Sea of Faith, Oxford

Programme for Hilary Term 2012

2012-01-22T16:32:00.001Z

Sea of Faith in Oxford
Hilary Term

We meet on Wednesdays at 2.00 pm in the Friends Meeting House 43 St Giles, Oxford

25 January: Guest speaker Allan Hayes, who writes this
Title: One Humanity: can we create a vision of humanity that we can all identify with?
This is perhaps the vital question for the twenty first century. We have the resources: we know more and can communicate better than ever before - do we have the humanity and the will to come together in such an endeavour?
Of particular interest to the Sea of Faith is how the established religions will respond. Will they be content to make contributions to be judged alongside others, rather than claim privileged status?
The recent book Christian Atheist by Canon Brian Mountford and its review in the Westminster Abbey sermon by Canon Robert Reiss(http://goo.gl/V5idc) show that some in the Church of England hierarchy are willing to engage openly with the issues, but the institutional policy of the Church, particularly on schools, points the other way. This ambivalence is apparent in my own city of Leicester: good relations at personal and lower organisational levels but jealous claims to privilege at the top coupled with inability or refusal to try to understand others.

Allan Hayes was head choir boy in his parish church when in 1946 at the age of thirteen he decided that he no longer believed the supernatural parts of his religion. Since then he has had absorbing interest in religion, society and philosophy.
In 1953 he went up to Trinity College Cambridge to read Mathematics (BA 1956, PhD 1960). After retiring from an academic career in Mathematics he has been increasingly involved with Secularism and Humanism at national and local levels.
Locally, he has been particularly concerned to bring people of different beliefs together, which he sees as especially important in Leicester, one of the most diverse cities in the country. He believes that children should be educated together and is strongly opposed to faith schools. For the last eight years he has been Humanist representative on the Leicester Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education (SACRE). He was Chaplain to the Lord Mayor of Leicester, 2010-11. His writings appear often in the Leicester Mercury.
Besides being on SACRE, Allan is a Director of Leicester Secular Society, Trustee of the British Humanist Association, Trustee of the Sea of Faith Network, and a life member of the National Secular Society. In 2010 he was elected to a fellowship of the Royal Society of Arts.
Allan and his wife, Bessie (a retired Educational Psychologist), have been together since school, they have three children and five grandchildren.

8 February with guest speaker Professor Richard Pring of Oxford University Education Department
Title: What is education for? For profit, and to produce people who will make and spend money?
To help our children become more fully human?
The place of religious schools in the Government’s plans.

20 –26 February THINK WEEK in partnership with Oxford and Brookes Universities’ Atheist, Secular
and Humanist student societies. Lunch time and evenings; many venues and some very distinguished speakers. Details soon on www.oxfordash.org.uk.

Thursday 23 February 4.00 – 5.30 pm in the Sheldonian Theatre: Rowan Williams and Richard Dawkins talking
together about Human Origins. All tickets gone, but there’s a waiting list for a possible overflow venue. If you’re quick, there’s a slim possibility of a ticket through me.

7 March with guest speaker Brian Mountford, Vicar of the Oxford University Church and author of Christian
Atheist. Subject: Faith in a Secular Society.

What is the Sea of Faith Network?

2011-06-14T09:55:00.003Z

The following appeared in the AHS (National Association of Atheist, Humanist and Secular student societies) eNewsletter for 2011 06 14

The Sea of Faith Network exists to explore the assertion that religions are all human creations; that is, not supernatural in any way.
In some ways, this is obvious. Most religions regard the others as ‘mere’ human creations, but their own as something different, more objective, given to them as a revelation from a divine principle, or divine beings, or a single unique Being. If religions are products of the human mind, like the arts, philosophy, mathematics and the sciences, they don’t have to compete for the position of being ‘the revealed Truth’. But as insights they may have a huge value in human development, as those other disciplines have.
The Network was founded in 1987 in the aftermath of Don Cupitt’s television series on the diminishing power of religion in human affairs. The title is taken from Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘Dover Beach’; but the Network has used the phrase as a metaphor in many ways very different from Arnold’s – for exploring, risking, setting sail on an immensity out of sight of land, surfing, plumbing the depths, surviving storms, steering by the stars, and many more.
We don’t have a set of doctrines, not even an agreed statement of intent (though that has been attempted from time to time); but we are united in the realisation that, whatever our religious, non-religious or anti-religious beliefs, we humans are responsible for them, for their consequences and for their future development. There’s no infallible divine principle out there who must be right in telling us to do cruel, destructive things to each other
That leaves room for a lot of diversity in our membership. Some are so disgusted with the mess that religion has made in the world that they have left organised religion completely. Some are leading lights in the British Humanist Association. But others still belong to the faith they came from (indeed some are clergy and priests, as the original founders were, and have remained so).
There are a lot of Quakers in the Network, and many members who would call themselves atheist, secularist or humanist. Some members are very involved in interfaith dialogue. In principle, the term ‘religion’ in our aim must refer to all religions, but there are only a few Hindus, Muslims, Pagans, Jews, Taoists or Buddhists among our members, a short-fall that some of us think we should do more to correct. We do not insist on any exact philosophical position on whether you can know that God doesn’t exist, but most would regard ’existence’ as irrelevant to the ‘idea’ of God, even if the ‘idea’ still appeals to us.
The scientific discipline of observation, theory, experiment and falsification is, by most of us, acknowledged as the only valid tool for establishing propositions which are either true or false. Religious beliefs are opinions, different ways of looking at things, of interpreting things. The myths of Animism, Judaism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, etc. have insights many of which are of great value.
It’s hard to go on trying to say only what we would all agree about. I’ve probably already crossed the boundary. So what follows are some glimpses of where my exploring has got me personally.
The human world has big problems to face. Religion as a force for good – a source of insight and compassion, a prophetic critique of power struggles and greed, a vehicle of respect, co-operation and peace-making – has been lost in truth-claims, dogmas and pontificating about ethics. Most of what flourishes is bad religion. Does the Network have a vision of good religion to offer?
There’s an energetic dialogue going on now. Anti-religious atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and others usually get mentioned) are news. And surely we should be out there too in that debate. There are many things we might be saying. That the Church should listen to its critics. That theist religion must plead guilty to the charges against it. We might acknowledge the harm ethical monotheism has done. And we might suggest that the atheists listen to what Animist, Hindu, Buddhist and many other faiths have been saying and living for centuries, very different from the stereotype of ‘religion’ (= dogmatic ethical monotheism) which they rightly oppose. And we might seek to demonstrate how much of human thought, emotion and behaviour is not rational. Our minds do lots more than think. So although the scientific method is a marvellous tool for explaining things, making models, finding new understanding, inventing ever-growing new techniques, that’s not all that we humans do with our lives. Wonder, love and hope are perhaps more central. Science can – I don’t doubt – explain these human experiences, and the explanation may well be very important; but people also live them, they gossip about them, write stories, paint pictures, play music and take part in rituals about them. The world is an inspiring place for us. Explaining it all can make it even more exciting, but we mustn’t let explanation replace or destroy our experience of this treasury of delights.
In itself, the cosmos is meaningless. Meaning is a human creation, a human concept, a human need which only we can satisfy. This need has evolved in our huge brains. Science, the arts and the religions have also evolved – they weren’t created – and they are still evolving. In biological evolution a large gene pool is vital for healthy flourishing and development. It’s the same with religion. In embracing new ways of celebrating the cosmos, there’s no need to throw away the old ones. You never know when an ancient insight from the other side of the world may come in useful. There is no final answer, and all human systems of understanding have deep flaws, contradictions and inadequacies in them, often unseen without a historical perspective. We need to be able to stand outside the ideas of our own place and time, our culture, assumptions and obsessions. The ‘search for truth’ is always contingent, provisional and plural.
There is no final truth at which we will some day arrive. We will always be exploring new unknowns and finding new questions to ask.
The Sea of Faith Network – in my view – has ways of addressing these issues which should place it at the heart of the debates. Its specific contribution is to provide a basis – namely, that all religions, including one’s own, are human creations – which might enable atheists, humanists, secularists, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Sikhs, Pagans and all the others to listen to one another’s insights, value them, challenge them, learn from them and be constantly developing new insights from the encounter. The Network is nowhere near that yet; but, in my view, that should be our aim.
I would go so far as to say that anyone who seriously wants to understand secular politics, theology or philosophy in today’s multicultural and fast-changing times should consider visiting our website www.sofn.org.uk. There you will find information about our quarterly magazine Sofia, local groups, day conferences and the annual residential conference at Leicester University.
Annual Conference 22 – 24 July 2011
Leicester University
Brain, Belief and Behaviour
Psychology & Religion
A conference on religion and psychology: getting to the heart
of our understanding and appreciation of religion
as a creation of the human mind,
the evolution of our brains,
and our behaviour as the earth’s most intelligent species.
With main speakers:
COLIN BLAKEMORE Professor of Neuroscience
at the Universities of Oxford and Warwick,
GWEN GRIFFITH-DICKSON Director of the Lokahi Foundation and
Professor Emeritus of Divinity of Gresham College.
ALAN ALLPORT Emeritus Professor of Experimental Psychology,
and Senior Research Fellow, St Anne’s College, Oxford.
Plus Workshops on
Don Cupitt’s newest book ‘The Fountain’; The Might of Metaphor;
Atheist Spirituality; Beliefs about Believing;
Advaita – or what’s wrong with the West?; Who is the Sea of Faith for NOW ;
Religion and the evolution of the Machiavellian mind; Music Therapy;
A Social Constructionist Approach to Religion; ‘Painting Your Brain’;
Religion and Society; What is Consciousness?;
A fresh look at the Passion Narrative;
Implications of developments in Psychology and Brain science for ideas of moral
and legal responsibility; AND MANY OTHERS.
More details on our conference website www.sofconference.org.uk

