Thanks to this cartoon below from Ros Asquith. Who said "secular schools can never be tolerated (because such schools have no religious instruction....all character training and religion must be derived from faith.”). Answer: Adolf Hitler April 26, 1933. Hitler was no atheist, despite the desperate claims of some Christians. Hitler was a man of faith. Link to the story that prompted the cartoon.
Secular humanist culture can encompass religious lives, but religious culture cannot do the same for secularism and atheism. Some powerful arguments from Mitchell Cohen in Dissent Magazine on the important role secular humanism should play in creating vibrant social democracies. Here's a short excerpt but it really is recommended reading:
"When religious movements are triumphalist, when they believe that they can assert themselves inexorably in the public realm, liberal and social democratic values are jeopardized....
...In my view, a secular state needs a humanist basis. Yes, that means that I think secular humanist culture should be privileged in liberal democracy (or in what I would prefer, social democracy) but not religion. The reason is that it can encompass religious lives, whereas religious culture cannot do the same for secularism and atheism. Humanism, with its Renaissance origins (among thinkers who were mostly religious in some way), fostered pluralism by legitimizing multiple authorities, leading people to evaluate for themselves, to see varied points of view, not just to accept a last word from one authority...
...It seems to me that aggressive efforts at some form of religious domination of the public realm in the U.S. and elsewhere undermine the possibilities of common political language. Let me make this stronger. If I express my secular humanist ideas publicly, if I try to persuade fellow citizens of them, I must be open to criticism—fierce criticism, down to the basics, up to the dots on the i’s of my ideas, every word and sentiment. I can survive those criticisms. I may even change my ideas. After all, the different bases of my ideas may be wrong, in whole or part. But what happens when religious-political claims are open to the same challenge? If a Muslim friend, on the basis of his profound religious convictions, makes an argument for a law that is to govern me, shall I challenge his belief in Muhammad’s prophetic role? Anyone who knows some history knows it is likely to lead to religious wars. The alternative is to ask him (or her) to secularise the principles of argument. ..."
Let's say a big no to tory bloggers placing themselves as the arbiters of what makes a good left wing blog shall we! Added to my list of links is Martin in the Margins - a very fine Labour supporting politics blog with decidedly secular humanist leanings. Lots of interesting and well argued material including this explanation of how multi-cultural education in primary schools can go horribly wrong:
"As a parent, and an erstwhile school governor, it's irked me the way that multi-cultural education often gets translated, especially in primary schools, into multi-faith education. Learning about 'other cultures' is reduced to finding out about the religious beliefs and customs of different groups. Non-white, non-indigenous groups are characterised as unchanging, homogenous cultures defined mainly by faith. Schools think if they've 'done' Diwali, Ramadan and Passsover, then they've fulfilled their multicultural obligations. In my experience, there's very little sense (at least at the primary level) of migrant communities as diverse, living entities, shaped by historical events, and very little sense of the secular and political forces at work within communities.
Defining non-white children primarily in terms of a nominal faith privileges that aspect of their identity above others, including loyalties based on nation, locality or cultural tastes. It also makes it more difficult for children to put any distance between themselves and their faith-of-origin, or to experience school as a neutral, secular space in which they might explore alternatives to the beliefs they were brought up in. And it has a spin-off for 'indigenous' children: they get categorised, by default, as 'Christian'. This subtle re-introduction of sectarian identities is ludicrous, in a nation where a majority are not active believers in any religion."
Here's an interesting new development - the Secular Medical Forum (SMF)- set up recently to put forward secular perspectives on current health debates. I was interested in their page on hospital chaplains and the millions of pounds which is taken away from frontline services to subsidise church activities. The Church of England alone has assets worth something approaching 5 billion pounds, if they think chaplaincy is worthwhile they should be funding it from their own considerable wealth, transferring money away from local health services to a capital rich vested interest like the churches whose services are not delivered on the basis of need, but on belief - is highly immoral. Here's the SMF take on this issue:
"In England, in 2007, there are 850 full-time and part-time hospital chaplains. According to the Tablet (a liberal Roman Catholic weekly) of 17 February 2007, the College of Health Care Chaplains believes that "chaplains' wages amount to 0.05 per cent of (NHS) hospital trusts' budgets". This sum is in the region of £18 million annually. Think of how many nurses, and other essential NHS staff, could be financed by this amount?
