Humans of New York - and Elsewhere

There's a blog I like a lot that's called Humans of New York, where photographer Brandon Stanton posts portraits he has made of people on the street, along with short first-person narratives that give a glimpse into the lives of his subjects. A selection of his posts was published in book form in 2015.

Recently Stanton has been traveling and doing similar portraits of people all over the world. He has for example, been photographing and listening to the stories of Rohingya refugees from Myanmar. And he has a link on his site to group that is raising money to provide temporary housing for the refugees. I encourage you to check it out.

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A week or two ago Stanton posted something that got under my skin when I first saw it and has continued to bother me since that time. (It's one of the great strengths of Stanton's manner of working that he lets people speak for themselves, which in turn encourages us to think about what we might have to say in response.) The post, which you can see here, shows a middle-aged man in Indonesia sitting on a blanket in a park and staring at the camera with a stern expression. The man's comment runs like this:

We must teach religion in our schools. We must start them really, really young. As soon as they know how to point out basic things like ‘rock, milk, tree.’ That is the best time to start. Not too much. Just one hour a day until they are about seven. Enough to teach them the basic prayers and Arabic alphabet. It has to be compulsory. You don’t have to force them to believe. But you must force them to study. It’s the most important thing in life. All of us have animal thoughts and lust. Only with God do you start having rules. Even the Christians have rules. I have a Christian relative. They pray to God as well. And the Hindus, well I don’t really understand Hinduism, but they have something too. You must have a higher power. When a man lives without God, it’s very dangerous. You have no reference, no principles, no precepts. You are almost equal to animal.

I think I understand why the gentleman feels this way. I suspect that many, if not most, people in the world would agree with his thesis. My mother certainly did. She was raised as a Methodist but married a Catholic. The church, in its wisdom, stipulated that my mother must agree to convert to Catholicism before she could be allowed to marry my father; furthermore, she had to agree to raise her children as Catholics. Which she agreed to do, because she believed that the Catholic religion provided a good framework for raising children. And so, as it turns out, my education was placed in the hands of the Sisters of Mercy (elementary school), the Benedictines (first two years of high school, and the Jesuits (last two years of high school and all four years of college.) And what I have come to believe, in part because of my experience with religion-infused teaching, and in part because of my experience of the world during adulthood, is that the gentleman's thesis is not just wrongheaded, it is recipe for disaster.

Certainly it is true that "all of us have animal thoughts and lust." Certainly it is true that human beings are capable of great selfishness and great cruelty to one another. But I don't believe it follows that the only way to have a life with rules is to be a theist, or that the only way we can confront and master our weaknesses is by the appeal to a "higher power." In fact, throughout history it is precisely the fervent belief in a higher power that has served as the smug justification for much of our most inhuman behavior on a massive scale.

It's a very short leap from saying that anyone who lives without God—or without the particular version of God that the speaker may have in mind—is almost equal to an animal, to believing that such people should be treated as animals, leading to the kind of genocide and ethnic cleansing that has been responsible for countless millions of death in the last century alone: Christians exterminating Jews (and Muslims), settlers exterminating native Americans, Hutus exterminating Tutsis, Buddhists exterminating Rohingya, Muslims exterminating Christians and even other Muslims of a different stripe, etc. etc. ad nauseum.

In the course of my education—much of it, as I have said, at the hand of fervent Christians, many of whom were, to their credit, open-minded about other ways of thinking— I have come to believe, along with the narrator of Ivan Klima's novel Love and Garbage, that the people who are most to be feared are not the ones who are given to doubts, but rather the ones who are entirely too sure of themselves:

The most important things in life are non-communicable, not compressible into words, even though the people who believe they have discovered them always try to communicate them, even though I myself try to do so. But anyone who believes that he has found what is truly enduring and that he can communicate to others the essence of God, that he has discovered the right faith for them, that he has finally glimpsed the mystery of existence, is a fool or a fantasist, and, more often than not, dangerous.

Amen, brother. Look no further than the front pages of your daily paper or the latest postings on social media to see the results. Ever since I began this blog twelve years ago, I have had at the bottom of the page a quote from Eric Sevareid that pretty much sums up my feeling: "One asks not only for the courage of his convictions, but for the courage of his doubts, in a world of dangerously passionate certainties."

I believe that it's a mistake to begin force-feeding children religion when they are too young to understand it ("an hour a day until they are seven"). To do so is to exploit the children in their innocence, to engage in a form of brainwashing that the children are helpless to resist, and, in the worst case, to narrow their vision and lay the groundwork for the kind of self-righteous thinking that results in the dehumanization and demonification of those whose perspective differs from one's own.

So, teach children the value (and the pleasure) of study, yes. Encourage their engagement in the world, their sense of curiosity, their sense of wonder and appreciation. When they are old enough to express an interest on their own, encourage them to explore the many interesting and thought-provoking ways that humans have come to answer such questions as "Where did we come from?" and "Where are we going?" and "What does it all mean?" Let them learn something about Islam, about Christianity, about Hinduism, about Buddhism, about Bahai, about Taoism, about whatever religious stances they find themselves drawn to, including agnosticism and atheism. Let them grow up in a state of respectful uncertainty, make their own choices, and learn to accept that the choices they have made are not the only possible ways of being fully human.