Teaching the Good in Godless

Posted on February 15, 2013 by Umwelt Utahpia

Alles in Ordnung:  so who’s different?
Photo by Ptarmi Kilgore

“Not possessing a religious basis for morality, atheists are fundamentally incapable of having a coherent system of morality.”

 –Conservapedia,  Atheism & Morality

“The biggest damage religion does is indoctrinating and brainwashing children.”

 –Richard Dawkins, in a The Times of India interview with Vineet Gill, 25 Jan 2012

As a precociously atheist child, I was often asked by friends why I didn’t just rob banks if I don’t believe in God, Heaven and Hell.  After all, morality comes from God and is taught to us through religion, right?

Today, as a father of two pre-teen children, I often think about my role in raising my kids to become intelligent, responsible, productive and socially well-adjusted adults.  My wife Ptarmi is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS) and, notwithstanding Dawkins’s stance about the damage caused by parents brainwashing their children with religion, we agreed our children would benefit from church membership.

I embraced raising our children to be LDS because the church, like many religions, has a strong moral education program.  The ideals of service to others, charity to the needy and less fortunate, loving one’s neighbors and welcoming strangers, honesty, self-reliance, healthy living, obeying the laws of the land, being respectful to others, not stealing and plagiarizing, working hard and honoring the family are among the many lessons children are taught each week through organized church instruction plans and activities.  These are lessons that should be taught to any child who is expected to become a productive member of modern society.

Yet while many religions have programs for the development of one’s moral and ethical character, I believe such a coherent set of moral principles suitable for teaching children is absent for parents with an atheistic and naturalistic worldview.  In general, people who are a-religious and do not believe in the supernatural often share a worldview that is naturalistic and a conception of reality that is evidence-based.  Critical thinking and an appreciation of scientific methodology are other qualities shared by the a-religious (though religiously affiliated people may possess such qualities in abundance as well).

But perhaps because many of us arrived at our naturalistic worldviews through individual effort and experience rather than via the centuries-tested, mass recruitment  schemes of modern religions, there is no unified canon of principles and texts that the a-religious can employ in a consistent, programmatic plan of instruction for developing the moral characters of our children.  Certainly, there are vast amounts of subject materials available—such as humanist literature, discussions and treatises on atheism, self-help guides for critical, logical and skeptical thinking, etc.—but parents must pick and choose for each family, and in a way, they have no choice but to home-school their children in this regard.  The disciplines of science, skepticism and critical thinking provide little guidance in the moral development of one’s mind and character.

Could a canon of instruction be assembled for the moral development of a-religious children, rivaling the generally successful programs of the great religions or with the impact of the ethical teachings of the Bible, the Koran, the Torah, the Buddhist moral paths?   Issue #114 of The Brights’ Bulletin informed me of the death of the prominent secular humanist Paul Kurtz, adding that he had selected his book Affirmations:  Joyful and Creative Exuberance as his choice for “Books by Brights”.  Affirmations is a collection of thoughts and beliefs that Kurtz offers as a way to living the good life, full of joy, wisdom, and ethical behavior (and free of faith-based, supernatural thinking).

I suggest that Kurtz’s Affirmations is a good start in creating a common canon of texts and materials for moral instruction by parents who want to raise their children to be bright and good.  Similar to Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations and Confucius’s Analects that have had tremendous impact on the mores and ethical thinking of their respective civilizations, Affirmations contains lucid insights into human nature that serve as lessons for appropriate behavior or optimal actions in the context of a modern secular society, without resorting to magical deities or assumptions of faith.  What the book lacks perhaps in organization or conciseness, it makes up for in its grander purpose.

Do you know of other texts that should belong in the canon?  Future generations of bright parents and children could benefit greatly from the seeds sown by dialogue on this topic today.

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6 Ways to Jump-Start Your Life

Posted on February 14, 2013 by A Rational Woman

Checked_elephantSpring comes early where I live in Southern California, but anytime can be a good time to give yourself the refreshing feeling of starting anew.

And for those who still make New Year’s resolutions, it’s a good bet that many of those well-intentioned goals are now moldering away in a neglected corner of your subconscious. (If that’s not true in your life, please share your own tips for stick-to-itiveness!)

