Honest Debate: Christianity Good and Bad

Moderator, pro-Christianity guy, & anti-Christianity guy

Here’s a video of a recent debate about Christianity, good and bad. I was the moderator, and I think it turned out well. Both debaters are non-believers because this debate is not about atheism versus Christianity. These debates are by and for atheists, created for the atheist community here in Seattle. Each debater represents a different viewpoint, but both viewpoints fit within the atheist worldview. The debate was what we call an “honest” debate. We have specific ground rules, roles, and expectations that prevent problems you see in typical debates: the unfair arguments, evasive answers, and rhetorical tricks. This format is inspired primarily by Rapoport’s rules for criticism, as popularized by Daniel Dennett. With that sort of approach in mind, I’ve been working with the Seattle Atheists to develop dialogs and debates that would facilitate a significantly more meaningful dialog than many of us have come to expect. This “honest” debate on Christianity is the third, and it’s the best. 

Here’s the video.

Sometimes people think that the point of Rapoport’s rules is to be nice. It’s true that the rules have the beneficial effect of taking some of the heat out of a disagreement, but niceness is only half of it. The other half is intellectual honesty. One rule is that you state your opponent’s viewpoint in terms so reasonable that the opponent accepts your paraphrase. Once you’ve done that, you can’t resort to caricature or exaggeration. When you state the opponent’s viewpoint, you demonstrate that you know exactly what you’re disagreeing with. Most people don’t. Over the years, I have seen people have a surprisingly hard time articulating their opponent’s point of view. You see some of this paraphrasing in the Christianity debate, and both debaters are pretty good at it. Before the debate, we had some preliminary discussions, so the debaters were already familiar with each others’ general positions. 

Another of Rapoport’s rules is to find places of agreement. I’ve come to appreciate the power of that technique more and more. This technique also appears in the book Crucial Conversations, about how to de-escalate conflicts and facilitate cooperation among people who are at odds with each other. In this Christianity debate, you see some times when the two debaters find things to agree on. 

The video ends before the results of the polls are announced. By the end of the debate, the pro-Christian side had picked up more undecideds than the anti-Christian side, but the anti-Christian side still had more sympathizers overall. 

The anti-Christian debater is Bob Seidensticker. He’s the author of Cross Examined: An Unconventional Spiritual Journey, and he critiques Christianity on his Patheos blog, also called Cross Examined. Bob had heard of Rapoport’s rules and was eager to participate.

Christianity was our third topic. Our first dialog was on Islam and Islamophobia, and it was not recorded because the topic is too touchy. The second was on Jesus, and you can see it here. We plan to do more.

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Agreeing how to disagree: Here’s a post that lays out the thinking behind better debates. 

Direct dialog on religion: Here’s a moderated video debate where we tried out some of the “honest debate” techniques. 

Kids’ Games and Clades

Air Land Sea is my only perfect game.
Also great for kids.

Most of my adult life, my livelihood has been creating sophisticated games for adults. Some games were artsy, like Over the Edge. Others were commercial endeavors, as when I led the redesign of Dungeons & Dragons and helped revive the sagging brand. At the same time that I was creating commercial games for strangers, I was also creating free games for kids, actually for my daughter as she grew up. These projects were “for fun” games that few people have heard about. It’s something new and exciting for me to do a professional game that’s kid-friendly, and that’s what Clades is. This post describes some of my kid games that, in some way, led up to Clades.

Twenty Guesses

If you play Twenty Questions with kids, you will discover that they would rather make guesses than reframe their guesses as yes-or-no questions. So how do you play Twenty Questions with little children? Turn it into “Twenty Guesses”. Instead of trying to get little kids to form yes-or-no questions, let them do what they want to do and just makes guesses. The trick is in how the grownup with the “secret” answers the guess. The grownup gives one hint about how the guess is “right” and another about how the guess is “wrong”. This structure models abstract categorization for little children, and they get it. Here’s a hypothetical example.

Grownup: OK, I’m thinking of something. [secretly thinking “monkey”] 

Kid 1: Is it a car? 

Grownup: No, like a car, it can move from one place to another, but unlike a car it’s alive. 

Kid 2: Is it a dog? 

Grownup: It is a mammal, like a dog, but it’s not usually kept as a pet. 

Kid 1: A cat! 

Grownup: Remember, people don’t usually have them as pets, but they are furry and they have tails. 

Kid 3: A beaver. 

Grownup: It has hair and a tail like a beaver, but it doesn’t live in the water. It lives in the trees.

Kid 2: A three-toed sloth!

Grownup: Remember, it has a tail, but it does live in the jungle, like a sloth does. It jumps around a lot more than a sloth. 

Kid 3: A monkey! 

Grownup: Right.

For more discussion of this variant on Twenty Questions, see my web page on this game, where I called the game “Guessit”.

Spaceship

A finished game of Spaceship

Little kids love this game because they make real, tactical decisions that help them win most games. Plus they get to draw spaceships, plus they get to scribble all over the grownup’s spaceship. To play, each player draws a spaceship, with weaponry. Then you play in rounds until one player has shot the other player’s spaceship four times. Each round starts with the child rolling a die. The child chooses to keep the die with the number it rolled, or give the die to the grownup. The child physically places the die on the spaceship with the number up. Then the grownup rolls a second die and places it on the other spaceship. If your spaceship has a number at least as big as the other spaceship’s number, you shoot the enemy ship. You can draw an explosion on the enemy spaceship, indicating about 1/4 destruction. A spaceship is destroyed if it’s hit four times. If both players get to 4 at the same time, it’s a draw.

