Raising Children With Brains
Nathalie Angier is one of the few non-primitive mommies out there, raising her children not to believe in anything without evidence. How sad that it's so rare for people these days to be intellectually modern. Instead, we've got a hoodoo-believing president. Even Republican cheerleader Peggy Noonan got uneasy at his relentlessly "god-drenched" inaugural address. Here's an excerpt, but here's the link to the whole thing, which is worth reading, despite the small type in the link:

I’m a science writer. I’m fond of evidence, and I’m a serious devotee of the scientific method, and the entire scientific enterprise. Let me tell you, scientists as individuals can be as petty, insecure, vain, arrogant and opinionated as the rest of us. The myth of the noble, self-sacrificing scientist should never have been allowed to grow beyond the embryonic stem cell stage, and most scientists will tell you as much. But science as a discipline weeds out most of the bluster and blarmy, because it asks for proof. “One of the first things you learn in science,” one Caltech biologist told me, “is that how you want it to be doesn’t make any difference.” This is a powerful principle, and a very good thing, even a beautiful thing. This is something we should embrace as the best part of ourselves, our willingness to see the world as it is, not as we’re told it is, nor as our confectionary fantasies might wish it to be. Science is also extraordinarily unifying. You go to a great lab or to a scientific meeting, and you will see scientists from around the world, talking to each other and forming international collaborations. This is something we should be proud of, even if we ourselves are not scientists – that our species, our collective minds, our heads knocked together, are capable of making sense of the universe. So to me, this, more than anything, is what being an atheist means, an ongoing devotion to exploration, a giving of pride of place to evidence. And much to my dismay, religion often is at odds with the evidence-based portrait of reality that science has begun, yes, only just begun, fleshing out. The biggest example of this is in the ongoing debate over evolution. This is like Rasputin, or the character from the horror movie Halloween – it refuses to die. The statistics are appalling. This year, according to the Washington Post, some 40 states are dealing with new or ongoing challenges to the teaching of evolution in the schools. Four-fifths of our states. According to a recent CBS poll, 55 percent of Americans believe that god created humans in their present form – and that includes, I’m sorry to say, 47 percent of Kerry voters. Only 13 percent of Americans say that humans evolved from ancestral species, no god involved. Only 13 percent. The evidence that humans evolved from prehominid primates, and they from earlier mammals, and so on back to the first cell on earth some 3.8 billion years ago is incontrovertible, is based on a Himalayan chain’s worth of data. The evidence for divine intervention is, to date, non-existent. Yet here we have people talking about it as though they were discussing whether they prefer chocolate praline ice cream or rocky road, as though it were a matter of taste.

To me, this borders on being, well, unethical. And to me, instilling in my daughter an appreciation for the difference between evidence and opinion is a critical part of childrearing. So when I tell my daughter why I’m an atheist, I explain it is because I see no evidence for a god, a divinity, a big bearded mega-king in the sky. And you know something – she gets that. She got it way back when, and I think once you get it, it’s pretty hard to lose it. People sometimes say to me, jokingly or otherwise, just you wait. She’s going to grow up and join a cult, be a moonie or a jew for jesus. But in fact the data argue against it. The overwhelming majority of people who join cults, more than three-quarters, were raised as one or another type of Christian, including Methodists, Episcopalians, Baptists, the works; and no greater percentage of atheists than in the general population. I’m sure Katherine will figure out a way to drive me nuts some day, but I don’t think the Rahjneeshi route is it.

Ah, but what of values, of learning the difference between right and wrong, good and bad? What about tradition, what about ritual, what about the holidays that children love so much? How will a child learn to be good without religious training? Well, damn. Do you really need formal religion to teach a child to be good, to be honest, to try not to hurt other people’s feelings, to care about something other than yourself? These are all variants on the golden rule, and there is nothing more powerful, in my experience, than sitting down with your kid and saying, how would you feel if somebody did that to you? There is a growing body of scientific research that demonstrates we are by nature inclined to cooperate, to trust others, even strangers, to an extraordinary degree. Even strangers we can’t see, over the internet, and even strangers that we’ll never meet again. None of this owes anything to the ten commandments. Which of those commandments tell you to help a stranger who looks lost, or jump into a river to help saving a drowning kid, or donate blood, maybe even a kidney or a slice of liver? Sure, people also do terrible things, scam you, betray you, steal from you, on and on. But sheesh, Rush Limbaugh was and for all I know still is a junkie, and priests abuse choir boys, and on and on.

...I don’t know the answer to fear of death, surprise surprise. But I find it interesting that religious people, who talk ceaselessly of finding in their religion a larger sense of purpose, a meaning greater than themselves, at the same time are the ones who insist their personal, copyrighted souls, presumably with their 70-odd years of memory intact, will survive in perpetuity. Maybe that’s the real ethic of atheism. By confronting the inevitability of your personal expiration date, you know there is a meaning much grander than yourself. The river of life will go on, as it has for nearly 4 billion years on our planet, and who knows for how long and how abundantly on others. Matter is neither created nor destroyed, and we, as matter, will always matter, and the universe will forever be our home.

via arts & letters daily