LETTERS to the editor.

* Peace and War

I agreed with everything that Douglas Mattern said in "Humanity's Juncture: Abandoning the Road of War for the Road to Peace" until I read: "The same species that invented war is capable of inventing peace." I don't believe that the human species invented war. All creatures apparently have been battling for their existence since the beginning of time. Before we can invent peace, we need to find a way out of our primitive roots.

Helen C. Depel Oklahoma City, OK

The March/April 2000 issue was thrilling. Douglas Mattern's thoughtful piece on "Humanity's Juncture" is replete with information plus a brainy plea for a brighter future for humanity than now exists. World peace is the essence of humanism. The rest of the issue represents the highly intelligent approach to the idealistic society we all crave but haven't the guts to fight for.

Edna Ruth Johnson St. Petersburg, FL

The cover story of the March/April 2000 Humanist is an exercise in futility. Douglas Mattern states all the reasons why we have solved problems by war and violence in the past and says we have to find a better way.

Why?

His other statistics prove amply that there is no alternative to violence, given the circumstances that prevail. Twenty percent of the world's people have 86 percent of the world's gross domestic product--three billion people live in poverty. And that is not likely to change, even though philanthropists like Ted Turner give billions to benefit the needy.

Human nature is shaped by its environment--and the environment is aimed toward competition, acquisition, and outdoing others. Those we revere are those who have the most worldly goods. Those we pity and look down upon are those living in squalor. Hardly anywhere are the lessons of fairness, equality, and love taught. Even in the churches, often the emphasis is on feeling superior to someone not as "enlightened" as they. The schools are instruments of teaching children to excel in a capitalist world--to become better educated than some, to want more goods, and to desire more privileges.

Ask yourself: if you were someone living at the poverty level, would you exult in the good fortune of the much admired millionaires who are praised in all our publications? Whether athletes who make millions of dollars a year or actors who command $20,000 an appearance or politicians who receive lecture fees of thousands of dollars for a speech, the propaganda is that they are superior human beings just by virtue of their acquired wealth.

So where are we all to learn to become loving and giving rather than hating and taking? Humanist societies, which generally support these values, are notably lacking in bodies. The Unitarian Universalist Association is one of the smallest congregations existing. Obviously, people are not flocking to learn how to be caring individuals who are willing to forgo luxuries in favor of equality. We can always hope that beneficent aliens will visit, take over Earth, and force us all to care about each other--but I wouldn't hold my breath.

U.S. citizens are engaged right now in trying to elect a president. Campaign finance has been generally ignored and huge bills have piled up for the leading contenders. I really liked Bill Bradley's ideas, but he's not going to make it, mostly due to lack of money.

Once, many years ago, I read a book by B. F. Skinner called Walden II in which small communities were set up around the ideas of equality and humanity. It sounded good, but I don't see too many of those.

I sound really cynical. Actually, my attitude toward my fellow humans is that I give everyone the benefit of the doubt and like them until they are proved false. I don't believe, of course, that people are born evil and have to have the devil beaten out of them. But I do believe that somehow, before we have a world of peace, we are going to have to change the messages we give to our young.

Dorothy Eppstein Kalamazoo, MI

* Toy Stories for Believers?

As one who believes in God but values much of the humanist debate with religious viewpoints, I appreciated reading Lucia Hall's "Toy Stories for Humanists?" ("Humanism in the Arts," March/April 2000). I even rented Disney's Toy Story and thoroughly enjoyed watching it through the eyes of the insightful allegory she presented. I'm still not convinced I'm just a "really cool toy," however, and I think I saw some things in this movie-as-metaphor which Hall's article may have overlooked.

The character Buzz Lightyear's misinformed view of himself might indeed apply to much of the popular perception of evangelicals, but what really makes Buzz special, like Woody, is that the child Andy loves him. Andy gives them the identity and ultimate purpose they both so desperately need. Woody's terror of being "a lost toy" reveals this, as does the absolute dejection the toys both feel when the R/C dune buggy runs out of battery power while pursuing their ultimate meaning and purpose (catching the moving van) near the climax of the story. They are toys, after all, and it is the experience of being loved and needed by Andy that they are pursuing. As toys they need more than the companionship, courage, and loyalty (love?) that they display toward one another. They need Andy's love.

Toy Story 2 picks up on this theme, and a unique quality of love emerges. Love by its nature demands an acceptable object, which reflects and responds to the love of the subject. Andy and his love are the purpose for the existence of toys like Woody and Buzz. Andy represents a quality of God to them, which animates the story itself, corresponding with ultimate human needs for love's ultimate object.

That Stinky Pete has no such need makes him "really stinky." He has lost his capacity to love truly because he has lost the ultimate reference point for a toy--a reference that the "rescue mission" still knows. Woody is temporarily deceived by Pete but comes to his senses through the persistent efforts of Buzz and the gang--evangelicals for Andy's love. They believe Woody really should acknowledge what Andy's love ought to mean to "toys like us." And eventually Woody sees the light.

So, to be consistent, humanists should write Andy out of the script. But in so doing they would become Stinky Pete. The Roundup Gang might conceivably appreciate each other "in mint condition" forever in a museum without the need for the love of children but, without children who will become adults and recall their love for such toys (and put them in museums), the Roundup Gang's compromised bid for lasting and meaningful material paradise becomes time limited. Without the love of children, the toys will, through the ravages of time, be forgotten and even their new meaning as museum pieces will evaporate.

The humanist concept of love--lacking as it does a feeling for the depth and demands of God's love and a vision of our own potential for eternal existence--appears to lose significance through a sheer lack of permanence. Human love desperately needs such an object and permanence to be taken as seriously as it ought to be. We can't escape becoming "lost toys" without it.

