HumanistLife

Why parents shouldn’t support ‘Operation Christmas Child’

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What could be the harm in sending a Christmas gift to a child in need? At this time of year, schools all across the country are taking part in the Christmas Box appeal, and the task is superficially noble: ask your child to fill a decorated box with toys and essential items and the charity will deliver them to a child who is living in poverty. It’s a tangible, personal way of giving, and it’s immensely popular.

But Operation Christmas Child is run by Samaritan’s Purse, a huge and zealous organisation led by Franklin Graham, son of the famous evangelist Billy Graham. Not only is the organisation openly homophobic, it seeks to proselytise in a manner that most people, including liberal Christians, find unacceptable. As a humanist, I am naturally disquieted by the idea of people performing evangelical work with the intended purpose of conversion; but I am positively offended when this work is performed at the expense of vulnerable children in desperate situations across the globe.

Several other charitable organisations and reputable businesses, including the Cooperative, have withdrawn their support for Operation Christmas Child.[i]  The charity Save The Children has questioned its effectiveness and expressed concerns about the use of evangelism in the context of people in need. Some leading teachers’ Unions, including the NASUWT,  have pointed out the difficult position that schools are placing themselves in when they support such charities without giving careful thought to their stated mission. But despite all of this, hundreds of schools will still take part in Operation Christmas Child this year, unwittingly supporting the work of a right-wing evangelical organisation, with little or no idea of what it stands for.[ii]

Homophobia

It is clear from the Samaritan’s Purse website and Franklin Graham’s social media pages that the organisation has a homophobic agenda. Recently Graham has been raising funds to support Aaron and Melissa Klein, who not only refused to provide services for a lesbian couple in their bakery in Oregon but even quoted Leviticus at a member of the couple’s family. It gets worse. Following consumer complaints posted online by the couple and leading to intervention by the Oregon Department of Justice, Aaron Klein sought support from others by publishing the discrimination complaint on his Facebook account, including the names and shared address of the complainants. This led to the couple receiving homophobic verbal attacks and death threats; they were even concerned that they might lose their foster children (whom they have since adopted). The couple pushed ahead with legal action and the Kleins were ultimately ordered to pay $135,000 in damages for the emotional suffering that they caused. Franklin Graham’s version of events is that the Kleins are conscientious objectors who have ‘done nothing wrong’. He uses their story to fuel resentment against equality laws and curry favour for the ridiculous notion that US Christians experience ‘persecution’, something which seems to have become something of an obsession for him.

This is just one example of the organisation’s homophobia as it seeks to uphold ‘the Biblical definition’ of marriage.  Samaritan’s Purse has also given considerable financial support to the campaign against marriage equality in the USA and Graham has made his own homophobia abundantly clear both in his words and in his deeds. He’s also got some startlingly ignorant opinions about gender.

Proselytising

Many UK representatives hotly defend Operation Christmas Child and claim to have seen no evidence of evangelism or of the accusation that the boxes are distributed with ‘strings attached’. These people are either disingenuous or incredibly naïve. A cursory glance at the charity’s own website provides a wealth of evidence that the explicit, stated purpose of Operation Christmas Child is to convert the child who receives the gift and to encourage them to convert their families. The mission statement says that ‘every gift-filled shoe box is a powerful tool for evangelism and discipleship – transforming the lives of children around the world through the Good News of Jesus Christ’. As one of the representatives in India puts it in this promotional film, ‘children become the harvesters’ for Jesus.  Religious literature is distributed, often in the children’s own language, and this is the charity’s own description of how it is used:

Some of the evangelical literature sent with shoeboxes to impoverished children

Some of the evangelical literature sent with shoeboxes to impoverished children

‘Through The Greatest Journey discipleship programme, boys and girls can become faithful followers of Jesus Christ. Samaritan’s Purse developed The Greatest Journey as a dynamic, interactive Bible study for use in countries around the world where Operation Christmas Child distributes gift-filled shoeboxes. Wherever possible, children receiving shoeboxes are invited to enrol on The Greatest Journey; 2.8 million children have enrolled on this programme since the curriculum was first developed in 2008.’

