Essay - corporal punishment

Essay Mar 13

Discussion question – What do you think of Ingersoll’s ideas about corporal and capital punishment.

I will address only the first part of this related to corporal punishment and to children.

The statement "Spare the rod, spoil the child" although not in the Bible is often quoted as a justification for corporal punishment. But if we slightly altered the punctuation and capitalization we might have a different perspective.

Imagine if it were written “Spare the rod. Spoil the child.” This would require parents to find alternative ways to discipline their children and reduce the images described by Ingersoll of a parent with a “face red with vulgar anger, and the face of the little child, with eyes swimming in tears and the little chin dimpled with fear, like a piece of water struck by a sudden cold wind.”

This would require parents to pause a moment, gather themselves, and respond appropriately, but the paddling, strapping, or slapping provides an instant release of their frustration or anger and in most cases, that is an action they’ve observed as a child by their parent. I have never paddle, slapped, or hit my three children and they have turned out well, so you don’t have to.

Parents only do it because they can get away with it. How would they like it if their employer disciplined them corporally? There it would be considered as assault and it is no different for children.

Mar15 Alt ?s Freethinker by Jacoby (7-8).

1.   What brilliant young scholar became a protégé of William James? (191).

2.   Time has borne out the truth of Stanton’s belief that what? (204).

3.   Whose poetry became a touchstone for, and a connection among, many kinds of American freethinkers before the First World War? (222).

4.   Full human development for any woman, Goldman argued, must come how? (236).

5.   Bryan did not grasp what truth about social reforms? (246).

6.    On appeal of the Scopes verdict, Darrow and the ACLU did not have the chance to argue what? (248).

7.    Birth control, like evolutionism and bolshevism, was identified with what in the conservative religious universe? (260).

8.   With hindsight, the twenties can best be seen as a decade that what? (262).

9.   The one commercially successful attempt by a freethinker to reach a mass audience in the twenties and thirties—a series of literary classics and iconoclastic contemporary fiction and nonfiction were known as the what? (263).

 Alternative discussion questions.

1.       Discuss how fundamentalists have used control of textbook content to limit students’s access to the latest biological information. What if anything can be done to reverse this process?

2.       How have political parties evolved and changed over time with respect to women’s rights?

Mar13 Alt ?s Freethinker by Jacoby (5-6).

1.   The period from roughly when to when represents the high water mark of freethought as an influential movement in American society? (151).

2.   What was the one political concern that united all freethinkers? (153).

3.   The most masterful articulator of the secularist vision was? (157).

4.   How was Ingersoll’s attitude toward women unusual? (164).

5.   What time was Ingersoll looking for? (173).

6.    American freethought in the West was largely what? (177).

7.    What did Darrow, Debs, and Ingersoll have in common, apart from their agnosticism? (180).

8.   Ingersoll did more than anyone to restore Americans’s memory of what? (184).

 Alternative discussion questions.

1.   Ingersoll’s creed was: “Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so. This creed is somewhat short, but it is long enough for this life, strong enough for this world. If there is another world, when we get there we can make our own creed.” Do you agree or disagree and why?

2.  Why was Herbert Spencer’s philosophy more popular in America than in England?

Quizzes Mar 13-15

SJ 5-6 (My ch6 questions are from the first half of the chapter, please add some from the 2d half)

1. Who was the first important American scientist to insist there need be no conflict between science and religion?

2. What would have been unimaginable to the 19th century heirs of the Enlightenment?

3. What was Mark Twain's reaction to Darwin?

4. What "impression" really mattered for freethinkers ("agnostics") , in the absence of a scientific explanation for the origin of life?

5. Herbert Spencer was a favorite for those who wanted to "have their God and evolution too" because of what he called the _____.

6. When for Darwin did natural selection become "subordinate" to other factors?

7. Who did Vanderbilt fire in 1878 for disputing literal readings of the Bible with respect to the age of life on earth?

8. What was Robert Ingersoll's "larger and nobler faith"?
==
9. Who were some of Philo Beckwith's heroes?

10. How did freethought lecturers have to appeal to their audiences?

11. What was the intellectual turning point in Ingersoll's life?

12. What does it say about 19th century America that Ingersoll was in demand to speak on behalf of both Republicans and Democrats?

