Further Reflections on Thanksgiving

After feeling rather ill last night, I decided to skip work and take a reading day. So I spent most of today reading and researching on the subject of Thanksgiving and its history.

When I read history I try to create a mental system of foci by which to guide my pursuit. In the case of Thanksgiving I began with four distinct periods or nodes from which the rest of my reading and thinking can spread. I always try to set these up in reverse temporal order, beginning with the present. History should always connect with the present. So I started with my own experiences with Thanksgiving and some of the popular ideas about Thanksgiving that are floating around these days. That makes the first node. The second is anchored on 1941 and the joint act of Congress that gave our modern American holiday a permanent place on the national calendar. The third lands on 1863 and the first national proclamation for a day of Thanksgiving by Abraham Lincoln. The fourth goes all the way back to 1621 and the popular “first thanksgiving” celebrated by the Pilgrims and their Indian neighbors. It’s a pretty standard framework, pedestrian even. But a preliminary framework is just a point of entry. Setting one up is a little like those old cartoons where characters would paint a door on the wall to make their escape. History can be huge and intractable, like a brick wall, so you have to just make a decision and dive in. Create an outline and crack it open. After that, everything can change, and that’s the fun part.

There are three big, contentious holidays in modern America: Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Each of them has historical roots in Christianity. However, all three have been thoroughly secularized, much to the chagrin of Christians. Their response has been a perpetual battle to reclaim these celebrations from the evil forces of secularization. Whether or not these forces actually exist is doubtful, in my opinion. Considering that the vast majority of our people are religious, and knowing what it’s like to be in the infinitesimal secular minority, I tend to think religious people themselves (including Christians) have done most of the “secularizing” via increased toleration, which has a homogenizing effect. That is, I think America has not so much been “secularized” as it has been “homogenized,” and that is a whole different problem, if you choose to see it as one. Which is why Christians have not done so well at reclaiming their “Christian nation”; they have a misguided approach.

When Thanksgiving comes around, many Christians are quick to point out that thanks cannot be given to no one; the act of giving thanks implies an object of gratitude, which in their view can only be God. This perhaps is true if you take a strict and literal view of Thanksgiving as a day to “give thanks,” but the history of the holiday in its varied manifestations at different points in our past does not provide a clear, unanimous voice to that effect. To demonstrate, let’s take a shuffle through my other three nodes.

In 1941, the United States Congress declared once and for all that Thanksgiving would fall on the fourth Thursday in November. The reason for this is interesting. By 1939, Thanksgiving had become the official opening day of the Christmas shopping season. Naturally, merchants and business owners preferred a longer season to peddle their wares. So the National Retail Dry Goods Association asked President Roosevelt to move Thanksgiving back one week from its traditional place from the fourth to the third Thursday in November. This caused confusion because not all the states followed the President’s proclamation. There was no official national holiday for Thanksgiving–only the yearly proclamation issued at the caprice of the President. So 23 states went along with the change, 23 states ignored it, and two states (Texas and Colorado) just celebrated twice. (Not a bad idea, eh?) For two years this confusion persisted until 1941 when Congress decided to take the scheduling of Thanksgiving out of the President’s hand. The interesting thing about this affair is that the problem had more to do with shopping and football than it had to do with giving thanks to any deity. Oh, I’m sure people were still using Thanksgiving as a time to express their piety, but it took these mundane forces to finally define our holiday consistently from year to year. In other words, people were more concerned about how to schedule the fun parts of Thanksgiving than they were with thanking God. If thanking God was all they cared about, what would it matter when they did it? From what I can tell, God has no yearly calendar. But people do. So does football and the Christmas shopping season.