Many schools either downplay or indeed appear completely ignorant of this aspect of the charity’s work, and UK representatives of Operation Christmas Child will claim that the spreading of the word extends no further than a small booklet of bible stories that may be handed out with the boxes. This is simply not true, or at least it is not true in all cases. Much of the literature used by Samaritan’s Purse demonstrates a clear and direct attempt to convert the young, and the charity aims to enrol children in their brainwashing programme wherever possible.

Numerous critics have observed that Samaritan’s Purse volunteers overseas are often more interested in conversion than provision. According to the President of Operation USA, an international relief organisation, Samaritan’s Purse organised a religious festival after the hurricane in Nicaragua in 1999 and pressurised local churches into taking thousands of children to a baseball stadium in Managua to hear Graham preach; at a time when resources were scarce and people were in desperate need, the money could have been so much better spent on basic supplies and rebuilding work rather than on proselytising. In 2003 the organisation was criticised in the New York Times for holding prayer meetings before it provided help to the people of El Salvador to build the temporary homes that had been provided by US Government funding; interviews with some of the locals reveal that volunteers had distributed religious literature and asked them to accept Jesus Christ as their saviour. Samaritan’s Purse also funded the distribution of Arabic Bibles in Iraq after the war and sent hundreds of volunteers into the country  with the mission of bringing Muslims to Christ. In 2008 they compromised both government-funded aid and diplomacy by attempting to convert Muslims to Christianity following the tsunami in Banda Aceh. After the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, the organisation was criticised in the liberal press for pouring money into evangelising rather than into aid; Graham claimed that the people of Haiti’s spiritual needs were the most urgent concern for his organisation, and he was supported in his endeavours by the ever-delightful Sarah Palin.

One of the reasons why so many people in the UK are completely oblivious to the extreme agenda of Samaritan’s Purse is that it is deliberately not promoted here, to the extent that many earnest and well-meaning volunteers remain blissfully unaware of its sinister nature. This is an excerpt from one of the organisation’s own statements about their UK-based operation, and it implies that there may well be practices that even those who work for the charity in the UK are completely unaware of:

‘Please be assured that the commitment of Samaritan’s Purse to evangelism is as strong as ever. … However, there is a difference in the way the boxes are processed in the UK for overseas shipment. The UK program removes all religious items … and forwards any Christian literature to our National Leadership Teams working in countries where shoebox gifts are distributed, so the Christian literature can be used with children. … The Gospel is also presented locally as part of the distribution of the gifts, and wherever possible, children are offered a Gospel storybook written in their own language called The Greatest Gift of All. Many children are also invited to enrol in a 10-lesson follow-up Bible study program, and upon completion receive a New Testament as a graduation gift.’

In the USA, where evangelism is broadly accepted and commonplace in many parts of the country, the evangelical message is better understood both by donors and by volunteers. In this country, most volunteers and participants in the scheme cling to the notion that if they haven’t seen it then it doesn’t go on. Do not be fooled – it does.

Suggested alternatives

If your local school is irretrievably wedded to the idea of a Christian shoebox scheme, the BHA advise that Link to Hope don’t distribute any literature with their boxes. The Rotary Club also runs a similar scheme and they at least have a proven track record when it comes to providing worthwhile aid within the developing world.  But most charities with a genuine desire to bring change to the developing world and to lift children out of poverty now reject the Christmas box model; donors may well have the best of intentions, but sending a shoe box full of gifts is ultimately a grossly inefficient and environmentally questionable way to give. If your school would like to back a more effective scheme with tangible outcomes you could suggest that they look at those run by Plan UK, Oxfam, Save the Children, Aquabox or Good Gifts.

