Defense Exhibit “Q”
Defense Exhibit showing why instilling Abrahamic religion is tantamount to littering the streets with loaded handguns: consider the 8-year-old (search for “poppy” on that page) who says, “I really do wish that I could go to heaven with him [my hamster], but I couldn’t.”
Exactly how many steps is this away from a suicide bomber? We have a little British girl wanting to off herself to be with a rodent in an imaginary hereafter.
Subscribe by email
December 18th, 2007 at 09h43
We are not religious , she is just upset!!
December 18th, 2007 at 09h49
Um, a lot of steps? Yes, I’m pretty sure it’s a lot steps.
Exactly? I don’t have the figures in front of me right now. I left them in my other Bag of Many Wonders. But I can go ahead and guess that the number is rather large.
Eight year olds, dude. I agree with your thesis. I do not think that this is not good proof of your thesis.
December 18th, 2007 at 09h49
Am I talking to Mum now? Dad?
I didn’t mean for the 8-year-old to see the post. I understand how upsetting losing a pet can be, and I don’t want to add to that. But this is not a children’s website. And if she believes in heaven, she is, by definition, religious, at least to that extent.
I’m not going to directly tell you how to raise your children. But as a father myself, I hope that this would never cross my son’s mind, as my goal is for him to understand that this life is precious and there are no do-overs.
December 18th, 2007 at 09h51
I do not think that this is not good example of your best grammar.
Check the ages on some suicide bombers lately? “Heaven” is not a benign lie. In my never-to-be-humble opinion.
December 18th, 2007 at 09h54
Double negatives sometimes don’t mean what you thought they didn’t.
December 18th, 2007 at 09h54
The website we are on is under’my hamster died’ and has 120 stories from young and old about hamsters dying. I thought it would be a cathartic process for her to write it down and it was. She feels better and was waiting for replies from other people who had lost hamsters!!!
December 18th, 2007 at 10h02
“Defense Exhibit showing why instilling Abrahamic religion is tantamount to littering the streets with loaded handguns…”
“And if she believes in heaven, she is, by definition, religious, at least to that extent.”
You lost an important qualifier there, man.
I agree with you that belief in heaven is at best a wasteful and at worst a dangerous and deadly belief. But you did not say (not?) that. That wasn’t your question. Your question was (not not) how many steps between what this kid wrote and this kid strapping a bomb to herself and blowing up a shopping mall. I think there are many steps.
December 18th, 2007 at 10h03
I’m still not sure who I am addressing under the handle “poppy”. But this eventuality is why I purchased myhamsterdied.info, to separate the grown-up stuff from the hammie stuff, which I carefully moderate. My fault for not making the notice bigger. It’s now huge, in bold, and at the beginning of the post.
Catharsis is good. But, mind-boggling threads about hamsters notwithstanding, mcgees.org is not a safe place to do it.
December 18th, 2007 at 10h07
What qualifier, Dave? “Abrahamic”? That’s where the idea of heaven comes from. Am I totally missing your point?
And my point (please Mum or Dad, edit the following out for little eyes…)
My point is that saying “I miss my hamster, I want to die and go to heaven with him” is not qualitatively different from “I miss my dad, I want to die a martyr so I can go to heaven with him.”
December 18th, 2007 at 10h09
Poppy’s parental unit, I’m not calling her a suicide bomber. Please hear that. I’m just saying, as part of the grown-up stuff that goes on at mcgees.org, that heaven is a dangerous, dangerous idea.
December 18th, 2007 at 10h27
You’re not missing the (my) point– but I do think it’s still an important qualifier. I realize that “heaven” as “paradise” may be primarily/especially/only an Abrahamic thing, but they didn’t invent the concept of “afterlife.” Jou know? The kid being raised in the religion of Amon Ra at the moment might miss his immediately dead rodent so much that he wishes he could see it in the Land of the Dead. Whatever. Also: weird. Anyway. None of them are good options, I’m just pointing out that your argument changed ever so slightly. Taking a tenet from a religion — “heaven exists,” “karma exists,” “I don’t eat cows” — does not a Christian, a Buddhist, or a Hindu make.
