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Archives for December 2014

Systematic discrimination against the non-religious is happening all over the world. And Britain faces a crossroads.

December 15, 2014 by Liam Whitton

‘Systematic discrimination; in flux.’

That is how the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) described the United Kingdom in its annual Freedom of Thought Report, which arrived last week for Human Rights Day on 10 December. It is the authoritative annual report into the legal status of and discrimination against the non-religious around the world.

In Saudi Arabia, atheism is now ‘terrorism’; in Malaysia, ‘humanism and secularism as well as liberalism’ have been singled out by the leader of the nation as prime causes of moral degradation. In 13 countries, atheism is punishable by death. This represents one end of the spectrum, and it would be tempting on the basis of this comparison to view Britain as a paradise for non-believers. But the reality isn’t quite so; only nine countries support full legal equality for religious and non-religious alike, IHEU finds.

As in previous years, the UK has been given an amber rating, signifying ‘Systemic Discrimination’, because of entrenched problems such as discrimination in admissions and employment by state-funded ‘faith’ schools, the presence of established churches in England and Scotland, and reserved seats for bishops in the House of Lords.

The UK was also one of only a handful countries this year to receive the special ‘In Flux’ rating because of conflicting signs about the future of discrimination against the non-religious in Britain. Despite the distance we’ve travelled to ensure that most non-religious people can live happily, confidently, and without harassment in their everyday lives, systemic problems remain, and 2014 was a year of marked attempts to politicise issues around religion or belief, as well as for claiming special significance for Christianity in Britain. And in parts of the country such as Northern Ireland, religious influence over politicians still remains the primary roadblock to sexual health rights for women and marriage rights for gay people.

The BHA will of course continue to work towards a secular state ensuring equal treatment of everyone, regardless of religion or belief. You can help this work by becoming a member, if you haven’t done so already, or by encouraging your friends to sign up. Your membership directly empowers our work financially – running campaigns can be expensive – just as your support infuses our work with energy and vitality.

Filed Under: Humanism

In the customs of our ancestors

December 11, 2014 by Emma C Williams

It was a shock last month to find out that the school teacher I remember most fondly had died. It was even more of a shock to find myself organising his funeral.

Tony was a difficult man to define. A magnetic personality, he threw himself into school life with passion and verve, yet it was painfully obvious to many of us that his private life was a lonely one. As someone with virtually no family and with a tendency to push even those that he cared for away, my beloved Classics master was left lying in a hospital mortuary for over a fortnight whilst a solicitor, his sole executor, waited and hoped that a friend or a colleague would come forward for him.  For reasons that still escape me, nobody did.

A ritualistic response to death is one of the things that defines us as a species. Tentative evidence of burial or funerary caching goes back to the Stone Age, and it seems clear that our earliest ancestors began interring their dead, sometimes with personal effects. Interestingly, some anthropologists immediately jump to the conclusion that these relics must be evidence for a belief in some kind of afterlife, in which it was assumed that the deceased individual would require the tools of his trade; others are more cautious, and argue that grave goods are simply evidence of individualisation and respect – religious or not, we like to bury a person’s things with them, as symbolic markers of who they were and the impact that they had on the world.

Certainly, everyone that knew Tony would have been acutely aware that he would not have wanted a fuss. I am told that it took some persuading to make him attend his own retirement party, a fact that does not surprise me in the least. However, people still went to the trouble to convince him, and with good reason: retirement parties matter. People want to offer their thanks and to acknowledge the contribution that somebody has made, however much a man like Tony would have waved his hands dismissively and insisted that he had been simply doing his job.

In the same way, but even more so, funerals matter. They matter because someone has lived; they matter because someone has died; they matter because we have to say farewell to their body and, in that inevitable moment, accept that they are gone. ‘People talk about “going through” grief,’ a friend once said to me; ‘the truth is that it goes through you.’ We can’t escape the physical, the visceral nature of loss, and our farewell to the corporeal entity that was once a vibrant individual is a painful but inescapable necessity. For all these reasons, I could not stand by and leave my dearest old teacher’s send-off to the reluctant whim of his legal executor. I simply couldn’t bear it.