Eric Whittaker's comment on Jasper Sky's talk on 5 May 2010 (see below)

2010-09-14T09:08:00.002Z

When I heard this talk I was most impressed, but on reflection since then I have come to the conclusion that this was more due to his eloquence than to the substance of his arguments. The idea that Gaia can provide our "guiding story" is really very misguided. Although over a medium range of time the state of the earth's surface can be regarded as self-correcting and self-sustaining, it is also subject to horrendous variations. The period of the "snowball earth" was a major one, but there are others. The climate during the period of Pangea must have been frightful, and if I had been an inhabitant of the landmass that drifted over the south pole to become Antarctica I would not have had much faith in Gaia. In any case it is a very geocentric concept. Saturn's moon Titan has clouds and rain and lakes (admittedly of liquid methane, not water), so it presumably has a self-sustaining character, and could be personified as Titania. This immediately suggests that Gaia also bolongs to a midsummer night's dream! There must also be many vastly different situations on the surfaces of exo-planets yet to be investigated.
But of course the main objection to rearding ideas about Gaia as suitable for our "guiding story" is that it is a material object in space-time, and must pass away. Our story must concern non-material concepts such as wisdom, thought, ethics, etc. We already have such a "story". "In the beginning was the word.....and the word was God". Gaia seems to be just a modern name for th old nature gods, Baal and Ashtaroth. Eric Whittaker

(And what's wrong with that? And maybe Yahweh, Krishna, Allah et al too?? - David)

KATY JENNISON REPORTS ON JASPER SKY'S TALK (see below)

2010-09-14T09:07:00.001Z

We had an excellent meeting on 5th May 2010. 18 people were there, four of them new to Sea of Faith. Jasper Sky, our guest speaker, fully lived up to our expectations. In fact, several people said it was the best meeting we’ve had. Katy Jennison summed his talk up as follows:

Jasper Sky is a Canadian, a researcher in climate policy at the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford. He is seeking a new story, which will make us all aware that our need to come together to defend our common home in Gaia is more important than all the imaginary divisions which separate us. These are my recollections of a few of his key points, in my own words, and very much open to correction.

Jasper was very inspiring, as long as I managed to forget about the everyday realities of the military-industrial complex and its icy fingers in the politics of the world.

He set out the evolutionary and biological reasons why humans are neurally predisposed to respond to charismatic leadership, and by extension therefore to anthropomorphic deities, and why we are also programmed to divide fellow-humans into an in-group and an out-group, and to compete and indeed to make war with people outside our own tribe. What we are only just realising is that the whole of the Earth, all its plants and creatures, all living things, the whole of Gaia, is our "in-group", and we should be combining to preserve her rather than wasting our energies in competing with each other.

Jasper talked about the mystical experience of one-ness, of lack of separation, which I think of as an enlightenment experience and which he characterised as the result of a temporary malfunction of part of the parietal lobe of the brain – temporary, because it would be very hard to live in the real world without any sense of separation between oneself and everything else, and the parietal lobe is performing a very useful function. Nevertheless, this fleeting experience does alter irrevocably one's perception of one's relationship with the rest of the world, and if it were ever possible to deliver this reliably to large numbers of people then a lot of alienation and exploitation might disappear.

A sizeable obstacle to our combining to care for Gaia rather than squandering resources in competition and warfare is the monotheistic message that "ours in the Right Way and everyone else's must be resisted and fought". We need a new story, behind which everyone, of all faiths and none, can rally. We also need everyone to realise that all the religious stories by which people live are just that: stories, rather than exclusive truths.

This talk struck me as a fascinating complement to the discussion we had last year with Colin Blakemore, who raised questions about the evolutionary function of religion which Jasper went some way to answering.

RELIGIOUS HUMANISM

2010-08-21T07:43:00.002Z

THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY
Workshop at the Annual Conference 2010 ‘Religion and Social Justice’
“The world’s religions could be major agents in building a good human future if they would abandon rival truth claims and embrace an agenda of creative kindness.”
The concept of religious humanism
SUMMARY OF THE DISCUSSION:
What do we mean by ‘religion’?
How you live your life A set of beliefs
A way of framing things to be meaningful Totality and diversity – how you feel reality
The sum of our values A community of belonging – and of excluding
Bridge between the community and the divine Pontifex maximus – telling you what to believe
Awe and mysticism Applying/ascribing human properties to the divine
An attempt to manage the unmanageable Drawing back the curtain
An attempt to imagine the unimaginable – terror and death Fatalism
Morality and spirituality Passing the buck
How is religion part of the problem?
Intolerance Exclusivism
Blindness to reality Limitation to a narrow set of beliefs
Holy wars Male domination
Persecution and cruelty Misuse of power
Blighting individual lives through Bigotry
Prudery
Guilt
Shrunken personalities
Puppets
Control of sexuality: “If you’ve got them by the balls the hearts and minds will follow”
Monotheism Organisational centrality