That being said (poorly) I still think that there’s a qualitative difference between the two sentences you offer after the carriage returns. It’s on the part of the person instructing the child. One could be a (yes, still dangerous) attempt to make a kid stop crying. The other is TELLING THE KID TO BLOW PEOPLE UP. I realize that they’re both “things potentially ignorant people say to kids,” so I realize that there’s part of the Venn Diagram they both inhabit. Kids will believe what grown-ups tell them. Many times, the bad things grown-ups tell them come because of religious teaching. But do you really not believe that there’s a scale? Saying to a sobbing child “your hamster is in heaven” might be Bad Idea Level 4. Saying to a sobbing child “Here, take this stick of dynamite and go blow up yon marketplace” is a Bad Idea Level 12. So I’m saying there’s, you know, an eight step difference.
I do not believe those statements are *equally bad statements.* That’s allz I’m saying.
December 18th, 2007 at 10h46
Just for terminological agreement,
Bad Idea viz. Bad Idea: Qualitative equality
Bad Idea Level 4 viz. Bad Idea Level 12: Quantitative inequality
The fact that the difference is degree, not substance, is my entire point. That’s what I attempted to express by the “how many steps?” question.
Having your child tell you that he or she would like to die, because you have told him or her that it wouldn’t really-you-know-in-actuality be dying, is not a Good Thing. And if one kid takes from it “Heaven is a wonderful place // Filled with glory and grace // I want to see my Savior’s face”, and another takes from it “Paradise awaits me if I slaughter the infidels”, then … on nth thought, I really didn’t sleep at all last night. So I’m probably making way too big a deal of this.
I’m sorry the rodent died. They don’t live long enough.
December 18th, 2007 at 10h56
Y’know how Popeye was a cartoon for adults, then suddenly became popular with kids, and the comic strip creator was forced to tone down the language? Or how design space in Magic: The Gathering has been severely restricted because they printed the card Quicken a couple years ago? That hamster post is the sticking point on my website. Everything I do on mcgees.org gets framed in terms of “My hamster died”. I think to myself, “that would be a good quote for the rotator,” then think, “Oh, but grammar schoolers are going to see it when they go looking for hamster support.”
“My Hamster Died” has, I’m trying to say, restricted the design space of mcgees.org. This is not a mourn-for-your-dead-hamster site. This is a grownup, anti-religious, fiercely vocal website at which I happened to mention the untimely demise of my pet rodent.
I might need to close comments on “My Hamster Died”.
December 19th, 2007 at 14h22
When I was a child, my mother forbid me from watching He-Man, because it contained magic (which was from THE DEVIL!!!) and because it used the title “Masters of the Universe”, which my mother felt was disrespectful to God’s position as master of the universe. Even at the tender young age of five, I could see that her position was completely out of proportion with the “offending” material. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve occasionally wondered if people exist at the other end of the belief spectrum whose reactions are equally confusing.
Today, I have my answer.
Josh, asking how many steps there are between a child saying that she wishes she could go to heaven with her hamster and stepping onto her school bus with a bomb in her backpack is somewhere on par with the people asking how many steps between gay marriage and people marrying dogs or children. Each question makes about as much sense, the only difference being that one is a subject with which you agree and one isn’t. Every time Jaimee shouts “I hope your balls explode” at some guy on the freeway, I don’t ask how many steps it is until she starts shooting at other drivers. Somehow, despite the number of times I muttered “I wish I were dead” as a child, my parents never put me on suicide watch.
If the number of steps between saying “I wish could go to heaven with my hamster” and suicide bombing is at all different from the number of steps between brushing your teeth in the morning and suicide bombing, the difference is so small as to fall well within any statistician’s margin of error.
December 20th, 2007 at 00h04
OK, basically everyone I’ve talked to about this thinks I’m insane. So chances are, I’m probably insane. It might be the suicide bombing bit. I probably should have guessed that suicide bombing is a hot-button issue, but instead of restating my post using another example of theistic excess, I’ll just try to reframe my entire thesis.