In that spirit, I offer six suggestions, some based on the latest findings of positive psychology. Try one for your own personal jump start.

1. Focus on the Positive:  Give yourself credit by listing resolutions you made in the past and reflecting on those you actually kept. This can help you see the long slow pattern of change, and remind you that change is indeed possible.  We tend to remember our failures, but we can learn to build up resiliency and upbeatness by seeking out the successes.

2.  Simplify: Even cleaning out one junk drawer feels good. Or make a list (mine is called “The Big Declutter List”), going room to room in your imagination. Just putting on paper all the things you intend to do to simplify your environment feels refreshing, even if you only accomplish a tiny bit at a time. Taking the idea a giant step further, write down where your time goes. That’s the first step to cutting down on inessentials so you can focus better on what’s truly meaningful to you.

3.  Get physical. Try out a new form of physical exercise, or do the same thing differently. There are so many ways to making walking around your neighborhood more fun, for example, whether you’re walking with a kid or a mate or a pal or by yourself. One I like is what I call a “What’s new” walk. Pay attention to details and notice every single thing that’s new or different to you, such as a new car in front of your neighbor’s house, or a cat on a roof, or a box in the trash that shows someone bought a new coffeemaker.

4.  Change the music. Ask a friend to lend you a CD (or however you obtain your music) in some musical form you’re never listened to before:  blues, jazz, opera, Renaissance music, rap. Give it a chance and try to grasp why some people are aficionados of that form. You can do the same with films or books. Some of my most fun reading experiences have been when I agree to read, for my blogs, a genre I hardly ever read.

5.  Revamp your  workspace. Does your workspace, at home or at work, reflect your current goals? Subtract something old, add something new.

6. Pick one small habit to change: Whether it’s checking your email constantly or leaving your pleasure reading until you’re too sleepy to enjoy it, or something related to your eating habits or some relationship issue, even working on changing one small habit is bound to shake up your awareness.

Copyright (2013) by Susan K. Perry

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Blessed Are the Happy

Posted on February 1, 2013 by Umwelt Utahpia

Happy“Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.”

─ Jean Baudrillard

Molding statistics to fit one’s preconceived conclusions is such a common practice that it’s a cliché even to point out when it occurs.  But sometimes, I just can’t resist….

The following headline appeared on the 5 October 2012 on-line edition of Deseret News, Utah’s 2nd largest daily newspaper by circulation:

“Religious Americans more inclined to have upbeat outlook.”

The article by Matthew Brown begins with the following declaration:

“Religious Americans, despite suffering hardships during the recession, still have faith in the American dream and are optimistic about the country’s future, surveys in the past two years have shown.

“The most recent poll by the Public Religion Research Institute found 53 percent of Americans believe the American dream still holds true, while 54 percent said the nation’s best days are ahead.

“According to a demographic breakdown of the survey taken in August, 81 percent of the 2,500 sampled said religion played an important role in their lives.”

Checking the survey myself, I found it confirms the 53% and 54% figures, but these reflect the responses from all Americans, not just the religious respondents as Brown implies.  In fact, since the survey focused on the white working class, religiousness of the respondents wasn’t even a factor in the American dream question.  And while the optimism question did differentiate responses by religious affiliation, white evangelical Protestants and white mainline Protestants are less optimistic about America’s future than religiously unaffiliated Americans, a category that includes atheists and agnostics!

The 81% percent statistic cited by Brown is found neither in the report nor in the Public Religion Research Institute’s summary of the report, so even if it is accurate, there is no way to know how it relates to the other data.  The most one can conclude from the report is that a majority of Americans surveyed believe in the American dream and are optimistic about America’s future, and some religiously affiliated Americans are more optimistic, and others less optimistic, than religiously unaffiliated Americans.

Brown’s article continues on to cite another survey that presumably provides additional evidence to his claim that religious Americans tend be more upbeat.  Again, when I checked the actual survey, the data were inconsistent with Brown’s interpretation.