[i] The delivery service DHL have withdrawn their support, as have the South Wales Fire service. Oxfam have also made it clear that they do not support this organisation. Even some Christian organisations  and individual Christian volunteers are detaching themselves from Samaritan’s Purse due to concerns about the extreme nature of the message.

[ii] Many websites state that concerns have been raised by the Standing Advisory Councils for Religious Education (SACRE). While they offer no national policy on Operation Christmas Child, it has certainly been discussed at local SACREs across the country and some SACREs, for example in Cambridgeshire, have written to their local schools about the concerns. Minutes from the Isle of Wight group describe Operation Christmas Child as “a long-standing issue” yet one that they don’t consider to be their concern, which seems pretty extraordinary. In Surrey, our SACREs have spoken to local representatives of Operation Christmas Child and seem to accept wholesale their reassurances, which they give here. They have not investigated further.

The state of cyberbullying in 2015

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At HumanistLife, our guest authors explore contemporary issues from a humanist perspective. In this piece, writer Daniel Faris asks: what can be done about the epidemic of cyberbullying? 

Cyberbullying is impacting more and more young people. Photo: Fixers via Flickr

Cyberbullying is impacting more and more young people. Photo: Fixers via Flickr

Earlier this year, Monica Lewinsky – yes; that Monica Lewinsky – gave a TED talk in Vancouver in which she explored cyberbullying – that is, bullying that takes place on the Internet.

When the news of her affair with US President Bill Clinton broke in 1998 – right when the Internet was growing into what it has become today – Lewinsky became the first person, she says, to become a victim of cyberbullying. She went to bed one night completely unknown, and then there she was the next day, the subject of headlines and tabloid fodder all around the globe for the next few months.

As time passed, Lewinsky faded from the national spotlight. But she still had a life to live and now, at 41, she’s reclaiming her narrative by speaking about how cyberbullying is a serious problem in the developed world. During her TED talk, Lewinsky said she decided to get involved in the movement to end cyberbullying after hearing about the death of Tyler Climenti, a student at Rutgers University, who killed himself after being cyberbullied about his homosexuality.

‘Public humiliation as bloodsport has got to stop,’ Lewinsky said. ‘Just imagine walking a mile in someone else’s headline.’

Why cyberbullies do it

If we agree with Lewinsky, cyberbullying has been around for about 17 years. Bullying, however, has almost certainly been around as long as human beings. Still, there’s a difference between cyberbullying and the more ‘traditional’ methods.

When a kid says something mean to another kid’s face, the bully gets to see the victim’s reaction with his or her own eyes. Assuming the child isn’t sociopathic, he or she is bound to feel at least a morsel of regret about hurting someone’s feelings.

Now migrate that bullying over to the digital world, and aggressors no longer have to deal with witnessing the negative consequences of their behaviors. With nothing discouraging them from cyberbullying, many bullies’ digital tactics can be even more ferocious.

How prevalent is cyberbullying?

Some groups purport that more than 40 percent of teenagers in the United States have been victims of cyberbullying. But slice that cross-section even further and you’ll find a particularly grotesque statistic: Eight out of every 10 students in the LGBT community are victims of cyberbullying.

On the other hand, those who employ more traditional research methods have concluded that roughly 25 percent of US students have been the victim of cyberbullying, with 16 percent of them admitting that they have been the aggressors.

It doesn’t matter which numbers you choose to agree with; they’re both higher than we’d like them to be. And make no mistake: this issue is hardly exclusive to the United States; a poll of 10,000 youths, conducted by nobullying.com, indicated that 7 in 10 young people worldwide have experienced cyberbullying. They went on to discover that Facebook is home to more online bullying than any other social network; 54% of poll respondents indicated that they had experienced cyberbullying on the site.

Managing the problem

While it’s certainly awful to hear any story that involves a young kid taking his or her own life because of bullying, rather than going on the offensive and trying to eliminate what is a very innate characteristic in children, it’s important for parents to educate their kids and remind them that they’re loved and that words are just words. Yes, people say mean things online. But isn’t that just the nature of the world?