This game is the simplest way I can think of to give a quite small child real tactical choices with instant consequences, good or bad. Spaceship is a little-kid version of Air, Land, and Sea.

For more information, here’s the link to my web page on this game.

Air Land Sea

Update: The end state of an improvised miniatures game that
adapted the Air Land Sea mechanic. This is the 4-year old’s
army. He tied the 10-year old.

This remarkable little work is the only perfect game I’ve ever done. It uses the Spaceship mechanic, except that there are 12 locations to place a die result. Each environment—air, land, or sea—has two locations on each player’s side. Your total value for each environment equals your two numbers multiplied together. You win if, after 12 dice rolls, your total is higher than the other player’s total in two or three environments.  Anyone can start playing with a few seconds’ worth of instruction, and you can complete a match in a minute or two. Even though the game is this simple, it has a distinct beginning phase, middle, and end. Some moves are easy to make, but other rolls give you choices that are painful. I invented this game as a way to teach multiplication, but you can simplify it by switching to addition or even dropping the arithmetic altogether.

For more about this game, here’s my original page about it.

Clever observers might see a resemblance between the three environments in Air Land Sea, the three theaters in Richard Garfield’s Star Wars card game, and the three environments in Clades.

Princess

This simple card game was all about the central question of poker: should I put more money in and vie for the pot, or should I cut my losses and fold? This relates directly to the other important question: are they bluffing? The top card in the custom deck is the Princess, thus the name of the game. This game was not a hit, but even a failed experiment teaches you something. Maybe if I made kids actually bet money, they’d find it more engaging, but I’m not sure that’s a great idea. In creating games for grownups, Rob Heinsoo makes use of a similar tension—to vie for the pot or not—in his grownup games Three Dragon Ante and Night Eternal.

Checkers variants

Checkers is a great game for a grownup and a child to play competitively against each other. Unlike chess, the game plays perfectly well with some of the grownup’s pieces removed. This asymmetry gives the game momentum, in that the grownup starts behind but might pull ahead. Both players can try as hard as they can to win, and the grownup can increase or decrease the child’s advantage just by starting with more or fewer pieces. To keep the game from dragging on, have a player win when they have more queens than the other player has pieces (regular pieces plus crowned pieces). Since I played with my daughter, the crowned pieces were queens, and the uncrowned “men” were princesses.

Here’s my original page on checkers.

Clades, the Evolutionary Card Game

For years I’ve puzzled over how one could create an evolution game that has solid science behind it. My answer is Clades. It works by playing to kids’ natural inclination to categorize animals, and it teaches that the way to understand an animal’s place in this world is to understand its evolutionary history. Like many of the games I’ve described here, it works great when grownups play with kids. For example, since most of the cards are face-up on the table, it’s easy for a grownup to help younger players.

In 2016, artist Karen Lewis and I returned to Kickstarter to raise money for Clades, and we raised enough to produce a “dinosaur” version, Clades Prehistoric. You can play the games separately or together. Clades and Clades Prehistoric are available from Atlas Games or (better yet) from your friendly local brick-and-mortar store. 

Clades and Clades Prehistoric available from Atlas Games

2016

YouTube video from 2 years ago

Direct Dialog on Religion

Daniel Dennett has long promoted rules for criticizing honestly instead of insultingly. For example, you should start by stating your opponent’s position clearly, in terms that your opponent would use. This exercise demonstrates that you understand the position you’re about to criticize, not attacking a straw man*. It also sets a tone of exceptional reasonableness. Recently, the idea of “steel manning" seems to be gaining attention, and that’s in the same ballpark as the rules Dennett popularizes. Steel manning means addressing the opponent’s position in its strongest terms. Usually we caricature an opponent’s view without ever realizing we’re doing it. We honestly state our judgments, and we don’t try to caricature anyone else’s view, but the caricature starts in our own heads, so it’s almost impossible to avoid. On the other hand, if you intentionally make a “steel man” argument and address the opponent’s strongest points honestly, you overcome the reflexive tendency to caricature the opponent’s view. Sam Harris has made arduous efforts to communicate across lines of disagreement, and he has suffered some dramatic failures. He’s still trying, and sometimes it works. Two years ago, Dennett’s proposals got me experimenting with formats for disagreeing. Two years ago, I talked two other atheists into joining me online for a video conference where I would debate one of them and the other would moderate. The topic was “how useful is it for us atheists to challenge the religious beliefs of others?” I just reviewed the video, and it holds up surprisingly well. Take a listen if you like. There’s video, but it hardly matters. The action is all in the audio. 

View on Youtube

It’s an amateur performance and recording, for sure. At one point there’s a technical glitch, but soon enough everyone is back in the conversation. None of us are familiar with the format we’re trying, not the Google Hangout nor the moderated discussion. No one’s timing anything, so sometimes our answers go on too long. The performance is uneven. But given all that, it’s an interesting record of our experiment because the conversation is different from a regular debate. We…

• figure out what we agree on, which is as important as what we disagree on.
• take absolute either/or questions and turn them into questions of proportion. 
• state each others’ views fairly.
• clarify where our differences of opinion really lie.
• address each other’s points directly. 