In recent years, several studies have reported that religious Americans might be happier than non-religious Americans.  As with the results of any serious study, these should be reviewed and validated, employing the proven best practices of scientific research.  The data then lead to improvements in our understanding of American social psychology and culture.  In contrast, Brown reverses this process by sustaining a preconceived conclusion with handpicked bits of data taken out of context from their sources.  Pointing out the error of such statistical manipulations is worth a cliché or two.

References:

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My Body, My Abortion

Posted on February 1, 2013 by A Rational Woman

choiceIf I were ever going to regret my long-ago decision to have an illegal abortion, it would have been on the ride home afterward. A sudden snowstorm caused the car I was in to slide into a snow bank. I began to bleed heavily and spent the next two days at a hospital in the tiny town of Lordsburg, New Mexico, pretending to the kind nurses that I’d had a miscarriage.

I could have died. The bleeding was from an infection, a result of having had my abortion in Juarez, Mexico, in a frigidly cold and not-very-medical-looking room, after paying with cash borrowed from friends. The car for the long mid-winter drive from Los Angeles was borrowed, too.

Still, I’ve never regretted having that abortion, only that it was illegal. This was just before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion 40 years ago. No one should have to go to such lengths to avoid unwanted motherhood.

In my mind, what was removed from my body wasn’t a baby yet. It was a mistake, and a correctable one. I didn’t want to leave school, or tell my parents, or be tied to the father, whom I had been considering not seeing anymore. I’d been on birth control pills, using a fake married name to get them from a private doctor. Only a month or two before the pills failed, the doctor had mentioned that this type of sequential pill wasn’t turning out to be as reliable as expected, and did I want to switch. From today’s vantage point, I have no idea what laziness or adolescent illogic kept me from changing pills. But I left it up to the doctor and he let me stay on them, and they failed soon after.

Every time a man masturbates, he’s throwing away thousands of half-babies. Every time a woman menstruates, a potentially viable egg slips away unfertilized. And that’s fine. We have options. We’re civilized, and science explains why unwanted stuff happens and, sometimes, how to stop it from happening. We don’t hesitate to kill unwanted viruses and bacteria that attack our bodies.

The less-than-two-months-old bean-sized bundle of dividing cells I had scraped out of me in Mexico all those years ago? Yes, it had eyelids, it had knees, and it had a very primitive bit of brain. Could it go on to develop without me? To become human? Impossible. And so, misbegotten parasite that it was, its future was mine to decide, and I couldn’t see a future for it.

I don’t understand those who are working so hard today to take away women’s freedom to decide how their own bodies are used. Bearing a child that you’ve chosen to have, or willingly surrendered to having, changes a woman’s life in every way, some of those ways unforeseeably wondrous. But the idea that someone whose belief system is entirely different from mine should make laws that affect me in such an intimate way is anathema to me.

The name Lordsburg might mean something special to some individuals. It is, after all, a town named for a supernatural entity. For me, it will forever be a reminder of a misguided law that could have killed me.

We may always disagree about some of the specifics of right and wrong, but let’s keep good laws stating that your religion stops at the borders of my skin.

Copyright (2013) by Susan K. Perry

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Helmet Safety Laws of Utahpia

Posted on January 18, 2013 by Umwelt Utahpia

Helmets“No brilliance is required in law, just common sense….”

─ John Mortimer

In the “Justice” episode of the television series Star Trek:  The Next Generation, the starship Enterprise crew investigates the culture of the newly discovered humanoids, the Edo.  Edo society is virtually free of crime and maintains only a small group of “mediators” to serve as what we would call peace officers.  Each day, the mediators randomly and secretly designate a “Punishment Zone”.  Anyone caught breaking any law within the Punishment Zone is subject to the death penalty, without exception.  Since no one knows where the Punishment Zone is on any given day, the system deters people from committing any crime, anywhere.

The youthful Wesley Crusher is among the Enterprise landing team members.  He accidentally crashes into a greenhouse that happens to be in the Punishment Zone; consequently, Wesley is sentenced to death for destruction of property. The Edo dismiss the fact that Wesley is a visitor who is unfamiliar with their laws, and assert that ignorance of the law is no excuse, prompting one Enterprise officer to ask on Wesley’s behalf, “When has justice ever been as simple as a rulebook?”  I would add that just laws should be based on common sense so that the unwary can reasonably expect to avoid illegal activities while going about their normal business.