How can religion be part of the solution?
Life is not a rehearsal Make the best of now
Religion in everyday speech – Don Ecumenism in the 1960’s
Agreeing to work together in the things we have in common
Accepting, respecting and valuing diversity Look, share and understand, leading to action
Mutual support, inspiration, encouragement (analogous to a large gene pool in evolution)
leads to making the world better
How can Sea of Faith help?
Our wide definition of ‘religion’ (see above). Is that the same as ‘spiritual’?
Integrity – the bad things about religion taken into account – intellectual honesty.
Avoiding prejudicial value judgements – dividing things into ‘good’ and ‘bad’.
We studied the concept of “Religious Humanism’ as set out in ‘Religion and the Human Future’ by David Klemm and William Schweiker (Wiley-Blackwell 2008, ISBN 978-1-4051-5527-4)
Three excerpts below
Overhumanization and Hypertheism (page 13)
To be human is to be engaged constantly in the task of world-making, culture creation. We are profoundly social creatures and also beings that must, come what may, make sense of our lives. Outside of the bonds of society, existence would be meaningless and wretched. Human beings imagine the struggles and vulnerabilities of existence within meaningful forms in order to buttress, console, and inspire their lives. We unavoidably seek to “humanize” reality, make it our own, in order to share it with others.
There is a downside to the work of culture creation. In the current age, human power more and more intervenes to direct the dynamics of life on this planet. Régis Debray writes that increasingly people in advanced nations live within “transistorized, fiber-optically cabled, air-conditioned, video-surveilled surroundings. Night and day are awash in man-made light. Little seems outside the human realm in which spirit can live and move. There is a loss of a sense of what transcends human meanings. The advancement of human power and purposes has ironically meant the loss of the human dimension of life. Debray rightly observes that “humans still crave, in order to breathe, non-human spaces.”
The triumph of human power in shaping reality is what we call “over- humanization.” The idea designates a social condition in which what possesses real worth, what should orient actions and social relations, is the extension of the human power to shape and create realities. To be sure, the inscribing of forms of life within cultural projects, symbolic forms, and power is meant to further human flourishing. This project has brought advances in knowledge, the lessening of disease and want, and the formation of freer and more open democratic societies. Yet it has also led to the profaning of life through wars, ecological endangerment, and cultural banality. Part of overhumanization is also the unjust distribution of its goods — say, medicine, clean water, stable social orders — and the unfair distribution of destructive features of modern societies: pollution, environmental damage, lack of access to hi-tech resources, astonishing poverty. Overhumanization is a term for the inner distortion or flaw of humanism. It is a now a challenge to the human future.
The worldwide resurgence of the religions over the last century has exposed a contradiction within theism analogous to that found in the legacies of humanism. Often reacting to a virulent secularism and legacies of power arid injustice associated with the “modern West;’ the religions have become global political, social, and cultural forces. On this vision, to he human is to be responsive to the divine will as it reveals itself in culture and history. Many anthropologists and historians of religion hold that cultures of the past have been religious. Human beings can be construed as homo rcligiosus. Outside of rehgious communities with their sacred traditions arid their communions with deity, life would he empty and senseless. Human beings belong not to themselves and their puny designs, but to God alone. Theists take joy and hope in their ultimate purpose of pleasing God. Presently, we see the resurgence of theism after its waning in the modern age, often in the most secular parts of the world.’° Theistic religions have relieved suffering, furthered human dignity and self-determination, arid advanced understanding among the world’s peoples. These religions in certain forms and at certain times are also forces of destruction, obscurantism, and opponents to knowledge and science. The appeal to conform to God will has too often and too readily been used to destructive ends.
The distortion in religion works much like the flaw in humanization. It is the attempt to enfold life within a specific understanding of “God” when “God” is only rightly known and loved within the confines of one special community. In truth, God is not a Christian God or a Muslim God or
a Jewish God or a Hindu God or a Buddhist God. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has rightly noted, “God is the God of all humanity, but between Babel and the end of days no single faith is the faith of all humanity.” The diversity of human faiths does not necessarily imply a diversity of gods. Yet insofar is members of any religion claim ultimate truth for their all-too-human conception of the divine, it is riot clear what status other communities can and ought to have in orienting society.
“Hypertheism” is the term we use for the conviction of a community or tradition that its faith and interpretation of God are one and the same with the divine, obviously true and ultimately real. Hypertheism claims that one’s vision of God and it alone is sufficient to speak of the mystery, power, and truth of the divine. Accordingly, human life must become enfolded within that community’s vision and faith and every aspect of existence made to conform to its convictions about God. Hypertheism is a term for the flaw of theistic religion that endangers the meaning and purpose of diverse forms of human life.
Hypertheism and overhumanization are concepts for internal distortions of theism and humanism and which also necessarily pit religion against humanism. Ironically, they are both forms of over-reach on the part of human beings, either in terms of the radical extension of human power beyond bounds or in terms of claims to know without failure or distortion the will of God. It is not surprising, then, that there are thinkers and movements who reject any form of humanism, secular or religious. Humanism is false on this account not only because it focuses on the worth of actual human beings to the seeming exclusion of other living beings, but because it tries to explain the working of complex systems solely with reference to the lives and actions of individual human agents. The rejection of the priority of human agency is one defining feature of contemporary forms of secular anti-humanism. Likewise, it is understandable that other thinkers and movements disclaim all forms of theism and especially the idea of one supreme divine agent. Theism is wrong in this view both because it denies other religious communities and because it believes in a supernatural divine agent somehow operating within a universe otherwise functioning according to natural laws. These claims fuel the fires of religious and secular post-theism.
Anti-humanism is not somehow anti-human. It means, rather, an outlook that rejects humanistic assumptions about the forces that define the world. To be human is to be part of some larger whole, and it is this whole, variously defined, that must be explored in order to understand the proper measure of human social life. Similarly, post-theism does not signify atheism, a stance that rejects all theology or discourse about God. Post-theism tries to affirm and reformulate religious sensibilities within contemporary structures of thought and experience. It displays a humility of thinking which backs off the triumphalism of much theistic religion. As seen later in this essay, both anti-humanism and post-theism grasp insights that are important for theological humanism.

A Way of Living (page 169)
A theological humanist lives through the religions rather than apart from them. One undertakes the discipline of living freely within a particular religion. The human future needs the contribution of the religions, but it needs only self-reforming religions that are dedicated to the integrity of life as the manifestation of divine life and the human good. Religious people should undertake the free and serious work of reform that will enable them to live more fully, completely, and responsibly Why, given all of the problems that currently afflict the religions and which so often set them against each other in spiteful antagonism, do we propose to work through and not against or apart from the religions?
Theological humanism is not a specific philosophy or a new kind of religion, although it implies philosophical commitments and religious sensibilities. As mortal and time-bound creatures, human beings live, think, love, worship, and die in specific communities. Accordingly, to be a theological humanist cannot mean that somehow one must stop being a Christian, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a South African, an American, a German, or some cornbination. At issue is how one inhabits, lives through, the many identities that shape any person’s or community’s actual life. This is the work of freedom and responsibility under the dictates of the cosmopolitan conscience, as argued in chapter 7. As a theological humanist, one freely decides to inhabit openly and critically the social and religious forces that have shaped one’s life for the sake of respecting and enhancing the integrity of life. One cultivates the goods of life in oneself and in others, works to educate conscience, and also undertakes reflection on how meaningfully to orient existence, personal and social. A theological humanist undertakes that way of life within an abiding commitment to the imperative of responsibility with its complcxity and in dedication to life with and for others.

Manifesto (page 174)
Theological humanism means developing fundamental moods and attitudes that can ground habits of thinking and acting. Fundamental moods are ways of being open to truth, beauty, and goodness in the world, wherever they may appear. Moods of joy, dread, and courage; faith, hope, and love; awe, gratitude, and humility; compassion, generosity, and good will — these moods inform the heart of theological humanism. Fundamental moods are more than ways of being open to sources of meaning and worth; they are ways of actively seeking out the goodness in this world. To live as a theological humanist one vigilantly seeks the life of integrity in oneself and in others. A life so dedicated will become different through its call and commitment to see the truth of things and to serve goodness.
To inhabit a tradition self-critically means to apply the norm of the integrity of life to every aspect of the community’s beliefs and practices. Theological humanists who are Christian (or Muslim or Jewish or Buddhist or ...) and wish to remain within their religion have a mandate to .judge how that religious outlook is lived and expressed. It is to live religiously in a free and responsible way. It becomes incumbent upon religious people to work for the change they desire within their chosen communities. Appreciate whatever brings the integrity of life; criticize whatever demeans and destroys it. And in all things, seek a humane future for life in its many forms as the dedication in one’s religious life.
We began this essay by noting conflicts among different attitudes towards the resources of Western culture and the religions: humanistic, religious, and open but skeptical attitudes. We took that as a signal about deep flaws in cultural and religious resources and the range of possible responses to those flaws. We have tried to articulate, analyze, and respond to those flaws that arise within the legacy of this civilization. Yet we have also provided a portrait, a sketch, of a way to inhabit religious and cultural resources that seeks to meet the future responsibly and hopefully.
This essay has sought, in other words, to meet an interpretive and practical challenge of our age in a way that thwarts the celebration of power that can and does lead to the clash among peoples and also the wanton destruction of other forms of life. In this respect, an essay is a practical wager and not a proof. It is not a proof, because life is in the living and not in arguments. The wager is that by living theological humanism within religious traditions, it is possible to respect and enhance the integral relations of forms of life, natural, human, and divine. That is the challenge and possibility of religion and the human future.

Should the concept of ‘religious humanism’ be a guide to the future of the Sea of Faith Network?

