Archives for November 2014

Two funerals in six weeks… and they couldn’t have been more different

November 26, 2014 by Guest author

Lorain Behrens offers a personal reflection on two funerals she recently attended: one Jewish, and one humanist.

Humanist Ceremonies funerals are popular for their personal and fitting focus on the deceased, paying tribute to the way they lived their life, the connections they made and left behind. Pictured: funeral celebrant Cath Sutherland.

My mother-in-law lost her battle against cancer in August; my mother died suddenly six weeks later. My husband’s mother attended a nearby synagogue. One short phone call later and the funeral was arranged for the next day. We had hardly time to accept that she had died before we were lifting soil on to her coffin. We chose to mark my mother’s life, by contrast, nearly three weeks after she died with a humanist celebration.

Angela lived in the Jewish heartland of Manchester, in a flat in Prestwich. Although not outgoingly religious, she was true to her beliefs and she wanted the traditional Jewish funeral. The rabbi was contacted and everything was swiftly put in place for the service and burial a mere two days after she had died in hospital. Around 50 friends and relatives gathered at the interdenominational graveyard where the rabbi spoke his piece and then dirt was shovelled ceremoniously on to the coffin. More traditions followed back at her flat, where the four main mourners sat on lowered chairs and ate a meal of a bagel, herring and a boiled egg. The women were supposed to remain in the kitchen while the men mingled with the rabbi in the lounge, but some traditions are meant to be broken!

We were just coming to terms with Angela’s death when my mother Sylvia, who had become quickly quite frail, had collapsed in pain and was taken to hospital. Two days later she was on life support. She never regained consciousness, and died two weeks later.

Mum had always insisted she wanted a no-fuss funeral. ‘Just put me in a cardboard box and cremate me,’ she said. It’s easy to laugh when your loved one is still alive.

However, the funeral director explained, cardboard coffins were actually much more expensive than basic wooden ones – apparently the process of making the cardboard itself is extensive, which is where the cost comes in. He then showed us a brochure from an organisation called ‘Colourful Coffins’ who offered a choice of designs, as well as the opportunity to design your own.

My mother loved poppies. Her father had served in the First World War, and on Remembrance Day every year she would walk down to the end of her garden and spend a few moments in quiet contemplation. So the choice, despite the sad circumstances, and thus we selected the poppy designed casket.

Mum always described herself as ‘a happy atheist’. Her husband, my step-father, saw religious people as ‘eccentrics’. I personally am what you might call a ‘militant’ atheist (whatever that’s supposed to mean).

So it was inevitable and accepted that we would say goodbye to my mother through a humanist ceremony. The British Humanist Association was wonderful and its accredited celebrant, Hilary Leighter, spent two hours with my stepdad and brother talking about my mum, who she was, what she was like, in order to put together a tribute for the occasion. Music was chosen. My mother had loved ‘It’s Alright,’ the theme from the BBC TV show New Tricks, which proved difficult but ultimately not impossible to get hold of. To that we added a couple of operatic arias, and finally ‘As Time Goes By’, a song which had meant everything to her in the 42 years she had been married to Derek.

The ceremony took place in a chapel at a crematorium in Amersham. ‘There won’t be any crosses or religious symbols, will there?’ I had asked the funeral director. He assured me that they would all be removed. However, when I went to place a stem of a hoya flower on my mother’s coffin, I spotted a Jesus on a crucifix half hidden by the curtain. The hymn books were also in place on the pews but ignored by our gathering. Some things you just can’t avoid, it seems.

Hilary, who had never known my mother, even shed a tear or two as she read the tribute, so strong was the feeling of loss among us all in that small room. But there was no mention of any god, any afterlife, any of that nonsense. Even a Sikh neighbour who attended came up to me afterwards to say what a lovely service it had been.

It was mid September and the weather was still warm. Many people who had known my mum came back to the garden at her home in Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, to eat, drink and chat in the early autumn sunshine. Despite our sadness, it was a day full of joy.

