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!
I feel for anyone who had to struggle with religion throughout their childhood.
I was very fortunate not to have to go through it; even as a youngster I was fascinated to hear others speak of such obvious absurdities.
I once debated an entire classroom, including the teacher, on the existence of a god, and although I was a minority of one, I came away thinking it was they who had the problem. In the more than fifty years since, that view has only been reinforced, especially given so much testimony from people like Peter about the difficulties they faced.
The world is smaller now; with such incredible ability to communicate, there should be fewer and fewer who have to go through shedding nonsensical and backwards teachings.
Nice to hear this. Not too dissimilar to millions of “escapees” . With the advent of the Internet the flood gates are now open. No more the manicle of organised religion, fear and superstition. Lookes like after many generations the sentiment of the enlightenment can flourish, unhindered by the authorities. Well done Peter for telling our story too.
I empathise with you Peter although have slightly different story myself. I was a very lost and emotionally young girl who went to university and found the world to be quite overwhelming. Too much freedom and fun had a distructive influence on me and chaos prevailed until I (reluctantly) found the refuge of the church. I spent nearly 20 years (a childhood and adolescence all over again) being educated about selflessness, love, grace, discipline and all the ‘fruit of the Spirit’ which was much needed at the time. But, as Peck describes in The Road Less Travelled’ I grew through it as my doubts of the absolute truth of the Bible being the inspired word of God increased to screaming pitch in my head. I left the Church and many friendships based on that life too. I am not a hardened atheist as I would argue that just because we don’t have a tool to measure something with doesn’t mean it does not exist. But I also find the philosophical idea of right and wrong (good and evil) rather arbitrary too. Clearly for social construct we need rules but are these absolute rights and wrongs?? Well, back to reality and I have filtered out and developed as someone who is possibly more humanist than anything else and you story, and those of others I have read, are genuine comfort to me as I redefine my life herein. Thank you for sharing 🙂
I believe it comes down to being rational. Thinking things through ought to lead one to see there is NO scientific explanation for the existence of ANY god or gods.
It’s time the non-believers had more respect from the government with regards to our views and the special treatment that religions demand above all others.More action is required from non-religious organisations promoting the dismantling of
the special treatment institutionalised in the ruling bodies to our detriment.Whats good for radical religion is good for us no regs.
Even in the direst situation the human being can find humour.
Nobody cracks a joke in the bible, to me, this defies the nature of mankind.
No evidence, no god.
Someone once mooted the question “can you imagine a world without religion” ? Yes easily, think about it.
Nice story. Thanks for sharing. Good for some people who read it to think about it.
But I have a comment and a question… It will seem like a political comment, but in the end you’ll see it’s not, it is much braoder and more than just a political comment.
You say:
“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 wonder if majority of people born and raised under propaganda and school curriculum in what is called “Western countries” or West European and USA collonialist countries and regimes have ever questioned what’s really meant when people say “communism”, “socialism”, or, in the case of what you wrote, “[Stalin’s] Soviet Union”. Stalin, as far as we can tell, was a maniac, a psychopath, paranoid and delusioned schizophrenic. (Lenin, in his testament, asks for Stalin to be removed from all positions.)
“Stalin’s Soviet Union” does not have the same meaning as, say, “organised crime and persecution during Stalin’s usurpation of rule in Soviet Union”. Similarly, you could say “Bush’s USA”, “Clinton’s USA”, “Obama’s USA”, or “Blair’s Britain”, etc. Somehow, it seems there is more respect in those details when addressing “Western” buddies, then other countries and peoples, don’t you think?
Another striking thought is that some prople (minority? majority?) think crimes of their “fathers”, of their countries and their regimes, crimes that accumulated wealth in their countries and made other peoples and countries even poorer and more miserable, … are somehow almost nonexistent.
So when you say…
“And closer to home, the 19th century British colonial administration which decimated, by intent or neglect, the Aboriginal peoples of Australia?”
…is it really only that, or just that, or id that even a good and strong representative? I know you didn’t go on listing every example, but there are more examples from our (“Western”) history of terror, then just mentioning Hitler, Stalin, apartheid, and, alas, we were not nice to the Aboriginals”?
Why do I go on about politics? Because a person can’t be sincere and can not be trusted and can not engage in logically consistent discussions if they apply logic only when they discuss what they find convenient, and avoid logic in all other topics or discussions.
Similar to this is religion. Some people try to find logic in why they believe in whatever they believe in, some people try to find logic in why relogion is man made fairy-tale. However, if you fake logic in one topic, and then try to be logical in another, then you just don’t have enough credibility to back up the discussion even when you are right and logical.
I was born in a country where religion was abandoned, where it was not allowed in school (by law) nor in social life (by various laws and, step by step, by social norms and judgement). I was born in a country where it was normal that women had the normal right to vote, where race and skin colour didn’t segregate people and didn;t mean nothing more than what science knew about the reasons behind those variations in skin and shape and genetics, (and the only additional meaning we added to “skin colour” was that people coming from certain parts of the world are suffering more and their countries should be entitled to more help and more compassion because of all injustices done to them,). We were normally tought evolution in schools, and about human biology and anatomy, and about reproductive organs and reproductive life, and about sex, and psychology and sociology behind sexual and social life, etc.