Tony left no instructions, but from my memories of him, one decision was mercifully clear: without hesitation, I asked the funeral director to book a humanist celebrant. Those of you who have read some of my previous articles will know the kind of school that I attended and therefore where Tony worked, an institution shrouded in religious superstition and dogma. Tony had a profound influence on me by modelling informed dissent; this was a man who pointedly read a book in the Chapel services he was obliged to attend, and who summarised religion quite simply as ‘a load of old hooey.’ In a tightly-controlled environment, where religious doctrine ruled and questions were ignored, it was frankly thrilling.

The other decisions I had to make for him were much harder, but I was fortunate to have the proactive support of another ex-pupil. She suggested a poem that she had studied with him, Poem 101 by Catullus, a poignant tribute to his dead brother from which the title of this article is taken; she was willing to read the poem for us in the original Latin, and she did so magnificently. I chose music that reflected Tony’s career as a Classicist, from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and from Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice. Who knows what he would have made of it all, but I hoped it was acceptable. I was also lucky enough to have the services of an outstanding Celebrant, accredited by the BHA and meticulous in his approach. Philip Scott drove all the way from Reading to meet me at my place of work in Woking, for he insisted that we must meet in person and not discuss the funeral over the phone. He listened with care and asked searching questions, he chased up the few leads that I was able to give him and ultimately he pieced together a moving yet respectful tribute to a man who was intensely private – a difficult task indeed.

Planning Tony’s funeral with minimal support has been challenging and stressful. There were times when I doubted myself, when I agonised about the decisions that I was making and fretted that I was making the wrong ones. For several nights in a row, I barely slept. But despite all of this, I would do it again in a heartbeat.  Tony’s legacy lives on in the lives that he touched and I am just one of so many students that owe him the due honour and respect that he deserves. As Aristotle said, teachers who inspire children successfully should be held in the highest esteem; a parent gives life to a child, a teacher shows them the art of living well.

 

Filed Under: Ceremonies

Remembering our common humanity: a story from Afghanistan

December 10, 2014 by Guest author

‘Although in some things we are opposed, we share an irreducible humanity.’ Julian Sheather reflects on a touching tale of human compassion. 

SONY DSC

Afghanistan. Photo: Ricymar Photography.

A friend recently sent me a news story from Afghanistan. As a slanting light can show hidden dips and lines in a landscape, so the story gradually revealed the knots and burrs of some of my half-buried prejudices. The story was about an Afghan psychiatrist, Nader Alemi, who practices in Mazar-e-Sharif, a major trading city in the north of the country. The city was taken by the Taliban in 1998 and they overran much of the surrounding countryside. At the time, Alemi was the only psychiatrist in the north of Afghanistan who spoke Pashto, the language of the majority of Taliban. For more than three years, with at least the tacit agreement of their commanders, thousands of Taliban fighters made their way to his consulting rooms. And what they bought to him during those years was the terrible psychological fall-out of war. The minds of these men were broken by it: lonely, scared and depressed, many of them admitted to a longing for death.

As I read about the damaged minds of those Taliban fighters I sensed the falling of that oblique light. The image of the Taliban I had absorbed – abbreviated and buckled by the media – did not have room for such ordinary human vulnerability. If I thought of them at all then it was as men trained from birth, like mountain Spartans, to be a warrior caste – inured to hardship and brutality, not degraded by warfare but born to it, nurtured by it. And to this I added, from out the ever-present stock of received ideas, the impregnable shield of a fundamentalist Islamism: for me the Taliban were the militarised dervishes of an orientalising fantasy.