There was some dissent; Derek received an email from a distant cousin who had been at the service, even though he had not made himself known. He wrote a few weeks later to complain that there had been no religious element to the ceremony; Derek sent the email to trash without responding.

My mother’s ashes will be buried in a plot at the Stoke Poges Memorial Garden. We will have a bench where we can sit and look out at the fountains and gardens, remembering her and enjoying some quiet contemplation. In the summer, planted poppies will grow there too.

Angela has been buried near to her mother’s grave and we will return at some point in the next few months for the official unveiling of the headstone.

Angela was 81, Sylvia was 78. They both had three children — a girl and two boys. One was my husband’s mother, one was my mother. Two women, two mothers, two very different funerals.

Lorain Behrens is a freelance journalist and visual arts student at Bradford College of Arts and Media. Some names have been changed.

Humanist Hero: Joss Whedon

November 25, 2014 by Liam Whitton

Here Liam Whitton writes about his admiration for writer-director Joss Whedon

There are few bigger names in entertainment today than Joss Whedon, who steered Marvel’s The Avengers to box office record-breaking success in 2012.

For his fans, this day was inevitable. Many of us had watched — or in my case, grown up on — Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and knew as early as then what a remarkable talent Joss Whedon was.

Buffy's enduring popularity hasn't just changed televisions, but several other mediums as well. Art by Jo Chen.

Buffy‘s enduring popularity hasn’t just changed television, but several other mediums as well. Art by Jo Chen.

What was also apparent to many, although perhaps many wouldn’t know it by name, was the extraordinary humanist quality to Buffy, and which can be found throughout Whedon’s work.

An obvious theme in Whedon’s work is the empowerment of women. But Whedon’s feminism is only a constituent piece of his larger, more encompassing humanist philosophy. Buffy, crudely summarised, is about a young woman with supernatural strength and physical attributes who fights the forces of evil. What elevated the show above its television forebears and contemporaries, and which continues to make it a seminal work of TV-as-art, is the programme’s relentless focus on the inner lives of its characters. The writers on the show were told to write with one question in mind: how does Buffy feel? From this spawned a rich show of complex characters encountering philosophical problems as often as social ones, making some of the most fully realised drama in all of fiction, and spawning an entire academic sub-field known as ‘Buffy studies’.

Whedon’s other themes are capitalism and greed, as explored largely in Angel, Dollhouse, and the comic book Fray; the fundamental dignity that comes with personhood, explored through Dawn and Connor in Buffy and Angel and as the central premise of the show Dollhouse; and secular explorations of redemption, as seen in all of his shows, where characters who have done terrible things attempt to make amends for their actions, and all learn in various ways that redemption is never finished, and that simple human compassion motivates the most profound and honest sacrifices.

Andrew West has written for HumansitLife about his love of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry before, and BHA Chief Executive Andrew Copson has written admiringly of Roddenberry as well. Star Trek‘s popularity with humanists is partially rooted in its optimism for the human race, and its almost Utopian depiction of a universe where the Humanism Roddenberry so passionately felt has motivated humankind to explore, develop rational scepticism, and foster cooperation, all to great success. And I myself have written on Doctor Who‘s humanist themes, particularly in the form of its non-human main character the Doctor, a firebrand humanist with one advantage the rest of us don’t have — he knows much more than we do about the world (which is often used to justify the show’s forays into fairly fantastical heights of speculative fiction). But neither of these programmes achieve what Joss Whedon has consistently done throughout his work, which is to present Humanism and explore its implications in a world where essential human problems share the scale of epics.

Whedon’s worlds are alive with Humanism despite these worlds often not being humanistic or physical materialist in conception. In Buffy and Angel, the characters confront monsters, demons, witches, and deities, and accept that these things exist. They have a good reason to believe these things exist which we do not: in Buffy and Angel they really do. The ‘soul’ is a major plot device in both those shows as well, as it accounts in a nebulous and nonspecific way for the presence of morality. An early Angel episode, ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin,’ even suggests that the absence of a ‘soul’ explains true human psychopathy. Yet as both those shows go on, Whedon becomes increasingly interested in using the supernatural framework of the show for exploring the human problems we all really face, and to advocate the evidence-based and compassion-led approach to ethics we should be using to make decisions our daily lives.