Instead of trying to prevent our children from experiencing life – the ups and the downs, the sadness and the happiness – there’s an emerging tendency to go overboard when it comes to ensuring their safety and well-being. While these parents are certainly well-intentioned, it’s more important to be able to deal with criticisms, failure, and meanness than to act as though such things simply do not exist in the world.

Since we will never completely stop bullying, no matter how hard we try, it doesn’t really make much sense to brand cyberbullying as an ‘epidemic’ simply because the Internet wasn’t ubiquitous 20 years ago. It’s a problem, yes; but the solutions aren’t as simple as we’d like to pretend.

Lessons learned

While many in the media might want everyone to believe that today’s kids can’t walk five feet without getting cyberbullied, kidnapped, or assaulted, the truth of the matter is that kids have learned to deal with the adverse realities of life for millennia. It’s unfortunate that some kids have to be made fun of and picked on, but so long as kids are kids, there are going to be some bad apples in the bunch who are going to push their luck.

But here’s an underreported factoid: young people are increasingly coming to their parents when they’re cyberbullied. Word has gotten out, and people are talking. Bullies have fewer and fewer opportunities to hide behind their devices as they poke fun at their peers, and some who are caught are even facing serious legal troubles.

Cyberbullying is a problem, but so is virtually everything else. Kids watch too much TV. They don’t eat the right foods. They stay up too late. They are too busy. They don’t have enough to do. They have too much homework. The curriculum is not challenging enough. And so it goes.

The remedies for cyberbullying reveal that this is a human issue – not a partisan, religious, or sectarian one. Religion, for example, while purporting to teach us to ‘treat others as we would be treated,’ continues to fail us in real-world issue pertaining to social justice. Humanism, in existing solely in the material world, and concerning itself with objective values, can better speak to the ‘value and agency‘ of human beings – that is, the founding tenets of the humanist movement. In other words: a Christian may tell us that cyberbullying is wrong because God would frown on it. A humanist, meanwhile, will maintain that cyberbullying is wrong because it’s wrong. Objective truths.

Only one of these worldviews is capable of instilling the value of personal responsibility. The other defers to the supernatural as a deterrent.

But here’s another truth: As long as kids are allowed to communicate amongst themselves, they are going to pick on each other. To make sure their children don’t become victims of cyberbullying, parents need to maintain an ongoing and open dialogue with their kids, consistently reminding them to not take things said on the Internet too seriously. Parents should also let them know the kinds of trouble they’ll find themselves in should they decide to harass one of their peers. The more active parents are in their kids’ lives, the less likely we are to hear stories about cyberbullying. It’s as simple as that.

Righteous anger and the death of Leelah Alcorn

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In death, Leelah (pictured above) plead for better treatment of transgender people

In death, Leelah (pictured above) plead for better treatment of transgender people

The recent suicide of a transgender teenager in Ohio is a painful reminder of the worst that can happen when empathy fails us.

In a distressing suicide note, scheduled to appear on her blog within hours of her death, Leelah Alcorn outlined a litany of failings by her parents, most of which appear to have been driven by religious dogma, ignorance and prejudice. In an interview with CNN, the teenager’s mother asserted that she and her husband loved ‘unconditionally’ the dead child that she still insists was her confused and troubled son. As for the gender dysphoria, described so harrowingly in her child’s own suicide note? ‘We don’t support that, religiously,’ she said.

The angry responses to Leelah’s death have been powerful and unsurprising. LGBT activist Dan Savage called for Leelah’s parents to be prosecuted: ‘[they] threw her in front of that truck. They should be ashamed—but first they need to be shamed. Charges should be brought.’ Leelah’s family postponed her funeral and wake due to threats, and hundreds of people have sent enraged messages to the teenager’s mother, accusing her of driving her child to suicide. Online rallying calls urge others to send messages too, providing links to the mother’s Facebook profile and advice on how to contact her and her husband. ‘Let’s all message that woman on Facebook,’ one tweeter exhorts; another has even published what he claims to be the family’s home address. In an ever-growing barrage of furious tweets, Leelah’s parents have been called everything from ‘murderers’ and ‘monsters’ through to ‘demons.’ It makes for horrifying reading, and while I understand the anger, I am disquieted by the lack of humanity shown.

