By Marilyn Mason

A recent meeting with the nice people at Anti-Slavery International set cogs moving in my brain – hadn’t I read somewhere that on the famous voyage of the Beagle Charles Darwin had encountered and been horrified by slavery? A Google search reminded me of the source of this vague memory: reviews of Darwin’s Sacred Cause by Adrian Desmond and James Moore (Allen Lane, 2009), such as the one in New Scientist with the headline “Hatred of slavery drove Darwin to emancipate all life“. Arguments justifying slavery were often based on the pseudo-scientific notion that the different races of humans were different species;Darwin’s liberal-minded empathy with his fellow human beings and his belief in a common human nature, contradicted that, and was a precursor of his later theories and writings about evolution and human origins.

Further Googling turned up the relevant extract from Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (1839):

“I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave country. To this day, if I hear a distant scream, it recalls with painful vividness my feelings, when passing a house near Pernamabuco, I heard the most pitiful moans, and could not but suspect that some poor slave was being tortured, yet knew that I was as powerless as a child even to remonstrate. I suspected that these moans were from a tortured slave, for I was told that this was a case in another instance. NearRio de JaneiroI lived opposite an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves. I have staid in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly was reviled, beaten, and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal. I have seen a boy, six or seven years old, struck thrice with a horse-whip (before I could interfere) on his naked head, for having handed me a glass that was not quite clean; I saw his father tremble at a mere glance from his master’s eye…

It is claimed that self-interest will prevent excessive cruelty; as if self-interest protected our domestic animals, which are far less likely than degraded slaves, to stir up the rage of their savage masters… It is often attempted to palliate slavery by comparing the state of slaves to our poorer countrymen: If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin…

Those who look tenderly at the slave-owner, and with a cold heart at the slave, never seem to put themselves into the position of the latter; – what a cheerless prospect, with not even a hope for change! Picture to yourself the chance, ever hanging over you, of your wife and your little children – those objects which nature urges even the slave to call his own – being torn from you and sold like beasts to the first bidder! And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbours as themselves, who believe in God, and pray His will be done on earth! It makes one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendents, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty: but it is a consolation to reflect, that we at least have made a greater sacrifice, than ever made by any other nation to expiate our sin.”

The final sentence refers to the British outlawing of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1807, the British navy’s efforts to intercept and capture slave-runners, and the abolition of slavery in theBritish Empirein 1833. However, asDarwinfound on his travels, slavery was legal in other parts of the world, and remained so until 1981 whenMauritaniabecame the last country to abolish it. But as Anti-Slavery International points out, slavery, or practices horribly similar to it, continues today in many countries: in child labour, forced labour, bonded labour and people-trafficking, people are sold like objects, forced to work for little or no pay, and are at the complete mercy of their “employers”.

Both the British Humanist Association and Humanists for a Better World have had friendly contacts with Anti-Slavery International, as slavery is very alien to the humanist ideal, shared with Darwin, of our common humanity, as well as to our support for universal human rights, and so anti-slavery would seem a cause that most humanists could champion. If you’d like to avoid buying the products of modern-day slave labour, please see http://www.productsofslavery.org, and for other ways to help see  http://www.antislavery.org/english/what_you_can_do/default.aspx.

Marilyn Mason, Co-ordinator, Humanists for a Better World 

By Dinesh V.K.

Violence in our lives

Violence can be an act or in thought. It could be demonstrated individually or collectively. This form of aggression may have many reasons or causes, but ultimately does more harm or yields negative results than good. Man is a social being living in communities and violence, although it manifests in many ways, cannot be an accepted part of civilised society. It has to be dealt with firmly or contained, if not totally neutralised. Therefore we as a society have formed organisations to organise and run our lives, individually or collectively, protected from serious violence. Here we will discuss broadly about how the state, the government and public sector play their roles to meet this challenge.

Here we analyse the corrective role of the public sector or state. It is present in the form of police, medical systems, judicial systems; educational systems and administration are for our internal needs of protection. Where as, the armed forces, military organisations and international bodies are for our greater needs of protection. As the violent behaviour and heinous acts increases, the role of public or state increases correspondingly. They need to evolve or transform according to the challenges envisaged.

Violence and Terror

Violence has taken a new manifestation in terrorism. Terrorism is a dastardly planned act of violence. Criminal elements have become involved in abetting such violence. Drugs, arms and explosives are part of this criminality. To deal with it, society now has gone to the extent of using resources of the military forces. So the demarcations and boundaries have thinned to a grey area. The state has to arm its police department with guns, rubber bullets, batons, helmets, tear-gas and more of such things to counter violence. Elite or Special Forces have been raised. And when things go worse the paramilitary are brought in, if available in the state. Counter insurgency, rearing up in many parts of the world has contributed to bring violence and terror into the lives of hapless people. More efforts, methods and resources are being put in to handle these challenges. The State and its organisations have a changing role to play. In this discussion we will be referring to the UK riots in some contexts.

Response

In the UK, new acts have been passed and put into force owing to these challenges. The Parliament of the United Kingdom has passed the Serious Organized Crime and Police Act 2005 (c.15) (SOCPA), which has significantly simplified the powers of arrest of a constable. The Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 has mostly come into force on 1st October 2006. Members of the agency- SOCA can be designated the powers of a constable, customs officer or immigration officer or any combination of these three powers.

Two months after the terrorist attacks in New York on 11th September 2001, The Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 was formally introduced into the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Introduced on 19 November 2001, coming into force on 14th December 2001, it has since been replaced by the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005.

Battling for Peace?

In the larger international realm, the state and public sector is involved in military situations. Response to organised crime and terrorism has now crossed borders and sovereignty. We now see the involvement of the United Nations, the NATO, the USA and others, in a fight against terror and dictatorial regimes. So we have military operations at the cost of human suffering active in Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq. The cause of all this is that somewhere there is a conflict of ideology, interests, of perspectives and values. Again we see the role of the state and government becoming important. Only international forums can resolve these issues of such magnitude. But again, it is not the act of violence? Maybe it is justified and sanctified by socio-political objectives and gains, but it boils down to one thing- force.

Society must do introspection

That brings us to the basic question of how can peace be restored individually and collectively. Civil society has to answer this and play its role to redeem the larger society from the imbroglio. The answer lies in the individual, family and the society. The answer lies in anchoring a value system that cannot be commercialised or abducted by selfish or vested interests. The answer lies within the human psyche. Are not human beings becoming desensitised? Society has to re-examine itself. We have to analyse the value system that has evolved over time. It’s definitely not into the healthy model that it needs to be. Who are our young society’s role models? A very diagnostic approach is necessary. A remedy must be sought. We owe it to our future generation.

That brings into the picture the area of state or public organisations and their changing roles. The national health services and education departments have their role to play and can develop a reasonable solution. We will have to explore the areas of social psychology and mental health. Although the education system in UK is a devolved matter, the system can greatly influence the society and the value systems. A lot of rethinking may be necessary, but a beginning has to be made to examine both the personal and cultural value systems that exist today.

The society, individual and mental health

Albert Bandura

The work and contribution of social psychologist Albert Bandura will be relevant to our discussion here. He has been studying social modelling, observational learning, aggression and self-regulation since the 1970s. From his theories, role models can influence behaviour of people and particularly children are significant today. Children exposed to violent behaviour at school, at home or on media may believe anger is acceptable behaviour. This will reflect in their behaviour and it could have a multiplying effect socially. The work of Professor Albert Bandura of Stanford University focuses on self-directing and self-efficacy. The research helps us to address and redress the values of growing children.