From the beginning, Buffy used the supernatural to generously provide metaphors for all manner of social issues. Often the personal struggles of a character would be reflected in those of the monster of the week, or some atrocity in a character’s past would contain meaningful wisdom the audience could apply to another person’s present-day dilemma. Good fiction has long done this: the most successful novels take a chosen theme and stretch it into every line of dialogue, every visual motif, make their pages blossom with insight into the world. With cinema and theatre, the visual and textual have long been aligned in this effort, but until Buffy, television was a odd-man-out, a place for episodic dramas about buddy cops and the like. Buffy itself quickly moved from ‘high school’ themes to more mature ones. Season one’s ‘Invisible Girl’ provides a fairly mundane example of this: high school social alienation (and the fact that Sunnydale High sits above a Hellmouth) literally makes a shy girl turn invisible. By its later seasons, Buffy was commenting on the same theme with all the deftness of a poet.

Buffy‘s most fantastical and high-concept episodes are probably season four’s ‘Hush’ and season six’s ‘Once More, With Feeling,’ a silent episode and a musical respectively. The musical television episode had been pioneered for the modern age with Xena: Warrior Princess (several times in fact) before then, but it was ‘Once More, With Feeling’ which set the bar for TV concept episodes to come. In both ‘Hush’ and ‘Once More, With Feeling,’ Whedon’s characters, who are otherwise known for their verbal dexterity and linguistic playfulness, struggle to express themselves. In ‘Hush,’ they fail to articulate and say what they truly mean, and gradually find through the silence which has enveloped Sunnydale that in fact, language can be a barrier to honest communication; a hindrance rather than a tool. When the silence ends, Buffy and her boyfriend Riley sit in awkward silence, failing to at all express what they truly feel. In ‘Once More, With Feeling,’ subtle characterisation and running plot threads in the character’s emotional lives come to the surface when the people of Sunnydale find themselves living in a musical. For all their exposed personal dilemmas, Buffy’s is the greatest, and it is the tortured character of Spike who must remind Buffy (through song) of her reason for living, despite her life-as-hell experience with severe depression:

Life’s not a song
Life isn’t bliss
Life is just this
It’s living
You’ll get along
The pain that you feel
You only can heal
By living
You have to go on living

…echoing Buffy’s own advice to her sister Dawn, in the previous season. You see, Buffy’s depressed in season six because she died, went to Heaven, and came back against her will. But her realisation in the season five finale ‘The Gift’ was that her love of her sister was a gift, and to sacrifice herself to save her sister’s life was her personal privilege. ‘Death is your gift,’ Buffy was told prophetically earlier in the season. She struggled to understand what that meant, if anything, before later arriving at a subtler understanding of life and death, and how one cannot have true meaning without the other. A humanist message in itself. ‘The hardest thing in this world is to live in it,’ Buffy counsels Dawn. Even in the supernatural world of Buffy, Whedon systematically undermines the supernatural to force the characters to explore the world as we ourselves face it.

The best example of this is in Buffy’s sister show Angel, when the beloved character Winifred ‘Fred’ Burkle dies in ‘A Hole in the World.’ The literal hole of that episode aside, which was a actual cavity running end to end through the Earth, the central ‘hole’ encountered was an emotional one for the characters as Fred died, possessed and eaten out from the inside by the ancient demon Illyria. In the ensuing episode ‘Shells,’ remembering Buffy’s aforementioned resurrection, Angel travels the world looking for a quick fix to the problem, before learning that Fred’s ‘soul’ was ‘consumed in the fires of Illyria’s resurrection.’ The hole in their world then becomes that much deeper, and I remember being 14 at the time it aired and really being hit powerfully for the first time by the reality and permanence of death. It made Buffy’s sacrifice (which for her, was to an unknown end) carry the same weight in subsequent rewatchings, and deepened my admiration for non-religious people who risk their lives for the good of others. It also reminds me of the Greek proverb: ‘A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.’

