Religious Brainwashing

How to get a child to grow up believing that God wrote the Five Books of Moses:

Immerse him in Orthodox Judaism from day one. Spend thousands of dollars sending him to Orthodox schools. Insulate him from non-Jews and non-religious Jews. Shield him from any mention of the documentary hypothesis. Assure him that commentators like Rashi and Tosfos know more about the Torah than any secular Biblical scholar. Make him believe that Orthodoxy is dependent on certain beliefs and that if he leaves Orthodoxy, he loses his community. And maybe your love, as well. Expose him to speeches almost every day about the beauty and necessity of the Torah. Have him study the Talmud for years and insist that the Talmud's analysis of every verse as if it were dictated by God is not only true, but was also given to Moses at Sinai.

How to get a child to grow up believing that the Five Books were written by men:

Don't send him to an Orthodox school.

Any questions?

Another Poll on Evolution

Gallup: Now thinking about how human beings came to exist on Earth, do you, personally, believe in evolution, or not?

Adam and Eve in the Land of the Dinosaurs

The NY Times reviews the new Creation Museum, which opens next week in Kentucky.

Two prehistoric children play near a burbling waterfall, thoroughly at home in the natural world. Dinosaurs cavort nearby, their animatronic mechanisms turning them into alluring companions, their gaping mouths seeming not threatening, but almost welcoming, as an Apatosaurus munches on leaves a few yards away.

What is this, then? A reproduction of a childhood fantasy in which dinosaurs are friends of inquisitive youngsters? The kind of fantasy that doesn’t care that human beings and these prefossilized thunder-lizards are usually thought to have been separated by millions of years? No, this really is meant to be more like one of those literal dioramas of the traditional natural history museum, an imagining of a real habitat, with plant life and landscape reproduced in meticulous detail.

For here at the $27 million Creation Museum, which opens on May 28 (just a short drive from the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky International Airport), this pastoral scene is a glimpse of the world just after the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, in which dinosaurs are still apparently as herbivorous as humans, and all are enjoying a little calm in the days after the fall.

It also serves as a vivid introduction to the sheer weirdness and daring of this museum created by the Answers in Genesis ministry that combines displays of extraordinary nautilus shell fossils and biblical tableaus, celebrations of natural wonders and allusions to human sin. Evolution gets its continual comeuppance, while biblical revelations are treated as gospel.

Outside the museum scientists may assert that the universe is billions of years old, that fossils are the remains of animals living hundreds of millions of years ago, and that life’s diversity is the result of evolution by natural selection. But inside the museum the Earth is barely 6,000 years old, dinosaurs were created on the sixth day, and Jesus is the savior who will one day repair the trauma of man’s fall.

It is a measure of the museum’s daring that dinosaurs and fossils — once considered major challenges to belief in the Bible’s creation story — are here so central, appearing not as tests of faith, as one religious authority once surmised, but as creatures no different from the giraffes and cats that still walk the earth. Fossils, the museum teaches, are no older than Noah’s flood; in fact dinosaurs were on the ark.

So dinosaur skeletons and brightly colored mineral crystals and images of the Grand Canyon are here, as are life-size dioramas showing paleontologists digging in mock earth, Moses and Paul teaching their doctrines, Martin Luther chastising the church to return to Scripture, Adam and Eve guiltily standing near skinned animals, covering their nakedness, and a supposedly full-size reproduction of a section of Noah’s ark.

There are 52 videos in the museum, one showing how the transformations wrought by the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980 reveal how plausible it is that the waters of Noah’s flood could have carved out the Grand Canyon within days. There is a special-effects theater complete with vibrating seats meant to evoke the flood, and a planetarium paying tribute to God’s glory while exploring the nature of galaxies.

Whether you are willing to grant the premises of this museum almost becomes irrelevant as you are drawn into its mixture of spectacle and narrative. Its 60,000 square feet of exhibits are often stunningly designed by Patrick Marsh, who, like the entire museum staff, declares adherence to the ministry’s views; he evidently also knows the lure of secular sensations, since he designed the “Jaws” and “King Kong” attractions at Universal Studios in Florida.

For the skeptic the wonder is at a strange universe shaped by elaborate arguments, strong convictions and intermittent invocations of scientific principle. For the believer, it seems, this museum provides a kind of relief: Finally the world is being shown as it really is, without the distortions of secularism and natural selection.

...

The heart of the museum is a series of catastrophes. The main one is the fall, with Adam and Eve eating of the tree of knowledge; after that tableau the viewer descends from the brightness of Eden into genuinely creepy cement hallways of urban slums. Photographs show the pain of war, childbirth, death — the wages of primal sin. Then come the biblical accounts of the fallen world, leading up to Noah’s ark and the flood, the source of all significant geological phenomena.

The other catastrophe, in the museum’s view, is of more recent vintage: the abandonment of the Bible by church figures who began to treat the story of creation as if it were merely metaphorical, and by Enlightenment philosophers, who chipped away at biblical authority. The ministry believes this is a slippery slope.

Start accepting evolution or an ancient Earth, and the result is like the giant wrecking ball, labeled “Millions of Years,” that is shown smashing the ground at the foundation of a church, the cracks reaching across the gallery to a model of a home in which videos demonstrate the imminence of moral dissolution. A teenager is shown sitting at a computer; he is, we are told, looking at pornography.

Holocaust Denial: The New Creationism?

Ezzie links to Mevaseretzion who posts about a disturbing story out of Britain:

Schools are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils, a Government backed study has revealed.

It found some teachers are reluctant to cover the atrocity for fear of upsetting students whose beliefs include Holocaust denial.

