opened the door, shook my head, and said politely that I’m an atheist and they were barking up the wrong tree. Once, on a hot summer day, my wife, without thinking, offered the poor Mormon boys a Coke for the road, trying to show that even atheists can be kind, sympathetic, giving people. Only as the door clicked shut did she remember that they wouldn’t be allowed to drink it. We try to make a point of being nice, while flatly rejecting the spiel and asserting our own beliefs. I’d rather teach people that there are nice atheists than confirm preconceptions that we’re all jerks.

Now that I have children, turning away evangelists has become a little more complicated, and all the more because I have family and friends and neighbors whom I don’t want to insult by teaching my children an over-simplistic and potentially offensive sort of rejection of the sorts of beliefs being evangelized. I wrote about this closer to Christmas in the context of teaching my daughter the Christmas story (and our rejection of its veracity) in a way that wouldn’t hurt her granddaddy’s feelings.

When my daughter asked who had come to the door, I explained that it was a couple of people who believed some stories sort of like those stories about Jesus that we happened not to believe. She asked, further, why they wanted to tell us these stories. And I replied that they thought the stories were really good news and were trying to share them with us because they thought it would make us happy to hear them. But then I explained that we already knew the stories and thought maybe they were nice stories, but we didn’t believe they were true, and we didn’t need to hear them again from these boys. Then I explained that in a way, it was rude for them to come knocking on our door and interrupting oru day to tell us these things, but I also said that we knew they were trying to be nice and that we wanted to be nice back to them so they’d understand that even though we didn’t think their stories were as special as they did, we were still good people. She seemed to sort of get it. We’ll see what happens the next time some missionaries stop by.

By being direct, I accidentally took the wind out of the sails of the latest Mormons. I think they were so surprised to meet a real live atheist who would admit it and yet who wasn’t rude to them (as no doubt plenty of atheists and religious folk alike are) that they just didn’t know how to respond. Having had to edit out a bunch of their script that I had done an end-run around, they defaulted to the parting shot of offering to help me do some chores, such as taking out my garbage. “No thanks,” I said. “But I hope you guys have a good day, and keep warm.”

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