Most people seem to take it for granted that Leelah’s parents feel neither grief nor guilt as a result of their child’s suicide, and some state this supposition as a fact. Others appear to assume that the family’s sorrow and remorse will have been triggered by the actions of online crusaders, and gloat that Leelah’s mother has now blocked all outside messages: ‘Carla Alcorn locked her FB profile. Good. Fuck you. I hope the fear and guilt plagues you and your husband for the rest of your lives.’  The messages are abundant, and increasingly violent: ‘I hope the entire world gives Carla Alcorn hell;’ ‘I hope you wake up every morning and vomit over the guilt you must feel from torturing your beautiful daughter;’ ‘you’ve got blood on your hands, … bitch.’ Most striking of all are the catalogue of self-satisfied statements, in which the authors crow about the lengthy and vitriolic messages they claim to have sent to Leelah’s family: one example reads, ‘sent carla wood alcorn a really long message i basically told her she was going to hell but said it eloquently (kinda).’ One can only imagine its hideous content.

So here’s a thought experiment for those online accusers, safely ensconced behind their keyboards and so confident in the apparent rectitude of their vitriol. Shunned by her community, guilt-ridden, grieving for the child that she clearly failed and confused by the clash between her inherited religious beliefs, the closeted nature of a conservative state and the caustic self-righteousness of her accusers, Carla Wood Alcorn also commits suicide. What would her accusers think then? While some of them, I am prepared to admit, might think ‘good riddance,’ others I am sure would feel responsible. Would they be responsible? Well, partly. This is the power and the danger of social media – we can say anything to anyone, at any time – no time for reflection, no time for regret. It is out there – for better or for worse – just as Leelah’s anguished suicide note is out there, despite her family’s attempts to remove it. Leelah’s own rage at her parents is palpable – ‘Mom and Dad: fuck you.’ She had a right to feel angry, and her parents will have to live with that painful legacy; it is not for the rest of us to hijack those emotions and claim them as our own.

Now I am the first to understand anger. Believe me, I get it. I am someone who rants – I rant and I rave. My favourite topics are all the ones that you’re supposed to avoid at dinnertime. I have risked embarrassment for my husband by calling other men out on sexist remarks, rather than just laugh along like you’re supposed to when a chap engages in ‘jovial banter’ over drinks. I have fought with colleagues over numerous issues, most recently equal marriage, and provoked mortified silences and awkward relations as a result. I will do it again. I have a reputation for speaking out – or shouting out – whatever the social situation and trust me, I am not always popular for it. Thanks to all this, I have lost a few friends into the bargain.

Aristotle believed that there is such a thing as righteous anger: there are times, he said, when not only is it right to be angry, it would be wrong not to be so; the trick, however, is knowing what to be angry about, when to express it, how to express it, and to whom – that’s what is difficult. Blind rage is wrong, he argued, and it is particularly dangerous when it arises from pure emotion, as opposed to reason. Now I reserve the right to embarrass someone at the dinner table, most especially when the table is my own; and with all due respect to Aristotle, I believe that everyone has the right to feel however they wish to, and to express those feelings, within certain parameters. It is entirely natural and understandable that some people have felt unbridled rage towards Leelah’s parents, especially those members of the trans community who have experienced the kind of ignorance and gross misunderstanding that she found herself exposed to. But is it someone’s right to express that anger towards Leelah’s family, so directly and so viciously? Tragic and preventable as her death clearly was, I think it is not.

