At certain points, all the kids are turned outside to play. They play games that involve a lot of screaming, throwing rocks and slamming doors. One parent bought their kid a vuvuzela. There will be a reckoning.

Not being parents ourselves, we seem to lack the ability to block this out. We haven’t gotten numb to things like the scratches on the sides of our cars from careless kids on bicycles. We spent years trying to keep quiet so that we wouldn’t wake the baby upstairs. Now that baby is a healthy child who like to run, jump and drop things. And move furniture, as near as we can tell.

Anyway, it’s time to move. But it got me thinking about a question that our friend Ty asked on the forum: do we owe it to the world to have children? My wife and I are fairly stable and reasonably prosperous (though a lot of that is because we don’t have kids) We could probably raise a healthy child. Do we owe it to the world to try?

What is a “New Atheist”?

How are the New Atheists different from the previous generations of atheists? Who constitutes the New Atheists, and who are still Old Atheists?

Well, alright, that’s not really the question. The actual question is: what does that mean?

In this day and age, what does marriage mean? Is it a relationship, an economic bargain, a sacred rite, and threadbare custom, what? Does it have a purpose, or is it a pragmatic recognition of a cultural reality?

Mother Jones has an article about Bob Inglis, the former US Representative from South Carolina. Inglis is a profoundly conservative Republican, but wound up losing to another Republican in the primaries because he “strayed from his conservative roots.”

Some of that may be because he voted against the Surge in Iraq, but a lot of it probably comes from his unwillingness to work with the Tea Party wing. Here’s how he describes one meeting:

I sat down, and they said on the back of your Social Security card, there’s a number. That number indicates the bank that bought you when you were born based on a projection of your life’s earnings, and you are collateral. We are all collateral for the banks. I have this look like, “What the heck are you talking about?” I’m trying to hide that look and look clueless. I figured clueless was better than argumentative. So they said, “You don’t know this?! You are a member of Congress, and you don’t know this?!” And I said, “Please forgive me. I’m just ignorant of these things.” And then of course, it turned into something about the Federal Reserve and the Bilderbergers and all that stuff. And now you have the feeling of anti-Semitism here coming in, mixing in. Wow.

The thing is, there’s very little new in this. Most of the things the Tea Party is spewing date back decades, or even centuries. As Richard Hofstadter pointed out in his famous essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics, these kinds of conspiracy theories date back to before the founding of America. Sometimes it seems like the only thing that changes is the nationality of the troops that are hiding just outside of our borders and waiting to invade.

I got into a discussion once with a professor who insisted that this is a uniquely American phenomena. I’m not quite as sure. So here’s my question: Is the kind of conspiracism seen above familiar to those outside the US? Do you encounter conspiracy theories regularly in your country?

This is mainly my own curiosity, so thanks in advance for your input.

So it seems that Anne Rice still loves her some Jesus, but she’s calling it quits with Christianity. She says, “It’s simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group.”

Being called “deservedly infamous” by the author of gothic vampire novels and s&m stories must sting a bit.

I doubt she cares, but she’s managed to make folks on both sides a bit huffy. Hemant gets cranky at people who try to distance themselves from Christianity, while still being, you know, Christian. And of course, many Christians are irritated that Anne Rice isn’t acknowledging that there are other types of Christianity that aren’t anti-gay, anti-woman’s equality, and so forth. Has she never heard of the Episcopal Church or the UCC?

Does knowing a writer’s (or director’s, or actor’s, etc) religious belief affect your enjoyment of their work? Will you refuse to buy a book from an author whose beliefs you strongly disagree with?

This was kicked around a bit in yesterday’s post, but let’s focus on it a bit more.

How should the attendees at Comic Con respond to Westboro Baptist?

Some thoughts: Westboro seems to want two things, publicity and lawsuits. So the best response is to deny them both, while still marginalizing them.

Some folks have had luck just blocking them from the view of their intended victims, but I think most of us would rather be more proactive.

Absurd mockery seems to work, like the way Purdue’s Society of Non-Theists dealt with an annoying campus preacher. That was pure serendipity – he just happened to show up on their annual Pastafarian Preaching day – but it’s hard to take someone seriously when people are dancing around them singing pirate songs.

Any ideas?

I was reading through the old Slacktivist archives and laughing at his deconstruction of Left Behind. LeHaye and Jenkins did a miserable job of, among other things, predicting what their “not to distant future” would look like. They made no real attempt to predict technological change, and their work looked dated as soon as it was published.

But are we any better?

What technological changes are you predicting for the near future? What modern trends will turn out to be important?

I had a friend in high school – let’s call him Jacob – who was a stone-cold biology geek. He was the kind of person who would always have a bottle of flynap in his bag.

We teased him unmercifully, of course. But there was a real tinge of jealousy there. Jacob seemed to know where he was going, had a plan for his life and confidence in his abilities to see it through. The rest of us, flailing away, couldn’t help but envy his competence. While the rest of use were struggling with college applications, he already had scholarships lined up.

We all knew that he’d go far. In fact, we expected him to do some real good in the world, since his interest was in genetics and agriculture.

After my freshman year in college, a group of us met up with Jacob again. We were shocked to find that he’d found Religion.

Well, actually, he’d found the Girl, who had introduced him to the Church, which had given him the Religion. The Girl went the way of most freshman romances, but he kept the Church and the Religion.