DQ

• Which forms of religion are not in conflict with evolutionary science? Buddhism maybe, given the Dalai Lama's statement of deference. Any others?
• What do you think of Stephen Jay Gould's "non-overlapping magisteria"?
• Were you given a religious education in school? What should public schools be teaching about religion?
• Are we "insignficant," in the light of evolution?
• How confident are you that science might someday explain the origin of life?
• If it turns out not to be possible even in principle to know how life began, or answer "the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything," will religion be vindicated?
• Does the advance of civilization represent a later stage of evolution?
• What do you think of T.H. Huxley's comments in reply to Charles Kingsley? (146-7)
• What do you think of Ingersoll's 1882 oration at the burial service for a friend's child? (148)
• Who would you include in your personal pantheon of heroes? (150)
• Will there be another golden age of freethought, when separation of church and state is affirmed across the political spectrum? (152)
• What do you consider the most important concerns for freethinkers today? 154
• How would you define "secular"? 155
• What's freethinking about a concern for asceticism and hostility to "white bread"? 156
• Will we achieve full freedom for religion in America sooner than we achieve freedom from religion? 158
• Are freethinkers more likely to be formed by an excess or a deficiency of "hellfire" in childhood? 158-9
• What do you think of Calvinist assumptions about newborns and childrearing? 160
• What do you think of John Dewey's educational ideas? 160 
• What do you think of Ingersoll's ideas about corporal and capital punishment? 161
• Is it important to you that the people you love be free of superstition? 163
• 
  

Quiz Mar 15, SJ 7-8 (My questions are from the first halves of these chapters, add yours from the second... don't overlook the photos after p.212.)

1. What did all freethinkers strongly support, in the embryonic culture wars?

2. What Augustinian idea did Elizabeth Cady Stanton deplore as antagonistic towards women's dignity and self-respect?

3. What prayer did Stanton recommend for Jewish men?

4. What did Ingersoll say censors applying the Comstock laws should take a close look at?
==
5. What forged the bond between freethinkers and leftists?

6. What were freethinkers consistent in upholding?

7. What should the first world war have taught Americans?

8. What was the consistent message of freethinkers in the late 19th century?

9. How did William Jennings Bryan's witness stand concessions at the Scopes Trial make him appear?

DQ

• Has the alliance between freethinkers and women's advocacy frayed in our day?
•  What current religious ideas/practices are supportive and unsupportive of women's interests? Are any particular religious movements exemplary (or not) in this regard?
• Is it weird to think of the deity is favoring (let alone being) one gender or another?
• Comment on the W.E.B. DuBois' quote on 192.
• Is political isolation or anti-globalism something contemporary freethinkers should oppose?

==

There’s a Problem With Your Religion When It Targets Children Ages 4-14
What is one of the most important aspects of church ministry today? Evangelizing kids during the “4 to 14” window, according to Steve S. Chang of The Gospel Coalition. That window contains the ages when evangelists believe they have the best chance of reaching (or indoctrinating) children. They start asking too many tough questions after age 14, I suppose.

That’s why we’ve seen a proliferation of Good News Clubs — Christian clubs that form in elementary schools. Those kids will do whatever you tell them. And if they’re too young to think critically, the thinking goes, it’s the perfect time to teach them about religion.
(continues)

"Saying a Prayer I Don’t Believe In"

Like countless Jews before me, I am saying Kaddish, the traditional Jewish prayer of mourning. Three times a day, wherever I am in the world, I strive to find a minyan (quorum) so I can recite these ancient Aramaic verses as a last measure of devotion to my father.

At each service, I repeat the mantra: “Magnified and sanctified be His [God’s] great name in the world He has created according to His will.” To which my coreligionists respond with great force: “Let His great name be forever blessed for all eternity.”

I say those words and hear that refrain three times daily. The strange thing is that I’m not sure I really believe them.

The Kaddish is probably the most famous of all Jewish prayers. Leonard Bernstein set it to music in his Third Symphony; Allen Ginsberg wrote a poem by the same name upon the passing of his mother. In Tony Kushner’s play “Angels in America,” two of the characters say the full Kaddish over Roy Cohn’s dead body. And it was chanted by Neil Diamond, playing a cantor, in “The Jazz Singer,” and by all of the workers in the factory in the last scene of “Schindler’s List.” Most improbably, it is even recited by Rocky Balboa when he mourns the passing of his beloved trainer, Mickey, in “Rocky III.”

Yet, the Kaddish is an odd prayer to have become the centerpiece of mourning. Despite its association with death and dying, it does not mention the word death. Instead, it is an endlessly repetitive celebration of the glory of God.Continue reading the main story

The Kaddish’s origin, and its adoption by Jews as the signal act of mourning, is not entirely clear. The first words of the prayer are adapted from a verse in the Book of Ezekiel. And there are opaque references to the dominant refrain of the Kaddish — “Let His Great Name be forever blessed for all eternity” — in a commentary on the Bible written in Talmudic times.

But it appears that the custom of reciting the Kaddish for a deceased parent did not develop until the Middle Ages. Many scholars believe it to have been a Jewish response to the massacres of Jews of the Rhineland during the Crusades. Others have posited, based on a story about Rabbi Akiva, a leading second-century scholar, that the Kaddish was a response to the Christian concept of purgatory, and is intended as a plea to God to mitigate the eternal punishment of the deceased.

Whatever its origins, the text of the prayer leaves me cold. Each day as I say the Kaddish, I struggle with the fact that I am praising a God who, according to Jewish tradition, created the world “according to His Will.” Does God really will that the world endure the cruelty and suffering we see so often? And, on a more personal level, did God will that my father, an intellectual who suffered from dementia, would lose the ability to communicate and have the mental faculties of a 5-year-old during his last 18 months on earth?