Beyond Words; a talk to Sea of Faith in Oxford by Simon Myerson

2010-06-03T11:34:00.003Z

Beyond Words: What's Special About Religion?
Preliminary Postscript
Many thanks to everyone who came along to hear this talk and take part in the discussion afterwards. In the light of all the helpful suggestions and ideas which surfaced, I thought I would make a couple of informal comments here. Incidentally, there's a bunch of stuff I didn't have time to mention is in the capacious endnotes, so do take a look at those if you're interested.
At the time of writing, the talk and these thoughts (except this paragraph...) is available for download from my webspace. If this isn't working, or if you have any questions, please feel free to email me for a copy - remove bumph from simon.myebumphrson@gmail.com.
My motivation for writing the talk was really to explain why I am somehow a militant secularist (albeit one who doesn't find much time for proper militancy), more or less a secular humanist, but still a 'pro-religion' atheist.
My argument as I imagined it was: I like mysticism. It's possible to speak of it in precise terms, albeit very personal ones. Mysticism is necessary and indeed a good thing. But on average, mysticism tends to involve religion. And there are good reasons why this will continue to be the case.
If you condemn religion, this misses the point, of course - just because something is likely to happen doesn't make it any better.
Also, what I mean by 'mysticism' as perhaps a little eccentric. It's very much my taste in mysticism - a bit abstract and intellectualised perhaps. There is of course full-blown mysticism, with mystical traditions inside most religions. But all I mean by it is the paradoxical zing possessed by even many everyday religious ideas and experiences.
It's possible that atheists and skeptics are more inclined to see mysticism in terms of 'big ideas' (there are rare transcendental states of mind which mystics strive to achieve) and 'oceanic feelings' or similar ideas. I'm not sure I go for either.
I think that some mystical ideas probably can't be fully appreciated without believing in them - at least for a while. You might have to internalise them, to believe them to fully grasp them. I'm not sure, but it looks to me like some people have no problem with feeling like something's real sometimes and knowing it isn't the rest of the time, and others aren't comfortable with it. To be honest, I've never tried...
Introduction
Thanks to everyone for coming and thanks David for inviting me to talk - I should probably also thank Richy, who I believe put David up to this.
Now, when David first suggested that I give a talk here, I realised first that I would love to, and second that while I did have a few ideas about religion, they were quite vague and really a long way from coherent. So, putting this talk together made me realise just what my position really is, and I should probably thank David again for that.
Although I know this doesn't describe everyone here, the talk I'm going to give today is directed principally at atheists and people inclined towards liberal/humanist religion. I originally came to be involved with the SoF through the Oxford Atheist Society. I have more or less always been an atheist, and more recently I've begun to consider myself a humanist as well. I'm not exactly an angry atheist in the mould of Richard Dawkins, but I think I am quite an irritable atheist. I think there's a great deal wrong with religion, and I try to be as vocal and annoying about my atheism as reasonably possible in the hope that somehow, that's going to help the situation.
But as I have become more sceptical of religion in general, I have begun to feel closer and closer to religion in particular. I remember very well that a high point for me of last term's Think Week was when, at the end of a week of very interesting, very helpful, very worthwhile talks from various vocal secularists, humanists and atheists, there was on Sunday a talk by Ken Smith from the Sea of Faith. And it was much more mystical, full of religious ideas and unresolved paradoxes. And after helping to organise this week of rationality, it actually came as a great relief to me, and I really enjoyed it.
I don't think this is something which even the most passionate anti-theist, the angriest atheist you can imagine would fail to recognise. But many atheists seem to see it as some mixture of nostalgia, curiosity about religion, and something which is really better expressed without religion in secular traditions. I don't agree with this. Personally, I just find that certain ideas have a particular quality, a sort of extra mystical fizz. It's probably just as common in secular as in religious sources (and just as uncommon, too). But it is almost always bound up with religious thought and ideas. And while religion certainly poses all manner of problems, I think that its special ability to discuss these mystical, spiritual things will always make it compelling to many or most people, and I don't think this shouldn't be seen as a problem.
I want to give a couple of examples of religious ideas which I see as mystical, and to outline what for me gives them that mystical buzz.
A mystical example from religious practise
The first example of the mystical that I want to talk about is something relatively everyday, rather than intellectual or abstract. A Christian service is shaped by the idea that God is present in or among the congregation. This is the focus of the elaborate symbolism which makes up the service. Over many centuries this symbolism has become both familiar and powerful, and it is backed by a vast body of debate about the relevant theological idea, the idea of the Holy Spirit.
Naturally I don't think that it's literally the case that God is present in a Christian service. I don't necessarily think that it's a good thing that that impression is given. But even if only as the driving force behind Christian symbolism, it is a very compelling idea.
In particular, it is a mystical idea. The claim that something which is divine and not of this world is present at a particular time, in a particular place, with a particular group of people, in other words in a relatively concrete, identifiable way, is paradoxical. John 14:17, referring to the Holy Spirit, reads in the translation that I've got,
This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in [or, among] you.
This is a paradoxical turn of speech. It sounds like an offer of knowledge about something inconceivable: the world cannot receive the Spirit, but he will be in you, will be among you. I think this kind of paradox is part of what makes this idea so striking and powerful, and I want to develop this with another example.
A mystical example from religious literature
OK. So, I said that I found mystical ideas as much in secular as in religious sources. There are plenty in philosophy, in literature - and in mathematics, actuallyⁱ. But these mystical ideas almost always draw, at least indirectly, on religious thought. In fact I found my second example of the mystical in Douglas Hofstadter's book "Goedel, Escher, Bach" (which is mainly about philosophy/science). It's his translation of a Koan from the Chinese Zen Buddhist text usually called the Gateless Gate in English. It goes like this:
A monk asked Nansen, "Is there a teaching no master has ever preached?"
Nansen said, "Yes, there is."
"What is it?" asked the monk.
Nansen replied, "It is not mind, it is not Buddha, it is not things."
I don't know if people would like me to read that again?
So this is quite opaque. I guess it probably doesn't have a concrete meaning. The author of the Gateless Gate, who is often known by the Japanese name Mumon Ekai, comments that "Nansen was too kind and lost his treasure." I've certainly found more than one interpretation of this passage, but I think one reading could be along these lines:
Nansen tries to convey something which by definition cannot be known, learned or taught, either through thought, devotional practise, or studying the world (mind, Buddha, things). He is trying to say something important, but he finds that by definition it cannot be said at all.
And, actually, I think that for me, this is what gives religious thought a mystical spark. It seems to talk about something which can't be completely defined or explained. It's a kind of transcendence - we can refer to such things, but they lie outside the realm of language and communication.ⁱⁱ
Of course, from my perspective (materialist and probably quite science-centred) this process must fail - it can never actually succeed in conveying anything except words and experiencesⁱⁱⁱ. But to me, this picture of mysticism makes it sound like a very natural thing to do. And I think it makes it sound like it has great poetic appeal. You could see it as an art form in which participants use ritual to train themselves to attain a state of mind which is itself the work of art. ^iv And it would have practical as well as aesthetic value. For one thing, because it's a process of self-control and self-exploration. For another, because the mystical has always acted as a source of new ideas, for example in literature, in science and in maths^v.
So in other words, I think this kind of mysticism is likely to be something which people will carry on doing, and that's a good thing. And I don't think that it can be completely secularised - it is always something people will do religiously. Imagine you want to convey something which appears to escape language. What do you do? You might emphasize the ambiguity of language with paradox and fiction; communal activity might suggest something which lies beyond a first-person narrative; you might also attempt to convey the idea through hard-to-describe experiences. You might choose from repeated ritual, meditation, drugs, altered states, sex and sexual references, music, art, symbolism. And by this point you might as well call it religion!
Religious belief
I've done my best with this talk so far to disagree with my fellow atheists and humanists about religious ideas, and I feel that to be fair I ought to finish by disagreeing with more postmodern or humanist religious circles like the Sea of Faith about religious belief. I think that if very radical religious groups changed the way they saw literal belief, they would be better able to help build a more tolerant and pluralist kind of religion.
Groups like the SoF and other radical religious organisations have a vision of a different way of doing religion, less concerned with literal truth, belief and the supernatural. There is a strong sense that religious ideas have their force as part of a communal narrative, a story, and that this is something which religion should embrace.
But I suggest that this is only part of the picture. I have described mystical ideas as being particularly compelling because they appear to transcend language. In other words, they are constructed to feel part of some capitalised Ultimate Reality. ^vi. And naturally then, that is what they will usually be taken to be.
I don't know if this is really a fair picture of the ideas which most people understand as mystical or religious. But history suggests that people don't readily decide that their religious narratives are simply narratives, and when they do they are often uncomfortable with the idea.
So if people aren't likely to accept en masse this more tolerant, postmodern approach to religion, are reformist, freethinking religious groups like this one pointless? In short, no. Because groups like the SoF may not be the future of religion. But they do (or could) have an impact on the way people talk and think about religion.
There is some intriguing evidence from extremely thorough surveys in the US that most religious people really don't think there is one religious truth. They may not describe it this way, but most people are happy to mix and match beliefs and practises from different traditions.< a href='#note7'>^vii I think this goes to show that that in a connected and diverse world, people listen to many different voices, and very few people seriously act like their point of view has a monopoly on truth - even if officially, according to their professed religion, that's exactly what they ought to be doing.
What if, in this context, there was more of a public voice for naturalist, that is for non-supernaturalist religion? For an unknown number of people this is the only option which is both coherent and comfortable. It must be a small number, but it may not be that small - after all, quite probably only a minority of this group ever actually describe their views in this way.
I don't see myself as part of this group, and so I hesitate to suggest this - but what if there was an effort not to promote this position as a vision for religion, but just to represent the interests of this group?^viii Living without the supernatural and without religion is now a highly visible position- no-one can afford to just dismiss it as a non-option. If, without becoming the norm, naturalist religion was seen in a similar way, wouldn't this be a huge step towards a more tolerant, pluralist future for religion?
Notes
ⁱ The stories of Jorge Luis Borges are a favourite of mine. See also note v.
ⁱⁱ Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that "There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical."
ⁱⁱⁱ Don Cupitt, on a similar note, has written that "because all thought depends upon signs, we cannot think ourselves clear of language". Although for him, not even experiences can be shared, but only words - in fact "there is no such thing as 'experience,' outside of and prior to language" (Mysticism after Modernity).
^iv Borges (see note above) imagined a language in which "Nouns are formed by stringing together adjectives... There are things composed of two terms, one visual and the other auditory: the color of the rising sun and the distant caw of a bird. There are things composed of many: the sun and water against the swimmer's breast, the vague shimmering pink one sees when one's eyes are closed, the sensation of being swept along by a river and also by Morpheus... There are famous poems composed of a single enormous word; this word is a 'poetic object' created by the poet."
^v In the West, the ideas of human rights and science were originally promoted as divinely ordained. Early 20th century work on the foundations of mathematics (including Goedel's incompleteness theorems) was motvated by a fascination with the ideal of final, objective truth - ultimate truth. In other words, it had a Christian motivation - the ghost of a faith its greatest figures did not profess.
^vi And to fully grasp the idea is to internalise it, to feel like it is indeed real (at least in some sense). Perhaps some mystical ideas, like personal contact with God, have been chosen and spread because, while fully engaged in ritual practise it can be impossible to avoid this feeling.
^vii In America, the Pew Forum conducts remarkably detailed surveys of religious attitudes. They found that while people may talk in terms of literal beliefs and religious truth, they don't act or think in the way this would suggest. Americans believe that many religions lead to eternal life, and that there is more than one true interpretation of their own religion. 24% attend services or more than one religion - even ignoring Protestants going to other Protestant services, it is very roughly a fifth. Of course most religious Americans have non-orthodox beliefs, Christians believing in repeated reincarnation for example. Meditation is common, and it's implied that it's seen as a spiritual practise like prayer. Substantial minorities of most faiths aren't sure if God really exists. (Among Catholics, Orthodox Christians, so-called 'mainline' Protestants, and many non-Christian religions it's more than a quarter; only among Jehovah's Witnesses is it less than 10%.) Larger minorities believe in an "impersonal force", not a personal God. Atheists are no more capable of orthodoxy! US atheists are a small and determined band, probably the most convinced and militant in the world. But in fact, 21% say they believe in God! 12% believe in an impersonal God, 6% in a personal god, 8% are completely certain God exists, 12% believe in Heaven, 10% in Hell, and 10% pray weekly.
Are these just misunderstandings or errors? This is out of roughly 550 atheists (1.6%) in a survey of 35,500 people. They identified as atheists after had being given a definition of 'atheism' as lack of belief in God, and could also have selected 'agnostic', 'spiritual', 'just Christian', 'nothing in particular', etc.. Apparent contradictions like this have been observed in other studies (see e.g. Stephen Bullivant, ' Sociology and the Study of Atheism', Journal of Contemporary Religion, 23:3,363-368). Taking all this into account, I think that this is not a mistake. It is another example of the difference between religious identity and religious beliefs, and of the tendency not to see religious truth as a matter of certainty.
^viii One could even imagine a national body set up with this aim, rather like the BHA aims to represent those without faith. It would It would presumably be not the Sea of Faith, but a new body with different goals. I don't know what this group would look like - certainly not a religion, although I guess it would have to describe itself in more religious than humanist terms. And if it did exist, I have absolutely no idea how it might evolve and what it might become