So where should we direct our righteous anger? Tragically, Leelah’s suicide is anything but unusual. A recent survey indicated that almost half of young transgender people attempt suicide here in the UK, and this shocking statistic is borne out by other recent studies in the USA. Wouldn’t we be better to focus our energies on making things better, to ‘fix society’ as Leelah herself exhorts us to do? In her note, Leelah lays blame very clearly on her parents, but also on the church they belonged to and the Christian counsellors she was forced to see. Shouldn’t our anger be directed at the ignorant self-appointed moralists, those who try to dictate to others how they should live, the pastors keen to say that Leelah did not exist and that Josh was a confused boy who was somehow abused and corrupted by the LGBT community, despite limited access to their support? Instead of sending hateful messages to Leelah’s own family, people should sign the petition to ban transgender conversion therapy, a change in the law that could have a direct impact on improving the lives and prospects of young people like Leelah, and lead a change of hearts and minds in the process.

By all means, be angry at Leelah’s death. But when someone directs their anger at the parents of a child who has just committed suicide? That’s a very bold stance to take. It’s the stance of someone so confident that they have never erred as to be spectacularly foolish in my eyes. A young person is dead. Blame religion. Blame suburban small-mindedness and ignorance. Blame us all for not fighting hard enough and acting swiftly enough to bring the changes that Leelah herself could have benefitted from. And let’s stand together to make those changes: in our schools, in our communities and in our families. Let’s make things better.

The last words belong to Leelah, and her instructions are clear: ‘the only way I will rest in peace is if one day transgender people aren’t treated the way I was, they’re treated like humans, with valid feelings and human rights. Gender needs to be taught about in schools, the earlier the better. My death needs to mean something. My death needs to be counted in the number of transgender people who commit suicide this year. I want someone to look at that number and say ‘that’s fucked up’ and fix it. Fix society. Please.’

Taking Humanism to school

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Aniela Bylinski discusses her experience of sending her daughter to a ‘faith’ school

Children aren't just educated at schools, but socialised there. Isn't it a parent's right to know just how that is being done?

Children aren’t just educated at schools, but socialised there. Isn’t it a parent’s right to know just how that is being done?

After a lot of anxiety and against my wishes, my daughter was assigned a religious school by the county. It was the best school academically, receiving ‘Outstanding’ from Ofsted, but it was not the education that I was concerned about. I had heard differing accounts concerning the religious education from parents whose children already attended the school, other parents were mostly indifferent, but I was becoming more and more uncomfortable with the idea. My daughter was born in a very high birth year and although I appealed to send her to a county primary school, my efforts were disregarded by the authority.

Before my daughter started the school, I met with the headteacher on more than one occasion to express my concerns about what my daughter may be taught.  The head assured me that my daughter would be instilled with Christian values such as tolerance, forgiveness, and love for one another. To me, these were simply human values. I was not satisfied with her explanations and was left wondering if she thought only Christians held these values, and if so, where she thought I got my values from?

We disagreed on the definition of indoctrination. For me, it meant to instil a set of values, one’s own set of values, usually a set based in scripture. So by definition, this is what was going to happen to my daughter, as they were teaching only Christian values.  I asked the headteacher, ‘If my daughter was to ask you whether god was a male or female what would you say?’ She said she would say that she doesn’t know. I asked her then ‘Why do you have signs around the school referring to god as a he?’ and mentioned that the signs should probably alternate between him and her, otherwise the message would be patriarchal. As half of the school is made up of girls, I was concerned by how girls and women would be represented (or not) in Bible stories and how this would affect my daughter, as well as about the impact of these sort of lessons on wider society.

The teachers assured me that they would always talk to the children by confirming that ‘this is what I believe’.  I still had my reservations, but in the end it was out of my control. There was nothing I could do. My daughter started school in September 2013 into what was a moderately religious school, funded by the taxpayer with no financial contribution made by the Church since it was first established in the 1960s.  However, the school was still governed by the Church.