At first it sounds like political correctness gone mad. But that's not what's really going on:

It found some teachers are dropping courses covering the Holocaust at the earliest opportunity over fears Muslim pupils might express anti-Semitic and anti-Israel reactions in class.

The researchers gave the example of a secondary school in an unnamed northern city, which dropped the Holocaust as a subject for GCSE coursework.

The report said teachers feared confronting 'anti-Semitic sentiment and Holocaust denial among some Muslim pupils'.

It added: "In another department, the Holocaust was taught despite anti-Semitic sentiment among some pupils.

"But the same department deliberately avoided teaching the Crusades at Key Stage 3 (11- to 14-year-olds) because their balanced treatment of the topic would have challenged what was taught in some local mosques."

A third school found itself 'strongly challenged by some Christian parents for their treatment of the Arab-Israeli conflict-and the history of the state of Israel that did not accord with the teachings of their denomination'.

The report concluded: "In particular settings, teachers of history are unwilling to challenge highly contentious or charged versions of history in which pupils are steeped at home, in their community or in a place of worship."

So there are really two things going on here. One is that teachers want to avoid antisemitic statements (or worse?) by their students. The other is that teachers are scared or reluctant to challenge what students have been taught by their parents or religious leaders.

The former is basically a discipline problem. Any reasonable teacher should be able to best a student in a debate about whether the holocaust happened. The way to defeat a bad argument is with a better argument, not with censorship. And any student who cannot refrain from hate speech (e.g. making anti-semitic slurs) should be disciplined or expelled.

The latter is similar, at first glance, to what's been going on in the U.S. regarding the teaching of evolution. Evolution has as much evidence for it as do the Crusades, but many schools do not teach it because of religious nuts. But it's not really the same thing. In America, the anti-evolution nuts are in the majority in many (if not most) school districts, while (presumably) holocaust deniers are still a small minority in Britain. It's bad enough to drop a subject when you have the truth on one side and a majority of people -- including many educators -- on the other. But when both the truth and the majority are on the same side, it's crazy to give in to the nuts.

What if I'd Gotten Married When I Was Still Orthodox?

It seems to me that the essential determinant of the divide between the frum skeptics and those of us who left Orthodoxy completely is whether we were married at the time we started having serious doubts. Orthodox culture is such that it's not generally plausible for a man or woman to come out as non-Orthodox without causing adverse consequences for his or her family. These consequences can include divorce, shunning, and even difficulty finding mates for one's children. I have nothing but sympathy for those who choose not to make their doubts or disbelief known even to their families.

Corresponding with a few of these frum skeptics recently, I got to wondering what my life would have been like if I'd married my last Orthodox girlfriend before I'd gone too far down the path away from Orthodoxy.

We would have had an Orthodox ceremony, of course, making it as liberal as I could get away with, but still containing language I could not agree with and some antiquated notions of marriage. I would have suffered through sheva brachos.

After the wedding, I suppose I could have attended shul the way I did anyway at that time in my life: go for the short Friday night service and try to enjoy the singing, and time my arrival perfectly on Saturday morning so that services were just letting out and it was time for kiddush (i.e. socializing.) We would have attended Shabbat lunches at other couples' houses and had them to our own. I would have made kiddush and sat through benching either letting my mind wander while moving my lips or actually saying some of the words to pass the time.

What of my intellectual explorations? Would I have dared to read Dawkins? To join the Internet Infidels Discussion Board? Or would I have settled with a hodge-podge of Jewish mysticism and apologetics? I doubt could have actually believed that stuff, but I probably would have been careful not to look at it too hard. What would have happened when I discovered the J-Blogs?

How would I act at work? Could I ever be comfortable as "the Orthodox guy?" What would I feel about explaining why I couldn't eat bread next week or why I couldn't attend the company social event? How could I answer my gay coworkers when they asked about Leviticus?

And then, kids? How would I feel at a bris? Would I have chuckled to myself during the pidyon haben? Or felt cheated if my daughter only got a simchat bat?

And then, preschool. How would I feel when my 3 year old came home and told me that God is everywhere? And when he asked me to say the shema?

Could I have handled it when she got a little older and asked why her Rabbi said that all non-Jews secretly hate Jews on the inside? Or what the word schwartze means? Or whether I would slaughter her if God commanded me to?

Then what if she asked me why the boys got to learn Gemara when she was stuck in Navi? And what exactly is a "firmament," andyway? And why does God command the murder of women, children, and even sheep? And is it really wrong to be gay?

What if my wife wanted me to start getting to shul earlier? And being a good role model for my children on Yom Kippur? And what if the gabbai asked me to lead the prayers or read from the Torah? What if a friend asked me to be a witness at his wedding and I knew that I wouldn't be a kosher witness because I turned lights on and off on shabbos? Would I start to hate being asked to lead the benching?

And what if my son didn't want to read his bar mitzvah portion? Could I insist? Would I? What if he went to summer camp and came back with a black hat and a well-worn set of mishnayos? Could I learn with him while holding my tongue about what I really thought? What if he decided my wife and I weren't being strict enough about kashrut and that our oven wasn't kosher enough? What if he went to yeshiva in Israel and wanted to stay a second year? A third? To eschew college and become a Rabbi?

Or what if he started reading Dawkins and was asking questions about evolution and the age of the universe? Could I pretend that saying "yom" means "age" solved the problem? What if he honestly believed in Orthodoxy but wondered what the deal was with the Documentary Hypothesis? What if he became an atheist while my daughter became ever more frum?

How long could I stay silent? What would its toll be on me and on my marriage and on my kids?

What of grandkids?

I'm just glad I got out when I did.