There is surely some correlation between abuse, hate crimes and violent behaviour, which we find universally on the rise.  Violence is a social and health problem of a unique kind that has to be addressed. Perpetrators and the affected should get proper treatment at a clinic or hospital.  As the crisis warrants, a family doctor or school counsellor or member of the religious community should be involved for counselling and referrals. Therapists can help people of different ages by managing stress, conflict and anger. For instance, in the UK, the NHS Mental Health Services and Trusts are probably the kind of infrastructure that can work for the betterment of social behaviour and harmony.

Education and values

That brings us to the issue of upbringing and the formative stage of a growing youth. The role of education plays a major part undoubtedly. In most countries education is a state prerogative or at least under supervision and guidelines. Schooling is during the formative stage of a young generation. Parents and teachers have to prepare themselves to play a vital role. It is in this context that we should perceive the Bailey Review of the Commercialisation and Sexualisation of Childhood as an important insight. Are we not observing a value system that’s going twisted? We have to make corrections. Authorities responsible for implementing public sector benefits and educational benefits should start to rethink. The solution is not a simple one but perseverance will pay. The National Curriculum of England was developed and finally introduced in 1992. Except for independent schools, Free Schools, and the new academies, all schools in England are required to follow it. Northern Ireland and Wales too largely follow the National Curriculum. Scotland has its own distinctive and flexible framework placing responsibility on local authorities and schools. The state and public sector can make a difference under wise counsel to work to protect us from violence and change our living style for the better. We can all work together for a healthy and humane society.

Non-Violence

Aung San Suu Ki

For the good and betterment of the individual, society and state, we have to draw from the concept of non-violence. Non violence can be a philosophy of abstention from violence. It can be a socio-political tool for change. It can also refer to the pacifist approach of an individual on moral, ethical, religious or spiritual grounds. Nevertheless non-violence is often associated with the intention to achieve social and political change. Mention must be made of the decades of non-violent struggle by Mahatma Gandhi against the British rule in India. Martin Luther King adapted Mahatma Gandhi’s methods in his movement to win civil rights for fellow African Americans. We have seen the “Velvet Revolution” in Czechoslovakia that brought an end to the communist regime. We have seen the likes of Nelson Mendela of South Africa and Aung San Suu Ki of Myammar becoming spearheads of peaceful resistance against oppression. We have seen the non-violent movement of Leymah Gbowee with the women of Liberia. They were able to bring peace after 14 years of civil war in 2003. Forms of non-violence actually are based on strong religious, spiritual beliefs and political analysis. The society and state organisations can draw inspiration from this pragmatic if not ancient philosophy of non-violence.

Author Bio:

Dinesh V.K., a blogger, who pens on latest consumer electronics, gadgets, shopping offers, free samples, market trends, politics, public services, health services and other informative articles.

Life.com has published some excellent photos from Chicago’s Anti-Superstition Society, 1940.  It states:

On December 13, 1940 — a Friday, no less — LIFE magazine attended a gathering spread across 13 tables in Room 13 of the Merchants & Manufacturers Club of Chicago. (Yes, each table sat 13 people). The result? The odd and endearing article, “Life Goes to a Friday-the-13th Party,” published a few weeks later in the
magazine. Now, in light of January 2012′s very own Friday the 13th, LIFE.com resurrects that feature, and celebrates some old-school businessmen unafraid to step on a crack. 

 

by Josh Kutchinsky

David Cameron, the  British prime-minister,  said last month:

“We are a Christian Country”

His speech was fairly  vague in line with what he said of his commitment to the  Church of England, the established Church, “I am a committed – but I have to say vaguely practicing – Church of England Christian, who will stand up for the values and principles of my faith…”

So where does this leave me, a UK citizen, born in England

My parents were Jewish. After they were married they set up home in Antwerp, Belgium. World War Two began less than a year later. My mother, a pessimist, feared for their safety. My father, an optimist, thought the Germans would not repeat the mistakes of World War One and invade again. As we know my father was wrong. Fortunately and with only moments to spare they escaped and crossed the Channel to England, the land of my father’s birth.

I was born a few years later. The older I get the more I realise that certain events, just before my birth, have had an enormous influence. I think of these events as historical black holes. They are so massive in their significance that they distort the very fabric of all our  lives, whether we realise it or not. In astronomy black holes are events that distort space and time and anything that gets close to them cannot escape. Even light is pulled into the vortex of a black hole. It is as if the black hole were the enemy of light. Mechanised warfare and the industrialised concentration death camps extinguished many millions of lives and blighted countless millions of  families and friends. Some of those people considered themselves Jewish, some as assimilated, Christian or non-religious, some were too young to have religious or belief convictions, others were political enemies, or belonged to one of the other target groups; homosexuals, gypsies, people with physical or learning disabilities or mental illness or simply those who resisted or were unlucky. They were chosen for extermination and for elimination from the family of humanity. The seeds for this were developed within a civilised continent, within a country of culture, of democracy, of the rule of law. All qualities possessed by this country.

The realisation of the horror of these events provided the impetus, even before the end of the war, for the creation of the United Nations and for discussions about the necessity for a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. By the way next year will be the 65th anniversary of that Declaration. In my opinion every home should have a copy somewhere, particularly homes with young children. The Holocaust and other genocides are open wounds in the body of humanity. This Declaration and the Covenants and Conventions that followed are part of an ongoing attempt to resist infection and where it occurs to treat it and prevent its spread.
Who can know exactly why my life in this country, and those of so many others of my generation, have been so charmed, so fortunate.
We have never been required to hold a gun.
That is a remarkable fact

This narrow window of comparative tranquility is an unnatural state of affairs. Many of the factors which have contributed to this peace and stability are now taken for granted. I am disturbed by the complacency of so many; their lack of interest or even outright hostility to internationally agreed principles of human rights; their disillusionment with politics. Cynicism may have some excuse when we see these agreed principles of international law ignored or over-ruled by states and individuals. But this is all the more reason to demand that they be taken seriously. Human rights are not set in stone. They are a part of a developing code of conduct based on many sources of values and principles. We must both improve them and defend them. We need to talk. We need to talk about our future. We need to take our responsibilities seriously.

So,  “who owns Britain?”

Well what do I mean by ownership?

I would like to consider three qualities of ownership; access, entitlement and responsibility.

Ownership allows enjoyment of the thing owned. However, if you are like me then for example many of the features of your mobile phone and other gadgetry are mysteries indeed. To have the full benefits of ownership we may have to spend some time exploring their features, possibly with an instruction booklet, or preferably with a young expert.

You need also for the enjoyment of your property confidence that it won’t be taken away from you. This is critical. So a system has been developed over many years whereby ownership is established and the rights of ownership and the entitlements that flow from it are acknowledged and if necessary defended. In this country we take this system of legal entitlement for granted.

However, often the enjoyment and usefulness of private goods requires more than just public acceptance of this right. It also usually depends on the use of shared property to realise the private pleasure. The person sitting in a car has nowhere to go without public roads. We all depend to some considerable extent on shared public amenities and services in order to enjoy our private possessions. Roads, or rights of way, can, I believe, provide some further valuable insights into the qualities of ownership. Where roads go is determined by many different factors. The reasons why they go straight to one place and avoid another may be lost in the mists of time, but there will have been reasons.

For a moment let’s imagine a time before established tracks and rights of way, many thousands of years ago. We find ourselves surrounded by trees. There are rivers, valleys, mountains and there are other animals. So how much of this territory can we call our own? Well, in the imagination, we can own it all, but in practice where can we actually go? How much does it cost us in terms of time and risk and effort?