Another example of the undermining of religious supernaturalism in Buffy is that ‘Heaven’ is probably just another alternate dimension (called ‘hell dimensions’) of the infinite number which exist in the the show’s multiverse: merely an especially benign type of the world, among many more of infinite horror, and several others such as the World Without Shrimp and the World With Nothing But Shrimp. When the character Cordelia goes to one such heavenly dimension in Angel, she finds it is simply inconsolably boring, and later the characters learn that the heavenly beings behind Cordelia’s ascension are really just as nasty as the demons they typically encounter down on Earth — except relentlessly mean-spirited in their pursuit of a bigger-picture, consequentialist ‘good’, providing a healthy rejoinder to that Christian maxim that ‘God works in mysterious ways.’ In Angel, gods work in mysterious ways because they’re dicks. Or rather, because sometimes people are. Angel‘s deities are just another set or kind of fallible people, and in Whedon’s world, the bigger and tougher of us always face greater propensity to be bullies.

For all she’s seen, Buffy remains an agnostic atheist: unconvinced that the supernaturalism of her world means anything. Not that it’s mentioned much; it’s sort of inconsequential to her life of kicking butt and stopping evil. ‘The jury’s out,’ she says, when asked if there’s a (Judeo-Christian conception of) ‘God’ early on in season two.

Dollhouse was perhaps Whedon's darkest television show, set in a science fiction universe full of bad people abusing one another. But it also explores hope.

Dollhouse was perhaps Whedon’s darkest television show, set in a science fiction universe full of flawed and sometimes extremely devious people abusing one another. But it also explores hope.

Whedon’s later series Dollhouse is very much rooted within a materialist universe like the one we really live in, and is as much as anything else about human corruptibility, and mankind’s negative traits, including (through a science fiction lens) the world of prostitution, sex trafficking, organised crime, and how badly we treat the mentally ill, the disabled, and the less fortunate. Unlike Buffy and Angel, there is no ‘soul,’ no secret sauce to the human experience outside of our material bodies. We can be uploaded, downloaded, altered all through changes to the electrochemical states of our brains, as new hardware allows brains to be treated like hard drives for minds. And yet even so, as main character Echo goes on, she cobbles together a personhood formed from fragmentary fictional and borrowed identities which is just as valuable and ‘real’ as any of the ‘real’ people with real personalities she encounters. When humankind is given greater power and propensity to abuse, humankind abuses it (which is perhaps the show’s sole environmentalist message), but even so, it is only people — in all their diversities — who can champion and stand up for all that is good in the world, too.

They do so in spite of impossible odds. In Angel season four, the character of Gunn is told that by a shady character that higher powers manipulate their lives to such a degree that their active choices carry little weight; he presents a free will problem we’ve probably all thought of before. We’re all shaped by forces outside of ourselves. Some big, some small. Can free will exist in a deterministic universe? Gunn makes, as best he can, a passionate plea that our choices still matter. Like Sam Harris would say, even in a world without free will, we can still find meaning in our lives, and make our decisions count.

Similarly, in season two’s ‘Epiphany,’ Angel, who spends much of his long life on one crusade or another, always reaching for the grand gesture which will redeem him in his own eyes and in the eyes of others, reflects on finding meaning in a universe with no ‘cosmic plan’, and no certainty. He concludes, in his titular epiphany, which is presented as a milestone for the character’s development:

If there’s no great glorious end to all this, [and] if nothing we do matters… then all that matters is what we do.

It’s really no surprise that Angel’s ‘mission statement’, and the character’s last words (which closed out Angel‘s five-year run) are ‘Let’s go to work.’ Whedon symbolically had Buffy repeat the line in the concluding issue of Buffy‘s first canonical comic book season five years later, reflecting the fact that these two heroes are united by the same basic purpose. They separately arrive at the conclusion that your good work is never finished. Good work is their shared duty simply because it needs doing; no more, no less. Whedon’s characters are unlikely ever to arrive at the paradisiacal future of Star Trek, or the easy happy endings which characterise Doctor Who, but still they continue, hoping to plant oak trees for future generations.