Then there is Lincoln’s call for a day of Thanksgiving in 1863. I discovered that people usually credit Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of the periodical “Lady’s Book,” for inspiring Lincoln to act. She had been trying for decades to get all the various statewide Thanksgiving proclamations to line up on the fourth Thursday in November, writing many editorials on the subject. She even wanted Americans living abroad to celebrate Thanksgiving on the same day as their fellows back home, as a show of national unity. What this has to do with God is beyond me. In fact, Hale took for granted that Thanksgiving was already universally celebrated throughout the United States. In 1859 she wrote:

That the American People shall have an annual Thanksgiving Festival after the ingathering of their harvests is now a settled matter. Every State and Territory has, in some way, signified its willingness to adopt this venerable custom, which we recognize in the Jewish “Feast of Weeks,” as appointed by Jehovah for His Chosen People. Is it not, therefore, peculiarly appropriate that “we, the People of the United States,” who acknowledge only the Supreme Ruler of the Universe as our Sovereign, should pay this yearly tribute of gratitude and thanks in national unanimity?

She later in the same editorial refers to her proposal as a “Thanksgiving Union Festival.” The idea of “union” runs quite strongly throughout her writings and was clearly the main purpose of her program. After all, if she knew that Americans were already celebrating Thanksgiving, thanking the “Supreme Ruler of the Universe as [their] Sovereign,” why was she worried that they do this on the same day? I doubt God would care. But Hale was looking for something earthly, just like the people who came eight decades later and worried about the Christmas shopping season and when to schedule their football games.

Finally, returning to 1621, it has been observed by many people that the Pilgrims did not celebrate a real Puritan “thanksgiving.” That would have been a day of prayer and fasting, not three days of feasting and merry-making and musket-firing. The Pilgrim celebration in 1621 was clearly a harvest festival. I’m sure the Pilgrims were thankful to God for their bounteous harvest, but that was not the central focus of their celebration. They were just glad they would have enough food to last the winter. (Recall that during the previous winter, shortly after their arrival in Massachusetts, nearly half of their number died because they were poorly prepared for the harsh climate of that region.)

The pattern I see at each of these “nodes,” as I call them, is one of a more terrestrial, mundane, or horizontal concern when people celebrated Thanksgiving. I don’t think this holiday was ever fully religious, not once it was coupled with the autumn season and the gathering of the harvest. There were plenty of thanksgiving days declared in colonial times, but they were not celebratory affairs. Take, for instance, these words from a 1676 proclamation in Boston:

The Council has thought meet to appoint and set apart the 29th day of this instant June, as a day of Solemn Thanksgiving and praise to God for such his Goodness and Favour, many Particulars of which mercy might be Instanced, but we doubt not those who are sensible of God’s Afflictions, have been as diligent to espy him returning to us; and that the Lord may behold us as a People offering Praise and thereby glorifying Him; the Council doth commend it to the Respective Ministers, Elders and people of this Jurisdiction; Solemnly and seriously to keep the same Beseeching that being perswaded by the mercies of God we may all, even this whole people offer up our bodies and soulds as a living and acceptable Service unto God by Jesus Christ.

Not exactly a celebration. Instead, the mundane life of the colony would cease for one day while the people centered their attention on appeals to God. This was a true “thanksgiving” day, and not something most people, even most Christians, are interested in performing in 21st century America.

These are just some preliminary thoughts I have had after a day of reading. There are some other things too, especially pertaining to Sarah Hale and Abraham Lincoln in 1863, but I will save those for another post. At any rate, I wish Americans would be more willing to examine and reflect on their own history. There are no definitive answers to our questions in history, but there are things that ought to give us pause. While Christians are busy calling Americans “back” to God, I would rather call Americans into a closer study of their own past.

Something Festive This Way Comes

Halloween, harbinger of the holiday season, approaches. Count me out. My money is on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the New Year. It is tempting to let Christmas overrun the others, or to slip into some vague “holiday season,” but that would ruin the character and quality of the individual celebrations, so I resist.

Wait a minute, theomorph! You’re an atheist. How can you celebrate Thanksgiving or Christmas?

Easy. I show up at my family’s gatherings, eat way too much food, and have a slammin’ good time. That’s probably what you do, too.

No, no, no. I mean, how can you celebrate Thanksgiving if you don’t believe in a God to thank?