IS THE IDEA OF GOD NECESSARY? Dane Clouston 2010 03 03

2010-04-01T14:52:00.006Z

Thank you all for coming to listen to me. I am rather surprised to be here. As a child or adolescent I used to live in fear and trembling of being called to the church. How did one know? Anyway it never happened. But here I am, talking about religion.
Is the idea of god necessary? Is the question that David Paterson and I agreed I should address. Well, of course, it all depends upon what you mean.
I recognize that the idea of god does seem necessary for many people, partly because it has been put there, in their minds, at an early age and it has never left. They have never escaped.
For them, it seems to be necessary in many different ways.
For comfort?
For someone to talk to ?
For an explanation of the meaning of life?
For a basis for morality?
For thankfulness?
For encouragement for the love of our fellow human beings?
For an explanation of the oceanic feeling, that sense of oneness with all that there is?
For explanation of how and why we are here?
For a sense of purpose?
But for me the idea of god is not necessary for any of these things.
For me, the idea of god is necessary, but only so that I can say that god is not - necessary
Why am I here talking to you when that is my firm conclusion?
Because I had the pleasure of meeting David Paterson when we found ourselves on the AHS Committee organising Think Week.
Early on, in December, I emailed the members of the committee, including David, as follows:
“I think it should be made clear that the recently formed committee was for the
"organisation of a students' led Atheist, Humanist and Secularist week in Oxford" rather
than a "student's' led Humanist week in Oxford".”
(The brilliantly energetic chair of the Oxford Humanists, John White, was making a bit of a takeover bid)
”It is the fact that it is all three, with different approaches, together with Sea of Faith and Sceptics in the Pub that makes it so creatively interesting and worthwhile. THINK is a great common theme. And lets in Rationalists!
I went on “While I may be on the Committee of Oxford Humanists, I have for many more years been a member of the National Secular Society and would be pleased to join the Oxford Atheists.
For me, “Atheist is what I describe myself as, because it clearly says what I am - a non-believer in the existence of any gods other than as ideas in the minds of those who believe in such things and a believer in mortal human spirit rather than immortal human soul.
“Next comes my strong secularist criticism of, but tolerance of, god-based religions and concern that they should be separate from the state.
“After that come broader non-god-based humanist morality and need for ceremony with, ideally, churches being able to be used as moral think tanks - as Bishop Trevor Huddleston once said to me at a wedding - and places for non-god-based as well as god-based ceremonies.”
Well, David emailed back to say that what I had said was his position and that it was put better than he could put it himself.
Which, of course, I doubt, and I should have suspected a case of ‘flattery will get you everywhere’, but didn’t smell a rat until, a little later, he asked me to speak to you today, which of course I am very honoured to do,, although equally alarmed, given my firm atheist conclusion speaking to a Sea of Faith audience.
And particularly in view of all the excellent speakers we have had during Think Week. There were many interesting points and points of view, but I am particularly indebted to Samantha Stein, of Camp Quest, for pointing out that atheism is not a belief, but a conclusion.

I am just an ordinary atheist, humanist and secularist
- wondering about the world, the universe and everything.
- wishing that others did not believe in a god, because it makes them so much more
difficult to talk to about important matters,
- recognising their right to believe in a god,
- and regretting that it can affect friendships, as it has, with friends who have suddenly
found god.

Why have I reached my firm conclusion? Well, there are many reasons. I will just touch on one, the astonishing scale of things in time and space, as discovered by open minded scientific enquiry.
On a scale of one mile to one light year, the orbit of the earth around the sun is a circle two inches in diameter, with the sun a fine pencil dot in the middle.
On the same scale - of one mile to one light year - the nearest star is another fine pencil dot four and a half miles away
And all the other one hundred thousand million other stars in our galaxy are equally fine pencil dots in a spiral disc which on that scale is about one hundred thousand miles across, - actually a hundred thousand light years across.
And that is just our Milky Way galaxy, in addition to which there are another hundred thousand million galaxies, each with a comparable numbers of stars.
How can we possibly imagine that there is a creator god of all that concerned with our collective and individual lives on this cosmic nanodot of a planet?
To me, but clearly not to others, it is obviously nothing but natural human wishful thinking.
Incidentally, I was very pleased to have this view of the universe published in a letter to the Times on January 9th last year, in response to a letter from Michael Reiss. He had said, in an article headed
“Darwinian thinking clarifies and deepens religious faith”
Above all, Darwin decentres humanity. In this he completes the work that Copernicus began. We are not the centre of the Universe. The Universe existed long before we came on the scene.
The first, amusing, response in The Times, on 5th January, was from Ken Binmore,of Bristol University Philosophy Department:
Sir, The religious mind is a source of infinite fascination. Michael Reiss (“Darwinian thinking clarifies and deepens religious faith”, Commentary, Jan 3) agrees that Darwin decentres humanity, thereby completing the work that Copernicus and Galileo began. However, “this decentring does not, of course, mean that we matter any the less”.
I wonder what would make him change his mind about the importance of the human race in the universe.
Then came my letter:
Sir, Martin Reiss [sic – regrettably should have been Michael Reiss, but no one complained and I did not notice the error until I looked up the letter for this talk!] points to Darwin decentring humanity in relation to other earthly forms of life and to other scientists decentring the earth itself. Indeed!
On a scale of one mile to one light year, the orbit of the Earth round the Sun is a circle 2 in in diameter; the sun (800,000 miles across) is a very fine pencil dot in the centre; the nearest star is another fine pencil dot 4.5 miles away; the approximately 100,000,000,000 other stars in our galaxy are also fine pencil dots contained in a disc, on that scale, 100,000 miles across. And then there are all the other approximately 100,000,000,000 other galaxies in our universe, each containing similarly vast numbers of stars, not to mention planets.
Martin [sorry! Michael] Reiss nevertheless claims that “Darwinian thinking clarifies and deepens religious faith”. As an example, he asks the “old but vital question as to why God allows suffering”. His answer is to see God as giving creation the ability to evolve itself, including the capacity to feel pain and pleasure. What God? Which God?