The major religious bodies in the UK are some of the richest organizations in the country. Cannot they pay for their own personnel to visit those patients who want some religious support when they are in hospital? Surely patients, who want religious care, would prefer to see the familiar faces of their local vicars, priests, rabbis or imams rather than "chaplains" personally unknown to them? Or, if such patients are in hospitals far away from their own communities, surely the nearest church, mosque or synagogue could send someone to see them?
The Secular Medical Forum believes that a majority of NHS patients today want taxpayers' money to be spent on medical services rather than on prayers. Each full-time hospital chaplain removed from a Trust budget would finance at least two nurses."
Yet more evidence to suggest that, on the contrary, in the US the Democrats don't have a troubling problem with religious voters, but the Republicans do have a big problem in how they scare off secular voters:
"...those who attend worship less than once a week are increasingly voting Democratic. In 2006, they did so by a whopping 63-37 margin -- a nine-point swing in favor of the Democrats from the 2004 election. And the gap is "larger than the difference among frequent attenders has ever been...That points even more to a Democratic advantage, because 54 percent of all voters are less-frequent attenders.
"...Democrats, in short, may be able to reap the benefits of resisting the faith-based politics of the other side. Republicans, caught between their solid "values" base and a more secular-minded electorate, may have their work cut out for them."
Step forward a slightly surprising flag carrier for political atheism - Matthew Paris - who has launched a rallying cry for the non-religious to make their voices heard in the public square. The article is in today's Times and is a response to the large number of critical emails he received after recently writing an article urging "intelligent Christians" to fight back against nonsense such as the idea that Pope John Paul II might have cured a nun from his grave. Paris says many emailers were basically telling him that if he didn't believe then he should "shut up" and stop writing about such stuff. This is a familiar line for Paris who recounts his time as a Conservative MP and how one Tory Chief Whip who explained he never felt the need to tell anyone about his personal atheism in case it "astonished" some of his local voters.
Here is Paris' response, it's worth reproducing one large chunk of the article:
"How do we reply? An ad hominem response would be to remark that when
the Church had the upper hand it was happy to persecute, imprison or behead
non-believers and fight crusades against other religions. Now it has lost
its boss status it simply asks us to keep our opinions to ourselves (but
still wants laws to criminalise us for mocking its pretensions).
On the back foot at last, it discovers (first) a brotherhood between all its sects. Then as the situation deteriorates Christianity discovers within itself a respect first for Judaism (suddenly we are all “Judaeo-Christians”), then women with a Christian vocation, then for divorcees, and finally finds a common purpose with religions such as Islam, too (the “faith” community). Needs must.
And as the Devil (or falling church attendance) drives, these “members of the faith community” cease enforcing their moral imperatives upon a secular world and retreat into whimpering about their “freedom of conscience” to carry on persecuting the minority groups upon whose sinfulness they can still find a consensus. Freedom of conscience, my eye! If only there were an afterlife: Martin Luther would have loved Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor’s protests. They don’t like it up ’em.
As mainstream Christian church attendances fall farther still I predict that the Church of England, and finally the Roman Catholics, will be driven to conclude that they cannot even afford to make enemies of homosexuals, unmarried couples and family planners, and start welcoming them in too. I expect they’ll call it the “love community”. In truth it’s the “can’t afford to be choosy” community.
But there I go again. Getting passionate, fighting dirty. But we have a better argument than “you’d do the same to us if you could” — though they would, and until about half a century ago they did.