Who says I have to thank God? Can I meditate on my relative wealth compared to most of the human population and be glad I’m not living in a cardboard box in Calcutta? Can I look back on the lines of historical succession that have made my life possible and marvel at my ostensibly precarious contingency? Can I recognize my smallness and lack of power in this vast universe?

Sure, but then you won’t have the deep satisfaction of thanking the one who made all that possible.

To be quite honest, I was pretty bored by Thanksgiving when I was still a Christian. God never seemed to care. In fact, I always thought God would have been rather unimpressed by our yearly return to thank him for being there. Weren’t we supposed to do that every day? Besides, the attitude of thankfulness is really about us and not about God, who is supposed to be self-sufficient with our without human thanks. Now instead of clouding my meditations with concern for a God who doesn’t need me anyway, I feel a much deeper sense of that “precarious contingency” and Thanksgiving is more meaningful than ever.

Thanksgiving is also an excellent time to reflect on our national history. Everyone knows the story of the “first” Thanksgiving with the Pilgrims and Indians, even though it is mostly imagined. (Yes, there was a shared meal between the Pilgrims and the Indians in 1621, but it was not called “thanksgiving.” The Pilgrims did have thanksgiving days as part of their religious practice, but a big feast spread across several days does not fit that mold. The famous “first” Thanksgiving was more like our modern, secular family feasts.) But not so many people know that our Thanksgiving holiday is a relatively recent creation of the federal government. New York State adopted a Thanksgiving holiday in 1817, and Abraham Lincoln declared the first national Thanksgiving holiday during the Civil War. Other presidents followed and declared Thanksgiving when they wanted to, but the fixed, yearly holiday was not established until 1941 by an act of Congress.

So? What does that mean for us?

It means we need to recognize that holidays like Thanksgiving are easily invented and changed by people to suit their needs. We have them for our own purposes, and not for someone else’s (e.g., God’s) purposes. Remember when Jesus recognized the Sabbath as a day of rest that was made for people to enjoy, not to be imposed on them? (See Mark 2:27.) It’s sort of like that. If we can create holidays in response to our circumstances, then we can certainly celebrate them according to our own beliefs. There is no law that says Thanksgiving must be celebrated as a tribute to the Christian God.

What about Christmas? How can you celebrate that?

Easy. I show up at my family’s gatherings, eat way too much food, and have a slammin’ good time!

Oh come on–that’s the same thing you said for Thanksgiving!

No, I added an exclamation mark.

Pardon me.

Honestly, Christmas means a lot more to me as an atheist than it did as a Christian. (Okay, well, the name of the holiday doesn’t mean much to me, but then how many other words with bizarre histories do I use every day?) When I was a Christian, I spent way too much of my holiday season trying to get “in the ‘true’ spirit,” trying to get my “heart” right, decrying the commercialization of Christmas, complaining about things like “Happy Holidays,” and so on. But these days I find myself most eager to put up lights during the dark days of winter, to play Christmas music, to hang around in Starbucks drinking holiday drinks, to entertain guests, to buy gifts for loved ones, and do the whole decorating thing.

In my opinion, complaining about the commercialism of Christmas rings hollow in a culture where the other 364 days of the year are plenty commercial, too. But during the Christmas season a lot of our spending frenzy is directed towards others instead of ourselves, and I find that quite interesting, even worthy.

Historically, Christmas in America has always been about inversions. In the 17th and 18th centuries it was about class inversion, with poor people demanding temporary benevolence from their rich neighbors (sometimes with violence). In the early 19th century, the middle class version Christmas was turned into a parent-child inversion where children expected excessive benevolence from otherwise authoritarian parents. In the late 19th century, especially following the Civil War, Christmas became a time of racial inversion, with whites bestowing a kind of arrogant benevolence on the newly freed blacks. Now in the late 20th and early 21st centuries we are seeing Christmas as a commercial inversion during which we open up our pockets, spend money irresponsibly, and put our economic concerns on the back burner in the name of family instead of simply being selfish like we are the rest of the year. (Remnants of those other inversions have stuck with us, too.)