These questions were probably answered not by sitting and thinking, but by acting in response to need and circumstance. Once we have established access to important places – safe places to eat and sleep, we may have spare time to explore. Again theoretically we can go anywhere in the land; we can climb some trees, we can visit some caves, but we are best served by carefully extending our access; venturing from the known to the unknown with considerable caution. These explorations will inevitably influence our children and future generations in their travels; for the opening up of roads and other means of transportation enable certain paths to be travelled more easily and with greater safety. Some will become well chosen paths.

There are more than just physical pathways there are also mental ones. These mental routes, these neural pathways, must also have been explored for many thousands of years and for most of this time these ways of thinking, were communicated to the following generations through stories and deeds. The stories made the deeds possible and gave confidence to action. How else could one learn which animals to hunt, which fruits to eat, which paths to travel, which people to trust and so on.

In one sense we all own all these paths. They are the legacy left to us by our ancestors. This mental geography is handed down through the generations in stories, in songs, in pictures, in poems, in dramas, in artefacts, in rites and rituals. More recently, in the last few hundred years, they have been stored in a new way;  the printed word.

The knowledge contained in all the books, and all the artefacts in all the great libraries, museums and universities of the world are also part of our shared inheritance. We are also owners of these treasures. The stories from Egyptian, Greek and Roman times, the writings of philosophers, the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Koran, the Bhagavagita, the works of the Enlightenment, the discoveries and theories of science, the formulas for technology, for potions and lotions, the writings of Confucius, of Lao Tse, of the Buddha and all the rest from Shakespeare to the living writers and artists of our time. They belong to us all.

And there is too much, and we need to select and we need help, we need more than just instruction booklets. We need education. For without knowledge a citizen, or someone with a right of residence or even a tourist who only has a temporary entitlement to stay in this country, may, in theory, have an entitlement to its many treasures, but how will they access them if they don’t know where they are? How will they choose the journeys to make? Keys are of no value if you don’t know which locks they fit. So in principle you may have equal entitlement but do you have equal access?

Entitlement to access  must depend on some qualities of identity. You may acquire one form of ownership, that is to say citizenship, by accident of birth, which in this country  makes you also a citizen of the European Union. You may also acquire citizenship by meeting certain other conditions. If access with entitlement is part, as I suggest, of a definition of ownership, then there are those whose main qualification is that they are wealthy. Sufficient wealth will provide you with considerable access and entitlement, more access, in fact, than the majority of citizens possess, although it is still true that you may have your entitlement and therefore your access refused or restricted depending on other factors, nationality, criminal record and so on.

So access isn’t equal.

Ownership presupposes an entitlement, and with that entitlement comes access, and with access, use and with use comes interest and responsibility; an interest in conservation, in upkeep, in  development. And also an interest in the agreements that protect and provide the rights of access; and an interest in who else has access.

So what is the agreed entitlement? Is there one? Being British is one identity from which flows a sense of ownership, but do we agree on what that means?

My father was British. He thought of himself as British but was not totally confident about it. After all he had been quite prepared to live, married to a Belgian, in Belgium until the Germans invaded. After the war he recognised the need for a Jewish Homeland, a place to which he could take his family, if this place also became unsafe. But he thought of himself as British.

He was a successful businessman in a business started by his father. We had a comfortable middle class life. How much did he think he owned of this country? Well churches had some uncomfortable connotations for him. The freedoms that he exercised, the protection of the rule of law that he enjoyed, the ability to belong to a community of other people who were Jewish, had in other places not only, not been defended by organised churches but these same churches had been key players in fomenting some of the pogroms which, a generation earlier,  had caused his father to flee for his life from Poland. My father wasn’t comfortable in churches.

I mean no offence to good people who might be Christian, might be members of the Church of England might even  be only ‘vaguely practising’. I just want you to know that my father, an Englishman by birth, did not feel  comfortable in churches. The Established Church belonged to others. He didn’t think for a moment that his right to travel the streets of the country depended on the Church of England’s largesse. He thought he was entitled to that by reason of his place of birth but he knew enough, having been taught English history, to know that the Church was a key player in the division of power that is at the core of Britain’s unwritten constitution. He knew that where the roads led to in this country had been determined by others and that there was not open and equal access for all.

He appreciated and valued the innate conservatism of such a long lived series of accommodations and adjustments. Like many other English people he was wary of strident socialism,  nationalism and of idealism and the revolutions that they sometimes encouraged. For they often seemed to challenge the rights of the individual to live as they please, within the law and with a minimum of state interference.

So, who do I think does own Britain?

Well, my answer is simple: we all do, everyone who is legally entitled to be in this country. More importantly it is only we as individuals who own this country. We the people may have invested governments, churches, companies and corporations, communities and other bodies (some of which are religious and many of which are not) with the status of a quasi-individual but their entitlement is second hand. It derives from us as individuals. It is because we give them, actively or passively, our assent.

So if we are the owners then what further questions do I think we need to consider?

Firstly, but not I think necessarily in order of importance, can non-Anglicans and particularly non-Christians and non-theists have full entitlement when there is an Establish Church?
Can an established Church of England avoid creating a host and guest relationship? The host with full rights of ownership and the guest with somewhat restricted ones.It may be that there are ways of solving the problem without necessarily engaging in full disestablishment. This needs to be explored. However I am not convinced that this is the most urgent of questions.

Article 1 of the UN Declaration states: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights” – but, as George Orwell noted, some are more equal than others. Equal in entitlement but not in the exercise of that entitlement. If there were to be considered a new British Bill of Rights, as some are calling for, how would all citizens of all religions and beliefs be guaranteed their rights?
If it began with a preamble along the lines of “We the people” who is it that would be included in that ‘we’?

There has been considerable discussion in the last few years about British Values and the underlying meaning beyond the legal status of British identity. These are I suggest irrelevant issues to the question of ownership. Our rights as citizens, residents and visitors are determined simply by our legal status and I think it is worth pointing out that citizenship is a human right guaranteed within the UN Declaration.

Words matter. They are, as I have already argued, the creators of mental pathways.

Does a woman, a British Citizen herself, and grandmother of someone born in this country have less of an entitlement because her command of the English language is poor or non existent?

No. Her entitlement is the same but quite possibly her ability to access her entitlement is severely reduced. All rights automatically imply duties and responsibilities. If you have a right to life then I have a duty not to kill you. But more than this the right to life is not just to any sort of life, but to the opportunity, and I stress, the opportunity, to live a full and fulfilled life. For those in power to ensure that you can live, but have only the means to do so, unemployed or on poverty wages,  in poor substandard housing without proper access to medical or other services is not to honour the duty to your right to life.

Meeting these and all the other obligations as individuals and through governments, state agencies, churches and the myriad other organisations requires a balance of rights against rights, and duties against duties, and it is often  complicated. We need to talk about these issues.

So here we arrive at some possibly even more challenging questions.

• Do you recognise the duty that you have to ensure the rights of others, others who are not members of your immediate family, of your local community, of your religious or belief community, of your sex , of your age, of your sexual orientation ?
• Do you accept that it is only by owning, by taking ownership of the whole of our human inheritance and then selecting and arguing and persuading as to how to proceed in the best way possible that we can move towards fulfilling our obligations to the human rights of others?
• Do you agree that to leave the decision making to others because you have not been here long, or because you are from a different culture or from a non-Christian religious background, or a religious perspective which is suspicious of engagement with others is to not fulfil your obligations to yourself, your family, your own community or to others?