This video is not ready for prime time, but as food for thought it seem worth sharing. 

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* “straw man” and “steel man”: These terms are needlessly gendered. Any chance that introducing “steel manning” is also a chance to change both terms at once? How about “straw dog” and “steel dog”? This switch works for me because men are dogs, but dogs are not men.

2016

Great-Great-200-Million-Times-Great Grandmother Fish

Great Great Grandmothers of Deep Time

How long is 400 million years? How do you get a child to understand that Grandmother Fish lived 400 million years ago? Honestly, that span of time is beyond the comprehension of an adult, let alone a child. So here’s a thought experiment to help little minds and big one appreciate the mind-boggling span of time between the first jawed fish and us. How long would it take you to say Grandmother Fish’s name if you said it out in full with all the “greats” that she deserves? It’s been 200 million generations since Grandmother Fish was alive, so she is our great grandmother with 200 million “greats”. If you said two “greats” per second, it would take you three years to say her full name.

Kids can understand what three years means. They might have siblings that are three years older or younger. They might remember how little they were three years ago, and they might imagine how old they will be in three years. It’s still a long time for a little mind, but it is comprehensible in a way that 400 million years is not. If you really want to drive this home with a kid, have them imagine that somewhere there’s another kid who is just now starting to say Grandmother Fish’s name with all the greats. Then for the next three years, occasionally remind your child that this imaginary kid is still saying Grandmother Fish’s name without a break. Poor kid. You can see why I call her just “Grandmother” Fish. Then three years after you first mentioned it, tell your now-older child that the imaginary kid has finally finished saying Grandmother Fish’s name.

The other value of this exercise is that it drives home an astounding fact. If you went back in time 400 million years and found the earliest jawed fish, they would be the direct-line ancestors of every human on the planet. They would literally be your flesh-and-blood ancestors, your family. The fish you found would also be the ancestors of all land vertebrates, not to mention nearly all fish. What a difference 200 million generations can make!

Here are all five Grandmothers, the number of “greats” in their names, and how long it would take to say the name out lout (at two “greats” per second). These figures are based on estimates from The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins, a book that helped me greatly as I worked on Grandmother Fish.

• Grandmother Fish, the earliest jawed fish. 200 million greats. 3 years.
• Grandmother Reptile, the earliest amniotes. 170 million greats. 2.5 years.
• Grandmother Mammal, the earliest eutherians. 120 million greats. 2 years.
• Grandmother Ape, the earliest apes. 1 million greats. 6 days.
• Grandmother Human, the earliest behaviorally modern humans. 4,000 greats. 80 minutes.

The time it takes to say a name corresponds to the number of generations that have passed, not the number of years. Apes have a slower life cycle than our earlier ancestors, so the number of “greats” in Grandmother Ape’s name is relatively small compared to the 30 million years since she lived. 

And if a kid gets excited and wants to try saying one of these names out loud, let them try. See how far they get.

2016

Geek Guys: Dress Up

At Emerald City Comic Con

Next weekend here in Seattle is PAX, the Pacific Northwest’s biggest game convention. Then on October comes Geek Girl Con. My message today is to the straight* guys out there who are going to attend these conventions or other conventions like them. You should dress up. It’s not hard.

When I was a teenage gamer, the idea of dressing up in fantasy clothes was ridiculous. It seemed childish, the sort of thing that even we geeks would criticize as being too geeky. We knew a college guy who played a 21st-level illusionist and who wore a cape to the game. A cape? We rolled our eyes. That’s the conformist 20th century for you. Luckily, modern society is getting over that narrow-minded disdain for costuming, especially in fandom. Costuming has really expanded in the last 10 to 20 years, and it’s a welcome addition to fan culture. Not only does it make conventions more fun, it especially makes the community more female-friendly. That’s an important improvement for a community that sometimes resembles a boys’ club. That’s why my message is for the straight* guys out there.

Dress up.

It doesn’t take much to be better dressed than the average geek guy at a con. Wear a funny hat. Wear a pirate shirt. A T-shirt with fannish joke on it might not be the best way to dress for a con, but if the shirt is clean and so are you, it’s a start. As for me, I’m not the sort to spend any serious time on a costume, so I’m likely to throw on a lab coat. In a lab coat plus a menacing glare, I'm a mad scientist. It’s not much, but that’s my point. It doesn’t take much to participate.

Wearing a costume shows that you’re the right sort of person.

• You put some thought into your appearance. 
• You like fun.
• You’re creative.
• You support costume culture. 
• You’re not a grumpy geek who takes himself too seriously to wear a costume. 

By dressing up, even a little, you help improve fan culture and make it more woman-friendly. Do your part. The bar is set pretty low, so no excuses. 

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* “straight”: In this post, I specify that my advice is for straight geeks. That’s because I have no standing to tell gay men to dress up. Only on a rare, good day do I dress and groom well enough for gay men to mistake me for gay. Male hetero geeks might be the only population to whom I could give any sort of advice about dressing up.

