Happy Humanist New Year, All You Thinking Parents! Now Get to Work

How will you mark this upcoming season of renewed dedication, to living your own best life? How about never mind the customary concentration on “no” this time of year — ask not what you can stop, or quit, or give up; ask what you can give and give more of, what you can do and do more of.

So here’s a gift for all good people looking to give and do and affirm, to celebrate values we do believe in, to be the change we mean to make in the world.

Today, January 1, 2010, marks the grand opening of a highly evolved human network that in life-changing concept means as much to me now, as the National Home Education Network did in its nascence, way back last century.

It is the Foundation Beyond Belief:

Our Mission: To demonstrate humanism at its best by supporting efforts to improve this world and this life; to challenge humanists to embody the highest principles of humanism, including mutual care and responsibility; and to help and encourage humanist parents to raise confident children with open minds and compassionate hearts.

On the educational side, the Foundation will help create and fund local groups for the education and social support of humanist/atheist parents.

I was cornered in the kitchen of a Christmas party by a well-lubricated older someone, who I’d not expected ever to pressure me about declaring Christian beliefs.

Despite his conservative political beliefs and fealty to FOX News, he’s only a church-goer in that culturally conformist, mostly secular way, if you know what I mean. I may have been a bit lubricated myself, too free of tongue in sharing my own real convictions about what is real and important right here on earth, and what gets in the way between people of good will.

So before I knew what was happening, he was staring into my eyes and declaring that I wasn’t the person he knew and admired, if I didn’t believe in his god and follow that particular god’s politics. Or else perhaps I was muddled and foolish and didn’t know my own mind; perhaps I was a good saved person who just didn’t understand how the almighty was indulging my silly disbelief, and I could come to my senses if he took a firm stand for my soul.

Well, what the hell do you say to THAT?! Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

You’ve got damned-deer-in-the-headlights stories too, I know you do, from the holidays each year and sports teams and parent involvement, public service, community projects and neighborly encounters, from the best and worst of times. Favorite Daughter the religion major does much better than I do at managing the belief-fraught social undertow that nearly drowns me on occasion (maybe because she’s still too young to drink at parties??) but she’s looking forward to this new community for good people free of religious tension, too.

We all have a lot to learn and contribute. Think of it as hmmm, a free water safety course?

The original inspiration of Dale McGowan:

There were also surely atheists and humanists among the emergency responders and doctors and nurses and counselors who fought valiantly to stitch together shattered bodies, minds and hearts . . .

The atheists weren’t absent. They were invisible.

Their bodies and skills were easy enough to see, of course. But their convictions — that this is our one and only life, that its loss is something to fight hard against, that we have no one but each other to rely on when bad things happen — those convictions went unnoticed. Prayers and songs and religious rituals announce themselves. Quiet conviction goes unseen.

I began to think about the problem of atheist and humanist invisibility

Political Power of Story in Smacking, Hitting, Punching

Matalin to Palin: Quit Bitching, That’s Just How The GOP Treats Its Women

If someone isn’t in tears every day, that day wasn’t all it could be advancing the campaign. I once witnessed an experienced (big) man slap a professional female colleague across the face over an ad buy… and no one thought anything of it, starting with the woman. In fact, she would have been insulted if anyone told her she should have been insulted.

. . .the reason the modern GOP mindset is broadly accepting of the physical brutality Matalin shrugs off so easily, is the work of child psychologist / reactionary Christian leader James Dobson. Nearly forty years of Dobson’s abusive child-rearing strategies have produced a modern far right wing filled with smacking, punching authoritarians who learned from childhood that might alone makes right.

Legitimizing this mindset depends on enablers like Matalin, who extend the aura of civil acceptability toward violence against women and co-workers. When this violence persists, we should remember who “thinks anything about it” and who does not.

Snooking on smacking as effective:
Can you go all day without hitting a child?:

Can anyone really deny that we are perpetuating and endorsing the lesson of “might makes right” when we rule over our children using physical punishment?

Stop every kid-hitter you can — teach ‘em a lesson!

Thinking about hitting and children

Child abuse is not home education:

Spankings were a minor part of the allegations. Hitting with objects and . . .in anger, yes, but there is much more to this
story than that. . .

Fear of fashion and it’s not even a man-purse!

[S]chool policy doesn’t have to be about religion–much less Christmas–to be soulless . . .
Sooner or later, unthinking policy at school or home–from labeling children to make them tolerant of differences, to hitting children to make them stop hitting, to clipping their wings to teach them to fly–achieves its own natural consequence, a new unthinking norm, normally to the detriment of the very children the stupid rules are meant to “save.”

Is your love for your kids controlling?