Of course not everyone is motivated to be politically active but here we come to the difference between, for instance, voting for one party or another, abstaining for whatever reason and simply not bothering to vote. Only you can know whether your abstention from political involvement on any particular occasion is for good reason.

Do you intend to honour the most important, the most sacred of your obligations; the one to your children. And to all the other children of this country?

You can not do the one without doing the other.

To honour this obligation means to enable them to develop into independent individuals and to help them to realise their full potential. I want here to give a somewhat contentious example. If you, for whatever reason, exercise your right, to send your children to schools of a religious character, whether independent or state funded, then you must ensure that, in addition to a wide and varied general curriculum, they learn about other religions and also about non-religious and non-theistic beliefs. I am told that there are quite a few schools of a religious character that have begun to include Humanism in their programs of study. I hope this is the case, for there are many in this country who hold these beliefs. If you are non-religious and your children know nothing about Christian beliefs or the beliefs of other religions and worldviews then they too are being deprived of part of their heritage, being denied part of their entitlement to full development.

Children have a right to education. They have a right, and here I quote a UN convention, to the freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of the child’s choice. This right is not unqualified. It is a duty imposed on us adults that we restrict what the child can access or impart if it is in the child’s best interest and this will no doubt vary depending on their stage of development. The analysis of the question of how we ensure the human rights of all the children of Britain is the most important conversation that I feel we should be having.

Prime-ministers  must stand up for something larger than just the values and principles of their own faith but should be among the principle defenders of the rights of all.

Contemporary dance was described by AC Grayling as “the cutting-edge art form of our time”.  Hamish MacPherson, the person behind Humanist Heritage, has been performing his own work since 2010 and is set to perform with fellow choreographer Martine Painter at Europe’s largest platform for work by new choreographers.

Hamish and Martine will be performing the premier of their duet, ‘Meeting Place’ on January 10 2012 at The Place, London, as part of Resolution!, a season of dance works by emerging choreographers.

They pair came together through a shared love of numbers and non-stylised movement and the piece plays with visually unfolding an algorithmic formula. As this takes place, an intimate and sometimes comic relationship emerges between the two dancers.

Hamish and Martine’s engagement with maths, science and philosophy reflects their diverse backgrounds: Martine read French studies, was a successful singer and is currently a librarian, and Hamish studied art and philosophy and is a civil servant.

Over the summer they both worked as dance artists with choreographer Eva Recacha for the Choreodrome season at The Place, where they performed in the Touch Wood season. Inspired by this experience they have gone on to make their own  work which was accepted for the biggest European platform for new choreographers: Resolution! at the world-famous contemporary dance venue The Place.

Tickets are available from The Place box office

Trailer can be watched online

The world’s greatest playwright never wrote directly about his personal beliefs, but his plays display scepticism about religion, and many of his characters have a deeply humanist view of life and man’s place in it, showing a consistent belief that this world is the only one that we can know.

Superstition was rife in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, and religion was a potent force. If you followed the wrong faith you could be disembowelled. Witches are still burnt at the stake and many people believed in fairies, miracles, and ghosts. But there were a few declared atheists such as Christopher Marlowe, taking advantage of the English reformation and the emancipation from the religious and social structures of the middle ages it represented.

It is acknowledged that Shakespeare took many of his story lines from existing plays and books, some of which had strong religious themes, but he usually omitted the religious element when adapting these works to the hand of his genius.

In considering the influence of religion it is valid to discount the history plays, where Kings and their usurpers dispute their divine right to pillage, rape, and murder from the age of King John to Henry the Eighth, and ‘god’ is a valuable tool in their armoury. Of course there are Friars and priests scattered across the plays, but with the exception of Friar Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet these are cardboard cut-outs with no development of character.

The happy characters not religious

Few of his other characters show evidence of religious belief. Not one happy character shows any interest in religion, and whilst we doubt that Shakespeare himself believed, there is no doubt whatever that he could weave the concept of god and heaven into a beautiful romantic couplet:

And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods
make heaven drowsy with the harmony.

Berowne in Love’s Labours Lost: 4.iii.

All scholars agree that the evidence points to Shakespeare being careful, responsible, and sober as an individual. Looking at his characters that exhibit these qualities could be taken as a guide to his own thoughts. Polonius, is a measured and responsible adviser to the court (even if sometimes rambling), and is always trying to give the best advice. When he speaks to his son Laertes, who is about to sail away, it could be Shakespeare’s own voice springing from the page as advice he would give his own son. Hamlet 1.iii.

The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail,
My blessing with thee!
And these few precepts in thy memory.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel.
Beware of entrance to a quarrel.
Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice:
Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgement.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not expressed in fancy; rich, not gaudy:
For the apparel oft proclaims the man.
This above all, – to thine own self be true;
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

“To thine own self be true”, make up your own mind, you do not need gods or ancient books to tell you what is right or wrong.

Shakespeare on grief

The character that must be most closely tied to Shakespeare’s own experience is Constance in King John. His only son, Hamnet, died aged eleven in 1596, when he was writing King John, and he poured all the agony he must have felt at this time into Constance who loses her son Arthur. This is expressed in these heart- rending words: 3 .iv.

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form.

This surely expresses Shakespeare’s own grief – and in secular terms. Constance (Shakespeare?) has also considered the Christian view of death and has these rather bitter words to say:

And so he’ll die, and, rising so again,
When I shall meet him in the court of heaven,
I shall not know him: therefore never, never
Must I behold my pretty Arthur more.

This passage hardly shows a belief or comfort in any meeting in a next world. Shakespeare’s own voice also seems to speak to us in straight-forward style, when from As you Like It :2 :vii. Jacques gives us the seven ages of man:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. As, first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad.
Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut.
The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

 But at what age, man or boy, would you commend yourself to a god or worry about your place in heaven or hell? If you were religious in the sixteenth century, these thoughts would have been very relevant. They are not present in Shakespeare’s life cycle of man.

Shakespeare mocks astrology

Scepticism about superstition is a constant theme throughout the plays:- Astrology is mocked: King Lear :1 .ii. tells us:

This is the excellent foppery of the world,
that, when we are sick in fortune,
often the surfeit of our own behavior,
we make guilty of our disasters
the sun, the moon, and the stars.

And from All’s Well That Ends Well :1 .i  we learn:

Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,
Which we ascribe to heaven.

And from Henry IV ^th Part 1,  Glendower says: 3 .i.

I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

To which Hotspur replies:

By Matthew O’Brien

The Archbishop of York, Dr. John Sentamu, wishes to amend the NHS Bill to include “spiritual” health[i] but rather than have it stated explicitly in the bill he wants it via the back door of a looser definition of “illness” that foregoes such nuanced and enlightened terms as “physical” and “mental” in favour of a more simplified term “illness.”

Whilst resisting the temptation to pluck and devour the low hanging fruit that would beg questions on his stance vis-à-vis so-called “spiritual healing,” his proposal is nonetheless ripe for examination as an exemplar of a pernicious trend to attempt to shoehorn antiquated conceptions of matters spiritual into a modern post-enlightenment discourse.

The Archbishop’s highlighting of the Bill’s apparent lack of concern for provision of “spiritual” health in favour of mere physical and mental health may on the one hand be suspicious of an obsession with a notional “Trinity” of human experience aligned with a Christian world view but on the other (whether intentionally or not) it also appears to obfuscate the hangover of the “mind-body problem” of Cartesian Dualism.