Table Grace for Nonbelievers

Plenty to be grateful for

In my atheist household, we have a little ritual to replace prayer before meals. I’m sharing it partly in case some of you would like to try it, partly as a clear example of what I’m talking about when I say that atheists could use more rituals. Atheists don’t have much going on in the way of rituals. In fact, plenty of atheists are hostile to the idea, or at least used to be when we were younger. We don’t like rituals because they’re irrational. But now it turns out that most of how we see the world is irrational, and rituals are useful things for humans who know how to use them. The birthday cake comes with a ritual; and it’s good, irrational fun. Counting down to the new year is another secular ritual, as are weddings and funerals.  Here’s a simple, heathen-friendly ritual from my household.

At my family dinner table, before we eat, each of us says something that we’re grateful for. We call it “saying our gratefuls”.

“I’m grateful that I got rid of a bunch of my old books,” someone might say.

“I’m grateful it stopped raining today.”

“I’m grateful for old friends.”

The practice of praying before eating has a significant real-world effect even if there’s no God listening. It focuses everyone’s attention on the same thing. It marks the beginning of a shared meal. It might remind people to feel gratitude, a feeling that most of us could use more of in our lives. Since my family doesn’t believe in God, we don’t pray, but we “say our gratefuls.”

Visitors join right in. Prayers can be divisive, sometimes even when it’s two different sorts of Christians at the table. Religion is tied up with identity, so divisiveness is basically built in. But anyone can say what they’re grateful for and appreciate what others say. Believers and nonbelievers can say their gratefuls side by side. Sometimes visitors thank God or Jesus, and I’m glad they feel comfortable doing it their way.

In theory, praying before a meal could encourage a sense of gratitude. In practice, however, saying grace is often done by rote. It can be so by-the-book that it doesn’t stir up much of a feeling. At the dinner table I grew up with, a child said grace quickly rather than with feeling. The sooner you finished the prayer, the sooner you ate. Saying gratefuls, on the other hand, can take a bit of time because each person speaks in turn rather than all at once. Nothing is rote. The extra time that gratefuls take may be a feature, not a bug. Sharing a meal is itself a powerful ritual. Steven Pinker says that it promotes a feeling of unity. A longer pre-meal ritual helps people prepare psychologically for a shared meal among family and friends.

Where rote prayers are general, gratefuls are personal. You generate your own statement; no one hands you a script. Everyone listens to each person in turn. When a group of people recite a rote prayer or listen to one person say grace, most of those people contribute nothing. When the people gathered around a table say their gratefuls, on the other hand, each person contributes something unique to the ritual, and everyone else pays attention to them while they do it.

As a game designer, I inevitably have some rules of thumb for how to do gratefuls “right”. First, you can’t repeat what someone else says. That rule is always fun when someone gets scooped, and they have to come up with a new grateful on the spot. Second, you should say a grateful that not everyone could say. That rule makes sure that each person is being personal and not abstract. “I’m grateful for old friends” is OK, but “I’m grateful that John and I took the same chemistry class in college” is more personal. Third, guests have to go first. That’s a joke rule that I spring on guests to get a laugh. Guests don’t have to go first. In fact, there are no rules for what your grateful can or can’t be. I like people not to repeat themselves, and I like people to be personal, but there’s not Pope of Gratitude to lay down laws one way or another. Just speak from the heart.

The reason that religious people do rituals is that rituals actually do work. That is, they have real-world effects, even if their supernatural efficacy is overestimated. Today, many secular people have jettisoned rituals because now we know that those rituals don’t provide supernatural benefits after all. There’s room in the lives of secular people, however, for natural rituals. In fact, we ought to be able to dream up better rituals than ever.

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Here’s an earlier post about rituals: Welcome Ceremony at Burning Man

New Testament Plot Fixes

Jesus' repentance and baptism under John
required a lot of explanation.

We modern people are sophisticated consumers of media. In our commercially oriented lives, we have heard more sales pitches than people in any other time or place in history. We hear and evaluate propaganda from our political and societal leaders. We are better educated, savvier, and harder to fool than ever. Today we find it easy to read between the lines and guess at an author’s motives. The Christian gospels were written for a less sophisticated audience, so it’s easy for us to see through them. The gospels were written generations after Jesus’ ministry, and all four of them plus Paul’s letters include “elaborations”. With our modern eye for shams, we can see the authors struggling to make the historical elements fit their mythic Christ figure. In particular, many parts of the New Testament read like answers to skeptical questions that 1st-century Christians may have heard from their dubious neighbors. Here is a list of hypothetical skeptical questions and the Bible verses that look like early Christian responses to them. 

Scripture Sources

Responses to each question are in chronological order, as found in the following works.

  Q, a lost compilation of Jesus’ sayings, written by c 50

  Paul’s letters about theology and conduct, written c 60

  Mark’s gospel, about how Jesus had secretly been the Messiah, written c 70

  Matthew’s gospel, which is Mark + Q + extras, edited for a Jewish audience, written c 80

  Luke’s gospel, which is Mark + Q + extras, edited for a gentile audience, written c 90

  John’s gospel, a bold retelling with an all-divine, not-at-all-secret Jesus, written c 100

Skeptical Question: If Jesus was the Son of David, why was he from Nazareth instead of from Bethlehem? 

  Matthew: Jesus was born in Bethlehem where his father lived, but they had to flee to Nazareth (by way of Egypt) to escape evil King Herod.