But despite the furious and repellent ideology of the Taliban, the men that found their way to Alemi’s neutral and forgiving consulting rooms were suffering from the ordinary human consequences of combat. Mullah Akhtar, second in command to the Taliban’s spiritual leader, Mullah Omar, habituated to the horrors of front-line combat, was delusional and hallucinating. Powerlessness fed depression: men had given over their fates entirely to their commanding officers and had no idea whether they would see the day out. Despite being depicted as men with medieval minds intent on burying the modern world, and despite seldom having seen a doctor before, they had no problem with modern psychiatry. Perhaps they reached for it as if it were a lifeline.

No doubt there were times when Alemi struggled with the men who were ravaging his country, but he held to the humane dictates of his professional codes:

I used to treat the Taliban as human beings, same as I would treat my other patients…even though I knew they had caused all the problems in our society…Sometimes they would weep and I would comfort them.

Taliban orthodoxy prohibits the education of girls, but while Alemi tried to heal the minds of Taliban fighters, his wife, Parvin, ran an underground school designed to do precisely that, for up to a hundred girls at a time. Given that Alemi was trying to hold the minds of their fighters together, the Taliban turning a blind eye to a modern psychiatrist in their midst is understandable. Parvin’s was maybe the greater risk. But somehow both she and the school survived. Some of her pupils have gone on to become doctors and engineers. There was that slanting light again.

When I read that news report, along with the slight unknotting of a prejudice or two came a strange shuffle of thoughts that revealed to me some of my deepest commitments. It is commonplace that ideas and beliefs rigidly gripped will divide us. The ways of the Taliban are about as remote from mine as I figure contemporaries can get. But one can condemn a regime, an inhuman ideology, while still acknowledging the humanity of those who promote it, or who are held, one way or another, physically or mentally captive by it. Although in some things we are opposed, we share an irreducible humanity. And so that oblique light came from somewhere. It had its origins in a set of humane practices that all humanists can celebrate: in the scientific medicine that can distance itself from conflict and quietly focus on a suffering human being; in the feeding and forming of young and growing minds through educating the whole human being. And in the belief, or call it a hope, integral to journalism at its best, that a news story set down in northern Afghanistan can open the mind, however slightly, of someone sitting at his desk in a very different city several thousands of miles away.

Filed Under: Humanism, International Tagged With: afghanistan, taliban

Support for humanist marriage is broad and overwhelming – so why is the Government delaying?

December 10, 2014 by Andrew Copson

As the Government continues to delay reporting on the legalisation of humanist marriages, we are seeing increased expressions of the political consensus in favour of it. Two dozen members of the House of Commons today have signed an Early Day Motion to urge the Government to move towards legalisation. They already include MPs from Labour, Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru, Green, Conservative, and even SNP making a rare venture into English and Welsh matters. They include Christians as well as humanists, and there are more signatories to come.

1

This is a follow-up to a triple cross-party strike from a Labour, a Liberal Democrat, and Conservative MP on 11 November, who pressed the justice minister from three corners of the chamber as to what was taking the Government (which had originally told the British Humanist Association that the whole issue might be taken care of by about eight months ago!) quite so long:

2

And on 4 December the Labour front bench, who were forced to compromise on humanist marriage at the time of the Marriage Bill last year when the Government threatened to delay same-sex marriage if the case for humanist marriage was taken to a vote, were showing their frustration:

3

And it’s not just in the Commons. Last week, on 1 December, there was a mini-debate in the House of Lords in which there was not a single voice raised against humanist marriage and in which, again, there was cross-party support from Labour, Conservative, and Liberal Democrat, as well as independent peers. Again, support crossed belief lines with Christians such as cross-bencher Baroness Butler-Sloss also urging the Government to get on with legalisation. She and Baroness Thornton got pretty much as forthrightly critical of the Government as it is possible to be in the polite atmosphere of the Lords:

4

Unfortunately, it does seem that the Government is just not listening. Even when the subject was raised directly with the Prime Minister by an MP of his own party at Prime Minister’s Questions on 19 November, there was no answer forthcoming on the substantive matter of humanist marriage, just the same ‘wait and see’ response, while Parliamentary time between now and the next general election bleeds away:

5

When the Marriage Act was going through Parliament, it was clear that there was majority support for the legalisation of humanist marriages in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The British Humanist Association, though obviously much much smaller and poorer than the wealthier and more powerful lobbies against humanist marriages, at least was able to make its arguments and expose the disingenuous ones of critics in the light of day. Now that the matter is being considered behind closed doors, there is no such opportunity.

