This summer I wanted to give my son a religious education. By "religious education" I mean that I wanted to educate him about various religions without indoctrinating him to believe any specific way. I want him to be knowledgable enough to be culturally literate and able to make an informed decision about his spiritual needs.
We have been reading together in Genesis, but I also browsed at the library to find a book that might give us more detail about specific religious beliefs. I found one that looked very promising. It is called How Do You Spell God?: Answers to the Big Questions from Around the World. The authors are Rabbi Marc Gellman and Monsignor Thomas Hartman, and it contains a foreward by the Dalai Lama.
The table of contents lists chapters such as:
What's a Religion?
How Are Religions the Same?
How Are Religions Different?
What Questions Does Each Religion Want to Answer the Most?
What Are the Holy Times in My Life?
Why Do Religions Split Up?
Who Works for God?
Why Does Bad Stuff Happen to Good Folks?
What Happens After We Die?
What Are Some of the Bad Things in Religions?
What Are Some of the Terrific Things in Religions?
This looked to me to be a fair and balanced discussion of religion.
I was shocked and dismayed to discover that the book is prejudiced against people who choose not to practice a religion. Here is what I read on page 3:
If you live long enough, you will meet somebody who hates religions. One of the things the people who hate religions say a lot is, "Religions divide people and teach them to hate each other." This is ridiculous, and here's what we say to people who don't like religions: "Look around this world! Look at the people who are doing good stuff, the people who are giving out soup to hungry folks who have no money to pay for the soup, the people who are building houses for folks who have no money to pay for the houses, the people who are talking care of little children who nobody wants to take care of--the good people. Can't you see that lots of these people doing good stuff have a religion that taught them to do it?"
The authors used a logical fallacy called "red herring":
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/red-herring.html
They avoided the charge that religions divide people and teach them to hate others and focused instead on the good works done by religious people.
Then we say, "Look around this world at the people who are doing bad stuff. The people who kill folks for no reason, the people who hurt folks for 'fun,' the people who beat up people because of the color of their skin, the people who cheat and lie and steal and throw their beer cans out of the windows of their cars--the bad people. Can't you see that none of these people learned how to do that bad stuff from a religion?"
I was appalled at reading this. One paragraph after the charge that religion divides people, the authors are dividing people into "good" and "bad" people. They insinuate that bad people certainly cannot be religious. They overlook people who have killed others because of their religion or because the victims happened to be occupying a "promised land" or holy ground. Evidently the authors themselves feel a bit uncomfortable with their statement, because in the next paragraph they say:
We know that you can be a good person even if you have no religion. You can do good things not because you learned them from a religion but because you just learned them from good people. We know that there are creeps in religion and good folks who aren't religious, but here's the thing: The teachings of religion are behind all the good things people do.
The attempt at being fair and unprejudiced is undercut by that last statement: The teachings of religion are behind all the good things people do. What a presumptuous thing to say! The teachings of which religion, I wonder?
The main thing is to do good stuff and not to worry so much about where it comes from.
Yet, evidently the authors do, in their insistence that religion is behind all the good things people do.
But when somebody says that religions divide people and teach them to hate each other, you should stand up and tell them they are full of baloney.
Yes, my child. Don't worry about proof or history or any of that. "Full of baloney" is a solid retort!
If they don't want to listen to you, just pick yourself up and go somewhere else where the good people are trying to fix the world with other good people who don't really care that much how they got to be good.
Ah, yes. You already know that non-religious people are the bad people, so don't worry about listening to their point of view; your main concern is that they listen to you. Hanging around people who are the same as you and never challenge your beliefs is much better than diversity.
Needless to say, I did not use this book in my son's summer religious education.
Ginny