The Real Santa I Believe In

Cool science with which I am making merry:

Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus — and Here’s What He Looks Like
By David Gibson

More detail and color art at the Saint Nicolas Center:

The image and the process to create it were featured on a one-hour television documentary, The Real Face of Santa, produced by Atlantic Productions for BBC 2 and also shown on the Discovery Channel.

Click to see the animation of the three-dimensional reconstructed image

Putting a Face to the Past, BBC interview with Dr Caroline Wilkinson

JJ’s Got a Naughty and Nice List

It’s a good thing I am not in charge, she muttered darkly . . .
Most public figures* including everyone with more money than morals would be in BIG trouble this year!

Although I heard Andre Agassi* answering some questions after a speech on NPR today and he makes the Nice list regardless of his clueless youthful excess, for honesty and modesty and public service and decent fatherhood, having reached his senior emeritas status.

Holiday Fun in TV Family Dys-fun-ction

Favorite Daughter and I have been watching Christmas movies, lots of them. Hilarity ensues. We grade them by a complicated and quirky power of story checklist we’ve developed over years of good, bad and ugly Christmas film fiction fare.

The other night we sat up late to wallow in a recorded made-for-tv movie that promised to be a twist on It’s a Wonderful Life, where a mom sees how differently her life could have turned out if she literally had been someone else by building her life on different values and choices, called Holiday Switch.

But for us, it was a moral morass and no one deserved a visit from Santa, much less a Christmas Angel to magic away their misery and make their dysfunction fun. Unlike the Cratchits or Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed, who were just as fun and functional rich or poor, this woman was dysfunctional rich or poor! What a pill she turned out to be. We were so annoyed after sitting all the way through it that we’ve nominated it as top rival to our Worst Christmas Movie Ever:

From FavD’s 2007 review of “One Magic Christmas” –

This movie features Mary Steenburgen as a desperately poor mom at the end of her rope with two guilt-ridden children and an emasculated out-of-work husband. Needless to say, they can’t afford a merry Christmas. Enter Happy Christmas Angel to show them how much they love each other! Right? Well, almost.

The angel, a hangdog Harry Dean Stanton in a trenchcoat and fedora which make him look just like the polygamous cult leader I always think of him as, is not exactly Clarence from It’s a Wonderful Life.

Harry decides that the best way to make Mary appreciate what she’s got is to magically disappear what little money there is in the family bank account. As you may imagine, this turn of events only makes Mary more shrewish, snapping at her kids, screaming at her useless husband, and generally raging at God.

Since she failed to respond to this brilliant tactic, the angel magics a bank heist next to Mary’s work. Mary’s husband gets shot, and the robbers try to run away his car, in which the kids were waiting. The robbers drive the car into a river in their haste, drowning the kids. Yes, you read that right: the Happy Christmas Angel just killed Mary Steenburgen’s entire family in front of her.

Feeling jolly now, Mary? Are ya?

Ho ho ho. . .
Let’s put more bourbon in those bourbon balls next batch, shall we??

But at least that’s all just made-for-tv dysfunction. Real social and economic dysfunction delivers no holiday fun despite its spelled center, and there’s no honest-to-god redemption at the end of a real greed and exploitation story for the rich OR the poor — not even on Christmas Morning.

C.S. Lewis once explained power of story as real, writing about his friend’s

Thinking of Damien Middleton Tonight, With Love

Brandon on FaceBook reminded us just as we were leaving for the Dance Studio, that this was the day three years ago, that the kids Learned the Hard Way what it was like to lose our dear, dear Damien . . .

Our children are neither schooled nor churched, but they both were drawn to and “belong” within an extended family of artists and performers centered around their dance studio.

This week the learning is especially hard and especially personal.

Latest Palin Lies Exposed: The Aunt Was a Peacock

Couldn’t resist the scholarly book pun, for yet another Republican/conservative calling out the ridiculous Sarah Palin for her self-aggrandizing and self-serving public lies. The original Ant and the Peacock is about complex and nuanced scientific truth. Want to lay odds about whether she’s read it? (I have.)

And speaking of Sarah Palin and science thinking, she who claims that God has everything planned out for her and wanted her to run for vice-president (and wanted her son off to war, her daughter pregnant, sister divorced etc etc?) — what a fitting exemplar of the effect discussed in this next story, frisky cock of the snook to Daryl via PZ Myers: divining the divine mind is really about probing the echo chamber of one’s self, how Dan Brown! [see chapter 118-133 note at link]

Epley’s research calls the worth of this counsel into question, for it suggests that inferring the will of God sets the moral compass to whatever direction we ourselves are facing. . .