  Luke: There was this weird census, and Jesus ended up being born in Bethlehem because that’s where his father’s lineage was from.

SQ: If angels or wise men came to herald Jesus’ birth, why didn’t Jesus’ neighbors know he was special? (The story of Jesus’ neighbors not having faith in him is in Mark and Matthew.)

  Matthew: Jesus family was lying low, since the authorities were out to get Jesus. 

  Luke: Mary kept Jesus’ miraculous birth to herself.

SQ: John the Baptist preached about a great apocalyptic figure to come, but he never named Jesus as that figure. Why didn’t John recognize him?

  Q, Matthew, Luke: John was in prison when Jesus started his ministry, but he sent his followers to ask about Jesus, and that’s how he came to recognize Jesus as the Son of God.

SQ: If the Holy Spirit came to Jesus the instant he was baptized, why didn’t John recognize him then?

  Mark: As soon as the Holy Spirit came to Jesus, it drove him into the wilderness. John was already in prison when Jesus came back and started his ministry, so John never had the chance to recognize Jesus. 

  Matthew: Actually, John did recognize Jesus, but secretly. In fact, Jesus was born of a virgin, so he was already the Son of God before he was baptized, and John recognized him as such.

  Luke: Actually, John did recognize Jesus. In fact, Jesus was born of a virgin, and John recognized him as the Son of God before the two of them were born (because their mothers were cousins, you see). 

  John: What are you talking about? Jesus was never baptized. That’s for sinners. He’s the incarnation of God’s own Word, the pure Lamb of God. And John the Baptist told everyone that Jesus was the great figure that he had predicted. We have his sworn testimony on record. 

SQ: But why did Jesus get baptized anyway? If he was the perfect Son of God, then why did he need baptism for the remission of sins? Was he a follower of John’s?

  Matthew: Of course he didn’t need to be baptized, and John said as much privately, but Jesus insisted that they do the baptism in order to fulfill all righteousness. 

  Luke: Why are you so fixated on Jesus’ baptism anyway? The Holy Spirit came to Jesus after John was done baptizing everyone, when Jesus was praying.

  John: Jesus showed up where John was baptizing people, but he didn’t get baptized himself.

SQ: If Jesus was the Son of God, why didn’t he tell people? 

  Mark, Matthew, Luke: It was a secret.  

  John: What do you mean, not tell people? He told everyone who would sit still that he was eternally one with the Father. That’s why those devilish Jews wanted to kill him. 

SQ: Jesus said that we in this generation wouldn’t get a sign, but if he had given people signs, wouldn’t more people have believed and gotten saved? Wouldn’t mighty signs have brought more people to your church? 

  Q, Matthew, Luke: You know what, that’s exactly what the Devil said to Jesus in the desert. Satan tempted Jesus with the easy route of proving his divinity by mighty signs. So no he didn’t just win people over with special effects. That would have been giving in to Satan. 

  John: What do you mean, no sign? Jesus’ ministry is basically six miraculous signs proving his divinity, with his resurrection as the mystical seventh sign.

SQ: What did Jesus mean when he said that the hungry were the ones with God’s blessing? Going without food is a curse, not a blessing. And how can the poor be blessed? Wealth is a blessing, not poverty. Was he crazy, like his family thought? (Jesus says that the hungry and the poor are blessed in Q, Luke, and Thomas. Jesus’ family thinks he’s out of his mind in Mark.)

  Matthew: What he said was, blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness. Also, blessed are the poor in spirit. He wasn’t talking about physical hunger or poverty. 

SQ: I talked with some other disciples, and they never said anything about Moses and Elijah showing up to give Jesus their endorsement. 

  Mark, Matthew, Luke: Actually, only Peter, James, and John saw that. 

SQ: While Jesus was alive, even Peter, James, and John didn’t say anything about Jesus meeting Moses and Elijah. 

  Mark, Matthew, Luke: Jesus swore the three of them to secrecy.

SQ: If Jesus was the anointed king of the Jews and their savior, why did they reject him? If the Jews didn’t accept him, why should gentiles? 

  Mark: The Jews only rejected Jesus because he intentionally hid his message from them. He taught in obscure parables so that the Jews would lose their opportunity to repent and thus be destroyed.

  Luke: Jesus came for all people, not just the Jews. Jews in his hometown tried to kill him at the start of his ministry when he told them that his saving message was for gentiles, too. 

  John: The Jews are basically in league with Satan. 

SQ: If Jesus was God’s Son and everything, why were the Romans able to nail him up on a cross like a runaway slave? 

  Paul: Being “hung on a tree” allowed Jesus to suffer a curse of guilt, which otherwise would never afflict a perfect being. It was all part of God’s plan.

  Mark, Matthew, Luke: That was all part of Jesus’ plan. He even taught the disciples about how he was going to be killed and resurrected. 

SQ: If Jesus taught the disciples that he was going to die and then rise from the dead, why were they surprised when he was killed and when he rose from the dead? 

  Mark: They didn’t understand his teaching.

  Luke: They didn’t understand his teaching because Jesus used veiled language.

SQ: If the crucifixion was all in God’s plan, why did Jesus cry out in despair as he was dying on the cross? (Reported in Mark and Matthew.)