Wouldn’t it be simpler just to realise that there are no gods? Other than as wishful thinking dogmatic unscientific institutionalised ideas in the minds of human beings that cause untold and unnecessary division and discord instead of harmony on our vitally important but cosmically insignificant microdot of a planet?
You can imagine that I was very pleased to have this published a letter to The Times!
I see the earth with its religious buildings all over it as a sea urchin in this vast and largely empty space, with all the minarets and church spires as spines pointing outwards to heaven in all directions, particularly now that our son and his wife have moved to Sydney rather than in London. Thank goodness, and thank science, for Skype!
So how do we atheists manage without all the reasons for which some people find the idea of god necessary ? Very easily, and with a great sense of relief.
It is the same world that we all look at but through different spectacles – some faith tinted and some not.
Atheists, humanists and secularists are neither morally better nor worse than anyone else because we do not believe in a god.
Nor are atheists unspiritual. We are moved by spiritual feelings, by great beauty.
David was kind enough to say that I am not a bad poet.
To which my early morning response the other day, while trying to decide what to say this afternoon, was that
I’m really not a poet
But sometimes nevertheless
I turn to rhyme and rhythm
When under emotional stress!
Anyway, I am now going take the liberty of reading to you a longer poem, or jingle of mine, that is in two halves. One half is perhaps poetic, under the influence of what might be called the oceanic feeling, which we atheists experience as well as those who view the world through a religious framework, and the other half is more political than poetic, with a political viewpoint that arises out of my non religious philosophical viewpoint.
It was written during and after watching a magnificent and memorable sunset, of the kind that suddenly changes the clouds and sky into a seascape with coastline, promontories, islands and distant horizon, from the edge of the Chilterns above Watlington. I called it:

ANOTHER VISION

From the edge of the Chilterns

There is no immortality!
There's only life and death.
We have to keep on climbing
Until we lose our breath.

A sunset-switch to magic sea
Can fill a heart so high
It feels it's seen the best in life
And happily could die.

As even more so if it hoped
For immortality,
Which churches in our world still teach,
As did they you and me.

Such hopes give comfort at the cost
Of honesty of mind.
Our cosmos is too prodigal
For us to be so blind.

Eternal life is 'guaranteed'
By fortunes and religion.
But here and now is all to me;
I have another vision –

A vision of a world where all
Will be content to share
Not income, but the fortunes left
In ways that are not fair.

If we can lose the burden of
Our dream of immortality,
We just might concentrate upon
Each new child's opportunity.

The obstacle to changing views
Of ‘heritance and tax
Is people’s wish to be immune
From dread of mortal facts.

But neither money nor the church
Will keep us here for ever.
So let us dream a new world view,
Accepting life and death

A world in which all climb the hill
So long as they have health
And every child receives in life
Inheritance of wealth.

I will say no more of that other than to mention my Campaign for Universal Inheritance which you can look up on Google (www.universal-inheritance.org) . Unfortunately the website has recently become even more of a mess than it was, for reasons that are mostly my fault, not helped by it being hacked into some time ago by, I think, one of the Ayn Rand objectivist people in the States, with whom I was having an argument about it.
David asked each of the members of the panel in the first meeting of think week what they thought was the big moral question of the day. For me one of the big moral questions of the day is how to bring about, in this our only life, genuinely greater equality of opportunity in education, health and the inheritance of wealth.
Now, I want to become more controversial in relation to the Sea of Faith. After I had been invited to speak to you ,I came along to your last meeting to listen to Don Cupitt. I left both interested and puzzled and with a strong awareness of a kind of religious nostalgia, which I very much understand but react to myself in a different way.
As CP Snow expounded, there are two cultures, the literary and the scientific. Like so many classifications they are not black and white, but a spectrum of colours and shades.
At the literary end of the spectrum, the literary mind likes a story, a metaphor, a tale, and will enjoy it, sometimes without being bothered too much whether is it true, but more concerned as to whether it is relevant and valid for human behaviour, experience and morality.
At the scientific end of the spectrum, the scientifically inclined mind looks for truth about facts, as established beyond reasonable doubt by empirical experiment, and particularly for truths that can be disproved, but have not yet been disproved, in the way that Karl Popper, one of my heroes, identified.
So I am now going to launch my spaceship into the Popperian outer third world of ideas, focusing upon the ideas and what I think of them.

Don Cupitt spoke of us being made by utterance of language.
To me that is unintelligible if those words are to be used with their normal meanings.
From the point of view of a self-description it may be that we are made – but only as a description – by utterance of language.
However, we exist, and so are made, as are apes, chimpanzees, shrews and bacteria, independently of the classifications and descriptions of our human minds.
If chimpanzees, apes, shrews and bacteria had not existed or been made, as they were, in the absence of human linguistic descriptions, we would not be here, since we are descended from common ancestors of theirs and ours.
The fact that it has taken language to find that out does not mean that we are made by utterance of language.
In the beginning was not the word, but more likely along the way, animal and bird calls, apelike grunts, and silence!
Don Cupitt spoke of religions making law, but to me it was the development of food production that required settled societies and the law that they then developed for the preservation of land cultivation, ownership and annual surpluses.
Religion accompanied all that, because religion was the answer to the questions to which no one knew the answers.
Don Cupitt said that religion enabled progress. To me it seems that religion accompanied progress.
I don’t suppose that religion was possible without language. So in a way you can say that language created religion, but not that language created us.
Language certainly did not create apes, although it has created our way of classifying and describing them.
Don Cupitt said that he is an anti-realist. I am afraid that I am an anti anti-realist. I am a realist. I love finding out where we are and how we got here, with all the wonderful evidence of biological, particle, evolutionary and cosmological branches of science – albeit as an amateur.
I understand his nostalgia for religion, and would not deny that god exists as a named idea in a language in the minds of those who believe that it does.
But personally I distinguish between a god and the idea of a god
- between a god independent of our minds, to whom it is worth praying and giving credit for the creation of the universe, and the idea of such a god in the minds of human beings who believe in the existence of such a god.
Having relatively recently read Sebastian Faulkes’ book Human Traces I am inclined to think that some degree of schizophrenia is the cause of personal experiences of a god, when one half of the mind cannot distinguish between messages from the other half of the brain and messages from outside it.
In early tribal life it may have been important for a leader to be so convinced that a message came from outside his mind that he was able to convince others of a set of moral precepts and rules for a stable society.
We have always needed explanations. God did it, is another way of saying that we do not know the answer.
I fully understand nostalgia for religion, with candles in a familiar village church at Christmas, but I fear that nostalgic apologists for religion help to support those who believe in the institutionalized versions of religion and so help to support the fundamentalists and so the terrorists.
For it is a great struggle for those of us indoctrinated at an early age in a religion to escape from it. And after I had escaped, I resented that indoctrination, as I resent the indoctrication I see children being subjected to in many religions around the world.
I strongly recommend escape from religion. It is a vast relief.
No more trying to work out the contradictions between natural disasters and acts of an all powerful all good god.
It upsets me now to see how churches muscle in on so-called Acts of God, describing as miracles the survival of some and totally ignoring the unanswered prayers of those who spend hours and days in agony before they die or in continuing suffering afterwards.
Then there is immediately a church service of self-congratulation for those who have survived as well as of remembrance of those who have not, who must presumably have upset their god in some way.
Whereas we know that it is all just good luck and bad luck – hazard, as John Fowles described it.
Also without a belief in god, one can be uncomplicatedly thankful for the good fortune of being alive.
Driving along on a sunny Spring day, with the leaves and blossom bursting out under a blue sky, one does not have to be thankful to an imaginary god but just to our parents, grand parents, great grandparents and then a whole line of our human and other ancestors including the little shrew-like mammal which managed not to become extinct 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs copped it, and the bacteria 4000 million years whose DNA is closer to ours than it is to the DNA of another kind of bacteria. I got this from my reading of Richard Dawkins The Ancestor’s Tale, which I strongly recommend, as indeed I do The Greatest Show on Earth. People are sometimes very ratty about him but I believe he is a courageous and great man who has achieved an enormous amount towards helping us all to escape the tyranny of institutionalized religion. As clearly have Peter Atkins, Stephen Laws, Maryam Namazie, Samantha Stein and all the other speakers who were good enough to speak to or come to Think Week (www.thinkweek.co.uk) . And I particularly praise Maryam Namazie for her courage as founder of the society of ex Muslims. I think it would be good to found an organization [that could perhaps be called ESCAPE] - a society of all ex-religious people - so that we can all come together and enjoy the freedom of being able to talk freely to so many others across the barriers of former creeds and varied cultures.
Of course, we atheists may all be mistaken, in which case no doubt we will burn and rot in hell for eternity, or possibly, as a result of some death bed conversion, float around in heaven for all time. Personally I am not bothered by the logical possibility, however much evangelical Christians on the streets of Oxford try to alarm me, as one did the other day while we were manning a stall and handing out leaflets to advertise Think week!
To share atheism with anyone is a great bond in a global world, enabling instant open conversation and exchange of ideas. We love life, not death, unlike religiously misguided suicide bombers who tell us that they love death, not life. It is good that there is a new fatwa against suicide bombing from a Muslim authority, telling people that such action will lead to hell instead of to the 70 virgins. How much better, however, if people were not brainwashed and indoctrinated into believing such nonsense in the first place!