And we were taught that people used to believe in various myths and mythical creatures, and that those beliefs were ever evolving, as human knowledge evolved and as cultural and social norms evolved, and that, in essence, people were putting those mystical forces (later to be called “gods”) further and further away, from wood and stone and caves to seas and oceans and mountains and clouds, eventually to reduce the number of supernatural beings to smaller numbers and then to one, and housing that one usually in the sky (and the other, antagonist, usually under the ground, as evil force). But the acceleration of science advancement was such that in the past century or so the science could challenge most of the myths and most of religious dogmas. Also, religious businesses and their leaders, as well as their interconnectedness with governments, powers, finances, greed, politics, etc., led to them using science and technology to advance their myths so that ordinary and with religious virus infected people can’t see through religious network of lies. And, a century or so is not enough to win.
We tried it. We succeeded. Then we were destroyed as a country. The country’s name was Yugoslavia. Founders of the country were Kingdom of Serbia and Kingdom of Montenegro. Serbia and Montenegro were those who abandoned religion and fought for reason. Yugoslavia was a mix of those who fought for reason and who advanced socialism independent of Soviet Union leaders’ or China leaders’ visions, who developed scientific reasoning in theories of so called socialism and self-governed socialism – and those were Serbs and Montenegrins; a mix of those who wanted to live together, but to keep their beliefs and ties to the Vatican – Croatians (who were and still are Catholic); and a mix of former Serbs and Croats – who had to change their religion during previous 5 centuries of Ottoman (Turkish) islamic occupation of the Balkans, especially in today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina – and of Turkish armies remains, all of whom became Muslims (islamic) throughour centuries. During WW2 Yugoslavia dissolved and Serbia and Montenegro were fighting against German (and other) invaders, while Croatia was German ally and Bosnia became German ally, too. Most attrocities were done on a religious bases (which was closely tied to “national” base), and were done in a fascist puppet state called “Independent State of Croatia” – where Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies were killed (more than 1 million people were illed in concentration camps, Jasenovac being the most famous one), and then in Bosnia (where, after WW2, almost no Jews and no Serbs were left in Bosnia’s capital Sarajevo – however, Serbs remained in Sarajevo’s outskirts as those are real mountains surrounding the town’s centre).
So we had atheism in parts of Yugoslavia, adopted in Serbia and in Montenegro, and fought against tooth and nail in Catholic Croatia and Muslim parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina (where Serbs still owned 54% of the land, Croatians about 24%, Muslims about 22%).
As we all know, Yugoslavia was destroyed at the beginning of nineties. Croatia proclaimed its independance and did it against the rpocedure outlined in Yugoslav constitution. Vatican was the first “country” to recognise Croatia and to stab Yugoslavia in the back. Germany was the second. Just for the record. Vatican was selling religion, Germany was selling guns and war business (after they unified 1-2 years ahead of Yugoslav breakup and had enormous amounts of weapons to get rid of and of personnel to lay off – conveniently employed in Yugoslav drama and in the end in 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia and Montenegro, and then building the biggets NATO army base outside USA at the time – Bondstil in Serbian southern province Kosovo, recognised as independent by USA and Germany and Vatican at first).
So, yes, we had atheism and it worked pretty well. We knew about fairy-tales and myths about various “gods” here an dthere throughout human history, but we knew those were creations of human imagination and phantasy, their need to “explain” what they didn;t understand, and someone else’s need to govern the masses, to rule, to have them obedient. We knew those were main purposes of human organised religion, and that religion was nothing more than that.
…And we were punished for being ahead of the time.
With civilisation at the same barbaric level as it was at the time of WW2, or WW1, or during middle ages, or whenever throughout history, and with technology we developed during 20th century and now, we were ahead of the curve, ahead of the time. We were ahead, thinking everyone can become good, honest, brothers. We were ahead thinking people will leave skin colour and religious beliefs behind and will become normal. We thought cooperation is what we need, not competition against each other. Cooperation and mutual help and understanding, helping each other make world a better place for everyone, not just a selfish game for some.
We were ahead of our time and we were destroyed. Here and there you can still see falce stories and lies about Yugoslavia and Serbia. …From the same “”kitchens” that “cook” crazy stories how atheism is bad and how belief is awesome, how “god” exist and how the truth is in whichever of their centuries old books.
I sit and watch your fight to define yourself as a non-believer, to change what you were. (You, Peter Tatchell, maybe discovered your atheism purely because you discovered your sexual self; if it wasn’t the case you might still be wandering between being a believer and being a semi-believer.) I sit and think how awesome it is to be born without that burden of religion. And I sit and think what’s ahead of you and how long it may take for societies to gt rid of religious nonsense. But I also ask myself how long would it take to see what’s next step, after atheism: is it world united in peace and normal life (as we dreamt about it and fougth about it (even created a Non-Aligned Movement – NAM – now 120 nations in UN are members of NAM – not under NATO, not under Warsaw Pact)), or is it “we are still better than them”?
Once USA say people the problem with US terror campaigns in a country X (Iraq, Cuba, Vietnam, Serbia, Latin American countries…) is not that it cost too much (in money or American lives) but that it was a crime against X people and that it costed Xs (Iraqis, Cubans, Cambodians, Vietnamese, Koreans, Chileans, Serbs,…) millions of lives and misery to many generations to come, or when British say that same thing about wherever they brought misery around the globe, then we may say we are closer to religious dogmas being torn apart.
Otherwise, like in Yugoslavia, religious groupings are a needed ingredient for nationalism and chauvinism dish, and that’s needed for religious, war, power, and greedy businesses.
Keep up your fight to enlighten people, but be warned: being ahead of the curve is deadly dangerous, as proven many times so far.
Good! Our church has taghut us that the best way to show the mercy and love of God is by ourselves, by how we behave, how we react to different things, how we improve, how we change…… I think, that is what you tried to ask for in the article, right? If you can’t be a role model, there’s nothing the others can take from you.