It is that they will again, unless we non-believers are watchful, and energetic and — yes — passionate. I hate ending up in scraps with nice Anglicans and thoughtful Catholics because the Church of England and intelligent Catholicism are not the problem. They are the best kind of Christians, but the best lack all conviction. It is the worst who are full of passionate intensity. Look at the evangelical movement in America, and to some extent, now, here. Look at the Religious Right in Israel. Look at fundamentalist Islam. What they share, what drives them, the tiger in their tanks, is an absolute, unshakeable belief in an ever-present divinity, with plans for nations that He communicates to the leaders, or would-be leaders, of nations. They are the very devil, these people, they could wreck our world, and their central belief in God’s plan has to be confronted. Confronted with passion. Confronted because, and on the ground that, it is not true.
Disbelief can be passionate. Sometimes it should be. Agnosticism can be passionate. A sense that we lack certitude, lack evidence, lack the external command of any luminous guiding truth, may not always lead to lassitude, complaisance or a modest silence. Sometimes it should provoke a great shout: “Stop. You don’t know that. You have no right.”
I hit you, earlier on, with a burst of the admirable David Hume. But he was not always right. “Opposing one species of superstition to another,” he wrote, “set them a-quarrelling; while we ourselves, during their fury and contention, happily make our escape into the calm, though obscure, regions of philosophy.” No, David. Listen instead to Nietzsche. “This eternal indictment of Christianity,” he said, “I will write on walls, wherever there are walls.”
We who do not believe must be ready with our paintbrushes, our chisels and our cans of aerosol spray. Disbelief can be more than an absence of belief. It can be a redeeming, saving force. "
What is equally interesting about Matthew Paris is that he is a Conservative. In Britain, the most prominent advocates of secular politics have always come from the left. What we may be seeing now is the ongoing growth of secular attitudes in the UK finally reaching the far bastion of organised religion - the Tories. Which can only be a good thing at the end of the day.
Now I only just said last week that we don't "do religion" on this blog - except where religion clashes with the cherished idea of secular democracy. I should have added one other category - where believers try and smear the character of us non-believers.
In the Guardian on Saturday was a column by someone called Nicholas Buxton which so infuriated me, I need to sound off a little. If I can crudely paraphrase Buxton, he wrote that there is no such thing as reality, just different social constructions and discourses, and that Christians like to construct life with special meaning whereas secularists and atheists are all in favour of globalised markets and the commodification of life.
It's a load of badly argued tosh, but contained within this text is the subtext that always drives me mad, that somehow Christians are better people because they've got "souls" and the rest of us are lesser members of society. I don't make any assumptions of the personal qualities, good or bad, of another human being purely based on their religion, or lack of. I thought it would be quite obvious that we should judge people on what they do and not on which belief they publicly ascribe to. But if a religious person wants to move way from that common sense and make personalised attacks on all non-believers, then we must retain the right to bite back.
I have always suspected that a number of theists would eventually abandon their centuries old claim to know The Truth after having just about all of it shredded by scientific advances, and instead resort to cultural relativism. You have your truth, I have my truth, and it would be unfair and aggressive to submit someone else's truth to any kind of scrutiny, or heaven forbid, demand evidence and rational argument to back up that truth. And this is exactly where Buxton is coming from.
Of course as soon as you use evidence to evaluate Buxton's arguments, they come crashing down. The non-religious are more likely to vote for left wing and social democratic parties than Christians. Social democrats, believe the markets should be made to work for people and not the other way around. The biggest force pushing global markets, trampling over democratic control, and turning every aspect of social life into a commodity - are the current incumbents of the White House - who just about all happen to be...Christians. Today, Regent University,
founded by the televangelist Pat Robertson to provide "Christian
leadership to change the world," boasts that it has 150 graduates
working in the Bush administration.