I’m a long-time resident of Utah, licensed to ride motorcycles for years, but I admit my ignorance about state helmet laws.  Trusting that the laws must be at least rational, I put a bicycle helmet on my 8 year old son Evan while I donned an adult-sized motorcycle helmet, and we rode out on my Vespa scooter for a 3 mile trip into town.  On our way home, we were pulled over by a city police officer.  I was cited for violating Utah’s helmet safety law that requires minors on motorcycles to wear DOT-approved helmets.  Just as the officer was issuing the ticket to me, a family of bicyclists zipped past us, all wearing bicycle helmets like Evan’s.

I accepted the ticket without comment, but on the ride home and afterwards, I couldn’t help feeling like Wesley in the “Justice” episode.  I did a little research and found that Utah has no helmet requirement for motorcyclists, except for riders 17 years and younger, and no bicycle helmet requirement.  In fact, barely 19 states in the U.S. have mandatory helmet laws for all motorcyclists.  Not knowing the laws, I had reasoned that, in a collision between a bicycle and a motor vehicle—even a small one like my Vespa—conservation of momentum would transfer much of the crash force to the bicycle, yet cyclists who share the street with motorists protect themselves only with the standard bicycle helmet.  Thus, I had figured, a bicycle helmet should provide Evan with enough protection–at least to satisfy any common sense law.  Maybe it’s just stubbornness, but I’m bothered more by the fact that my reasoning had failed than by getting a ticket!

Of course, ANY law requiring helmet use is a good thing, and protecting children from preventable injuries ALWAYS should be a priority.  But why do we accept the annual deaths of hundreds of un-helmeted riders and cyclists, particularly of accident-prone young adults in whom society has already invested so much, while protecting only a small group of minors beyond (my) common sense?  Cold-hearted economic arguments might not convince many people but they would be a better basis for rational helmet safety laws than notions of preserving personal liberties.

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The Best (Atheist) Singing Acting Comedian

Posted on January 17, 2013 by A Rational Woman
Photo of Tim Minchin copyright Linzy@angryfeet.com

Photo of Tim Minchin copyright Linzy@angryfeet.com

When I initially watched a video of Tim Minchin performing one of his songs to his own piano-playing, it was love at first sight. His timing is great, his rational philosophy is matchless, he’s delightfully honest about love and human absurdity and parenthood and prejudice and religion. Plus he’s very funny and rather attractive in a self-mocking semi-androgynous way.

Minchin, an Australian, has been touring the world for several years, growing his audience city by city. I saw his act in person in Los Angeles, and it was a terrific show. Let me share a few quotes and links that will demonstrate why Minchin’s popularity is soaring and ought to soar even higher.

You might start with his own site where you’ll find what he’s up to and get a flavor of his personality, as well as some videos and cool photos.

Thirty videos are found on his own YouTube channel.

The intrepid (and most thorough) explorer should search YouTube here.

Among my favorites of his songs are “Not Perfect”; “If You Open Your Mind Too Much, Your Brain Will Fall Out”; “Confessions”; “If I Didn’t Have You;” and

“Storm” is his prose/poem/rant against NewAgey beliefs about medicine, and other sorts of absurd quasi-spirituality.

Minchin’s TV debut is a recurring role in Season 6 of the (unaccountably popular) Showtime program Californication starring David Duchovny. I don’t keep up with musical theater, but he played Judas in the musical Jesus Christ Superstar and wrote the music and lyrics for Matilda the Musical.

Here’s an 11-minute video of Tim Minchin on Religion.

And finally, to get a non-tuneful sense of Minchin’s beliefs, here are a few quotes from various interviews I found online:

“I think [religion is] a bad force but that’s because I’ve never ever had it and I think there’s no need for it. All I see is people not wanting gays and women to have power.”

“These days I’ve refined the way I talk about these things. You won’t see me sort of going ‘you’re an idiot for believing anything!’ I say believe what you like but you’re not special, no one’s special, you have to be accountable for your moral choices.”