Within the first few weeks my daughter came home to tell me that ‘our god is the Christian god’, ‘god lives in the sky’ and that ‘my soul is in my stomach’. She sang songs like ‘Our god is a great big god’ and ‘Love the lord your god’ all with hand actions and great enthusiasm. I realised that she probably didn’t understand half of it, even asking me what a soul was, but my fears had been realised.  She was too young to think critically, to ask the Reverend ‘How do you know my soul is in my stomach?’ and ‘How do you know god lives in the sky?’ I was starting to wonder why they would tell children this. How would this information benefit my child? Despite their best intentions there was no evidence for these teachings.  I knew I was unlikely to receive a satisfactory answer. However, I felt a duty to at least raise these concerns with the school, though I did not want my daughter to become singled out. Just because I had a lack of religious belief, did that mean they could impress their beliefs on my vulnerable daughter (anyone under the age of 18 in law)?

I wrote to the school stating that the values which they teach could be taught in an inclusive setting, outside of Christianity, so that the Muslims, Jews and non-believers alike could all reflect together.  There was no need to separate children based on their parent’s beliefs and surely this is what is creating division in the world.  I informed them that I was bringing my daughter up to take responsibility for her own life, that her failures, successes and achievements were her own and that she is good because it makes her andpeople around her feel good. In 2014, schools should be teaching children how to think, not what to think, surely. For me, taking Humanism to school literally means applying logic and reason to school, something which I found very difficult to reconcile here.

A humanist and his son’s fear of death

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Julian Sheather shares a personal story of easing his son’s bedtime terrors about death and the afterlife.

When he was eight, or thereabouts, my eldest son developed an intense fear of death. Without warning – at bedtime or waking in the quiet hours of the night – he would cry out in terror: ‘Daddy…I’ve got that terrible feeling again.’ My wife and I, although in fairness a little more often my wife than I, would take it in turns to console him. We would lie alongside him on his bed under the eaves – it seemed to help if it was raining – and try gently, clumsily, to soothe him. At times, seized with fear and disbelief, he would list all the people he loved – his grandparents, my wife and I, his friends, his younger brother (usually) – and almost physically wrestle with the knowledge that they were all, at some point, going to die.

Fear of death is infectious. Like most of us I suppose I have succeeded, most of the time, in pushing it to the margins of my mind. We may vaguely have heard that all philosophy is a preparation for death, but then not many of us are philosophers. Among healthy adults talk of death has a morbid, almost lavatorial quality: you tend to keep it to yourself. But ripped from sleep to confront a young boy’s – your own boy’s – appalled struggle with mortality, to hear him in the night confront so unprepared the basic terms of life, is a sobering experience. It rather throws you back on yourself.

During those long nights, the question of religious belief, of some possibility of an afterlife, inevitably came up. And I admit I struggled. There is a great deal of cheap, pre-fabricated criticism of religion knocking about at the moment. (There’s also a deal of cheap, pre-fabricated religion, but that’s another story.) If we are going to criticise any system of thought or belief then I figure we are obliged to take it in its best dress, at its richest and most serious. And fair to say that at its best religion addresses itself with great attentiveness to common human fears. Consider some of the great spiritual autobiographies: fear of death played its part in Tolstoy’s conversion; in Grace Abounding fear certainly had a heavy hand on John Bunyan’s tiller. So although there is a great deal more to religion than the weaving of tales to still our terrors, there is no doubt that for millennia religions have also spoken to our fear of death and helped structure a response to it.

I am not very good when I am tired. I remember saying to my son during one of his crises, casting around for something, anything that might help still his grief, that there were those (oh weaselling words) who believed in an after-life – words to the familiar effect that for some death is a horizon not a terminus. ‘But you don’t believe that, do you, Dad?’ he shot back.

I am not in the habit of lying to my sons, and I didn’t then. This is partly because, on the whole, I’d rather tell the truth. But also because lying would be pointless. They know me too well. My son’s response wasn’t a question, it was a statement. And so night after night we lay there together under the eaves until his anguish stilled itself and he fell asleep.