Buxton tries to claim that human life was in some way valued more before the decline of Christianity:
"Where once we were souls, we are now consumers"
Well I wouldn't fancy being a peasant in Europe when the church had its way and strongly supported for centuries a system of feudal bondage and slavery. Hardly a profound point to make, but the Buxton article is a gross re-writing of history. Quaequam blog attacks the article on similar grounds:
"...the Church was a political body which was perfectly happy to treat the hoi polloi as so much fodder to work on its land and fight and die in its wars. Trendy lefty though I may be, I’m much happier being a post-Enlightenment ‘consumer’ than a pre-enlightenment ’soul’.
You also only have to look around you to see that there are plenty of Christians who are perfectly happy to treat us as consumers. Brian Souter is hardly the poster child for corporate social responsibility. Thatcher, the vanguard of neoliberalism in the UK, was hardly famous for her atheism: Reagan and his spiritual heir George Bush are famous for their faith."
This article was published in the Guardian on the same day the newspaper lead its front page approvingly with a quote from Gordon Brown and his concern about celebrity culture: "It is a remarkable culture where people appear on television and are famous simply for the act of appearing on television." I don't think it's being too harsh to say that Buxton may have some talents, but writing insightful opinion pieces isn't one of them. It seems his only apparent qualification for getting prime space in a national newsaper is, ahem, that he
appeared on a TV "reality" show called The Monastery.
Buxton previously wrote for the Guardian that a life without religion would
give us no reason to get up in the morning and instead we should just
give up and jump off the edge of a cliff. Hmm, interesting insight into his state of mind!
Update:
Unsurprisingly Buxton has been well and truly trashed in the comments section on the Guardian web site. It was also good to see the philosopher Stephen Law join in the "debate":
"Buxton is here more or less quoting from Rowan William' Dimbleby Lecture in which Williams claims that only a religious tradition makes "possible a real questioning of the immediate agenda of a society, the choices that are defined and managed for you by the market." Buxton would have us believe only the religious ever really question our shallow commercial culture. They alone are the "free thinkers".
As an atheist philosopher who has spent half a lifetime asking such questions as whether there’s a God, whether life has meaning, what makes things right and wrong, whether there may be life after death, and whether there is anything beyond the material, I find it surprising that Buxton and the Archbishop would pretend that it’s only from the perspective of a religious tradition that such questions ever get asked.
The great religious traditions do not have a monopoly on addressing the most fundamental and challenging issues. They share that honour with the secular, philosophical tradition (which is of course, also older than theirs).
And one advantage of a more philosophical approach to such questions (which certainly doesn’t rule out religious answers, of course) is that it doesn’t prejudge the issue. Rather than approaching such questions in a genuinely critical, open-minded way, religious enquirers have often already made up their minds: they’ve already decided that only a religious answer will do. In the hands of the faithful, questions like “What is the meaning of life?” may be asked, not in the spirit of sincere, open-minded enquiry, but merely as the opening gambit in an attempt to recruit more true believers.
Let's have more philosophy, not more religion."
Look this video is very American and very patriotic, but good grief the issues it raises are so relevant to what is happening here in the UK. Watch this video because it makes the case for secular democracy and why all people, those who hold to a faith, and those of us who don't should support a full seperation of religion and state. I was particularly taken by the part on the injustice of having to delcare your religious beliefs on a job application, because that is what is coming to the UK if we go down the road of faith based welfare:
A new report by Tearfund - a Christian agency - into churchgoing in the UK concludes there is a "secular majority" in the UK, but they decided to omit this finding from their press release for the report.
The report's executive summary states:
"Two thirds of UK adults (66%) or 32.2 million people have no connection with church at present (nor with another religion). These people are evenly divided between those who have been in the past but have since left (16 million) and those who have never been in their lives (16.2 million). This secular majority presents a major challenge to churches. Most of them - 29.3 million - are unreceptive and closed to attending church; churchgoing is simply not on their agenda."
The research was designed and conducted by a Christian group, so it's probably safe to assume that if any manipulation took place it would have been to boost the Christian figures rather than the reverse.
