Customer Reviews

Maybe Right, Maybe Wrong: A Guide for Young Thinkers

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Amongst all the WWJD, religion equals morality, preaching stands Dan Barker, willing to say, "Yes, there is such a thing as morality and, no, there's no need to buy into superstition to understand it." Barker never talks down to kids nor does he try to pass off the old shell game of pretending that morality is simply a matter of following someone else's rules.

I highly recommend this book for children of freethinkers and anyone else who prefers rationality to dogma.

Teaches young people how to be Good, not through obeying laws and rules without thought, but by remembering certain principles ("do not hurt others", "value life) and fitting them, through thought, to situations. A wonderful answer to the idea that people can't be moral without god and government.

I bought this book for my son, who was raised by my dad down south, in the bible belt. To say my son was brainwashed would be putting it mildly. I'm not sure how much the book did, but he's becoming more normal every day, and is now starting to be able to make his own decisions based on his own feelings of guilt and his own moral code, rather than having to ask himself "what would jesus do". I read the book myself, and though very basic and maybe a 2nd-3rd grade reading level, I thought it made some excellent points, and it made me think... no small matter for a book of such a low reading level! I highly recommend it to any agnostic or pagan parents trying to teach their children the true meaning of right and wrong, without the guilt of a higher being being used as an intimidation and scare tactic to twist the child into submission. This book should help to develop the free thinking skills that are required for any child to be happy and have good self-esteem in regards to their choices and actions.

This book is about a young girl, Andrea, who is learning how to make ethical decisions in a variety of situations by acquiring and learning how to use the tools of reason, rather than relying on arbitrary doctrines or dogma decided beforehand by authorities past or present, be it Prophets,

We live in a country where Fundamentalists are pushing religion into every corner of our lives. My 11 year old daughter and her best friend were both told by another "friend" that they would burn in Hell because of their beliefs....my daughter is a Humanist and her best friend is Jewish. (Mind you, we live in a mostly progressive and open-minded city!) We need this book and more authors who are willing to say that all of us can be good and moral without a belief in God.

Dan Barker is a well-known freethinker, and I bought this book for my young children, to introduce them to the basics of Humanism. At first, I was nonplussed by the artwork of this book; it is not inspired or creative. My kids, however, have read "Maybe..." a number of times now, and seem to really enjoy it.

Mr. Barker shows kids how they can use their brains and hearts to figure out the best course of action in various real-world situations. Because of this, "Maybe Right, Maybe Wrong" deserves a spot on the bookshelf of my young readers. Perhaps for his next book Mr. Barker will work harder on the visual appeal.

Very simple comic style book that covers some pretty serious issues. Both my children enjoyed this book and had a lot of thinking to do as a result of reading it. I highly recommend this to anyone who would like their children to think a little more about what they hear and do.

The beginning of this book - and the part I had access to via the preview function - starts out well enough. We are introduced to Andrea, and immediately to a situation where she determines that fighting solves nothing. It then jumps to a hypothetical situation of Andrea's cat being hit by a car and we are walked through Andrea's struggle between two concepts she knows to be right and realizing that they can't both apply to the situation. Should her cat be 'put to sleep' and spared inevitable pain or kept alive, suffering, in an effort to delay inevitable death. Before Andrea makes her choice, the question is offered, aptly, to the reader. Then next page shows Andrea choosing the difficult but most logical choice -- to end her cat's life, and thus, his suffering. I found this portion of the book to be precisely what I expected in terms of reader interaction and the promotion of free thought the book is supposed to be based upon.

The question regarding Andrea's cat posed on page 20 of the 76-page book, is essentially the last real thought-inducing question posed to the reader. Allow me to express my surprise here, as I believed that this book would gently guide its reader to conclusions, rather than stating them outright.

There are some pages following this discourse which discuss the concept of morality and there being 'good people who do believe in god(s)' and 'good people who do not believe in god(s).' Appropriate enough.

Then it jumps into small segments of 'do and don't' lists, ie. 'Do be fair.' or 'Don't cheat' and most of these have little follow-ups on the 'why' of explaining the reason these are or are not things we should do. I honestly expected more. As in, I expected that rather than laying down a bunch of adult concepts spelled out in simple kid language, that the adult concepts would be geared toward a kid audience on a kid-level while still maintaining their core ideas.

Perhaps the following example will demonstrate this fairly succinctly. On page 48, addressing the topic of honesty it gives this example: "Suppose a woman you know comes to your home and says she needs somewhere to hide because her husband has been beating her up." Huh? Really? Because dozens of 5 year olds are running their own covert battered women's shelters?