My brother-in-law opines that saying “Your hamster is in heaven” is akin to saying “Your dog went to a big farm where he can play forever.” He further contends that “I want to be with my hamster in heaven” is the same as saying “I want to visit that farm where my dog lives.”
Succinct, but no. Farms exist. And while, to a city kid, a rural idyll may be as much fantasy as a cloud-infested paradise, to the parents they are obviously not the same. Note that I oppose lying to the child in both cases: in both cases, it nurtures cynicism, which, unlike skepticism, is not a desirable trait.
What’s the big difference? In the “heaven” example, you’ve instructed your child that there is something more desirable than life. And that’s my big sticking point. You can visit a farm — hell, move to a farm — and still be alive. But in nurturing the idea of heaven, a paradise afterworld wherein the good are rewarded, you are nurturing elitism, intolerance, and a lack of the love of life over which theists so frequently claim they have exclusive domain.
A kid saying that he or she “wants to go to heaven [now]” scares me. It is not different for me, in the fear quotient, of a child saying “I want to be a martyr [now]“. And raising kids to believe in heaven strikes me as having one of two likely results: self-righteous kids who think that life is a dress-rehearsal, or really cynical kids when they realize that the whole heaven thing is make-believe.
The point of bringing up suicide bombing for me was not the murder. It was the martyrdom I was focusing on. And I will fight tooth and nail to defend my belief that lies about heaven increase the chances of someone “martyring” oneself (actually, I believe that only a-heavenists and those who believe they are damned can truly claim martyrdom. But that’s a rant for another post.)
If I haven’t disgusted poppy’s parental units away from this thread, I wonder if this consoles at all. If not, bear in mind that apparently everyone else, including people whom I deeply respect, agree with you that my analysis was flawed.
December 20th, 2007 at 01h14
I worked on this some more with my brother. He brought up three points:
1. Ideas vs. actions
2. Adults’ ideas vs. children’s ideas
3. Believing that I had implied there were zero steps between the two stated cases.
Ruminate, respond, flame, whatever. I’m going to sleep, and will probably write more tomorrow.
December 20th, 2007 at 11h56
A kid saying that he or she “wants to go to heaven [now]” scares me. It is not different for me, in the fear quotient, of a child saying “I want to be a martyr [now]”.
Scary in what way? Scary, like, they might actually do something to hasten their departure from this world, or scary in that you just don’t like that way of thinking? If it’s the first, then I’m going to have to check your sense of proportion, because I would probably guess that the ratio of children who say “Gee, it’d be swell to be in heaven right now” and then go kill themselves is probably smaller than the percentage of children who think “Gee, it’d be swell to go out in the garden” and then subsequently die of bee stings. Or the kids who listen to a Nine Inch Nails album and then slit their wrists. It’s such a miniscule chance of being an actual occurance that I, were I a parent, would quickly put it aside to worry about bigger issues.
Of course, there ARE places where a kid might be convinced to strap on a bomb and die for the glory of Zeus or Cthulhu or whoever, but I’m having a hard time imagining that the martyrdom that’s being presented to them might not sound so enticing if they weren’t living in poverty in an area occupied by a highly aggressive and largely unethical invading force that was resulting in local deaths by the truckload while the international community does absolutely shit to help them. Of course suicide bombing for a martyrs cause sounds like a bad idea to you! If deciding not to die today just meant that you were probably going to get your ass blown away by next week’s cluster bombing, you might feel differently.
Yes, of course we’re all disgusted by the concept of children strapping bombs to themselves and taking themselves out in a delusion of glory. I fully agree with that disgust, but I also recognize that it comes from a position of extreme privilege. Small children mourning their hamsters (who, if having their hamster pass away is the biggest thing on their mind right now, also benefit from that position of privilege) are about as far removed from the psychological world of suicide bombers as it is possible to be while still sharing a species.
December 20th, 2007 at 11h58
might not sound so enticing
I meant to write “would sound so enticing”. Don’t you hate it when you type the opposite of what you actually mean?
December 30th, 2007 at 12h40
Wow, I missed two Bob Mike posts. I don’t know how I didn’t get alerted to them. I was coming back to make some more points.