So you’re justifying the rampant consumerism of Christmas by the assertion that we’re buying lots of junk for other people instead of for ourselves? That seems kind of shallow to me. Maybe we’re buying a lot more gifts at Christmas, but we are certainly pretty selfish in December, too.

And why not? How many people wake up on January 1st and suddenly feel reinvigorated, making resolutions and such, because they have gotten all that selfishness out of their systems? I think people need massive festivals like Christmas in order to balance their perspective. We need to experience that yearly sense of anticipation and ultimate letdown. It reveals our shortcomings and keeps us from taking ourselves too seriously. Getting uptight about the gluttony and consumerism of Christmas keeps us from experiencing that rebalancing effect.

That’s an interesting way to see things. Don’t know that I agree, though.

Well, you’re free to disagree. Until next time, alter ego.

Slice of Life

I have been neglecting the blog lately. No reason in particular, but probably a confluence of things. Working six to seven days a week has been pretty exhausting. Minor familial strife has not helped. Nor has a rather intense conversation buried in the comment section of a previous post (which shall remain nameless). Even my bookstore boss noticed that I looked more tired than usual.

My reading has only been limping along, as well. At the moment I am reading The Scarlet Letter because I never read it in school and suffered a sudden burst of curiosity a few days ago. Turns out I love the book and Nathaniel Hawthorne is my new literary hero. But my more “serious” (i.e., non-literary, non-fictional) reading has suffered a bit. I have been picking at bits and pieces of Herodotus, a previously mentioned book about the “Scopes Monkey Trial,” and a pop-history about the United States in the late 19th century. But now I am starting John Taylor Gatto’s An Underground History of American Education (available to read online here) because it is the latest selection for my reading group. That will be a major task, especially since Gatto’s writing style and lack of documentation annoy the heck out of me.

Meanwhile I have also been reading Mourt’s Relation and trying to lay my hands on a decent copy of William Bradford’s Of Plimouth Plantation. Yes, it’s that time of year again, and I can’t celebrate a holiday without diving back into its history (or alleged history, in the case of Thanksgiving).

Despite all this reading (and I’ve not included all my reading in this account), I have had surprisingly little I felt like writing on the blog. However, I have been working on a different literary project. Every literate person should have a novel in the works, I think. Let the masses have their television, I shall find my escape in writing. Working on a big piece of fiction also has the delightful effect of centering one’s intellectual pursuits around a singular narrative or literary theme. This is especially helpful for me and my insanely broad interests. Perhaps one of these days it will see the light of day as a published work, but don’t hold your breath.

Of course, being an independent reader and a closet novelist, one must always struggle against the slithering tentacles of crackpothood and dilettantism. That, too, is exhausting.

At any rate, I have not shriveled up and died, and I have no intention of abandoning my blog like so many others have done. A quasi-hiatus now and then is almost inescapable, though. As my mother tells me I once said to my father at an early age, “I’m not Superman, daddy!” Indeed. Nietzsche notwithstanding.

Colson, Derrida, and “Doubt-Ridden Skeptics”

Jacques Derrida died last week. Chuck Colson commented:

The very day Derrida died, I was on an airplane. A couple recognized me and came over to talk. They told me the sad tale of how four years of college had turned their son from a solid Christian into a doubt-ridden skeptic. Now multiply that incident a million-fold, and you’ll understand the real legacy of Jacques Derrida, who amused himself at our great expense. Who said ideas don’t have consequences?

Classic. Innocent Christian kid goes off to university, comes back a “doubt-ridden skeptic.” Happens all the time. You might say it happened to me. Maybe Derrida’s deconstructionism had something to do with it, but not the way Colson wants you to think. No, deconstructionism is not an evil force that is hacking away at the scriptural foundation of Christianity from without; deconstructionism has been called to the defense of Christianity from within. In fact, I might even go so far as to say that modern Christianity could not function without deconstructionism.