Unlike Roddenberry’s vision, in which humankind has on the whole shown its best possible face, the characters in Dollhouse face the fullest extremes of human deplorability and summon up the strength to fight it with the only weapon they have: their humanity. (That and advanced fighting skills.) In Whedon’s shows, religion is not the enemy of Humanism, but nor is it really on the agenda (or of any interest) to any of its crypto-humanists. Instead, they are tackling the world in all its complexity and all its difficulties, across dimensions of class, creed, (species,) gender, and health. Whedon depicts the world at its worst and people at their best. And when they’re at the best, they’re grappling with the world as it really is, in all its difficulty and strangeness, and still finding the strength and motivation to go on in their Humanism.

Spread festive joy this holiday season with special, quirky humanist cards

November 25, 2014 by Liam Whitton

The latest in the popular series of BHA ‘Christmas’ cards was announced last week, and I for one think they’re a great way for humanists to take part in all the festive celebrations going on this winter… with a bit of a wink and a nod.

When we announced it on Facebook, there was a little consternation over the word Christmas, but I tend to feel — personally, anyway — that Christmas is a perfectly good word for referring to this time of year. I certainly don’t treat Christmas as an especially Christian holiday any more than I treat Thursday as an especially Thorian one. Maybe you’ll disagree — feel free to tell me I’m wrong in the comments.

The BHA’s latest Christmas card depicts Charles Darwin’s ‘Tree of Life’ as a coniferous, snow-capped Christmas tree, with little references to his life and work on the card as well. It’s a beautiful design which we’re very pleased to be able to add to our growing collection of alternative seasonal cards.

However you, or your family, or your friends and loved ones, celebrate this time of year, for many it will probably involve writing to those you can’t be with and getting together with those you can for a meal or maybe an exchange of presents, as people have done in this part of the world going back thousands of years. A humanist ‘Christmas’ card lets you take part in the merriment, and cheekily put your own personal stamp on a staple tradition.

And feel good about yourself, too, as sales of cards are a source of funding for the BHA’s charitable activities. Ahead of 2015, and with all the ambitious projects we have ahead of us, your support of our work continues to be invaluable.

In addition to the tree card (pictured above), we’re also still selling our popular ‘There’s definitely a Santa,’ Fibonacci spiral, Christmas/Saturnalia ambigram, and ‘Santa Darwin’ cards at the BHA store, and you can get yours today in time for Christmas if you buy yours now.

‘There are no atheists in foxholes’: How this humanist approaches Remembrance Day

November 10, 2014 by Guest author

How do we remember the dead? Matthew Hicks argues for an inclusive approach to remembrance.

Death is something I think about a lot. For any serviceperson or family member of a serviceperson, it is impossible not to. We are currently leaving a decade long period where friends, colleagues, brothers, sisters, mums, and dads have been repatriated injured or in boxes on a weekly basis. My job as a nurse within my current specialism requires exposure to a lot of people who are face terminal illness or are so ill that they might not respond to active treatment. That doesn’t make me an expert on dealing with death as a person. Indeed a friend recently suggested rightly or wrongly that I might have seen too much. I honestly couldn’t tell you what the best way to deal with death is apart from talking about it as much as possible and prior planning if at all possible. What I do know however is there are ways not to deal with death and there is a phrase which comes back to haunt me numerous times which provides the perfect example

‘There are no atheists in foxholes.’

The following response to this statement is not a flag flying-exercise for atheism or indeed for Humanism as such. There are enough flaws in this statement to make it unsuitable for those even of faith as much as those who have none.