  Luke, John: What do you mean? He took his crucifixion in stride, with no show of fear, pain, or weakness. The crucifixion didn’t even kill him. He willed his own death when the time was right, in accordance with scripture.

SQ: So if the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate had Jesus crucified, does that mean Jesus was an enemy of Rome? (In the late 60s, Jews across the empire were in revolt, making this question particularly salient.)

  Mark: It was really the Jews who were behind it. Pilate couldn’t even figure out why they wanted Jesus dead and offered to release him. 

  Matthew: Pilate’s wife told him Jesus was innocent based on a dream she had, and Pilate washed his hands to symbolize that he did not participate in the judgment. The Jews called for his death, accepting the guilt of their act on themselves and their children. 

  Luke: Pilate found Jesus innocent, but the Jews called for his death.

  John: Pilate tried twice to release Jesus, and he even placed Jesus in his own judgment seat. But the Jews screamed that he should be crucified.

SQ: Bodies of crucified criminals are thrown to the dogs. How was there a tomb for Mary Magdalene to visit? 

  Mark, Matthew, Luke, John: A respected member of the Jewish council took Jesus’ body for burial. 

SQ: You say Jesus supposedly “appeared” to a couple followers after his death. So what? Sometimes people see things.

  Paul: He appeared to 500 people at once. Five hundred people can’t just be “seeing things”.

  Luke: Is that right? Well, the disciples didn’t believe the women at first, either, but then they learned the truth. Don’t be like them.

  John: Actually, there was a disciple who doubted, too, but once he put his fingers in Jesus’ wounds, he believed. Don’t be like him. 

SQ: Now that Jesus is dead, you Christians are claiming that he taught stuff that no one has heard before.

  Mark: He taught the disciples secret knowledge. That’s why you haven’t heard this stuff before.

  John: Jesus told us disciples that he would send us messages in prayer, so some of this teaching is new to us, too. But it’s still Jesus saying it.

SQ: The disciples don’t have any authority. They’re just a bunch of guys that tagged along after Jesus.

  Mark, Matthew, Luke: Actually, Jesus hand-picked his disciples and even knew their names before talking to them. 

SQ: Jesus never said that the disciples had any of his authority or set any of them up as a leader.

  Matthew: During a private meeting, Jesus gave authority to Peter and to the disciples. 

  John: When he came back from the dead, Jesus breathed the Holy Spirit over the disciples, giving them the authority to forgive sins, or not. And another time when he was back from the dead, he told Peter to feed his sheep, meaning lead the church.

SQ: Jesus never baptized anyone. Why are you Christians baptizing people? That was John the Baptist’s thing.

  Matthew: When Jesus came back from the dead, he told the disciples to baptize people.

  John: Jesus did too baptize people. In fact, his disciples led a bigger baptism campaign than John did. 

SQ: I get having a meal in Jesus’ honor, but where does all this sacrificial blood imagery come from? (A once-lost document called the Didache reveals an early Christian community with a memorial meal but without a blood covenant.)

  Paul, Mark, Matthew, Luke, John: Jesus privately established a new covenant in his blood. 

SQ: When Jesus was alive and for the following 20 years, his sect was strictly Jewish. Now this guy Paul is founding gentile congregations, and gentiles no longer have to convert to Judaism to become Christian. That can't be right.

  Matthew: Once when Jesus appeared to the disciples after his death, he told them to make converts in all nations. The Jews used to be God’s Chosen, but now it’s the Christians. 

  Luke: Jesus said right from the start that he had come for all people, which is why his wicked Jewish neighbors tried to throw him off a cliff.

All these cover stories point back to a historical Jesus. Christopher Hitchens said that the amount of fabrication in the gospels is impressive evidence that the stories are based on a historical figure. (Here’s a link to the video.) If there hadn’t been a historical Jesus doing things like getting baptized, the reasoning goes, then there would be no need for these layers of justification. Mainstream historians reach much the same conclusion. 

Spotting Crow Families

An adult on either side, the juvenile in the middle.

This post is for animal lovers and especially for science-loving parents with little kids. Learn the call of the juvenile crow, and you’ll be able to find crow families for fun and education.

Here in Seattle, you can often hear fledged juvenile crows pestering their parents for food. Here’s a link to an audio clip of this distinctive call.

Juvenile crow call

In this call, a parent might recognize the whiny tone of a demanding child. It’s April, and the complaining has begun.

If you hear this call, it’s often easy to find the juvenile. They’re not in the nest. Instead, Mom and Dad are taking Junior out for a scavenging tour. Mostly Mom and Dad get food and fly it back to Junior. Sometimes you’ll hear Junior’s call start fine and get garbled. That’s when a parent puts food in its mouth in mid-whine. As Junior grows, Mom and Dad act less and less accommodating. Junior has to fly closer and closer to the food to get fed. Eventually Junior has to follow Mom and Dad to where the food, and finally Junior is scavenging on its own.

You can spot a juvenile crow because it looks like a goof. Adult crows are just the opposite: savvy, aware, together, and poised. Juveniles are awkward, with clumsy posture and a certain air of cluelessness. Sort of like a teen boy who’s grown so tall in the last year that he doesn’t know what to do with his limbs. Other than this cluelessness, juveniles are hard to tell from the parents. A juvenile’s feathers puff out and make it look big, probably an adaptation that helps juveniles get eaten less often.