“I write about love all the time. It’s one of my favorite topics. I try to address, not love specifically, but in my shows, the misconception that to be skeptical is to be cynical. Or that to have no religious belief is to see no beauty in the world. For me, to observe a sunset and not attach to it any supernatural or mystical significance is to see its true beauty. You can be completely overwhelmed by beauty and the inexplicable nature of a sunset. There [are] degrees to which it’s inexplicable, I mean [there are] the ongoing questions about why.”

If you can’t get enough of Minchin’s gorgeous piano-playing, don’t miss his “Peace Anthem for Palestine.”

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A Radically Rational Approach to Marriage

Posted on January 11, 2013 by A Rational Woman

handshakeMost of the world’s cultures advocate some form of the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. You’d think treating your mate according to such a rule would be ideal.

Not necessarily. Not if it means you’d be giving what you want for yourself, not what the other person wants. I like to think in terms of an even more utopian version of the Golden Rule for couples: Do unto your partner as your partner would like, not as you would like or as you wish he or she would like.

Even better is what I call the “Couple’s Manifesto of Love”: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” For our purposes, “needs” equals “wants” (and “his” obviously equals “her”). Avoid a tit-for-tat mentality, what psychologists call an exchange orientation, to focus on what’s good for both partners, also known as a communal orientation. Research has shown that such a cooperative attitude is far more likely to contribute to sustained satisfaction for both partners.

So rather than “you scratch my back, I scratch yours,” when tonight’s scratcher has a need, his or her partner will try to provide it.

And that’s what I found to be true in my research for Loving in Flow: How the Happiest Couples Get and Stay That Way.

WHAT’S FAIR?

Often, both partners in struggling relationships believe they’ve done the most compromising. They’ve considered the other first when making decisions, and put their own needs on hold for the sake of pleasing the other. And each may believe the other has not done so. Such biased thinking is easy to slip into, especially when you’re stressed.

One mid-30s man I interviewed, married 16 years with two young children, admitted to me that he “keeps score” at times, particularly when he’s tired. He told me, “Sometimes my wife will be in the kitchen and I’ll be upstairs and she’ll ask me to get her a glass of water. I’ll get the water, but it bugs me at the time. Then it just fades away.” While his wife might feel entitled to this minor bit of caretaking, he feels he’s done more than half the work already by putting in long hours.

Things tend to come out most evenly if the two of you accept each other’s subjective analyses of how much is being contributed. It took me a while to trust, for example, that the many hours my spouse spends maintaining his garden (his passion) is as valid a use of his time as is my reading of two newspapers daily. Actively supporting your partner’s view of the world is a way of showing love.

WHAT DO YOU HATE LEAST?

I recommend discussing how various activities exact a different amount of psychic energy from each of you. What if you discover that one of you would prefer to give a half-hour massage than untangle one garden hose? Psychologist Andrew Christensen told me in an interview that his wife hates making business phone calls, so he makes them. “If I can do a thing easily,” he explains, “then I do it. I think that’s the best system because it’s individualized.”

Once you get the hang of the Couple’s Manifesto, you won’t worry about having your turn. Reciprocation wariness, holding back in the moment from giving what might feel like more than your “half,” makes it harder to form a strong trusting bond. And then you are less likely to get what you want.

I once came across a book aimed at parents in which the author insisted: “Never give away the ice cream.” But think about how manipulative that is. You’re ensuring that every pleasant activity is connected to a desirable behavior preceding it. I believe the opposite is true: you should frequently give away the ice cream, especially to your mate. If you espouse a philosophy of “only give when you have already gotten,” it’s as though you’re standing there with your arms crossed, waiting for the other person to show good will. In the best relationships, good will is taken for granted.

Some therapists have suggested that the partner who makes a small change should get a payoff, so that if you talk to your  mate for a half-hour as she’s been asking you to do, you get to choose a movie that week. From my own experiences and those of others, I can tell you that such tit-for-tat efforts are ineffective at creating long-term change.

Fairness ought never become a battle cry. If you’re too busy tabulating every penny spent, every minute of effort, every compromise made regarding what to eat or watch, it’s liable to slip your mind that you’re on the same side in this relationship.

[This post was adapted from Loving in Flow.]