I don’t actively tell people that I subscribe to a humanist way of thinking. In my work, to do so would be inappropriate. I’ve sat and held the hands of a lady who was days away from dying who felt the compelling need to tell someone about her faith in God. I’ve had to inform a wife that her husband didn’t make it and then listen and comfort her when she said God didn’t listen to her prayers. I have met Wiccans, Pagans, Hindus, and non-religious patients who have all faced their own journey. My overwhelming feeling as someone who has regularly nursed at the bedside of the dying is that, most of the time, people experts in their own passing. That is, with the right support, most people meet their end with dignity and wisdom in a similar way that many mothers meet childbirth: with a kind of default, inbuilt instinct. That is, of course my opinion and not something that I can verify by statistics or evidence. My viewpoint is that all people are naturally spiritual (for want of a better word). That is: we all have a developed tendency on a lesser or greater level to consider and respond to the universe around us creatively and meaningfully. To encourage someone to be more spiritual is like trying to persuade a squirrel to be more squirrel-like. Often when people approach death, the barriers, inhibitions, and social expectations that get in the way of addressing that issue are no longer present. To that end, many of these people gain an approach to their situation that those of us who are left behind cannot even begin to comprehend or touch. Sometimes we are left behind before the loved one has even passed away.

It is for this reason alone that I have an issue with the title statement. I have heard it many times. I have heard it from (thankfully only) one hospital chaplain. I have heard it from many people who have asked me outside of work, how I think about death as someone who doesn’t believe in an afterlife. I have heard it from members of various faiths who seem to think it is evidence for the existence of ‘God’.

The issue here isn’t whether or not there’s a god. The issue here isn’t who does or doesn’t think about a god when they are faced with the end, either suddenly or protractedly. There may well be research that shows that many people do turn to God. I deliberately haven’t studied these things because for every person who finds a way to express themselves by turning to God there will be someone somewhere who expresses themselves without doing so. Everyone has the right to approach their end in whatever way they wish without those around them making assumptions about the need for faith that serve no other purpose than to ease the nerves of the person making them.

Arguably religion or ‘faith’ is a matter of language more than belief. In the UK, the stock, standard way (over the last millennia at least) has been to ponder one’s existential circumstances through prayer to a personal god. Until very recently it has been the standard for teaching children to understand their place in the universe. Many young people growing up will adopt a faith, but, increasingly these days, many will not. Some people may only adopt the language of faith, without the belief bit, out of a fondness for its narratives and conventions. Either way, it is quite understandable then that some people, when faced with a sudden realisation of likelihood of death or danger, might try to make sense, or find easy comfort, through the impossible. Fearing the inevitable, they might even pray. And yet, many atheists in foxholes will experience no such ‘reversion to type’. They are settled and comfortable in their understanding of what death really means. For many humanists, it is this same knowledge which has given meaning to their lives. The language of religion isn’t just unappealing to them; it is empty, devoid of explanatory or consolatory power.

These days, more and more people grow up without exposure to religious traditions. More and more people are making sense of their place in the world without religious faith or language. Many people even find faith in beliefs, religions or traditions that sit outside of traditional theistic belief structures. For all intents and purposes these people too can be considered atheists. To assume that everyone, in the face of danger, will turn to a god is almost like assuming people will begin speaking in French. It is an unrealistic and very unhelpful assumption.

For many people therefore, confronting death isn’t a trigger for turning to religion. God is no longer the ‘default’ cultural setting, after all. That goes not only for those who are dying but for those who are left behind. Many people will bow their heads quietly on 11 November against the white noise of a prayer from a representative of a faith they do not belong to or affiliate with in any way. During Remembrance, or an occasion which reminds us of loved ones who are dead, we sit in our own personal or collective foxholes. Each one of us whether religious or non-religious has the right to negotiate with the cultural and philosophical resources we have grown up with, or have adopted, without being made to feel that our approach somehow falls short of a gold standard.

Wouldn’t it be something if we could find a common language through which we could collectively remember the fallen, one which fulfils and refuses to compromise with our need to honour loved ones in a personal way?

Matt Hicks is a nurse in the Royal Navy as well as being one of the RN Service Representatives for the Defence Humanists. In his spare time, Matt can be found touring Devon with a bag full of songs and his ukulele. He blogs at The Wooden Duck.