What is the Archbishop’s case for the existence of “spiritual illness?” In order to answer this one can, with modern technology courtesy of countless diligent scientists, view a video clip on the BBC news webpage of the Archbishop standing in the House of Lords regaling those present with the power to effect political and social change in the UK in the 21^st century with a story that would not be out of place in the Iron-Age that spawned similar biblical tales. The story was that of a young girl who had been traumatised after witnessing an animal sacrifice by a witch’s coven and how the good Archbishop (then a mere vicar) had “…freed the spirit of a young girl, left petrified by seeing a goat sacrificed,” [ii] after neither general practitioner, nor psychiatrist nor psychologist could apparently help her.

Indeed there is something deeply troubling upon seeing a grown man festooned with three degrees from Cambridge and four honorary degrees[iii]^{,[iv],[v],[vi]} from other UK universities standing in the House of Lords in 2011 brazenly mentioning a witch’s coven to try and make a point. Even more troubling was the lack by the Archbishop of any mention of the involvement of social services or consideration of a place for the child on the Child Protection Register; only that where modern medicine had failed, he with his ‘spiritual healing’ had of course succeeded, but I digress.

Allow me if you will to return to the key point that the Archbishop wanted to make in his speech; that of “not [dividing] up the human person” into physical mental and spiritual entities. His sleight of tongue here is masterful; it is almost as if he is saying,  ‘I preach non-division because I see one more division than you and in order for that extra division to be taken seriously I request a definition of illness so broad as to legitimise my own particular view of illness.’ This is reminiscent in part of the much celebrated ‘Rationalist vs. Intelligent Design’ Dover trial in the USA in 2004 that saw eleven parents of school-aged children take the Dover Area School District to court challenging the latter’s alteration of its Biology curriculum away from teaching Darwinian evolution and towards one that espoused the doctrine of Intelligent Design. During the course of the proceedings it became clear that some witnesses for the defence had so stretched their definition of “theory” in an attempt to allow “Intelligent Design” to be considered for discussion alongside genuine scientific theory that it also necessarily encompassed astrology.[vii] Returning to the case of the Archbishop, the arena may be different but the tactics are the same.

As a mature medical student with years of previous clinical experience I am no stranger to extolling the virtues of holistic care, it is indeed the pinnacle of health care that is sadly not always achieved yet this was not what the Archbishop was asking for. Not once does he request the word “holistic” to be included; rather he proposes a loosening of terms in the Bill that would allow the insidious leakage of more esoteric concepts to permeate powerful national legislation. Furthermore provision of ‘spiritual care’ in the NHS is already carried out by multi-faith hospital chaplains but their cost (£29m between 2009-2010) and their lack of significant association with better standards of health[viii] mean that if patients genuinely value them, they should be funded by their respective religious organisations and not by the taxpayer.

When considering such points of principle I hope that many readers will be reminded of the valiant and highly visible campaign by the BHA to use the 2011 census as an opportunity to start blowing the wind of change with regard to how population statistics may be used by Government to justify their actions. One goal of that campaign was that with evidence of significant numbers of non-religious citizens comprising the UK population we may one day see (amongst other things) the non-automatic inclusion of the three most senior Anglican bishops admitted ex officio to the Privy Council via the House of Lords. I can only hope that we have succeeded and that the BHA, its members and allies will continue to fight the good fight so that we shall never again have to bear witness to an ostensibly well-educated man speaking of witches and spiritual health in the heart of government and that law-making may be distilled and further refined by the exclusion of the unelected and the irrational from the process.

Original image by Dennis Burger

By Alistair Barbour

I recently had the pleasure of visiting Oslo in Norway. Whilst there we did the usual sight seeing. Travelled the Fiord, visited the Viking ship museum and the usual sightseeing amble through this beautiful c ity.

We had heard that the ‘Vigeland Sculpture Park’ was well worth a visit. We were heading up to the royal palace anyway and as the park in question was near there we thought we would take a look.

The park’s entrance is situated in quite an affluent area of the city. Wide avenues lined with large detached private homes. On one of these avenues stands the parks large gated entrance, opening up to an expansive park with a wide concourse running from the gate and finishing at the large central monolithic structure in the distance.

As you enter the park the first statue you encounter is that of the designer ‘Gustav Vigeland’. The park itself has been around since the 18^th century but the design and layout ‘by Vigeland’ was the first half of the twentieth century.

You next come to a bridge that crosses over two duck ponds. The walls on either side of this bridge are decorated with sculptures of people depicting humanity in its many forms. All the sculptures in the park are of the human form stripped and bare. No famous historical figures, no religious symbolism. Just humanity!  Showing us as human beings in our different stages of life and exposing [through our nakedness] the vulnerability that we all feel and the range of emotions that makes us who we are.

Apparently the most famous statue in the park which stands on these walls is ‘Angry boy’. Anyone who is a parent will recognise all to well what this statue is conveying. A young boy stamping his feet throwing his arms in the air and screaming with all his might. You will not have to search too hard for this one. The hoards of photographers eagerly snapping away is a sure give away of its position.

You slowly walk along studying each statue putting your own interpretation on what some of them may mean. Some obvious such as the angry boy. Some not so obvious such as the man who appears to be violently shaking four babies of him.

Once pulled into these figures your mind can really start to try and read what they are trying to say to the viewer.

Walking on you come to the fountain. This time the statues appearing to be wrapped in with and interacting in ‘The tree of life’.

The walls of the fountain decorated with episodes from life and death. Macabre images depicting mortality. These kinds of images which are so common in religious buildings and art. But unlike religious iconography they are not trying to scare you into giving your life to a make believe god. They are telling you the cold hard facts of existence. You are born you live you die. This is life. It is finite it will end!

When you have absorbed all this fountain has to say you then come onto to what I think is some of the most moving and beautiful works of art I have ever seen.

The path in front of you splits in two, each path leading you around the rose garden up some steps and through ornate iron gates. The gates, following the theme of the park and in its intr icate lattice work depicting yet more images of humanity. Naked, vulnerable and exposed.

Now, in front of you is the huge monolith. The closer you get the more intricate and amazing the images carved within become. It’s a sea of writhing naked bodies. Men women children. All ages lying beside and wrapped around each other. All climbing and heading towards the top of the column as if searching for meaning in life or perhaps human desire to grow and develop. The detail is incredible. Every time you move your gaze over it something else comes into view. You get absorbed into the intricacy and meaning of this beautiful column.

All around the column are granite figures. Beautiful and stunning depictions of human life.

Mothers and fathers cradling new born babies. Men and women embracing each other as lovers. Old ladies cradling grown up sons and daughters showing that no matter how old you are you are still someone’s child. This being even more poignant after so many children have had there lives cut short on an island just outside the city by an evil religious fundamentalist.

Another statue shows a group of young early teen’s girls with arms round each others waist’s serene smiles staring out into the distance together. As if looking to see what life will hold in store for them? Beside this one a comical image of a group of young boys knocking the living daylights out of each other. Symbolising the very real difference between the feminine and the masculine.

For me though the most beautiful statues where the ones that I could associate with. I have two sons. The statues of fathers proudly and loving holding there children as babies toddlers young and middle aged men was just to much and you find yourself choking back the emotion and turning  your head momentarily whilst gaining your composure so as not to end up on someone’s photograph with tears streaming down your cheeks. Likewise the statues depicting the old with there wrinkled face and sagging skin are just so moving you again gulp down the emotion bubbling up inside.