Copyright (2013) by Susan K. Perry

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Family Secrets Revealed

Posted on January 4, 2013 by Umwelt Utahpia
Typical Japanese grave: my uncle's family tomb in Yamagata prefecture.

Typical Japanese grave: my uncle’s family tomb in Yamagata prefecture.
Photo: Chie Takahashi

My mother, Yukino Asai, is a native of Gunma Prefecture, Japan.  Born in 1934, her life began not only in a place but also a time very different from New Jersey where she lives today.  Over the decades, she’s told and re-told countless stories from childhood, and I’ve tried to piece together her most vivid memories into a picture of what it was like to be a girl in the early Showa period.

One story that highlights this “another world-another time” aspect of my mother’s childhood concerns her family grave.  A traditional Japanese grave is a multigenerational tombstone that has a chamber beneath it in which boxes containing the cremated remains (“cremains”) of deceased family members are placed.  Family members regularly visit their tombstone on specific holidays to give offerings (water, incense, flowers, and food) and tidy up the site around the tomb.

Since my first visit as a preschooler, I’ve been to the Asai family grave site more than a dozen times with various members of my Japanese and American families.  The tombstone is of average size and style, with little to distinguish it from the other tombstones in the Buddhist temple cemetery.  As tradition expects, my aunts and uncles pour water over the tombstone with a ladle, light several incense sticks, lay flowers and sometimes leave tangerines around the stone façade.  Oddly, they then repeat the rituals at a spot on the ground about 3 feet from the tombstone, on what looks to be several fist-sized stones that have been pressed into the dirt.  Having grown up with these practices, I never thought to ask about the second offerings to the random stones.  It’s just what we always did.

Several summers ago, we had the fortune of having several family members in Japan at the same time.  Taking advantage of the coincidence, my mother, my two cousins, and my family (my wife Ptarmi, two children, and myself), decided to visit the Asai grave.  Sensing that this might be the last time we would be at the grave together, my mother—who in just two years had endured the deaths of her older and younger sisters—asked us to gather around the stones in the ground next to the tomb.

“I think it’s about time I talked to you about our family secret,” my mother began, directing her words to my cousins and me.  “Only my siblings and I knew the truth about this secret, and we’ve kept it for nearly 60 years, but now, the memories are fading, so it’s safe for the secret to come out.”

“These stones,” my mother continued, “mark a grave.  Beneath them lies a child, the little son of Aunt Jane.”  My mother referred to her sister Setsuko—called “Jane” by everyone—who had died from tuberculosis before I was born, more than 50 years ago.  I’ve heard many stories about Aunt Jane’s incredible intelligence and courageous civic activities.  In the 1950s, she was an outspoken advocate for the fair treatment of laborers and had helped organize a union at the factory where she worked.  But she was unmarried and childless, I had thought.

“The boy was illegitimate.  He was so cute, always smiling, but had a weak constitution.  He died when he was two.  The father was a nice enough man but Jane couldn’t marry him…he was Korean.”  Historically, people of Korean heritage have not been treated kindly by the Japanese; a Korean-Japanese couple would meet with social intolerance similar to a Black-White couple in the U.S. at the time.  So the family secret is as much about Aunt Jane’s affair with a Korean man as it was about her illegitimate baby.

My 7 year old daughter, fluent in Japanese, immediately responded with, “That’s it?  That’s the family secret?  Big deal!”  Thanks to Japan’s enthusiastic embrace of South Korean pop culture today, my kids know nothing about past discrimination against Koreans.  Even my mother and much of her generation have at last dropped most of their old biases and are expressing their newly found admiration for (South) Korean history and culture.

So the secret, by today’s norms, turns out to be the typical stuff of a daytime TV soap opera, which is probably why my mother thought it okay to reveal now.  And though I relish the fact that we had an old family secret involving a heroic activist aunt’s clandestine affair, her tragic child’s death, and the family tombstone, I am happier that we live in a world where these secrets can be discussed openly as a lesson about the past with our children, who just might grow up with fewer irrational biases and a greater appreciation for diversity than we have.