Randy Stephens Middleburg, FL

* "Humanitarian" War

Michael Parenti's article, "NATO's `Humanitarian' War: Notes on the Aftermath (March/April 2000), disappointed me by its author's uninformed bias, credulity, and blindness to the pervasively corrupt and bankrupt "socialist" dinosaur that is today's "Yugoslavia" (read: Serbia).

Throughout the article, Parenti avoids critical weighing of both sides of arguments and accepts blindly the Serb versions. Take the case of the Serb metaphor comparing the fate of Mexicans in the United States and Corsicans in

France to the Kosovar Albanians. Parenti seems blind to the long list of Serb atrocities, not just in Kosovo but throughout what was greater Yugoslavia. Interestingly, the same issue of the Humanist mentions under "Worth Noting" that five Croat officers were sentenced by The Hague tribunal for war crimes. It is also worth noting that all five were extradited by the government of Croatia to the tribunal. No Serb has yet been extradited to The Hague by the Yugoslav government or by Republika Srpska.

As a native of Yugoslavia and a humanist, I could say more. Yes, there are some grains of truth in Parenti's article. Unfortunately, they are inseparable from the mass outpouring of Serb paranoia.

Ted Kramer Ames, IA

Thanks to Michael Parenti and his fellow visitors for "NATO's `Humanitarian' War: Notes on the Aftermath," which is the first such exposure in a U.S. magazine of the Yugoslavian debacle I have read since watching the more open coverage of that seventy-eight-day NATO nightmare in three other countries that I happened to be traveling in at the time: Canada, France, and the United Kingdom.

But I would add a point. Parenti mentions the impact of NATO cluster bombs. As it turns out, NATO has dropped more cluster bombs in Yugoslavia in a shorter timespan than since the U.S. carpeting of neutral Laos and Cambodia in the early 1970s. And German television has reported that unexploded bombs in Yugoslavia will take women and children's lives for a long time to come.

Lawrence Iles Kirksville, MO

* Partnership Education

Riane Eisler's article "Education for the Twenty-first Century" (January/February 2000) espouses a theory of education that cannot work. She would abolish the hierarchical aspects of schooling and make students "partners" with teachers to promote the learning process. I believe this is a wrong approach for several reasons.

First, children come to school from hierarchical homes, where they are dependent upon their parents for all kinds of assistance and guidance for everything they need and want. This experience is not likely to change, and it is hardly preparation for becoming partners with teachers.

Second, children cannot "partner" with teachers because their lack of knowledge and experience prevents them from contributing to the relationship in a meaningful way. Teachers were once children, and it is easier for them to read the minds and emotions of their pupils than for the children to be aware of and articulate what they are experiencing.

Third, children in the higher levels of education may be closer to the intelligence level of their teachers, but by that time they need to learn to study independently and use library resources. Instead of making children partners with their teachers, it is better for the teachers to wean them away from dependence upon them.

Norman L. Edwards Newton, MA

Editor note: Riane Eisler's article sets forth general principles and goals that are fleshed out in better detail in her new book, Tomorrow's Children (Westview Press). But you can read about a specific example of how such ideas can work in "Nobody Left to Hate" (this issue; pp. 17-21). Author Elliot Aronson provides a proven method whereby students who enter school without certain types of knowledge can nonetheless partner with the teacher and classmates, countering some of the effects of our hierarchical society in the process.

Have you noticed an apparent contradiction between what is proposed by Riane Eisler in "Education for the Twenty-first Century" and the expectation that this change could occur in our present school system, which is based, to use Eisler's words, "on domination and submission, on coercion and accommodation"?

Our presnt system says to children: "You must go to school exactly when and where your democratic government requires, you must accept what it teaches and nothing contradictory, and your parents must pay for this school even if they send you to another (which also must follow your democratic government's regulations)--that is how your democratic government works. We will make you a free (if you obey) citizen!"

The foundation of the present system, with its "dominator" model of education, is the compulsory attendance laws. If these did not exist, schools could all be based on the partnership model, insofar as parents and students desire. But is this conceivable while attendance--"who, when, and where"--is compulsory? School staff are ordered to report absences and police are empowered and instructed to arrest truants. Can partnership education exist where students are forcibly forbidden to leave a class?

In pursuit of the partnership model through Eisler's Center for Partnership Studies, I hope someone will file and fund a challenge to this foundation of the dominator model--all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

R. K. Multer Rindge, NH

* Biblical Criticism 

In "American Coriolanus" in the . January/February 2000 Humanist, Melvin Seiden makes the statements: "Moses and Jesus were fatherless sons" and that "one finds not even a shadow of paternity." But in Exodus 6:20, Numbers 26:59, and 1 Chronicles 6:3 and 23:13, Moses' father is identified as Amram. He married his aunt (his father's sister)--an incestuous relationship prohibited in Leviticus 18:12.

Seiden also writes that "Mary looms so large and Joseph so small." Yet this heroine of Christian mythology is not mentioned in the Epistles, nor is she identified by name in the gospel of John, which does cite Joseph. The gospels of Mark and John do not even report the virgin birth. In fact, outside of her adulterous affair with the Holy Ghost, references to Mary are so rare as to make her a relatively minor character. She is cited by name nineteen times, whereas Joseph is cited sixteen times by name. And in addition to the gospel of John, Joseph is cited more often than Mary in Matthew. Thus, except for being Jesus' mother, she hardly looms "large" in comparison to Joseph.

Elliott Lesser Editor, Bibles Review: A Secular Study of Bibles Phoenix, AZ