If you spook the parents, they may fly away, in which case the juvenile will follow them. If you hold still, you may be able to observe the adults feeding the child. Looking straight at a crow makes it more wary. It’s less threatening to watch them out of the corner of your eye.

If you’re a city parent, crow families are an opportunity to show your kids a little bit of nature and the cycle of life. For example, crows are a lesson in pair-bonding. Mom and Dad crow work side-by-side, not just raising kids year after year but scavenging day to day. Very different from robins, where the males love to fight each other and the most successful ones establish families with multiple females. Robins also choose mates over again each mating season. That’s a different sort of lesson for your kids.

Bonus self-referential question: Ask a kid if they can think of any other kind of animal that takes its young ones out and about to learn about the world. If you’re walking with that kid in a park telling them about crows, then the answer is you.

Kids and Grandmother Fish

Kids loved even this early draft of  Grandmother Fish.

Macmillan is picking up Grandmother Fish for a second edition in September, and Karen and I are ecstatic. We’ll reach a lot more kids, and we won’t have to do the packaging, shipping, and marketing. This deal is really quite a milestone for us, and it’s a joy to bring the miraculous story of evolution to lots of little kids. Last year at this time, I was really excited by the response that the book had gotten from parents and educators. Now I’m even more excited because I’ve seen and heard how children respond to Grandmother Fish. 

Before finishing the book, we had lots of people read sketchy versions to children, and the results seemed promising. We even saw the “light go on” when a girl, having the story read to her by her mother, saw Grandmother Human and realized that the story was about her. The only test that counts, however, is when parents are reading the finished book to their children. Now that we have self-published the book, we have heard from plenty of parents about how kids in their own homes respond to it, now complete with all of Karen’s lovely art. The verdict? Kids love Grandmother Fish. Lots of parents tell me that this book is their children’s favorite book, or even that their kids want the story read to them every night. 

A professional editor said she was surprised that both her 3-year old and her 6-year old loved it. One 4-year old has memorized the book and now “reads” it to his dad, something he’s never done with any other book. 

For an older girl, it’s the first book she was motivated to read (actually read) by herself. 

One 2-year old delights in telling people “I AM A HUMAN!” She belts out that phrase at the store or over the phone—wherever she finds a listener. 

A 4-year old reportedly asked his parents, “What do you think we’ll evolve into?” His dad told me that the question made his heart and his wife’s heart “sing a little.” 

One father, an author I greatly respect, sent me a video of his little girl struggling to read the “cuddle” page. Then, in a heart-melting comment, she says she wants to put the book in her “beauty drawer,” where she keeps beautiful things forever. 

A blogger and mother of two boys with autism says Grandmother Fish is great for her kids. 

Lots of parents also tell me that kids love studying the phylogenetic tree in the back, a great feature that Karen encouraged me to add to the book. 

It’s been tremendously gratifying to hear all these stories. As near as I can tell, the book really seems to connect to kids. Wiggling like a fish is a lot of fun, but I think what really appeals is that the story grounds the child in the family of living things. When a 2-year old announces to strangers “I AM A HUMAN,” she’s saying “I see where I fit in.” I would say that reaching kids this way is a dream come true, but honestly I never dreamed that children would respond so deeply to Grandmother Fish. Karen and I can’t wait until the second edition releases in September. Then we’ll all really see what the reaction is like. 

2016

Description of first PNW gathering

Oasis Coming to Seattle

Oasis is a secular community that started in Houston, spread to Kansas City, and is now opening chapters across the US. Founders from Houston and Kansas City came to the Pacific Northwest to support locals who are interested in opening a chapter here, and I was curious enough to attend the first gathering. A group of mostly ex-Mormons, connected over the Internet, is providing the core of interested people bringing Oasis here. It’s similar to Sunday Assembly, although with weekly gatherings, less singing, and better childcare. Overall, I liked what I saw, and I recommend folks check it out. 

Oasis meets weekly, which is great if it works. Folks are not expected to attend every week, but they’ll still probably attend more often than folks attend Sunday Assembly, which meets monthly. In terms of building community, the more you meet, the better. 

Music at Oasis is provided by musical guests for attendees to listen to, as opposed to the group singing that typifies churches, Sunday Assembly, and all manner of communal gatherings back to our primordial history. Lots of secular people feel weird singing in groups, so for them Oasis is going to be more comfortable. As for me, I’m not much of a spectator, so listening to someone perform isn’t as compelling as singing in a group. I can’t really sing, but I don’t let that stop me. By not singing together, modern people are turning their backs on our universal heritage, but that’s a whole other story. 

Oasis offers childcare, although it doesn’t yet have a curriculum or formal program. They’re already ahead of the game if they provide a casual program where secular kids have fun together while their parents do something more adult. They also have their ducks in row as far as background checks and other security precautions you need when dealing with children. Kids’ programming, or at least childcare, is something that most secular groups leave out, and usually you have to go to a church to find an intergenerational community. (That’s what I do. I’m a Unitarian.) For me part of being a feminist is supporting parents and families. If a program offers no options for kids, that’s a burden for both men and women, but mostly for women. 