My son’s fear of death was with him on and off for several years. It took many forms. He would shield his eyes when we drove past cemeteries. He would suddenly call a halt to certain conversations. The TV would be switched off abruptly. He continued waking in the night cold with fear and my wife and I continued, clumsily, to console him. Somehow linked, he grew terrified of the severely disabled. He once bolted up the road when a disabled child was wheeled on a recumbent chair from our local surgery. Life was showing itself to him.

If I were writing this as fiction, this is not the ending I would choose. It is a little too pat. A friend gave me a book of philosophical puzzles. I can’t now remember why but my son was interested and I started to read them to him at bed time. He grew intrigued and I bought a version for children. And so we chatted about pigs that wanted to be eaten, and pills that made you win at everything, about rings that made you invisible and ships reassembled on the brilliant foreshore. And one night he looked up and said that his fear of death had gone: the puzzles had set flight to it.

It was one of those occasional, sun-lit moments you get as a parent when, groping around in the dark, you feel you’ve finally hit on something right. I am not quite so naïve as to believe that in philosophical paradox he had found a substitute for religion. Partly he was growing up. Looking back – this was a few years ago – it probably had a lot to do with the ordinary work of being a parent, the slow accumulation of all those nights, one slightly less-frightened human being consoling another. But I still like to think that in the face of some of life’s biggest fears, its most intransigent problems, he had found some of the breathing room that thought brings. And just recently he has told me he would like in the future to work with children – including the disabled.

 

 

Parenting without religion

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Aniela Bylinski discusses her journey to Humanism.

A parent's work is never done, the saying goes. Photo: Marina del Castell.

A parent’s work is never done, the saying goes. Photo: Marina del Castell.

As a new parent in 2009 my world opened up to a new way of life. I had a baby which was reliant on me for food and shelter, care and affection.  After a few months of getting to know my baby and getting into a new routine which worked for both of us, well mainly her, I started to think about what I was going to tell her, what my truth was, and what her truth might one day be.

I made conscious decisions to be her sole carer for the first 12 months at least, and to support her emotionally and physically as much as I could, without taking away her independence.  I also reflected on my own childhood and made decisions about which bits were good or bad, what I might use myself or not.

People around me were having their children christened and becoming part of a church or religious community, but that is not what I wanted for my children or my family.  I would have liked to have been able to find a community which was consistent with my non-belief in god but unfortunately it did not exist, or so I thought.

I was asking myself questions about morality such as; if I don’t believe in god then how will I fit in with other families, how will my children be perceived?  What will I teach my children about telling tales, being good and working hard, what difference will it make if they are bad, if god didn’t exist?  If I don’t have my child christened what will that mean for her and her school place?

I decided that I did not want to be peer pressured into supporting a community which I did not agree with, just because it was the only one available.  I had difficulty articulating my non-belief without offending people and decided to research other options which could be available to me.

I did know that I wanted my children to grow up to be open minded, critical thinkers, to question what they were told and not just accept things as a fact.  I didn’t want to put any fear into them and didn’t think they had any sins which they needed to be cleansed of from birth.  I knew I wanted them to be brought up to use logic and reason.  But where was the community in the UK in 2009 which could provide this for me?

I looked around on the internet and found some fantastic books to read ‘Parenting Beyond Belief’ and ‘Raising Freethinkers’.  These books were like a breath of fresh air, they explained how you can raise children with ethics and values confidently, without a god, they explain how you can talk to your children about death without a heaven, and they give good examples of how to tackle religious holidays. The list goes on; disciplining, sex education etc. There are loads of practical guides and exercises which you can use to teach your children how to wonder and ask questions.  It also gives permission to say ‘I don’t know’ and gives you the opportunity to explore the world with your child.  These books gave me the confidence to go out into the world of religion and say I’m not religious, my children may or may not be and that’s OK.

More importantly though the books lead me to Humanism and in particular the British Humanist Association.  When I visited the website it reinforced what I already felt about living a life using logic and reason, to benefit the whole of humanity, I know now this was my truth.