Twentieth-century American Christianity was richly prepared for deconstructionism by fundamentalists who took the biblical texts, hacked them into pieces, and rearranged them to build the fantastic “prophetic” schemes of premillennial dispensationalism, authorial intent be damned. All they had to do was remind people that God was the true author, and suddenly their own ideas about God could stand in as authorial intent. Rearrange the text, build theological tenets on allegedly interrelated passages, forget about the massive cultural and contextual gap between yourself and the biblical authors. Congratulations! You have deconstructed your “holy” scriptures. (See, for instance, the Scofield Bible, which encouraged nonlinear reading by placing in the margins numerous reference markers pointing to other passages.)

But the fundamentalists aren’t the only Christian deconstructionists. The liberals do it, too. These are the people who constantly re-interpret various passages based on an allegedly superior understanding of the original language and cultural context. For instance, many of them have managed to turn the Bible into some kind of feminist manifesto. I once read a whole book that was dedicated to convincing its readers that despite what the Bible seems to say about women (that they are lesser people), it is in fact emphatically supportive of equality between the sexes. Sure, there are some parts in the Bible where women are allowed to play important roles, but their treatment is far from consistent. So how come radical feminism within Christianity didn’t happen until almost two thousand years after the canon was completed? Suddenly scholars in the twentieth century can understand the texts better than their original authors and readers did? Welcome to Christian deconstructionism! (Liberal Christians also use deconstructionist critiques to support homosexuality, even though the Bible is pretty darned clear on that one, too. But since the ancient text doesn’t line up with modern tolerance, we’ll just tweak it so it says what we want.)

Then there are the Catholics who establish scriptural authority with voting councils. Because, you know, while a lone, “reformed,” sola scriptura reader might be wrong, a bunch of institutional elites who argue and then cast votes can only be truly led by the Spirit. Apparently God is a democratic deity. This from the branch of the church that is the most hierarchical and authoritarian. Go figure. (Watch out, here come the Catholic readers to slap me silly and tell me I’m wrong, likely under the auspices of some papal bull or other authoritative document.) Seems like shades of deconstruction there, too. How can you establish authorial intent by taking a vote? Does the author get a vote?

(Of course, most of these Christian forms of deconstruction were around long before Jacques Derrida, but they’re not too different from his theory. Only the liberals have actually read and been directly influenced by Derrida. My point, though, is that Christians of all stripes have wandered from the original intent of the authors of their scriptures and begun reading their own meanings into the texts, sometimes innocently and sometimes not, sometimes individually and sometimes collectively.)

When I went to university, I decided that since I was bolstering my education in other corners, I might as well delve into my faith. So I started reading the scriptures more carefully. I read whole books at a time, instead of just picking and choosing verses or chapters here and there. I tried to learn about the context of the author. Who was his (or her, in the case of some books, perhaps) original audience? Why? Where were they? When were they? What was this about? That is, I began to read them as a historian instead of a religious devotee. Rather quickly it became clear to me that the only way to make these writings as meaningful as I had been taught they were supposed to be was to deconstruct them, to read into them, to listen to the intent of various commentators and historical authorities instead of to the bare texts themselves.

So there I was in the midst of my university education, starting to wonder about the validity of a religious text that is more interpretation and tradition than anything else. In other words, it was the deconstructionism rampant within modern Christianity that exposed the silliness of the religion to me. So if Colson wants to worry about deconstructionism, he ought to turn his guns against his own, because the “doubt-ridden skeptics” are not the ones doing the deconstructing.

