Jewish Atheist

“There is nothing that is too obvious of an absurdity to be firmly planted in the human head, as long as you begin to instill before the age of five by constantly repeating it
with an air of great seriousness.”

– Arthur Schopenhauer

No, “Battle for Zachary’s Brain” is not the title of a sci-fi horror movie. Zachary’s brain belongs to a very cute, very much alive almost-5-year-old, who likes learning and is picking stuff up – numbers, categories – very fast.

His parents are divorced. He has regular webcam conferences with his Mom. She gives him number and verbal skills games. Zachary is a sucker for Thomas the Tank. His Mom is always well-equipped with jokes, games, and other material.

In the sense that his human brain is equipped to learn what his parents and teachers will expose him to, Zachary, in a very few years, will go from what he is now – the equivalent of a dimly conscious hominid – to a homo sapiens in the making, with full language skills and access to practically infinite amounts of information.

A million years of evolution

A million years of evolution will be accomplished in a decade or two. But right now, it’s easy to see Zachary as a 250,000-year-old man, with basic language skills and truly ill-formed notions of reality. How he builds these basic beliefs – about parents, life, pain/pleasure, the nature of the world – will influence the rest of his life.

Right now a fierce battle is beginning to be joined. It is rooted in Zachary’s religiography (a word I made up), which is as follows:

Zachary’s religiography

His mother, not the custodial parent, is a hard-core atheist/skeptic, as is her new husband. Zachary lives with his father, a lapsed Catholic who joined his previous wife in ridiculing the Pope but has proven to be adaptable in matters religious and goes along with his new wife’s mainstream conservative Christianity (e.g., you must believe that Jesus was divine), which has some vanilla, forgettable denominational name.

So wife #2 is a bit of a hard-liner who takes it all very seriously, and Zachary’s Dad goes along, even to Bible classes. Zach goes to Sunday School and colors pictures of Baby Jesus, but it’s not clear what, if anything, he understands about Baby Jesus.

Finally, the boy has a 17-year-old brother with a long record as a hard-core skeptic (even telling younger Jewish kids that they wouldn’t always have to wear their skullcaps). This even beats my coming out, which was when, at the age of 12, I refused to say “under God” in the Pledge.

Basics of reality

Zachary is now at the crucial stage where he acquires the basics of reality (e.g., an airplane goes on the ground AND in the air). As cognitive scientists say, what gets fired, gets wired. Once Zachary acquires his notions of reality, they will be hard to change.

In the matter of religion, the two sides are providing conflicting information, though conflict is minimal at this stage. Apparently he’s been trained to say “never mind” when his Mom brings up religion, and she rarely gets him alone.

But she persists, because he’s malleable. If he’s told that SpongeBob Squarepants is in the other room, he believes it without proof. And falls for the same trick again five minutes later. His Mom visits him from a local hotel, so he thinks she lives in the hotel. He has almost no concept of time, so Mom’s visits are announced only when they are immanent.

It’s really easy to see him as a primitive man with decent language skills, trying to put things together and figure out why things happen and what relationships they bear to each other.

Real vs. unreal

When Mom gets him alone, she drills him on real vs. unreal (TV cartoons, Superman, soon Santa, then God). This is a tough one, but no different from mixed-marriage divorces, where we have conflicting religious traditions; in this case, secular humanism is one of the contenders, and it offers a sharply different view of the world.

In all too many cases, as Dawkins laments, the parents are a united front and jam the same kind of religious BS, whether orthodox or liberal, down the kid’s throat. Reason doesn’t have a chance when it counts most.

Zachary may have some difficult revelations ahead. The realization that religion is a mass make-believe is almost unbelievable, but there it is. Same for the reality that religious fantasies are much beloved and honored in most societies, including most certainly this one, though they are the cause of much suffering and death.

Still, I really can’t see Zachary turning into a Christian. He’s too much his Mother’s son, and besides, there’s already a skeptic in the house (just as in the Inquisition, older brother can be punished for being critical of religion).

Crunch time

But crunch time is near. His stepmother will not tolerate open skepticism. There will be a point at which Zachary refuses to go to Church, when he realizes that he really doesn’t believe any of it, and when that time comes, he has to know what to say and how to behave. Somehow, I think he will.