Now, we’d gone to a Catholic high school, so we were all religious to some degree. Had Jacob just gotten really zealous in his Catholic faith, or jumped ship for a mainline Protestant faith, we wouldn’t have batted an eye. But the Church was a storefront affair with a Charismatic service. The sermon was from a traveling evangelist, and his message was trite and ended with “give me money.” The preacher had a half dozen people with him in front, all playing instruments.

(Incidentally, believers, just because Jesus has inspired you to play music in his honor doesn’t mean that he’s given you the talent to do so. Please, please, put the mandolin down.)

I could just see Jacob throwing away his future to become just one more Charismatic preacher in a little storefront church. Jacob had started believing in the apocalypse and prophecy and the literal word of scripture. We tried to talk to him about it, but, well, college sophomores are not know for their subtle methods of persuasion. Things got ranty, on both sides. We lost touch after that.

How do you talk to someone who seems in danger of slipping into religious fervor? How do you throw them a lifeline?

One of the good things about working in the museum field is that other museum folks are more willing to tell it to you straight. And so, during a tour of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, one curator told a group of us about the historic baseball that Abner Doubleday didn’t have when he didn’t invent baseball, when he wasn’t in Cooperstown, which wasn’t in 1839.

Of course, not everyone wants to hear that, which is why the curator was venting to us. Despite the fact that the Doubleday myth has been roundly debunked for decades now, people still show up at the Hall of Fame wanting to hear the old story about the Civil War general designing the baseball diamond.

This kind of story is sometimes called a “zombie fact,” no matter how many times you try to kill it, it always rises again. Somehow they just seem lodged in our collective memories, and no amount of pounding gets rid of them.

There are a number of national “zombie facts,” like the idea that Columbus was trying to prove the world was round, or the story of Washington and the cherry tree. But I think most of these facts exist on the local level, just as little stories that get passed around the community that no one ever bothers to check.

In this region, we have to tell people that the song “Yankee Doodle” probably wasn’t written at Fort Crailo – which, incidentally, wasn’t really a fort. And no, I’m sorry to say, Captain Kidd did not bury his treasure anywhere along the Hudson, nor did Robert Livingston abscond with any and bury it on his land.

Not, of course, that telling people does any good. The zombie fact always rises to lurch another day.

What sort of “zombie facts” do you have in your region? Are there any that particularly get under your skin?

(Note: Your answers may or may not be used in a top-secret art project…)

For me, one of the most fraught and frustrating words in the english language is the word “spiritual.” Salman Rushdie once complained that everything in Western culture gets stuck with the “spiritual” label. Even walking your dog could be considered spiritual.

There was an episode of Nature dealing with Death Valley. They interviewed some participants in a marathon that ran through the heart of one of the hottest places on earth. One participant, a doctor who could have done a great impression of a dessicated corpse, acknowledged that the race did lasting physical harm to the participants. But, he said, there were spiritual rewards.

Here, “spiritual” is being used as a synonym for “stupid”.

What does the word “spiritual” mean to you? Is there any use for it?

I’m reading Diarmid MacCulloch’s Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years right now. Let me just say that I will NOT be reviewing this thousand page monstrosity. It’s fairly good so far, but I can’t see myself finishing it any time soon.

Sharp-eyed readers will notice that Christianity has gained another one thousand years of history in the subtitle. MacCulloch threw that in to represent the fact that Christianity grew out of a thousand years of Jewish theology and Greek philosophy. And also the fact that Christianity isn’t done yet.

That last bit is an exercise for the reader. Given that no one in America a century ago could have predicted the rise of Mormonism or the rapid spread of Charismatic worship, I’m leery about trying to make predictions about where the religion is going.

Still, it’s worth thinking about. In your country or region, where do you see Christianity headed?

Despite the attention received by the New Atheists, they are just the most recent face of atheism. There have been many previous generation of atheists. In my recent poll, 18% of respondents stated that they had always been an atheist, and presumably this means that most of them were raised in non-theistic households.

The divide between first generation atheists – those who were raised religious but deconverted – and second generation atheists – those who were raised in non-theistic families, is starting to get some attention. There was a recent episode of Point on Inquiry that discussed the matter, creating some discussion in places like Blag Hag and other atheist blogs.

In your experience, is there any difference between first- and second-generation atheists?

Are the first-generation atheists more confrontational, as Elaine Ecklund suggested in PoI? Or is it more complicated than that?

And also, If you’re a second-generation atheist, what motivates you to get involved in the atheosphere?

It’s no secret that atheist blogs frequently act as support groups for people leaving the faith, and a chat rooms for people trying to dissect their old religion. Don’t you occasionally feel left out?

(Thanks to reader Revyloution for suggesting these questions)

I first heard about Adam and Eve in Sunday school. Then I heard about cave men from some pop culture source – the comic strip B.C. maybe.

This confused me. I kept asking people who came first: Adam & Eve or the cave men? I can’t remember ever getting an answer.

Later on someone told me our souls go the Heaven when we die. This confused me. I didn’t have a clear distinction between the mind, the soul and the brain. Alright, I still don’t, but back then it was really pronounced.

So for a little while I imagined Heaven as a place full of disembodied brains walking around on little feet. Somehow this didn’t seem scary, just … weird.

I used to wonder how those disembodied brains played video games. Because Heaven was supposedly the best place ever, so I knew they had to have a lot of arcades. I figured that the brains all stood on really tall stools and moved the joystick with tiny little arms.

What odd questions or beliefs about religion did have when you were a kid?

One debate that has passed me by is the male infant circumcision debate. It always catches me off guard when I suddenly find people with very developed opinions on the matter.

So, in the interest of my education: What are your arguments for or against male infant circumcision?