Solon’s Culture of Life

Before I slipped into sleep last night I read a little Herodotus. The historian tells the story of a wise Athenian named Solon who was traveling throughout the lands of the Greeks. In Lydia, a region that is now part of Turkey, he came before the King Croesus, one of the richest, most powerful men of his day. Solon was known for his wisdom and experience, having recently rewritten the Athenian constitution, then setting out on a ten year journey to experience greater Greece. So Croesus, finding a wise man in his court and hoping to bolster his vanity, inquired of Solon who was the happiest of all men–fully expecting to hear his own name echoed back. But Solon told him of other men whom he deemed happier, listing their achievements both modest and great, and finally declaring that no man’s life can be truly evaluated until it has ended, so that all the days of his life can be counted. Every day is different, Solon reminded Croesus. Even great men who have lived long may still find time to fail and fall. Croesus, of course, was angered by Solon’s response, and judged the Athenian to be a fool.

The story probably did not happen as Herodotus told it. Solon instituted his Athenian reforms in 594 BCE then set out on his ten year journey, but Croesus did not become king of Lydia until 560 BCE. Be that as it may, the conversation between Solon and Croesus is still a valuable piece of philosophy, even if its historicity is dubious. (See also the 17th century Dutch painter Nikolaus Knüpfer’s inspiring portrayal of the story.)

Reflecting on the words of Solon I turn back to modern times and the various movements posturing themselves as proponents for a “culture of life.” The people of these movements judge life by its potential instead of by its achievements or failures. This view is allegedly more hopeful and inspiring than the one espoused by Solon, but I wonder. How is it good to plant a sense of value into every person regardless of how that person lives? What can that do but establish a sense of complacency that allows us to take our lives for granted? Certainly we all have potential. But greatness and importance and value come not from potential but from what is done with potential. Potential may be used wisely or it may be squandered. Tragedy occurs when one who is attempting to use his or her potential for something great is caught up in the machinations of nature or human society only to see that effort and that potential cast down to oblivion. Tragedy is what happens when those who strive are beaten back by forces greater than themselves. Without striving, without an attempt to act on potential, there can be no tragedy.

Solon had his own culture of life, and it is one that I can affirm. Life is valuable as an opportunity, but human lives are valuable as efforts to be and to become something more. No life can be judged a failure or a success until it is completed and no beginning is enough to secure a valiant ending. Many of us will fail and be forgotten. Only by striving against the entropy and oblivion of time and history can we secure for ourselves a place of honor. Don’t give me a participation award and tell me that simply existing is good enough, pat me on the head, call me valuable, and send me on my way. That is not life but illusion. Give me something real instead. Give me Solon’s culture of life, and not this feeble culture of modern days.

July, 1925

Greetings, gentle readers. If you’re wondering where I am, and why I have not posted for several days, let me assure that I have not disappeared or spontaneously combusted. I have only been working and reading and thinking, letting things boil around in my brain for a while.

For instance, I am currently reading Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion by Edward J. Larson, who won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1998 for this book. It is a fascinating tale, this circus of a trial in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925. I’ve always thought it was interesting, from the day I first learned of it in my advanced placement U.S. History class. (I can still see my teacher’s handwriting on the board, the words “Scopes Monkey Trial.” What a catchy name for a trial!)

A whole host of issues coalesced in the Scopes trial: individual rights versus majority rule; academic freedom versus education as indoctrination; legitimate and illegitimate uses of the judicial system; ideological content versus media “events”; and, of course, science versus religion. This makes the Scopes trial one of those points of perennial fascination in U.S. history, not unlike the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 in its popularity, its sordid human conflict, and its simple staging that translates well into linear narrative. (Consider the two famous plays The Crucible by Arthur Miller and Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, the former based on the Salem trials and the latter inspired by the Dayton trial.) Many of the recurring themes in American history can be encapsulated in these two events. (Most of the rest of them crop up in the Civil War.)

