Facing Rabbi Ishmael on my Summer Vacation
(Continued)

Training in both analysis and belief can give us protection from religions that threaten us. (Does Katie Holmes have this protection?) It can give us protection from paranormal claims which can hurt us. Think of it as inoculation: early exposure to shades of belief can help us deal with full-strength harmful uncritical nonsense when we find it.

There’s more to it than just providing people with a skeptical tool kit. Because religions can be very firmly rooted in culture, they can provide a tool kit that is archaic in appearance, but especially durable. Write up a list of rules for textual analysis and publish them in the Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, and I’ll never read them. If I tried, I’d never understand the jargon. When I was done I’d push the ideas aside as potentially useful but not something I can deal with just now.

Pass these ideas on through religion, and you are wiring it into teaching children an ancient language from age three, building the habit of reading out key texts as part of morning “prayers”, and then including the set of rules, written in that language, in that daily reading session. Repeat daily for eighteen hundred years, and you have got resonance. I’m not going to get all dewy-eyed and start singing selections from Fiddler on the Roof, but staring sleepily at the same page of rules as my grandmother did, and her grandmother, and her grandmother before her elevates one sleepy camper to princess of a dynasty of skeptics.

Expecting a flexible young mind to believe six impossible things before breakfast can, of course, go horribly wrong. The girls twisting and turning in place with their prayer books in front of their faces never seemed to believe things on different levels. Suggest to them that the Bible is a book of religion and not a book of science, they look back with a rather smug look because they know better. For them the truth of religion will never be shades of meaning and value.

A mediaeval commentator on the book of Exodus says with a straight face that fruit trees grew from the bottom of the Red Sea to feed the Israelites as they crossed. That girl with the prayer book in front of her face believed it the same way that she believed that Joseph dreamed of power and the same way she believed that Franklin Roosevelt had been President of the United States. What can you do: you can lead a horse to water, make her read out thirteen rules of critical thinking every morning, and she’ll still believe in her own culture’s equivalent of Santa Claus.

For some it doesn’t work at all, and of course religion isn’t the only way to learn a fusion of evaluating beliefs with rigorous critical thinking. It is well known that some religious sects are downright hostile to the idea. Religion can have other difficult aspects: some religions wake adolescent girls up early in their summer vacation and take a dim view of kung-bao shrimp.
For some, however, religion is not just another silly set of paranormal beliefs or a mind control plan or a means to enable holy men to make a living without doing honest work.

These two versions of Rabbi Ishmael show two aspects of religion: the idea of rigorous critical thinking and the idea of teaching by telling exciting stories. A good fusion of these aspects allows somebody to absorb and analyse traditions, philosophies and values of a religious community without taking away the ability to think skeptically.
Rabbi Ishmael’s angelic parentage doesn’t come with a lot of strong documentation, but we can still learn a great deal from him.

Dr Lynette Davidson lectures and writes on history. She lives in a charming market town in the south of England with her partner and two daughters.

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