Watching the crowds milling around you can see other people experiencing the very same emotions. Red eyes or flushed cheeks. My wife in particular was experiencing the very same. I knew very well not to speak to her as I knew she was struggling to hold back the emotion.

Looking around you could tell that some people only seeing the nakedness and genitals on display and giggling and laughing. That’s fine though because I bet each and every person there would find at least on statue which pulls at the heart strings. One they will remember forever.

If you’re ever in Oslo please make sure you go this park. You will not regret it. No religious symbolism. No famous people. No answers to life. Just human beings, just the message ‘embrace the journey’.

Images by tony4carr and red5standingby. Used under creative commons licence.

By Alom Shaha

More than one of my friends is glad that Ramadan is over. Not just because the long summer days have made it a particularly hard month (you’re supposed to fast from sunrise to sunset) but so that they can be relieved of the heightened pressure to conform to the expectations of what it means to be a “Good Muslim”.

Islam, like all other religions, has a set of rules and regulations that are supposed to be followed. Fasting during the month of Ramadan is considered to be one of the “five pillars”, the five most important of the practices which Muslims are supposed to adhere to. Fasting may have spiritual benefits, but it also serves the important purpose of being a visible demonstration of one’s faith.

In the secular west, people generally have the freedom to pick and choose how to follow the religion of their birth. I’d like to write the religion of their choosing, but the fact is that most people who belong to a religion simply do so because, as research has shown, that’s what their parents told them to do.

The overwhelming majority of children are taught that God exists from the minute they can learn anything. They are subjected to elaborate rituals, such as christenings and religious festivals, which reinforce the significance of this thing called God and the importance of belief. In short, they are surrounded by people who act as if God exists, so there is no reason at first to suspect that God does not exist.

It’s only once children start thinking for themselves that belief in God first wavers, but even then, the indoctrination or conditioning they have experienced when they were young make it difficult for most to develop their own thinking on this issue. Adults present religious stories to children as being ‘true’ and categorically different from the other stories. As Sam Harris writes in The End of Faith, ‘each new generation of children is taught that religious propositions need not be justified in the way that all others must’.

A minority of people grow up to question the beliefs handed down to them and eventually reject those beliefs in favour of either a different religion, agnosticism or atheism. Academics describe the process of leaving a religion using various terms – apostasy, exit, defection, disaffiliation and deconversion. In their paper The variety of deconversion experiences: contours of a concept in respect to empirical research, Prof. Heinz Streib and Dr Barbara Keller suggest that “deconversion” consists of 5 characteristics:

1. loss of specific religious experiences (experiential dimension): the loss of finding meaning in life; the loss of experience of God; loss of trust and of fear; attraction to a new kind of religious experience
2. intellectual doubt, denial or disagreement with specific beliefs (ideological dimension): heresy
3. moral criticism (ritualistic dimension): rejection of specific prescriptions; application of a new level of moral judgement
4. emotional suffering (consequential dimension): loss of embeddedness; loss of social support; loss of sense of stability and safety
5. disaffiliation from the community: retreat from participation in meetings or from observance of religious practices; finally, the termination of membership which eventually follows

It is this last step that is perhaps the hardest for most people who no longer believe in the religion of their childhood; not everyone who is a non-believer is prepared to openly declare their true feelings about religion if it means hurting the people they love or, perhaps less nobly, getting trouble from the communities in which they live.

Suzanne Brink and Nicholas Gibson, of the University of Cambridge, recently carried out research which examined the experiences of people who, like myself, describe themselves as “Ex-Muslim”. They found that

‘There are cases in which people have ceased to believe in their religion yet continue to pretend to believe in that religion. The reasons behind this decision are generally social in nature. It may be that they are afraid of getting hurt when stating their disbelief openly, or it may be that they do not see enough merit in disclosing their newly found disbelief to justify hurting the people whom they love. They prefer remaining a secret disaffiliate… of those making any mention of disaffiliation, around one-third of all narratives included statements to the effect that the authors considered it a necessity to keep their deconversion a secret’.

Religious customs and traditions can be central to the identity of entire communities of people, and individuals who don’t believe in God may still want to carry on those traditions and customs because they feel some kind of moral duty to maintain those traditions. I have heard it said that Jews who reject their religion are “finishing what Hitler started” – emotional blackmail of the worst kind, but perhaps not so different to the pressures applied to children of all religions who are brought up with the notion that it is immoral to not follow the one true religion of their parents.

It is perhaps unsurprising that people from Muslim backgrounds, where Islam is at the heart of their cultural identity, often fail to take the final step towards deconversion and choose instead to live lives of quiet non-belief.  I know many secret Ex-Muslims and I totally understand why they choose to keep up the pretence of belief.

This Eid, my thoughts will be with them.

Alom Shaha is author of The Young Atheist’s Handbook

Image: Sandip Debnath, Creative Commons, 2007

The Guardian features a report on the services being provided by faith-based organisations that operate crisis pregnancy centres (CPCs). These centres offer counselling independently of the NHS and could take over work performed by abortion providers such as Marie Stopes and the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), after the government said it was considering handing the counselling role to “independent” organisations.

The report reads that:

Women receiving advice from pregnancy counselling centres run by faith-based organisations are subjected to scaremongering, emotive language and inaccurate information about abortion, according to an undercover investigation by a pro-choice charity.

You can read the full article here

Josh Kutchinsky presents a humanist historical perspective on human rights.

I feel scared. Frightened not just for myself but for others too, others like me; hands, eyes, brains, that sort of thing, but younger, maybe even not yet born. I don’t know if history repeats itself because I am not quite sure what that means. But I have lived long enough and more importantly read enough, which is to say shared the thinking of others, to detect some patterns.

I fear that people, including good people, are doing it again. They are believing that the other, as an individual is a threat and, in large numbers, agents of  calamity, like disease to a healthy body.

At night I  see Greek Colonels and a silhouetted soldier with fixed bayonet and flames. I watch as tanks silently, persuasively, roll into the Athenian streets, the birthplace of democracy. A radio beats out a military march  interrupted by proclamations “We decide, we order” and the freedom to think evaporates. And the torture begins.

There is a woven copy of Picasso’s Guernica at the UN. Did I dream that they covered up this tapestry of terror  so as not to disturb the diplomat’s weaving of half truths to persuade the world of the necessity of invading Iraq? I did not.

Today the original, and even more powerful, Guernica is at home in Madrid.  Next year it will be the twentieth anniversary of its move to Spain. The artist’s wishes had been respected. The painting was not in Spain when Franco’s torturers were hard at work (and the Greek militia were busy pulling toenails).

Where else in this Europe of the Convention of Human Rights were tears being torn from people’s eyes? Portugal, for example, with Franco’s friend Salazar whitewashing language, as they all do,  in this old ‘new state’ of horrors.  These were Mussolini’s children, like Hitler, playing their power games over broken bodies.

Whilst governments in other countries did not succumb, do not believe that they were not at risk.  There were even colonels plotting in the English shires. Harold Wilson’s  paranoia was well founded.

Of course half of Europe was in shackles chained, more or less, to the Soviet empire: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina,  Croatia, Republic of Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia.  These were the lands of the invisible hand of terror, of the unheard scream, the disappeared, of the silenced. Millions were tortured and millions died.

In the 1960s I was  in England, in the UK, in a backwater of  this sea of suffering and witnessing some progress. I was not fully aware of the cruel hand which pressed down on those desperate for the lack of  a divorce, the need for an abortion, the need to hide their sexual orientation, the need to breathe air free of the stench of sexual repression, of militaristic, hierarchical, class-ridden restrictions, racism and sexism.  Suddenly there was a confluence of liberality and reform within a surge of youthful optimism.