Americans of all stripes would do well to revisit the Dayton, Tennessee of July, 1925, the complex characters who converged there, and the conflicting ideologies that clashed swords there. There is something telling in the “Scopes Monkey Trial,” not just in its explicit content and what is recorded in the transcript, but in the way that the trial was arguably a manufactured publicity stunt–manufactured by all participants, from the ACLU that sought a “test case” for the antievolution Tennessee law to the Daytonians looking to put their town on the map to William Jennings Bryan and his post-Great War paranoia of a Darwinian-Nietzschean alliance to the bombastic Clarence Darrow who volunteered for the case only after he discovered that Bryan was involved. All this after the enactment of a law that no one really expected would be enforced. The clamor of the public regarding this trial indicates, at least to me, that Americans needed a stage upon which to enact their inner struggles over the ideological direction of their nation. Dayton was willing to be that stage and Scopes, Bryan, and Darrow were willing to be the players. Publicity stunt though it may have been, it was a cathartic one that gave new direction both to the evolutionists and to the antievolution fundamentalists, setting the tone for their conflict up to the present day. (It is surprising how many of the same arguments are still around, 79 years later.) It was as though the participants, under the guise of a publicity stunt, were creating a myth–a myth to put Dayton on the map, to destroy evolution, to ridicule fundamentalism.

History is filled with interesting stories and events that ought to make us pause and reflect. Rather than speeding us along toward some imagined, predicted future, they should caution us always to consider what has already been said and done. Daniel Boorstin once wrote that

When we become historians, we are seduced by the prophet’s temptations–to pretend to be wiser than we really are, and to underestimate the probability of the unexpected. But History should be our Cautionary Science. Our past is only a little less uncertain than our future, and, like the future, it is always changing, always revealing and concealing.

What happened in Dayton in 1925 was not the beginning of a conflict, nor the end of one, but a conveniently dramatic emergence of an emblematic representation of arguments that have almost always been with us. The United States has always been a land of conflict and turmoil and that has usually been a sign of our health. That is one of the reasons I so often delve into controversy with this blog. Even if an argument changes no minds, it has the sneaky effect of exposing both sides to each other’s existence, and that is perhaps more valuable than changing minds anyway.

Guillen’s Galling Guff

Michael Guillen has a new book. Can a Smart Person Believe in God?

What kind of question is that? Of course smart people can believe in God. They do it every day. Apparently Guillen is arguing against the straw-atheist who claims only idiots believe in God. This is exceedingly annoying. But wait, there’s more!

Guillen can’t even make it past the second page of his book without spreading more silliness. He says we are “split into two camps: Those who believe in God and those who believe in something else. You’ll notice I resisted lapsing into the common practice of referring to the two camps as Believers and Nonbelievers; doing so would encourage the totally erroneous notion that ‘believing’ or ‘having faith’ is something only some of us do. Truth is, everyone of us ‘believes.’ Everyone of us ‘has faith.’ What divides us are the different objects of our faith, our different gods.”

Umm, no. Sorry. Real life ain’t Hollywood where everybody has to “believe in something.” (Speaking of which, I am absolutely sick and tired of hearing that same freaking line in every other movie. You’d think Hollywood was all about pie-in-the-sky and nobody cared about the bottom line. Ha.) In real life, there are people who believe in things that can’t be seen, observed, verified, or otherwise detected by any non-subjective means, and people who don’t. I am one of the latter. We are a very small minority.

Which Guillen recognizes: “4 percent of Americans don’t believe in God–a pretty meager percentage given the disproportionate attention and clout this camp appears to enjoy in today’s secular age.”

Huh? Attention? Clout? Yeah, right. Guillen has clearly never been an atheist, or he would know what it’s like to live in a world where everybody (for all intents and purposes) believes in God, and basically assumes that you do, too. He doesn’t understand that when you work in schools and you have to stand up every morning to pledge your patriotic allegiance, that pledge still includes a theological point because the “clout” for that issue is entirely on the side of the theists, who are always standing at the ready to ram a theological declaration down the throat of every American. Nor does Guillen know what it’s like when every civic meeting and ritual seems to include an invocation and/or a benediction, during which we allegedly attention-getting, clout-wielding atheists are made to feel like outsiders. Anyone who has actually been an atheist knows what it is like. Any attention we get is negative, any clout we have is fought for tooth and nail. Why are the presidential candidates bending over backwards to appeal to religious voters, but none of them give a damn what we atheists think? I’ll tell you why: Because there are only a very few of us and we have approximately zero clout. In fact, most atheists are not interested in “clout” for the sake of atheism. We’re not like Christians, who want to convert the whole world and are willing to stage massive proselytization efforts to achieve that end. Most of us just want to live our lives and have Christians stop telling us we have to say things like “under God” if we want to pledge our allegiance to our national flag. Stuff like that.