Ask me no questions

November 7, 2014 by Emma C Williams

‘Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies.’ Emma C Williams relates an incident on Twitter. Photo: Derek Bridges

About a month ago, and this is unusual, I found myself stunned into silence by a lay preacher. Don’t get me wrong, the silence was short-lived. But, for a brief moment, I was dumbfounded.

At the time, I was curious to know how a person of faith could accept the fact that mankind is a product of evolution but still claim that we’re unique in our possession of a soul. Whilst I don’t personally believe that there is such a thing as the ‘soul,’ it’s an important tenet for a Christian; I was curious to know whether he thought that the soul had evolved along with us, or whether God just popped it in one day. You know. On a whim. When He’d run out of Sudoku puzzles and got bored with inventing new parasites.

Now since then I have done some reading on the subject and discovered that there is considerable theological debate in this area – a debate almost as pointless as the one about how many angels can dance on a pinhead in my humble opinion, but that’s neither here nor there. At the time, I was genuinely curious and fascinated to hear what this preacher had to say.

Anyway. I asked my big question, bounding into his timeline like an enthusiastic puppy, and was greeted with the following reply:

‘I’m afraid it’s not a question that’s ever bothered me.’

Sniff. Disappointing.

Not to be deterred, I pushed my nose in further, determined that this preacher, this man who stands before others and makes the claim that their naturally mortal ‘soul’ (whatever that is) can be granted the gift of immortality by the Grace of God (whatever that is), this man must surely be intrigued by a question that explores the very nature of the soul itself?

In the end, he answered as follows:

‘It’s one of the things I don’t understand about atheists that they need answers to questions that most of us who have a faith aren’t concerned about.’

Wow. I mean … wow.

Okay, I didn’t expect ‘an answer’ as I suspected at the time that there wasn’t one (although the Catholic church, if you’re interested, has some entertainingly specific guidance on this very theme). What I did expect, perhaps naively, was a response deserving of respect; something like, ‘I don’t know, I’d really need to think about that one,’ or ‘I don’t know but I bet [insert name of highly-respected theological Prof here] has something to say about it, I’ll look it up.’ To come back with ‘it’s not a question that’s ever bothered me’ followed by a patronising chastisement for being a typical atheist asking silly questions not only left me open-mouthed but took me right back to being at Church school. There my atheism was cemented in place quite unintentionally but quite brilliantly by the fact that I was ridiculed for asking questions.

Personally, I don’t understand how anyone can agree with the evidence that mankind evolved but refuse to accept that there is therefore nothing special about us other than the fact that we are a truly brilliant ape. And this particular ape has questions – lots of them; telling me that those questions are uninteresting or unimportant to you will only make me suspect, rightly or wrongly, that you fear the answers.

So, like it or not, my dear preacher … I’m still asking.

Peter Tatchell: My journey to Humanism – how I made the transition from dogma and superstition to rationalism

November 4, 2014 by Peter Tatchell

Human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell writes about the story of his journey to Humanism. This article was originally published in Humanism Ireland under the title ‘My Journey from superstition to rationalism.’

Peter Tatchell: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is proof that humans don’t need a god to tell right from wrong, and something we as humans can be proud of.

Organised religion is the world’s greatest fount of obscurantism, prejudice, superstition and oppression. It has caused misery to billions of people for millennia, and continues to do so in many countries. So how come I was once in thrall to it?

Nowadays, I am a human rights activist motivated by love and compassion for other people. I do evidence-based campaigning, based on humanitarian and rational values.

But I once had a very different perspective. Indeed, I grew up in a devout evangelical Christian family in Melbourne, Australia, in the 1950s and ’60s. My mother and stepfather (with whom I spent most of my childhood) were prim and proper working class parents, with very conservative views on everything. The Bible, every word of it, was deemed to be the actual and definitive word of God. Their Christianity was largely devoid of social conscience, more Old Testament than New. It was all about personal salvation.