Google a little if you are not familiar with the reforms that took place in the 1960s. Try and imagine the time before and what it must have been like for those who were oppressed.

Do not believe, for one moment, the claptrap spoken about this period as having gone too far. It never went far enough. By what measure? By the measure of individual suffering at the hands of others.

“Is there no need for rules, for discipline? Should people just be allowed to satisfy their immediate lusts and desires without any check?”

What else do people say, as they have always said, to impose their will on others?

“The young are out of control. The frightening events in society are caused not by us, but by them, by their freedom, their saying things which we wouldn’t dare to say and doing things we wouldn’t dare to do. They call it art but what is it? Self indulgent rubbish and we pay for it. Where’s the respect? They do drugs and drink and smoke even though we tell them not to. We tell them that some of us did some of these things and it wasn’t good. But will they listen? And then quietly to ourselves, whilst biting our lip we admit the very  worst of it. Which is … that they are young and we, we are old and they will take what we have and they will outlive us.“

Am I so clever that I know what should be allowed and what should not?  Well, first of all banning or forbidding  something is not the same as putting a stop to it, but it does indicate an intention to punish those who disobey.  Allowing something will also not necessarily make it happen. For it will not happen unless people wish it. Recently I was asked whether it might not be a good idea to make young people swear some sort of allegiance to human rights as what they described as “a last ditch effort to shore up respect for the UN’s Universal Declaration”. Well, maybe, but better still would be to educate young people about human rights and the benefits to them, their family, friends and others. Engage them in the development and improvement of these human rights globally, for the world will soon be theirs.

Clearly, most young people are not out of control, they are, in the main, if anything too much under control. Most of the frightening things in our society are of our making. Who else can be to blame? Creativity is the only hope for a better future and bad art is only a step on the road to good. If somebody is doing something of which we disapprove maybe we should ask ourselves whether it is doing us any harm. Then we could ask whether we are being made to do it ourselves. If we are being harmed  maybe we could try and engage with them and help them see our problem? Try to find a way for them to be able to do what clearly they wish to do without it harming us. We should support reasonable controls to prevent harm to others. Of course, it may be necessary to sanction those who harm others but surely it is better still to educate and prevent the harm in the first place.

But this is all well and good in a well ordered society, but it is this very notion that I fear is at risk. It is at risk because those who spread rumours of terror and discontent do so because they wish to accrete more power to themselves and their clique or to prevent its diminishment. It has always been so. Europe is not just a common market, not just a political union, not just a common currency, it is a creation of its time and its time was the Europe shortly after World War Two , when fascist , and the equally repressive  and totalitarian, communist ideologies were still at play, everywhere.  I don’t know what other options might work to  ensure that Greece, Portugal, Spain and the new Europe, all of us, are safeguarded from jackboot militarism. How are we to be gently encouraged to stroll peacefully arm in arm?

Human rights were conceived as a defence against tyranny, democratic or otherwise. Rights are decided by us, human beings, and may need improvement. However we must be sensitive to ignorant blustering (and even more to concerted, clever and assiduously contrived attacks) Resist those who would undermine the fundamental principles on which our safety, our peace and our security rests.

When we hear a platitude:
“Rights? What about responsibilities?”
or:
“Why should Europe/Brussels/Strasbourg tell us what to do?”
or:
“Who ever thought the  Euro was a good idea?”

We should ask: who is saying this and why? Are they blustering or conniving or are they offering serious arguments backed up with evidence and maybe even suggesting a way forward?

We must resist,and protest  on behalf of those people who are suffering (or will suffer) and we must do so as if they were our own, for in truth, they are.

Josh Kutchinsky is an organiser of  the Central London Humanist Group and founder and co-ordinator of Hummay a humanist support group. He was a director in a publishing company and co-editor of Merely a Matter of Colour – The Ugandan Asian Anthology. He was also director of a laser show company and produced the first comprehensive exhibition of lasers and their applications at the Science Museum. He writes prose and poetry as well as about science and technology.

This news item the BBC has posted about a young man in Russia who died because of superstition is pretty sad.

The 35-year-old victim had believed that burying himself alive for a night would bring him luck the rest of his life.

Link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13623938

According to the article, the man had been reading stories about self-burial online, but finding further information about this has proven difficult.

In other news NDTV reports that police said on Tuesday a woman accused of practising black magic was killed and her body cut up, roasted, and eaten by her murderers in Jharkhand’s Gumla district of India.

After she was killed, her body was allegedly cut into pieces by the assailants who later made a meal of it after roasting it.

Superstition isn’t just a little bit of fun or an amusing entertainment. It can be very damaging.

A controversial new rule that would force women badminton players to wear skirts or dresses during competitions has been shelved after a lot of criticism. According to the BBC:

The Badminton World Federation (BWF) had wanted to introduce the new dress code to “glamorise” the sport.

But some women players, including Scotland’s Imogen Bankier, have attacked the decision. Bankier called the plan “sexist”.

The article states that the proposed new dress code had attracted particular criticism from Muslim countries., but in the UK it has also faced a lot of criticism. The Guardian reported that it had been called:

“a regressive and damaging attempt to sex up the game” by Hugh Robertson, the minister for sport.

The Muslim Women in Sports blog has an excellent post about the effect the proposed rule would have had, with quotes from both sides of the arguement:

“This is a blatant attempt to sexualize women,” said Janice Forsyth, director of the International Centre for Olympic Studies at the University of Western Ontario. “It is amazing. You’d think at some point, somebody would have said: ‘Wait a minute. What are we doing?’ ”

and

“We’re not trying to use sex to promote the sport,” said Paisan Rangsikitpho, an American who is deputy president of the Badminton World Federation, which is based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. “We just want them to look feminine and have a nice presentation so women will be more popular.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/badminton/13589270.stm

Billboards promoting safe sex have been targeted by Australian Christian Lobby. One complainant wrote: “Firstly, one of the men is wearing a wedding band. This suggest that either (A) they are a married gay couple (which is illegal in Australia), or (B) that at least one of them is married and is cheating on his wife.” Thankfully, the morality police are being kept in check by reasonable argument that physical health is more important than ‘spiritual health’.

One commentor pointed out:

So, this is the same nutbag group that was allowed to put up posters telling us the world was going to end last week??? Fer Chrisssake!!!
Let me tell you, I had to explain the ‘End is Nigh’ ads to my scared 8 year old who goes to a catholic school and beleves everything the church says. He honestly thought he was going to die last week until I calmed him down. If ever there was an add that was offensive it was that religous claptrap.
Some democracy we live in.

The Guardian has a comedy headline this week, saying a Saudi woman driver has been “freed” after agreeing to quit the Women2Drive campaign and stop driving.

Manal al-Sharif was jailed after posting a YouTube video of herself driving.

Sharif said (translation): “Concerning the topic of women’s driving, I will leave it up to our leader in whose discretion I entirely trust, to weigh the pros and cons and reach a decision that will take into consideration the best interests of the people, while also being pleasing to Allah, and in line with divine law.”

Sharif has been critical of elements in Saudi society which had attacked her driving protest as immoral and irreligious.

More details here

The Guardian has a piece by Patrick Strudwick about coversion therapy following a landmark ruling this week againsts  Psychotherapist Lesley Pilkington, who had tried to turn a gay person straight. She was found guilty of “treating” a patient for his homosexuality.  According to Strudwick, “she tried to make me pray away the gay”.