But let’s start with Mike. Did you miss my point or are you ignoring it when you play the privilege card? For reference, what I said:
And your response is that “Of course suicide bombing for a martyrs cause sounds like a bad idea to you!” That I, Joshua McGee, think that suicide bombing is a bad idea because I support illegal war atrocities? That’s really underhanded, Mike. Of course suicide bombers are bad off, politically and financially. You read this site. You know my views on this. My point is that religious martyrdom that claims to guarantee an afterlife is deeply, deeply flawed in any incarnation, and I would frankly have more respect for these “martyrs” if they soundly believed they were going to Hell or oblivion as soon as the bomb detonated.
You are right. I DON’T LIKE THAT WAY OF THINKING. You were right with option “b”, except you decided to qualify it with “just”. I think it’s dangerous. And I’ve been mulling this over, getting reproach from many sides, over the past couple weeks. And my conclusion is, I think I’m ahead of my time on this.
There’s a scene in the book Little House on the Prairie in which one of the girls — I believe it’s Laura — sees a group of nomadic Native Americans pass. She sees a mother with an infant, which she calls a “squaw baby”. She’s taken with it, and demands that her father go get her the “squaw baby”.
I feel like the person standing up and saying “This is deplorably racist”, and hearing an echo back of “But squaw babies are cute!” That’s not the fucking point. The point is that it’s deplorably racist. It’s not a “squaw baby”, is a “human infant”, and Laura’s parents should have known better than to raise her with this kind of inhuman racism regardless of what century she lived in.
There seems to be this pervasive idea, even among my readers too sophisticated to believe in an afterlife, that the idea of heaven is some sort of mild, harmless lie we tell children to make them feel better, and not at all different from the Hundred Acre Woods or Never-Never Land. And I disagree. This is obviously not a popular position among my readers, at least those with balls enough to post, but it is my position. I think raising a kid to believe in an eternal, pastoral, undying afterlife is a vicious, harmful, sometimes deadly lie, and that it needs to stop. I trust that the information on this site will never disappear, due to glorious archive projects such as archive.org, so time will bear me out or show me up, one way or another.
But my guess? Give it 150 years, and the 21st century child spouting a desire to go to heaven will be seen the same as a 19th-century child begging for a “squaw baby” is now: yes, she may be too young to know better, but her parents sure as fuck aren’t. Abrahamic religions. Loaded guns. I think the metaphor is sound. I don’t know what the solution to this is, because I believe that governments having the sole responsibility of raising kids is more abhorrent than any couple of teenagers who can figure out where the parts go getting the sole responsibility to raise their kids. But that doesn’t mean that what incompetent parents teach is helpful. It just means that it is. The solution, in my vision, however it’s accomplished, involves the elimination of the dangerous myth of heaven.
December 30th, 2007 at 16h05
I’m getting a different vibe from Bob Mike’s last post upon re-re-re-re-reading it, that it was meant as less of a jab than I took it as. Mike, If you’re willing to state your argument while leaving any privilege I might enjoy out of it, I will certainly stipulate that the psychological states of children with dead pet rodents are different from the psychological states of children with dead family and the daily threat of grievous bodily harm to their selves and others.
They’re different quantitatively, though. They’re different by degree. In these two cases, both can be expressed as “My X just died, and I wish to be in heaven with him/her/it.” And if they didn’t have a conception of an eternal afterlife, this thought would never occur to them. In this way, the heaven myth is doing real damage. I do not agree that they are as far separated as “is possible to be while still sharing a species”.
Compare the case of an atheist child who has a pet hamster die versus another atheist child who has a mother die. Let’s say they both are experiencing the feeling that “Life is not worth living without hammie/mommy.” Is this position reasonable? Probably not. Childish? Certainly. Helpful? Not at all. Should it set off warning bells? Maybe, depends on the child.