I begin to question, with that last example, what age audience this is supposed to be geared toward. On one hand, the illustrations and tone of the writing seem quite well matched to an early grade-school child. It is written in simply-worded text that my five year old daughter could easily read herself (though I certainly intended to read it over with her first). But when you touch on a prickly topic like battered women, something that hopefully most children will not have to encounter, you open up some rather uncomfortable possibilities. The one that comes to my mind is my daughter going to school and telling her teacher than if daddy ever beats mommy, she won't tell him where mommy is. Parents out there may grasp why this would be an undesirable outcome of broadening their child's mind..... For children who have already encountered real-world domestic abuse, I think it's fair to say they have bigger fish to fry than pondering whether providing shelter to battered women whilst being honest with the husband is the moral high ground. The subject matter is too mature and could have been better chosen given the potential age group.

Moving on.

Later, on page 57, the Golden Rule is addressed. I'm quite fond of the Golden Rule and its endless applications. As I understand it, in its most common form, states "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Barker has a different take on it and says it means, "Some people are kind to others because they want to be treated the same way themselves." That's actually a quite different thing. Amazing how you can change words around ever so slightly and convey an entirely different concept. Barker goes on to demonstrate this glaring difference by saying, "But other people are kind because they think human beings are valuable, not because they want a reward." I find this perplexing. Perhaps I've gone my whole life interpreting the phrase "as you would have them do unto you" incorrectly, but I always believed that you treated others the way you would ideally like to be treated -- though that may not necessarily be the way they actually treat you in return. It's a form of empathy, you know? One that comes from the most valid source of logical data one has for interpersonal relations - their own interpretation of how the actions of others effect them. If an action effects you negatively, then you should not visit that action upon another being (human or otherwise). Which, going back to the initial scenario, could have easily been the logic for euthanizing the pet cat. If your death were inevitable and you were suffering greatly, would you choose euthanasia or would you prolong your life, suffering, dignity beyond reason? I would have euthanized the cat because I would ideally hope that another would use their own insight to do the same for me in a similar situation. I would still euthanize the cat, even if someone chose not to euthanize me were the tables turned, because my moral compass is internal and greatly based on my experience of personal pain and suffering and the experience of watching others needlessly endure it. That is all to say, I find the section on the Golden Rule to be off- perhaps influenced by a negative connotation with its general association with religion?

This book is presented and titled as being a guide for young thinkers. But as I got progressively further into the book, it seemed to be laying out a sort of moral dogma, with little justification, and requiring little thought and contemplation from the reader. Dogmatic presentations of moral thinking are precisely what I believed the book was created to counter, and I feel it fell flat. This is even more sad because on each and every page I can see the author's *intention* and then as he carries that good idea along he almost seems to trip himself up on it and it just gets regurgitated on the page in ineffective form. By the end I felt that the ability to think your own way through it was rather squelched by the 'do and don't' tone it takes on.

I bought this book as part of a long-term plan to counter Christianity-based indoctrination that has been directed at my daughter. As an atheist of many years, I find it difficult to stand idly by and let her believe that what little she has been fed by religious infleunces represents the thinking of the entire world. I'm terribly disappointed to say I don't this will make its way into our 'Chrisitanity-unschooling' curriculum. Which is a shame, because I've looked extensively and can find nothing else like it.

I plan on returning this book. It will be my first book return on Amazon. But I feel our money could be better spent on educating our daughter about -- well anything. Mythology, eastern religions, philosophy, ethics, science and the cosmos.... There are a lot of paths to free thought. But this one, I believe, is too forward, too black-and-white, and not informative enough to be the optimal one.

Maybe right and maybe wrong is a great book for honestly explaining morality (both to adults and kids) without any appeals to arguments from authority. It gives valid reasons for why one should behave in certain ways, without appealing to any Bibles/Korans/Talmuds. And in a much more universal language, it advocates morality, listening to one's conscience, and living with principles. It leaves open the possibility that one principle might be more important than another principle, whereas religiously based morality makes inflexible (though sometimes contradictary) moral assertions, without any general principles and explanations about why something is moral (other than appealing to the authority of the bible, et. al). The religious way can and never could be reconciled with the paradoxes of real human society. For example, if killing is always against God's commandments, then why do Muslims exhort killing in Jihad's, or why do Christians and Jews believe in the eye for an eye (without any explicit permission). For real morality, you have to be consistent. Principle based morality relys on us humans to figure out what is truly moral.

What a fresh and honest outlook on life this book gives. I wish my parents had read this book to me when I was little.

Excellent book for children age 8 and older. Speaks of universal values and principles, points out the limitations of rules imposed by authority (religious or otherwise), and teaches children to *think* for themselves and follow their principles. Easy-to-read prose, great illustrations, light-handed yet deeply philosophical. A must have for those searching for resources for parenting beyond belief.