All that can be done is to state yet again the case for legal recognition, against which no coherent or just case has ever to this date been made.

In England and Wales, members of literally dozens of religions from Scientology to Methodism and from all the denominations of Judaism to the Spiritualists and the Aetherius Society (Yes – honestly!) can all have a legal marriage in the place most special to them, conducted by one who shares their beliefs, and in the form that embodies their most deeply held beliefs and values. Those with humanist, non-religious beliefs and values don’t have the same choice.

In Scotland, where humanist marriages are legal, they have proved hugely popular – so popular that they have contributed to a growth in marriages overall. Giving legal recognition to them in the whole of Britain would be fair, inexpensive, easy, uncontroversial, and beneficial for both individuals, wider society, and the economy. What can possibly be being discussed behind closed doors that weighs against all that?

Filed Under: Ceremonies, Humanism, Politics Tagged With: humanist marriage

10 tips for a happy humanist Christmas

December 1, 2014 by Marilyn Mason

Marilyn Mason’s 10 top tips for humanists this festive season.

'Christmas' is a time for family and friends - and to overidentify it with Christian tradition specifically, or to fret about the name, is a waste of time. Photo: Josn McGinn.

25 December and thereabouts has been a special time for celebrating with friends for thousands of years. Some would say that to overidentify the holiday we call ‘Christmas’ with Christian tradition, or to fret about that name, is a royal waste of time. Photo: Christmas Eve dinner by John McGinn.

 

One

Accept that Christmas Day is what we call 25 December and you’re not going to change that, any more that we humanists can rename Easter weekend, Eid, Divali, Passover… Enjoy the fact that it’s the one day of the year when almost everything is shut, you can’t shop, almost no one goes to work, the roads are empty… Relax.

Two

Send a card if you want to keep in touch with friends at this time of year — as many people still prefer a hand-written card to an email. But if you think they wouldn’t appreciate a physical card, send an e-card instead and give the money you would have spent on cards and postage to a worthy (secular) charity like the BHA (or wherever you like). If you want to support a charity and send a card to your loved ones, then a great way to do that would be to buy the from the BHA’s range at 80p a card (in packs of 10).

Three

Keep present-giving simple: give to those who need stuff, come to an agreement with those who don’t (which is most people past their youth). There is nothing particularly virtuous in buying things that people don’t need which will probably end up in a charity shop – you could cut out the middle-man and give the cash to charity instead.

Four

See friends and family when it suits you and them — don’t get too hung up on 25 December (remember Christmas is no big deal for humanists). Most people have several relatives they feel obliged to visit on Christmas Day – make life easier for them by opting out of the competition for their presence and see them another time.

Five

If you’re on your own over the holiday, just think — you can eat what you like, watch what you like on television, read a book, go to bed as early or late as you like… Relax.

Six

Eat, drink, and be merry, but pace yourself. You don’t have to drink alcohol at breakfast time or eat Christmas pudding, mince pies and Christmas cake all on the same day – or at all. You don’t have to cook or eat turkey or Brussel sprouts if you don’t like them. Admittedly this is harder when you are a guest, but tiny helpings may help!

Seven

Feed the birds, and enjoy watching them eat the inevitable leftovers

Eight

Go for a walk somewhere lovely on Christmas or Boxing or New Year’s Day — roads will be empty if you time it right, and few other people will be out. Be prepared to wish the few a Happy Christmas and New Year.

Nine

Take pleasure in in singing. Not all Christmas songs or carols are religious, and music of all kinds can be very uplifting.

Ten

Focus on enjoying yourself. Christmas can be a pleasantly sociable or self-indulgent time of year if you don’t get too caught up in the competitive consumerist rush. Relax.

Filed Under: Humanism

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