Now go back to the Abrahamic child with a dead hamster and his Abrahamic kin with a dead mother. They’re both experiencing “I wish I could go to the afterlife to be with hammie/mommy.” You could say it’s just as unreasonable, just as childish, just as unhelpful, and possibly as worrisome as the non-Abrahamic case — set those values as you see fit. But in my mind, this latter case is, additionally, really fucking scary because it’s predicated on a lie. In this case, because it posits a fantasy realm where reunion can occur, it makes for a very different statement. Not, “I need to stopping living because it hurts so much”; rather, “I need to stop living because then I can be reunited.” And do I think that the heaven-believing youth is more likely to bring about the end of his life than the non-believing youth? I suppose that yes, at the bottom, I do believe that. So go ahead and check my sense of proportion. But I think we’re on a slippery slope.
Go ahead, blast away.
January 2nd, 2008 at 11h48
While it seems as though Josh was able to discern my meaning upon the second reading, I just want to clarify for anyone who might be confused. I am not accusing Josh of supporting illegal war atrocities. For the record, the only atrocities that I have ever witnessed Josh supporting have been musical in nature, and they have been completely legal (which only shows you how messed up the justice system is in this country).
The way I see it, if I’m going to be called out for being underhanded anyway, I might as well get in my cheap shots.
The point that I was originally trying to make, just so we’re absolutely crystal clear, is this: To a teenager who has seen his country occupied, his city carpet bombed, his neighborhood “ethnically cleansed” and his friends and/or family killed, the notion that life is precious and must be protected at all costs must seem as big or bigger a lie than being told that you’ll get into Valhalla if you take yourself out by blowing up a bus full of people. When you ask how many steps it is between a child wishing she could go to heaven with her hamster and a suicide bomber, I would suggest that you start by counting the number of steps that it would take for England to suffer a complete breakdown of civil order and become a Hellish warzone occupied by a foreign power that cannot be combated by traditional means, because that’s the common denominator driving suicide bombers.
I can’t say whether or not you’re ahead of your time. Maybe, at some point in the future, people will look back on these comments with the same disdain that you have for that particular Little House on the Prairie anecdote. It doesn’t really have a bearing on this discussion, however, as someone could just as easily claim that 150 years from now people won’t be saying much of anything, because the prophecy of the Revelation will have come to pass. Were I a betting man with cause to believe that my lifespan would ever see the venerable age of 178, I’d bet that both claims were wrong. Even assuming that your statement is correct, and that the people of the future do look back on religious beliefs as misguided, that won’t necessarily mean that said future population is right. Argumentum ad populum is a logical fallacy, and never more fallacious than when the populum in question is one that exists solely in a theoretical time that might, at some future date, come to pass.
I don’t think that anyone here has suggested that the notion of heaven is a harmless one. I’m certainly not suggesting anything of the sort. The notion of heaven has on occasion caused harm, therefore it is not harmless. What I think that people are trying to say is that, even if the notion of heaven is a dangerous one, you’ve done a poor job of arguing it in this particular case, because you’ve chosen as your example a situation where the level of harm, if one exists at all (which is debatable), is in all probability quite low, and then sought to connect it an action at the far, far end of the Bell Curve. Your argument could as easily be that because a kid says he wants to be a rock star, there’s a serious danger that he’ll become addicted to heroin and commit suicide. The gap in question is a huge one, and you do your beliefs a serious disservice by arguing from a position where you’re going to be seen as unreasonable by a large portion of the population.
This entire situation is a perfect microcosm of why Vonnegut was awesome and Dawkins is a douchelord. You expressed, to no one in particular, your grief at the loss of a close pet. A child, living on the other side of the planet, found this record of your grief and was able to tell you that she in some way shared your feelings, even if you expressed them in a different manner. What you have experienced is a moment of brilliance and, yes, humanism that as little as twenty years ago would not have been possible, but you’re so utterly freaked out by the tiny ways in which your expressions of grief are different that you can’t focus on the really remarkable way that your values coincide with the values of this child.