The brain scans found the same thing, particularly in a region called the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) that’s been linked to self-referential thinking. . . The three images below show the differences in brain activity between the three tasks and you can see that the ‘God’ and ’self’ scans had little to distinguish them. . . . many people, from Rousseau to Twain to Voltaire, are credited with the line: “God created man in his own image and man, being a gentleman, returned the favour.”

Epley’s results are sure to spark controversy, but their most important lesson is that relying on a deity to guide one’s decisions and judgments is little more than spiritual sockpuppetry. . .

Favorite Daughter Talks Sex and Rejects “The Wilding of Sarah Palin” Premise

Favorite Daughter wrote a long essay on this piece* (see below) late last night, unbeknownst to her mother until the holiday yeast rolls were in the oven and we were relaxing together just now, and she mentioned it in an offhand way.

She is almost 20 now, and we’re leaving for her boyfriend’s parents’ multi-family dinner in an hour. Anyway, don’t miss this if you want a brutally honest young woman’s progressive perspective in response to this article about sex, politics and the real-world effects of the Politics of Sex:

. . .[The "recovering liberal" author of the article] posits that democrats purposely keep women afraid of rape so that they’ll vote democrat, like a sick stick to the carrot of equal pay and abortion rights. She goes on to insinuate that democrats put out some sort of subliminal messages about conservative men all being rapists. She makes this allegation with no evidence whatsoever, and, if the average conservative sex scandal is any indication, my 14-year-old brother has a lot more to fear from Mark Foley, Larry Craig, and Ted Haggarty than I do.

She goes on to hint that she might have been raped (“probably at a peace rally,” Calvin groaned), and called the perpetrators “minority,” “thug,” “hoodlums,” blaming liberal social programs for the circumstances that led directly to her violation. If I may interrupt: I have a hunch that not stoning rape victims was once considered a “liberal social program.”

She goes on to accuse everyone at Berkley of being a “sleazebag,” (really, everyone) and that because liberals subscribe to the concept of moral relativism, they sanction the stoning of women in the Middle East. Where, the last time I checked, women were being preyed upon by religiously and politically conservative men.

Then it gets really good (or bad, I guess, would be a better

Do Media Refs Do This Too? It Would Explain a Lot

If “winning” and not good governance is all the most vicious partisans care about, their political game plan would look just like the Illini’s foul play and it would work out for them, especially on tv. A theory with excellent predictive value!

ESPN dot com
November 23, 2009
Associated Press

They don’t all need glasses. But if you always suspected basketball referees are biased — well, you’re right, according to a couple of professors who’ve studied the matter.

Refs favor the home team, the academics say. They’re big on “make-up” calls. They make more calls against teams in the lead, and the discrepancy grows if the game is on national TV.

The professors studied 365 college games during the 2004-05 season and found that refs had a terrific knack for keeping the foul count even, regardless of which team was more aggressive.

Exhibit A:

Young Son’s Shakespeare Set to Scotland’s Pipes

As promised, a sampling of family photos from the first annual Fall Weavers Festival at historic Millstone Plantation here in Tallahassee FL.

You can see Young Son playing as Richard the Third in morning scenes staged under the Great Oak, then as great highland bagpiper with the Edinburgh-born McIlroys in the afternoon, as the sheep pasture shadows lengthen toward Lake McBride:

The Liar, The Witch, and the KKK’s Wardrobe

Sarah Palin’s presidential-ambition-blessing pastor was a real, literal witch-hunter and witch-persecutor.

No joke.

Now comes another no-joke witch story, one I saw earlier today in the Chronicle of Higher Education weekly round-up by Don Troop, under the irresistible and accurately newsworthy headline, “The Liar, the Witch and the KKK’s Ridiculous Wardrobe.”

(Just ask if you want to know more about the Liar and the Wardrobe*.)

A woman who sued the University of Nebraska saying the school fired her after learning she is a witch has agreed to settle the case for $40,000.

The university made the offer “solely to compromise the claim … without admitting the validity of plaintiff’s contention or any allegations of wrongdoing by the defendants. . .”

Jane Doe said she took a job with the university in 2007 directing a youth program. But an associate dean terminated her, despite her satisfactory performance at work, after learning she was a witch and her religion was

Shocking News: Our Dear Friend Betty Malone

MEG! What happened??

Nance and I have just learned of Betty’s passing — stunned and saddened. Dear in life, dear in memory.

Betty posted a comment here Sunday, about the religious left emerging. She had been writing on FaceBook about having the flu, and then the morning of Nov. 13 said she was feeling better, ready to get cracking on her directorial work with The Best Christmas Pageant Ever.

Now they are posting eulogy messages to her FB wall.

Are you brainwashing your child with your truth or allowing the freedom of learning to flourish in your home? — Betty Malone

Betty Malone