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10 Bright Ways to Think about Death

Posted on January 4, 2013 by A Rational Woman

sands of timeIt may seem paradoxical, but what more rational way for a Bright to say good-bye to the old year and welcome a new one than to consider the end of everything?

That’s why I’ve compiled some approaches toward death held by various clear thinkers. Philosophers, psychologists, scientists, poets, and novelists have expressed a wide array of attitudes about dying. I find each of the ones below worth pondering. Perhaps one or more will help you make your own peace with mortality.

1. Plan ahead. When it comes to death, many prefer life-long denial, according to Virginia Morris, author of the practical (and entertainingly written) Talking about Death. By giving serious thought to what you want to have happen at your end, you may have a chance at experiencing the kind of dying scenario you’d prefer. The vast majority of us apparently get the opposite of what we hope for, living wills and “do-not-resuscitate orders” notwithstanding.

2. Get used to it. The opposite of denial is to accustom yourself to the reality that everyone, absolutely without exception, regardless of dreams and hopes and faith, has to die, including you. Treat the dread like any other phobia and think about it so much, in a controlled way, that it eventually bores you a little and terrifies you a little less.

3. Don’t gather regrets. Arrive at your deathbed without the added gloom of feeling you’ve made irreparable mistakes. If you’re particularly lucky, you may have some time to tidy up loose ends and various kinds of remorse, but better not to count on that.

4. Connect. Talk about death with someone who shares and thus validates your fears. Reading psychiatrist and novelist Irvin D. Yalom‘s book, Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death, feels like sitting in the presence of a wise, earnest, soothing friend. Lacking a loved one or a therapist who “gets it,” make a point, Yalom suggests, of connecting with the larger community, including making use of online support groups.

5. Find your meaning. Existentialists like Yalom and literate thinkers such as Julian Barnes in his Nothing to Be Frightened Of note that fear of dying often brings up fears of not having lived well enough, as well as not long enough. So make time to think about living a fulfilling life. Yalom mentions Nietzsche’s “eternal return” thought experiment, in which you imagine living your identical life “again and again for all eternity.” The idea there is to lead us “away from the preoccupation with trivial concerns to the goal of living vitally.”

The Novelists Speak

6. See the biggest picture. The idea Barnes explores near the end of Nothing to Be Frightened Of is my favorite. It’s also the bleakest and may not work for you (as it doesn’t really work for Barnes). It’s the idea that, sometime in the coming six billion years before the sun burns out, evolution will discard “us,” these current millennia’s humans, as it favors the most adaptable. Art will not defeat death; the far future will not recognize us at all. While that very big idea doesn’t offer license to be selfish, it does suggest (to me) how very inconsequential is the task of sweeping the driveway or the pain of a tennis elbow.

7. Wanting more is selfish.  From The Crow Road, a novel by Iain Banks):

The belief that we somehow moved on to something else — whether still recognizably ourselves, or quite thoroughly changed — might be a tribute to our evolutionary tenacity and our animal thirst for life, but not to our wisdom. That saw a value beyond itself; in intelligence, knowledge and wit as concepts — wherever and by whomever expressed — not just in its own personal manifestation of those qualities, and so could contemplate its own annihilation with equanimity, and suffer it with grace; it was only a sort of sad selfishness that demanded the continuation of the  it was only a sort of sad selfishness that demanded the continuation of the individual spirit in the vanity and frivolity of a heaven.

8. Just be here now. In the novel The Music Teacher, by Barbara Hall, who is a  novelist and producer, one character says:

Nothing is real, and nothing is not real. Things just are. That’s why you try to be in the moment. Because you might as well be somewhere. And all evidence seems to point to the fact that being here, now, is where all the good stuff happens.

And another responds:

Like when you’re playing a riff, and you’re not worried about finishing it. You’re just in it.

9. Being the center of everything becomes less important with age. From an article in the N.Y.Times Magazine by Daphne Merkin about novelist Margaret Drabble:

 “As I get older,” Drabble confided, “I do fear my physical world is getting thinner. When I was younger, I led multiple lives. When I’m here in Porlock, everything flows in again. It doesn’t matter if I’m thinning out. . . . The trees are full, the sea is full and I am getting more ghostly. The physical world is taking over and absorbing me and eventually my ashes will be scattered in the churchyard.” And then, taking her aptitude for seeing beyond the glare of self-interest — beyond the moment’s buzz — to its natural extension, she muses unblinkingly on the inevitable void that awaits even those who fill the world with words: “My being the center has ceased to be of importance.”