On the whole, I do not believe that theists are any more or any less moral than atheists. On the whole, I believe that most of the things that we value are the same. On the whole, I believe that both theists and atheists believe that they know the truth, and that both groups feel that truth should be heard. Generally, I believe that atheists generally value human life, truth and social justice, but I also believe that you need to look no further than anything that Christopher Hitchens has written on the subject of the War on Terror to see that these values are not intrinsic or exclusive to atheism (Note: Any atheist looking for absolute proof that the universe is not guided by a force of cosmic benevolence need only remember that Carl Sagan is dead, while Christopher Hitchens is still alive). I believe that theists also generally value human life, truth and social justice, with similar exceptions.
In short: HOLY SHIT! IT’S HUMANITY!
January 2nd, 2008 at 13h23
Also, since it has already been determined that her family is not religious, might she not have been wishing to go to secular heaven?
I mean, who wouldn’t want to go there?
January 2nd, 2008 at 13h34
“When you die, if you get a choice between going to regular heaven or pie heaven, choose pie heaven. It might be a trick, but if not … mmmmm, boy!” — Jack Handey’s Deep Thoughts
Funny.
“I would suggest that you start by counting the number of steps that it would take for England to suffer a complete breakdown of civil order and become a Hellish warzone occupied by a foreign power that cannot be combated by traditional means, because that’s the common denominator driving suicide bombers.” — Bob Mike
Like the relatively wealthy Saudis who piloted the jets in 2001? The ones who went out partying in style the night before the attacks, were very well funded (enough to pay for flight school and first class airfare), and believed they were going to a glamorous afterlife with dozens of virgins to deflower, Mike? Like those suicide bombers? Or is that one of the times “on occasion” that the idea of heaven has caused harm?
And you’re not attributing that “life needs to be protected at all costs quote to me”, are you?
January 2nd, 2008 at 14h18
Short week + First week of the year = Accounting Hell. Full rebuttal coming as soon as I catch a break (expect a few days).
January 3rd, 2008 at 00h32
“Argumentum ad populum is a logical fallacy … you do your beliefs a serious disservice by arguing from a position where you’re going to be seen as unreasonable by a large portion of the population.”
Just thought I’d point out that double standard there.
You are right, I invoked an ad populum device, but it is not central to my thesis. If an atheist in this horrible country knows anything, it’s that majority vote is not necessarily (in fact, almost never) the most intelligent conclusion. I used it as illustration.
I’m not arguing right vs. wrong here, I’m arguing right vs. incorrect. My thesis is that belief in heaven leads people to do things, such as suicide bombing, that they wouldn’t otherwise do. That is either true, or it is untrue. On a smaller scale, it leads children to believe that going to heaven right now is a solution for grief, even if they don’t slit their wrists as a result. Belief in heaven is incorrect, and, in the former case, possibly deadly and destructive.
I believe my statements are true. But I’m ready to learn. Go ahead and show me statistics that people who believe death is a permanent, abrupt, and final act end up as suicide bombers more frequently than those who believe they’re going to a glorious paradise, even when adjusted for population. But I don’t think you’ll find such statistics, because I believe that religions with tenets of martyrdom and reward in afterlife are more likely to generate suicidal behavior than those that do not, and more than is found among a-religious people.
January 3rd, 2008 at 04h40
I wish that I had never shown Poppy that website! We are in uk and I presume you are in US. We are not as religious over here as where you are, however, my kids attend a C of E school, more because of area we live in than religion. The school does not ram religion down our throats, but it is obviously part of the curriculum up to 11 years. You will be pleased to know that my 11 year old son does not believe in an afterlife etc as I have never been under any illusion otherwise. My daughter will find out soon enough, but you can hardly compare a village school in middle-england to war-torn countries in the middle-east who ram religion down each others throats. Religion , in my opinion, is the cause of the world’s problems, however, what people do to privately grieve is up to them. Afterall, it was only a hamster, but the loss of your first pet never is forgotten. By the way, I do like Dawkins, but read John Humphrys ‘In God We Doubt’. This is my final post on the matter as I have a newborn baby that is taking up alot of my time (and sleep )at present.
February 8th, 2008 at 00h33
[...] I made too big of a deal about a little girl wanting to go to heaven to be with her hamster. While I’ve run this by atheists who agree with my premise, I should never have done so [...]