Guillen’s book “Includes a revealing self-test to determine your own SQ” or “Spiritual Quotient.” I can’t get past the first question:

1. If something unlikely but good happens to me, I am most likely to:
(a) Shake my head in wonderment over the coincidence.
(b) Try figuring out how it could have happened.
(c) Thank God.
(d) Thank Lady Luck.
(e) Try analyzing the odds of its happening.

So what am I supposed to do if none of those answers applies to me? My answer would be “(f) Be glad something good happened.” But Guillen doesn’t allow for that, because his test is biased. He still thinks that even though I am an atheist, I still “believe” in something. But I don’t.

Anyway, that’s all the time I have for now.

Standardized Testing

Today I am administering standardized tests to seventh graders. These are local tests, part of our district’s attempt at “deep alignment.” (I.e., the powers that be are convinced that a Good Education for all seventh graders means they can all pass the same tests at the same times throughout the year.) The kids have no idea that they are not really being tested. Standardized tests have nothing to do with students or what they know. They have everything to do with The System and what it can induce the students to regurgitate. Want your students to test well? Write a test then prepare them for it. This will tell you nothing about what the students know or about how well they understand anything (except maybe how to deal with multiple choices and how to shade in bubbles). However, it will tell you how well The System has adhered to its curriculum. This is clear from the fact that students are not graded by standardized tests–schools are graded by standardized tests. Your school did not fare so well on the standardized tests? Prepare to be punished or sanctioned or sentenced to the purgatory of “professional development.” (I.e., “Because your students did not pass the standardized tests, you are clearly not up with current instructional and psychological fads. If you were a good teacher, you would do what we tell you to do and stop trying to respond to the innate curiosity of individual students, which only short-circuits the precision of our nearly-automated curriculum, which you need to follow if you want to produce standardized, cookie-cutter students. Our standardized, cookie-cutter tests reveal this flaw in your professional and personal character. Report to the nearest re-education–er, professional development–center.”) The kids will never notice anything except that suddenly their teachers are in a frenzy over how well the students perform on all these tests that won’t affect their grades. Welcome to modern American education.

Tired

It’s one of those days. I’m not even focusing as I write this. All the words are doubled. Too tired to bother. Worse, I still have five hours left at work. Worse than that, at least five more days until I get a day off. It’s already been at least a week since I had a day off, too. (On top of that, my last days off were all Civil War reenacting days, which are exhausting and not restful at all.) One of these days I’m just going to fall over, I think.

Sunday Morning

Ah, Sunday morning. NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday. Huevos rancheros. Orange juice. Espresso. The swish of the dishwasher. Looking out the window on a world swathed in the orange and pink light of a rising sun. Going online, skipping around a few blogs. Finding rude, unnecessary, and as-yet-unsubstantiated comments regarding my personal character.

What? Oh yeah, that last part. Alexa.

Here I am, trying to be one of those honorable bloggers who manages to speak out with unpopular perspectives without attacking people for their personality, marriageability, etc., when along comes yet another Christian testifying to the transformative power of her faith. Lovely.

If you don’t like what I write, don’t read it. Better yet, tell me why. I can weather criticism pretty well. (I’m an atheist in a predominantly Christian culture, a non-partisan atheist in a milieu when atheists are predominantly leftists, and a relatively privileged white male in a “postcolonial” age when relatively privileged white males are everybody’s favorite whipping boy. You do the math.)

Anyway, I’m gonna go pull another shot of espresso, have another glass of juice, and read a book. Good day to all.