10. Death is simply part of life. From Christine Falls, the debut crime novel of Benjamin Black (the pen name of John Banville, who won the Man Booker Prize) (the main character is a pathologist who has been beaten up by those who don’t want him snooping into a possible crime):

He had thought he was going to die and was surprised at how little he feared the prospect. It had all been so shabby and shoddy, so ordinary; and that, he now realized, would be the manner of his real death, when it came. In the dissecting room the bodies used to seem to him the remains of sacrificial victims, spent and inert after the frightful, bloody ceremony of their souls’ leaving. But he would never again view a cadaver in that lurid light. Suddenly for him death had lost its terrifying glamour and become just another bit of the mundane business of life, although its last.

  • Do you have an insight, suggestion, or personal philosophy to add to the conversation? Please share.

Copyright (2012) by Susan K. Perry
Follow me on Twitter @bunnyape

 

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Make Every Day a Holiday

Posted on December 28, 2012 by A Rational Woman

Atheist HolidayFrom time to time, I’ll be highlighting a new book about issues that concern me as a Bright and as a rational woman. I don’t claim to be a book critic, rather simply a blogger who knows what she likes and wants to share it with the like-minded.

A book that’s timely now (and anytime) is Penn Jillette’s Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!: More Magical Tales (Blue Rider Press/Penguin).

Penn is the talkative half of the magic act Penn & Teller and co-host of the television program Penn & Teller—Bullshit!

Every Day Is an Atheist Holiday! is conversational, bawdy, in-your-face, amusing, and hard-core atheistic. It puts me in mind of a stand-up shtick rather than a book of essays, but I so appreciate that, in part of the world at least, it’s possible to express oneself in print in such an impolite way.

And Jillette is very very impolite, asking us to feel his crotch and using examples that contain language I’d prefer not to use here. So if you believe that only atheists who are nice and who are patient with traditional beliefs should be writing books or discussing their views publicly, avoid Jillette’s work. If any part of you has ever longed to thumb your nose openly at, well, at whatever you consider unworthy of politeness, then he’s your man.

The first chapter is ostensibly about the Christmas carol “Joy to the World,” which Jillette finds lacking utterly in joy. He first expounds on the “Theme song from Shaft” at some length. Then he segues into why the phrase “The exception proves the rule” drives him buggy, before returning to the deeper implications of “Joy to the World.”

“Religious holidays are about how bad life was,” he writes, “or how good the way distant future or even the afterlife is going to be. . . .  In the New Testament . . . there’s lots of ‘forsake your family and come with me.'”

In another chapter, Jillette explores the complications of using offensive language, either as a joke or as an ironic post-modern statement. He doesn’t believe in tribalism and wishes all the stereotypes would go away, and he hates that it’s so easy to be misunderstood and have people think you believe differently than you do. He’s unusually aware of the power of language to stir emotions, as well as to hurt.

Jillette likes to tell stories from his own history. Some relate to show biz. They’re all rather quirky. It’s hard for me not to like this forthright man.

For me, this is the core of his message:

The awful truth of how sweet life can be is enough to crack me every second. That black-and-white picture of my mom, alive, and bursting with her future in her little wool hat and matching mittens—that . . .  is what scares the shit out of me, and . . . religion can’t protect any of us from that. I’m not afraid of a hot lead enema followed by some serious ass-to-mouth with Satan—give it your worst. I’m afraid of a life that is so full of joy and love that every second just bursts by and is gone. It’s a gorgeous, detailed, 3-D, surround sound, no-flutter-in-the-bass mural done by 10 billion artists, and it’s whipping by the car window at the speed of sound, and I’ll never come back to it. I can take pictures of it, but in the time I hold those pictures up, I’ll have missed another billion images and experiences.

Can you be any more life-affirming than that?

  • Read an excerpt here.
  • Read about a previous book of Jillette’s: God, No!

Copyright (2012) by Susan K. Perry

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