The survey claims 53% of the UK population claims to be "Christian". This is way down on the 72% figure from the 2001 Census. Does this mean there has been collapse in Christian belief in the last 6 years? This is unlikely, although we should expect to see a steady and continuing decline. No, it's probably got more do with this survey being a better method for finding out about people's beliefs than the Census question on religion which is critically flawed and needs to be dropped by Office for National Statistics.
Here is the summary table of adult responses to the main question in the survey:
From the table we can see that only a minority of people aged under 45 are Christian and that a majoirty of all people aged under 35 have no religion. So unless there are mass conversions, in the future Britain is on course to be firmly secular with a small minority practising religion, mostly comprised of those in later life, those recently arrived from countries with higher levels of religiosity and other non-Christian religions.
The report also estimates 10% of the population attend a church weekly rising to 15% who attend at least monthly. This puts active, practising Christians as a small minority of the UK population. This could and should have implications for the conduct of public policy in the UK as it makes no sense to privilege such as small group over the rest of us.
The Tearfund press release tries to be as upbeat as possible with its language of "encouragement" and "opportunity", and makes no mention of the "secular majority" conclusion from the report. There's nothing to stop any organisation putting a positive gloss on anything they publish, and we would expect any lobby group to do so, but we should also expect that other voices, including this blog, will look behind the headlines and point out any spinning the facts that might be taken place.
It's a report rich in data so may return to this again in the near future.
Joan Smith in the Independent is bullish. She reckons this has been a fantastic week for secularism. The first reason for Joan to be cheerful is the failure to get a god-clause into the declaration to mark the 50th anniversary of the EU:
"When the leaders of 27 countries meet in Berlin today to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the EU, there will be one significant absence. To the annoyance of many Poles, who have what is arguably the most crackpot right-wing government in Europe, God has not been invited to the party. Neither Christianity nor the deity feature in the declaration which Europe's leaders will sign to mark the occasion, signalling the high point of what has been a fantastic week for secularism."
While the failure of the lobbying effort to insert the god-clause may be pleasing, at the end of the day it's all about symbolism. And even if the clause had been included most of us Europeans would have carried on doing the same as we have done for the last century or so and ignored the establishment and carried on leaving religion. Smith also lists Alan Johnson's guidelines which will allow schools "to ban paranoid forms of religious dress", the French court decision to acquitt Philippe Val, editor of the weekly satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, who was taken to court by Muslim organisations after publishing three cartoons deemed offensive to the Prophet, and the churches' failure to get parliament to support more discrimination in society:
"At the same time, some of the country's most senior Anglican prelates were roundly defeated in the House of Lords when they made the idiotic error of supporting the Catholic Church in its attempt to discriminate against gay couples who want to use its state-funded adoption agencies. "What do we want? Discrimination! When do we want it? Now!" has never seemed to me a persuasive platform for any religion to fight on, especially when the public has warmed to gay weddings such as that of the singer Sir Elton John (who, by the way, is celebrating his 60th birthday with an eloquent blast against gay-bashing worldwide).
In a dramatic sign of the times, the Archbishop of York and two Anglican bishops found themselves criticised by peers who wanted to know what had happened to the notion of Christian love. Baroness Howarth and the former Culture secretary, Lord Smith, spoke as practising Christians and were supported by Lord Alli and my friend Baroness Massey, easily winning the debate. The Anglican hierarchy needs to do some soul-searching about why they joined this doomed cause, placing themselves on the same side as monstrously prejudiced bishops from Latin America and Africa."
And in a final rallying cry Joan writes:
"The Enlightenment, in other words, is back with a bang. Of course people have a right to their religious views, but they aren't entitled to exercise them in ways that trample on the rights of women, children, gay people and freethinkers. Wake up and smell the coffee: God doesn't rule, OK?"
It's good knock about stuff, but there's going to be setbacks along the way. I've never known a time when organised religion has been, well, so organised, about grabbing state power and tax payers' money. Without doubt the people are leaving religion behind but secularism, like democracy, requires eternal vigilance.
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