NOTES ON DON CUPITT’S REMARKS
“We are made by utterance of language” NEWSPEAK. WE ARE NOT. WE MAKE LANGUAGE. ARE APES MADE BY LANGUAGE? SPECIOUS ARGUMENT

“Religion has made law.” NO – THE DISCOVERY OF AGRICULTURE/FOOD PRODUCTION ENABLED AND REQUIRED LAW

I BELIEVE IN THE IDEA OF THE EXISTENCE OF GOD AS AN IDEA IN THE MINDS OF THOSE WHO BELIEVE IN IT. BUT I DON’T BELIEVE IN THE EXISTENCE OF GOD OTHER THAN AS AN IDEA IN SOME HUMAN MINDS

DOES S OF F DISTINGUISH BETWEEN GOD AND THE IDEA OF GOD?

WE HAVE ALWAYS NEEDED EXPLANATIONS. ‘GOD DID IT’ MEANS ‘I DON’T KNOW HOW IT HAPPENED’.

NOSTALGIC APOLOGISTS FOR RELIGION HELP TO SUPPORT THOSE WHO BELIEVE IN IT AND THEY HELP TO SUPPORT THE FUNDAMENTALISTS AND THEY HELP TO SUPPORT THE RELIGIOUS TERRORISTS.

THEOLOGY'S STRANGE RETURN Don Cupitt 2010 01 10

2010-01-27T13:39:00.005Z

At our meeting on 20th January, our guest speaker was Don Cupitt, and he attracted a record attendance – around 50 – so that the room was packed, with people sitting on the floor.

Don introduced his latest book (out in July) ‘Theology’s Strange Return’. In all sorts of ways (he said), the Christian story is now expressed in secular terms. Our modern tendency (‘for instance, in this University’ he added) to test and criticise every statement, is a remnant of the old idea of God as judge. We are now our own severest judges.

The Jesus story is about God coming down to earth from the sky where he’d been banished, and in doing so, he dies. Now, everything is contingent and there can be no assurance, which sets Nature free to be more creative. We might say that this is the return of God as our maker, enabling us to see the world as innocent and good, and so comprehensible.

The modern world has seen enormous increases in the average human life span (29 in 1800, 48 in 1900, nearly 80 in 2000, 100 for those born now). The modern world is putting into effect the search for more abundant life. It’s in this world, not another. In the past, the cosmos seemed to be just irrational competing forces; then it was seen as beings, spirits, gods, the skyfather God; and now One God who is Nature. A unified cosmic order, in our control.

Don inspired some very lively questions from the audience, among whom were students from the University Atheist and Humanist societies......

...AND A COMMENT FROM KATY JENNISON:

Don Cupitt both inspired and helped to found the Sea of Faith movement in 1984. He has written many books on radical theology, the earliest ones of which I found all but incomprehensible (at the time – perhaps I should re-read them). His 1997 book After God: The Future of Religion, however, struck me as entirely readable and eminently reasonable. Since I've read nothing of his since then other than occasional articles in newspapers and journals, and since I conceived him to be someone whose ideas were continually developing and advancing, I looked forward to being illuminated and challenged by his Sea of Faith talk in Oxford.

In retrospect I probably set him up in my imagination with unrealistic expectations which were destined to be dashed.

Don talked of wanting always to say the opposite of the conventional opinion, but what he went on to say seemed to me either disappointingly banal and hackneyed or, in some cases, flatly counter-factual. Above all he seemed not to have progressed from his starting-position of reaction to a particular variety of Christian theology: his perception, like Richard Dawkins', seemed to me to be shackled to the very specific mind-set he was opposing, and he failed to present us with any wider vision, anything that was not centred upon a narrow rejection of (in his case) Anglican theology of fifty years ago. If anything, he seemed to have resiled from the more mystical and affirming spirituality of the last chapters of his 1997 book, in which he writes of "ecstatic immanence" in a way which, I thought, would resonate across the mystical traditions of all faiths.

It may be the case, simply, that certain of his arguments which might, ten or twenty years ago, have seemed startling, revelatory or radical have, since that time, entered the mainstream and been treated very effectively by other writers and theologians. The strand of Judaism which challenges and disputes with God, for instance, is now familiar from Karen Armstrong's writing, as are the different faiths' changing approaches to Deity over the past several millennia.

At several points Don made statements which seriously worried me. One of these was about the dogmatic and pre-critical nature of Islam: this strikes me as both simplistic and inaccurate, and reminds me of the monolithic, straw-man version of Christianity imagined by Richard Dawkins.

He also seems to hold uncritically to the assertion that without religion we would not have either ethics or the National Health Service. This is not even a "post hoc propter hoc" fallacy. In many cultures ethics and religion may have developed, or been codified, alongside each other, and in some cases by the same people, but there is no more logic to saying that religion is responsible for ethics than there is to saying the reverse – in fact, probably less. Ethics is the codification of what is acceptable and unacceptable behaviour within particular (human) groups or societies, but such codes of behaviour are just as apparent in animals and birds as they are in humans: it would be very hard to sustain the argument that religion, in any form, pre-dated even that stage of human evolution which parallels the group behaviour we see in birds.

Yes, I expected too much. In a smaller group there were questions I might have asked, and I appreciated David Paterson's attempting to toss Don the ball of Paganism, but I think it rang no bells (to mix a metaphor) and it passed him by. I am reluctant to think that Don has simply lost his edge, however. I shall, at least, try his most recent book.

COLIN BLAKEMORE 2009 03 11 THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS

2009-03-30T10:51:00.001Z

As a spin-off from Channel 4’s “History of Christianity” episode 7, Colin Blakemore was the guest speaker at the March meeting.
He started with some comments about the danger of turning science into an alternative religion [OK by me, I thought, if both science and all the religions respect and value each other!]
Colin’s interest is in every aspect of how the mind works. It is not evident that anything about the mind makes it inexplicable by scientific methods.
Belief structures stem from the human need to pattern our experience. Means of communication (language, gestures, dance, ritual, etc) confer evolutionary benefits – cohesion and continuity. Belief in the existence of the supernatural does not have obvious advantages, and may arise from (a) consciousness of a longer span than one life-time, (b) extrapolation of awareness that other people act intentionally as I believe I do, so that we look for a personal agent for all events. Worldwide, language is intentional in structure.
Colin added that there has been little genetic change in homo sapiens for 100 000 years. Culture, language, printing, and now IT have led to changes in the way our brains organise themselves. (Dawkins recognises 4 000 ‘nims’).

Oxford Atheists Society 2009 02 04

2009-03-03T21:32:00.002Z

Talk given at the February 2009 meeting by Richard Thompson, co-founder of the Oxford Atheist Society
Abstract: I think I'll talk a bit about what I know about to start with (!!!! In other words, a bit of a fact-finding exercise about the Oxford Atheist Society and the general state of the atheist youth in this country), before rambling a little bit about how I think young atheists generally view religion. If you want to give it a name, maybe you could simply say "A Young Atheist's Perspective".

Speech: Hi all - thanks for coming.

I thought I’d start by talking a bit about the society I run – how we came to be, what we do, and our place in the rapidly growing student freethinking movement. And then maybe after that we can get onto something a little more relevant to the Sea of Faith.

OK, so I founded the society in Trinity 2008 with Will Potter, simply because we felt that there should be somewhere that people could discuss all aspects of atheism in a largely unassuming arena. I say “largely” because our society does have one central tenet – the only position that the society itself takes is that God almost certainly does not exist. By starting with this belief, we can then explore where to go from there, and by having the society take nothing else as given, we can have a diverse array of opinions be presented to the society.

We’re in part a guest-speaker-based society, and the diverseness of our society is reflected in our speakers – while we have, shall we say, more “standard”, speakers for a freethinking society, such as Julian Baggini and Peter Atkins, we also have other speakers that may not get invited by such societies very often.

For example, later this term we have John Hedley Brooke, coming to examine, amongst other things, the history of the relationship between science and religion. Last term we had 4 speakers, all of them religious – we had some Oxford theologians and philosophers of religion coming to try to find some common ground on some issue or another, and we also had a Buddhist (who happened to be a prominent TV scriptwriter) come and talk about the atheist aspects of Buddhism.