Like Sunday Assembly, Oasis features informative and personal talks as well as music. Talking and listening to talks is one activity that secular people have nailed. In fact, if even listening to songs is too churchy for you, the Seattle Atheist Church offers a program that’s all talk. As for Oasis, I’m happy to report that their policy is not to take their gatherings as an opportunity to carp about religion. There’s more than enough negativity in the atheist community already.

Oasis also features social events. In fact, in Kansas City the atheist group there is devoted to activism, leaving Oasis as the default place for organizing secular get-togethers and service projects. Some participants skip the services and just participate in the social and service programs. Here in Seattle, the social angle is already well covered. Seattle Atheists has a huge array of get-togethers and a few regular service projects, Sunday Assembly offers a parallel track of get-togethers, and smaller secular groups provide more options for social gatherings. Seattle Atheists has a book club, Sunday Assembly has a book club, and Oasis will probably have a book club. Seattle Atheists has game nights, so does Sunday Assembly, and I bet Oasis will, too. It sure would be great if there were an easy way for someone to see all the social options there are out there for secular people in the Seattle area.

A big question is where the gender ratio will end up at communities like Oasis. Atheists are mostly men, and church appeals disproportionately to women. So where does that leave “atheist churches”? We’ll see. Given how hostile the atheist community can be for women, I'm sure that these groups focusing on community will do better than atheist forums on the Internet. 

The information meeting was in Tacoma, but the first chapter might open in Seattle, where the largest number of interested people were from. The group is organizing a launch team to prepare for a launch in June. If you’re interested in getting involved, the Meetup group is a great place to start [http://www.meetup.com/Seattle-Oasis-Secular-Community/], and you can contact organizers there.

2016

Clades Card Preview

Squamates, by Karen Lewis

Karen recently updated the card face for Clades, the secret game we’re working on, and here’s what they look like. With this nice look, I’m getting excited about this game. For years I was stumped by the question of how to do an evolution game. Now I have one.

All my life I have loved biology, but I never learned what a clade was until I started studying evolution to write Grandmother Fish. Now that I know what a clade is, I’m so excited about the idea that I created a game about it. A clade is any complete branch of the evolutionary family tree. In other words, it is an ancestral population plus all the descendants of that population. “Mammal” is a clade because all mammals descend from an early mammalian population, and no other animals do. The category “reptile” is not a clade because birds descend from the same early reptiles that lizards and crocodiles descend from. Since “reptile” doesn’t include birds, it doesn’t include all the descendants of those early reptiles and can’t be a clade. Biologists have reclassified living things along cladistic lines, putting birds with reptiles in the “sauropsid” group (meaning “lizard-face”).

The top card shown is the clade Squamata (“scaly”). Squamates are lizards and snakes. The card also shows four smaller clades: the chameleon clade, the snake clade, the gecko clade, and the Toxicofera clade (including snakes and chameleons but not geckos). In turn, the Squamata clade shown on this card is part of the sauropsid clade with birds, turtles, and crocodiles. The bottom card is the clade Whippomorpha, which includes whales, dolphins, and hippos. The whippomorphs are part of a major mammal clade including deer, pigs, horses, carnivores, and most large land animals.

Whippomorphs,  by Karen Lewis

Since the concept of the clade is based on common descent, clades demonstrate that evolution has happened. The only reason that scientists can read the genomes of different organisms and classify them together in clades is that different species evolved from common ancestors. When we say that hippos are closely related to whales, we don’t mean that they’re alike. We mean that their common ancestor lived not too long ago, maybe 50 million years ago in this case. In the 1700s, Linnaeus classified organisms according to their traits, such as whether they have scales. Today, we classify organisms according to their evolutionary family history.

The clades concept helped me create an evolution-themed game that kids and grownups can both play. For years I’ve mused about how one could create an evolution-themed game that didn’t compromise on the science. The big problem, as Richard Garfield has observed, is that games are about players planning to reach a goal, which is the opposite of evolution. By its nature, evolution defies the default structure of a game. Another problem is that you “win” evolution by reproducing. Computer games can model reproduction easily, but that’s hard to do with a tabletop game. One year when the Burning Man theme was evolution, I ran mate-choice simulations using playing cards, but we couldn’t do successive generations because there’s no easy way to represent reproduction. And that’s where I was stuck. Thanks to my research on Grandmother Fish, I learned about clades. That gave me a new angle from which to approach the problem of how to do an evolution-themed game, and I’m gratified to have finally designed one. Happily, this game is all about Karen’s cute, little pictures of animals, which are on all the cards. 

As with Grandmother Fish, it’s exciting to be on the side of scientific literacy, especially evolutionary science. Scientific literacy has been on the rise for the last century, and that may have contributed to the rise in IQs. Science is so well-proven that even the opponents of science, such as creationists, pretend to be scientists. Evolution in particular is a great topic to be working with because it’s a scientific topic that people respond to emotionally. Some people hate it, but others respond warmly to it. It’s about who we are, and I bet that’s why it matters to people. 

No more details yet. Just wanted to offer a peek at the cards and rave about clades. The plan is to run a Kickstarter later this year. Stay tuned. 

Clades in Grandmother Fish: post from last August.

More on clades: The Berkeley site Understanding Evolution has some nice explanations of clades free online. I also worked on the Wikipedia page.