The Kaddish is hardly the only prayer that troubles me. Take the 145th Psalm, which I say every day as an observant Jew. It proclaims that “God protects all those who love God, but will destroy all the wicked?” Really? Do I honestly believe that’s a true reflection of God or our universe?

Yet despite my theological ambivalence, I am turning somersaults to say Kaddish at three different prayer services each day. And in accordance with tradition, I will continue to say the Kaddish daily for 11 months within my period of mourning. Already, in the two months since my father passed at 86 years old, I have prayed in synagogues and office buildings, schools and private homes in far-flung places, including Texas, Florida, California, Colorado, Copenhagen and London.

One night I took a red-eye flight back from the West Coast so I could attend an early-morning minyan near Newark Airport, because any of the available flights the next morning would have caused me to miss saying Kaddish altogether that day. Another time, I found a minyan in Orlando where everyone was a Moroccan Jew and the only languages spoken were Hebrew and French. There is a minyan in San Francisco that meets every afternoon in a Trolley car, and another in Manhattan that meets on Track 42 at Grand Central Terminal. And come spring, I know I won’t have any problem finding a minyan during home games at Yankee Stadium, just past the kosher hot-dog stand.

The fact is that makeshift synagogues where Jews can gather to say Kaddish are ubiquitous. They spring up like mushrooms wherever there are Jews. And for one simple reason: They create community.

Unlike some people, Jewish and non-Jewish, who take great comfort in communicating with God, I am not confident that God even listens to our prayers. Yet I have reoriented my life to accommodate my obligation to say Kaddish. And I do so cheerfully because it links me to Jews across generations and continents. It defines me as a member of the tribe. My tribe.

That is the essential gift of the Kaddish. It fosters community for a person who has just suffered a searing loss of a parent or sibling, spouse or child, even when we find ourselves far from home.

Even if the words themselves offer little comfort, I take great satisfaction in this communal act of prayer; of hearing the voices of others respond to my own prayers; and of being welcomed and enveloped by a larger and transcendent community. And in that experience, I honor and reconnect with my father. nyt

Jay P. Lefkowitz was the United States’ special envoy for human rights in North Korea from 2005 to 2009.

Richard Dawkins, Time to Stand Up

Lucas & Raine, "Time to Stand Up" Report quiz and DQ's

*LINK TO ESSAY: https://ffrf.org/news/timely-topics/item/14035-time-to-stand-up

QUIZ

1. What event is Dawkins essay in response to? 
2. What Abrahamic religions does Dawkins specifically call out? 
3. What belief does he credit as “the key weapon that made the New York atrocity happen”? 
4. Dawkins says "My point is not that religion itself is the motivation for wars, murders, and terrorist attacks, but that religion is..." What does he claim that religion is in this sense? 
5. If not for religion, Dawkins says, what kind of state in the middle east would have no meaning? 

DQ's

• Do you think there would be less war, and overall violent conflict, if religion did not exist? 
• Conversely, do think there would be a dramatic loss of morals if religion did not exist? 
• Do you think the United States will ever have an openly atheist (or agnostic) leader? Why or why not?

*This & similar essays appear in A Devil's Chaplain...

Mar1 Alt ?s Freethinker by Jacoby (3-4).

1.   The “woman question” was no side issue for Garrison, because it was inseparable from what? (77).

2.   What was a painful thorn in the side of religious conservatives? (78).

3.   Because her personal and unorthodox faith was the center of her being and informed all of her social conviction, Mott exemplified the bonds linking what? (85).

4.   What historical document was debated in Seneca Falls, NY on July 19, 1848? (90).

5.   For Ernestine Rose, what was a basic right owed all men and women – not a privilege to be denied on the basis of educational, economic, and class-based disadvantages. (100).

6.    During the war years, no one agonized over moral and ethical issues more profoundly, or articulated them more clearly for the American public, than whom? (108).

7.    As a general rule, the post-presidential acquaintances emphasized Lincoln’s religiosity, while those who had known the president from his young manhood emphasize what? (112).

8.   Lincoln’s evolution from a cautious gradualist on abolition into the Great Emancipator is of course a remarkable case study of what? (118).

9.   What makes Lincoln a compelling figure to religious believers and nonbelievers alike? (118-9).

 Alternative discussion questions.

1.   Soon after the war ended, the Western Christian Advocate, described Lincoln meeting with his cabinet as follows: “all dropped on their knees, and offered in silence and in tears their humble and heartfelt acknowledgment to the Almighty for the triumph he had granted to the national cause.” An eyewitness to the event said it never happened. This was an early example of “fake news.” Can you think of anything comparable today?

2.    Jacoby says that many sincere Christians wanted to believe that Lincoln shared their religious beliefs because “his great prominence in the world’s history, and his identification with some of the great questions of our time…to trace his motives and actions similar convictions to those held by themselves. Do you think Christians throughout the nation who supported the Confederacy shared those views?