Next term we have Olivera Petrovich, an Oxford psychologist who will be talking about how children develop their conceptions of science and religion, and David Boulton, who I guess you guys are somewhat familiar with!

None of these speakers would be invited by a strictly secular society, and indeed this is why we felt there was room for our society in Oxford, for you see there is already an Oxford Secular Society, which was founded 2 years before our atheist society. My understanding is that Sec Soc (as I shall call it) has the largest membership of any student freethinking society in the country, but because they are explicitly secular and not atheist, we felt there was room for a second, explicitly atheist, society. While “secularism” is an important drawer within the filing cabinet of discussions that is labelled “atheism”, it is only one drawer – there are many more.

So, Oxford is now the only University in the country to have more than one irreligious society. Freethinking student societies have been springing up over the last 2-3 years all over the place, and there are three basic types:
Atheist societies
Humanist societies
Secular societies
In most Universities I get the impression that these names are used fairly interchangeably, especially the first two, i.e. if a society names itself as one of the three, it actually means to say that it is an adherent to all three different beliefs. This might be why Oxford is the only place to have two societies – because everywhere else has all three positions covered by one society. There’s a bit of a running joke that maybe one day we’ll get a humanist society in Oxford too!

So yeah, there are big societies in Leeds, Warwick, Edinburgh, Southampton, Liverpool, Durham, Keele... the list goes on. And recently the various societies have been hard at work together because we’re in the process of setting up a national federation!

The federation will be looking to do stuff such as help new societies launch, help inter-society cooperation, encourage each society to hold a “Rationalist Week” (which is a week with lots and lots of events) and just generally have fun. The main issue the federation has had to face so far is what to name it, because of their being three different types of societies involved. After several hours of vigorous debate we ended up calling it... the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies. Or AHS for short.

In fact this meeting is quite timely actually, because the national federation will be having its press launch in London two weeks tomorrow, and it’s going to have Richard Dawkins, Polly Toynbee and AC Grayling in attendance – the same three people who were at the launch of the Atheist Bus campaign! It’s all quite surreal and exciting.

So anyway, there’s definitely been a mass of this type of society appearing recently. What caused it? I suppose fairly obviously the cause is the likes of the Four Horsemen bringing atheism much more sharply into public discourse. For those who don’t know, the Four Horsemen is a name used to describe Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, and was established by the group when they had a roundtable discussion last year.

Is there unanimous support for the Four Horsemen amongst the atheist youth? Well I think it varies. I think most students involved in our type of society probably do subscribe to them to some degree, but for example in terms of how our society is run, we try to be independent of their typical message, and explore a wider range of issues on our own. Julian Baggini gave a talk to us yesterday where he criticised the Four Horsemen, as well as the Brights movement (which by the way from where I am doesn’t seem to have taken off – I don’t think people like the name), saying they’ve ultimately set atheist causes back. I disagree with that.

Atheism definitely has an image problem for being too critical of religion, but like Dawkins I believe that, while you certainly get some mud-slinging which doesn’t help in any way, a lot of the criticism of religion is indeed merited, and I think that a lot of the hoo ha surrounding this criticism is because people aren’t used to it – religion certainly has faults which deserve criticism and I think the reason there is an outcry is that religion has been immune to this sort of criticism on this sort of scale, for, well, ever. If everyone can just keep things constructive, then I hope that in time, everyone will come to relish the debate.

Right, so the second thing I promised to talk about is my amateur opinion on this whole Sea of Faith thing, and what I feel the general opinions amongst the irreligious student populace are on religion. A slight warning: From here on out the speech will not be based on known statistics but will instead be based on my own personal experiences. Maybe other people have seen things differently from me and I apologise if anyone feels I’m misrepresenting things.

Let me start by saying that amongst the youth in general, I feel that there has been a bit of a polarisation of opinions, and that the number of those holding moderate religious beliefs is on the decline. This is probably because there are now two large and competing sets of beliefs in this country, and whenever such competition occurs, interest in the whole damn thing rises, and people get more engaged. One of the two, atheism, is in many ways a new set of beliefs (it’s certainly been presented in new ways lately), and so is experiencing rapid growth as it finds itself as a widely accepted option gaining the serious attention of everybody for the first time. The other set of beliefs is, in reaction to this, working harder to keep itself going, and more Christianity also leads to stronger Christianity.

A knock on effect of this is that it means that more moderate groups lose out, such as the Quakers, who I understand have declining numbers.

Having said that, the number of “active atheists”, i.e. those involved in this kind of youth society, is quite low. Many of them are content without joining such a society or fearful maybe that they may take on some of the trappings of organised religion (not on my watch mind!). But that doesn’t mean they’re not religiously clued up.

Right, a little about my background. My parents are both atheists, and took the strange approach of deciding to bring me up without telling me anything at all about religion, to see what conclusions I would come to myself. It sounds like a strange thing to say but I think I realised that Christianity is false around the same time as, and in much the same way as, I realised that Santa and the tooth fairy aren’t real.

I don’t know if my background affects my views at all, but thought I’d say it for full disclosure. Moving on to young atheists then, and what they believe, let’s start with spirituality.

Personally I don’t think of myself as spiritual at all, and believe that everything can be explained can be explained by science. There seems to be a slight split amongst prominent atheists on this, with my opinion being shared with Dawkins, and Peter Atkins is coming to talk along these lines tomorrow, but opposed by Julian Baggini and Sam Harris – the latter being a proponent of Buddhist philosophies. What’s the consensus amongst the young masses?

I suspect most of them come down on the side of Atkins, Dawkins and myself. I think holding spiritual beliefs is seen as holding beliefs that are not explainable by logic and empirical evidence; and in rejecting religion, most young atheists are not just rejecting organised religion, but effectively rejecting all beliefs that science has not attempted to tackle.

So where does this leave religion, when viewing it from a post-religious perspective? I suspect, as sad as it is, that most young atheists don’t take any positive knowledge from religion at all. Why is this? Probably largely because they haven’t thought about it. At the moment they’re all on a war against organised religion and its many evils, getting worked up about intelligent design and religious homophobia, and haven’t yet reached the stage where they’re trying to see past that.

It’s a war that needs winning, and I think it’s a war gradually being won (especially in this country), so I expect things will change in time, as the battle moves into the past. But trying to look ahead now, what do I personally think religion will ultimately give to a post-religious world?

Starting at the very bottom, we should at the very least be able to derive some entertainment from modern religion, as there are some excellently crafted stories out there, with very archetypical characters. Indeed if you look at the Greek, Norse and Egyptian mythologies, entertainment is largely the purpose that they serve nowadays.

But one thing that could do with being explored more, in my opinion, is the relationship between memes and religion, thinking of religion as memes, and following up this thought process with trying to derive information from religion.

Let me expand on this a little. An interesting question would be to ask why, from a memetic point of view, adherents of various religions believe what they believe. For an obvious example, most mainstream religions believe in converting everyone else to their religion. Why is this? Obvious answer here: Because for a meme to thrive, it is a good idea for it to continuously draw new members!

I’m sure most of you are familiar with this idea of viewing religion through memes, and some people have indeed methodically worked through religion in this manner, explaining everything through its memetic properties, be it benefits to the survival of the religion directly (as in my example), or benefits to the survival of the religion’s adherents (and hence, indirectly, the religion itself).

But I suspect the next step would be to see if this could be used to teach us something about how best to go about our lives. To use my (possibly overly simple) example about conversion again, I guess the conclusion here would be that a community that welcomes in new members with open arms is likely to thrive, whereas a closed one will ultimately stifle itself. (That may seem a bit obvious which is why it’s probably too simple an example, but hopefully you can see what I’m getting at.)

I’m sure religion can be used as empirical evidence in other similar ways, and as far as I know this hasn’t been done much before. And I think that that will be the final contribution of religion to the world.

To end then, I wish to tell an amusing anecdote of the experiences of our society at Fresher’s Fair in Michaelmas. Fresher’s Fair can be quite a boring thing, so after maybe half a day or so we started keeping tallies of what was going on with the people who came to see us.

The first tally we started was the look and laugh tally, which was for people who saw the atheist society stand, looked at us, and laughed. This happened surprisingly often – 53 times!

At fresher’s fair we were in a room with Sec Soc and the religious societies. (I remember someone from the Catholic society telling us very smugly “Ha! So you’re a religion too!”) ...And so the second tally was the number of people who asked us how we felt about being in the religion room – this happened on 22 occasions.

The third tally was for the number of people who came into the room, spotted our stand, and immediately rushed over to sign up – this happened 28 times.

And the final tally was the number of people we got signing up for our mailing list – and this was 265, which I’m quite proud of, as it was more than the Christian Union ;)

Thank you,

Richard Thompson