According to our church, some of the worst sins were swearing, drinking alcohol, smoking, dancing, sex outside of marriage, communism, belief in evolution, not praying and failing to go to church every Sunday. All my extended family was of the same persuasion. Naturally, I also embraced God.

But in secondary school, aged 13, I began to think for myself. I remember a rather smug religious education teacher who one day gave us a lesson in faith. He argued that when we switch on a light we don’t think about it; we have faith that the room will light up. He suggested that faith in the power of God was the same as faith in the power of electricity to turn on a light.

Bad analogy, I thought. What causes a light to go on when one flicks the switch is not faith; it is man-made electricity and wiring – and this can be demonstrated by empirical evidence. The existence of God cannot. This set my mind thinking sceptical thoughts.

This nascent doubt was not, however, strong enough to stop me, at the age of 16,from becoming a Sunday school teacher to six year olds. Being of an artistic persuasion, I made colourful cardboard tableaux of Biblical stories. The children loved it. My classes were popular and well attended.

The first serious cracks in my faith had begun to appear the previous year, 1967, when an escaped convict, Ronald Ryan, was hanged for a murder he almost certainly did not commit. At age 15, I worked out that the trajectory of the bullet through the dead man’s body meant that it would be virtually impossible for Ryan to have fired the fatal shot. Despite this contrary evidence, he was executed anyway. This not only shattered my confidence in the police, courts and government, it also got me thinking about my faith.

According to St Paul (The Bible, Romans 13:1-2), all governments and authorities are ordained by God. To oppose them is to oppose God. But why would God, I asked myself, ordain a government that allowed an apparent injustice, such as Ryan’s execution? If he did ordain it, did God deserve respect? And what about other excesses by tyrannical governments? Did God really ordain the Nazi regime? Stalin’s Soviet Union? Apartheid? And closer to home, the 19th century British colonial administration which decimated, by intent or neglect, the Aboriginal peoples of Australia?

I began to develop my own version of liberation theology, long before I had ever heard the phrase. During the 1960s, the nightly TV news was dominated by footage of the black civil rights struggle, led by the Baptist pastor, Martin Luther King Jr. His faith was not mere pious words; he put Christian values into action.

This is what Christianity should be about, I concluded. Accordingly, at 14, I left my parents’ Pentecostal church and started going to the local Baptist church instead. Alas, it was not what I expected – not even a quarter as radical as Martin Luther King’s Baptist social conscience. A huge disappointment.

Undeterred, I began to articulate my own revolutionary Christian gospel of ‘Jesus Christ the Liberator’, based on ideas in the Sermon on the Mount and the parable of the Good Samaritan.

This soon led me into Christian-inspired activism for Aboriginal rights, as well as against the death penalty, apartheid, the draft and the Vietnam War. I linked up with members of the radical Student Christian Movement. In 1970, aged 18, I initiated Christians for Peace, an inter-denominational anti-war organisation which organised a spectacular candlelit march through Melbourne, calling for the withdrawal of Australian and US troops from Vietnam.

At the age of 17, I had realised I was gay. From the first time I had sex with a man I felt emotionally and sexually fulfilled, without any shame at all. This positive experience overwhelmed all the years of anti-gay religious dogma that had been pummelled into me.

Amazingly, I never experienced a moment’s doubt or guilt. I reasoned: how could something so wonderful and mutually fulfilling be wrong? Instantly, I accepted my sexuality and was determined to do my bit to help end the persecution of lesbian and gay people.

By the time I turned 20, rationality finally triumphed over superstition and dogma. I didn’t need God anymore. I was intelligent, confident and mature enough to live without the security blanket of religion and its theological account of human life and the universe.

Accordingly, I renounced religion and embraced reason, science and an ethics based on love and compassion. I concluded: we don’t need God to tell us what is right and wrong. We humans are quite capable of figuring it out for ourselves. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is proof of this. It’s not God-given dogma and intolerance, but a fine example of high moral values, without religion. Bravo!