The Pope has shut down a Rome monastery for ‘financial and liturgical irregularities’ and questionable behaviour. According to numerous reports, the monastry had hosted a Madonna concert and a performance from an exotic dancer turned nun, and the Telegraph speculates that there was suspected ‘homosexual relations’.

A culty nun-like sect in central Russia thinks Putin is the reincarnation of St. Paul, the apostle or if not that, he may in a past life have been the founder of the Russian Orthodox Church. “I say what the Lord has revealed to me,” the sect’s leader, former convict Svetlana Frolova, said.

Exciting news reported from National Geographic News:

If you look to the stars tonight, consider this: No matter how innumerable they may seem, there are far more planets than stars lurking out there in the darkness, a new study suggests.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/05/110518-planets-jupiters-worlds-space-science-nature/

What must ‘Humanism’ mean? Richard Norman thinks outside the tribe.

Richard Norman, speaking at the BHA Philosophy and the Arts day conference, 2010

If ‘humanism’ means anything at all, it must surely embrace respect and concern for all human beings, whether they are members of our own family or group or society or are people on the other side of the world whom we do not know and will never meet.  It means a responsiveness to the needs of all with whom we share a common humanity.  As humanists we often invoke the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which reflects and translates into political imperatives those shared human needs, and which includes these items:

Article 25:  Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

Article 26:  Everyone has the right to education…

Article 28:  Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.

But the sad truth is that we have a long way to go before we have an international order in which these rights are fully realized for everyone.  Here are some facts about the world in which we live.

• Around 1.4 billion people still subsist on less than $1.25 a day, the international poverty line defined by the World Bank.
• Around one billion people suffer from hunger.
• Almost nine million children die each year before they reach their fifth birthday.
• Hundreds of thousands of women die due to complications of pregnancy or childbirth every year.
• About 69 million school-age children are not in school. Almost half of them (31 million) are in sub-Saharan Africa, and more than a quarter (18 million) are in Southern Asia. (Data)

Humanists have always been actively involved in organisations dedicated to tackling the challenges of global poverty and injustice. The BHA encourages its members to continue that tradition of involvement, but has rightly avoided duplicating the organisations which are already active in the field.  For this reason there is no specifically humanist movement dedicated to combating poverty and promoting international development.  There are also good reasons, parallel to the ones which Marilyn Mason mentions in the case of climate change, why humanists have not organised as humanists:  we may legitimately disagree about the best way to deal with poverty and global injustice, and we are resistant to being told what causes to support.

But without creating unnecessary new organisations, it’s important that humanists are visible in their support for global justice.  Actions do speak louder than words, and if we’re serious in what we say about shared human values and about living a good life without religion, then we need to put those values into action.  The role of the new interest group ‘Humanists for a Better World’ should be to add a distinctive humanist presence and voice to existing organisations and campaigns.  It should act as a forum for humanists to pool news and information, and to alert one another to important events and campaigns.

Here are some of the issues which I think are currently important.

In the last few years, concern for international development and concern about climate change have become increasingly linked.  The problem of climate change caused by CO2 emissions has been created by the industrialised countries, but it is above all the countries of the global south which are already feeling the effects, with more extreme and unpredictable weather patterns, increased flooding in some areas, and changes in rainfall leading to crop failures and the drying up of pastureland in others.  Action on climate change has to take the form of ‘climate justice’ – enabling the poorer countries of the world to follow a low-carbon route to development and not being forced to pay the price for our failures.  Oxfam and the World Development Movement among others are campaigning for a global Climate Fund which is fair and effective.  See:

• http://www.oxfam.org.uk/get_involved/campaign/climate_change/
• http://www.wdm.org.uk/climatedebt

World poverty is being fuelled by the spike in food commodity prices, which have been artificially inflated by the irresponsible behaviour of commodity speculators.  We need international regulations to curb food speculation – see:

• http://www.wdm.org.uk/food-speculation

Development organisations have increasingly come to recognise that trade is the route out of poverty.  But this requires more than the free-marketers’ mantra of ‘free trade’.  It needs trade justice.  At the level of our daily lives and our own purchases, this is something which we can promote by buying Fairtrade products and raising awareness of the value of Fairtrade.  I’d like to see more Humanist groups committing themselves to using Fairtrade refreshments at their meetings and events.  But it also requires political action, because the scope for trade to benefit developing countries is severely limited by the unfair tariffs and subsidies maintained by the US and Europe.  The Fairtrade Foundation is currently running a campaign against American and European subsidies for their own cotton farmers, which lower world prices and hit cotton-producing countries such as Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad and Mali.  See:

• http://www.fairtrade.org.uk/products/cotton/default.aspx

If you share these or related concerns, do please make use of the ‘Humanists for a Better World’ web site at www.h4bw.org.uk to communicate news, ideas and actions, and to work with other humanists for global justice and a better world.

Richard Norman is Emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy, founder-member of the Humanist Philosophers’ Group, and Vice-President of the BHA. His book On Humanism was released in 2004.

Far from being offensive, open criticism of deeply held beliefs is part and parcel of respect. Eve Hendrick writes – and you have the right to read.

The right to freedom of speech is one of the fundamental principles of democracy, and it is one which democratic societies are rightly very proud of. The right to freedom of speech includes the right, within limits, to say and write whatever we like about any subject. Putting aside the chances of being accused of slander, libel, or incitement to racial or religious hatred, the right to freedom of speech ensures that we are free to express ourselves and our opinions.

Treating all beliefs equally - Christina Martin's God Trump cards from New Humanist magazine

The right to free speech found its original justification in protecting people from authoritarian oppression because the concept enabled people to speak out against governments without fear of punishment. In addition to this and as a fundamental principle of liberalism, freedom of speech falls in line with other liberal rights as enabling the individual to do and say whatever they like as long as they don’t harm others. In other words, individual freedom is paramount. Furthermore, J. S. Mill thought that freedom of expression did not just ensure an individual’s freedom and happiness but that it might actually contribute to society by revealing better ways of living.

What is interesting about freedom of speech is that it is defended as being an important right of the person doing the speaking, writing or drawing (although Mill thought that free expression would eventually benefit society, this was arguably an added bonus and definitely came second to the idea of the right of the individual to be free). Is there another side to free speech? Can it be defended not only as a right of the speaker, but perhaps as a right of the listener also? If I have a right to say and write what I like, does it make sense to say I also have a right to hear and read what others say?

This sounds like a strange suggestion, but it may well turn out that free speech is important not only because of what it allows me to say and write, but because of what it forces me to hear and read as well. Consider the idea of religious offence.

Some religious believers find it incredibly offensive to hear criticisms of their beliefs, especially if these critiques take satirical or mocking forms. Perhaps the biggest example in recent history would be the Danish cartoon saga of 2005. Many Muslims, Christians and atheists found the Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad deeply offensive, insulting and even racist. There was outcry; one side championed free speech and the other championed religious respect.

What was largely ignored in the debate however, was the possibility that satirical cartoons (and other forms of expression) of a religious figure or belief could be defended, not only on the principle of the individual’s right to express themselves, but because such ‘expressions’ demonstrate respect for the religious believer. This is not as bizarre as it sounds, although it does require a little more work than the simple free speech defence.

The case for this position can be made by understanding what “respect” means. There are many subtleties in the concept of respect but it can be stripped down to the fairly simple (and not so simple) idea that respecting something or someone means recognising what that object is, and recognising what characteristics make that object worthy of whatever we discern respectful treatment to be. So to respect a human being, I must recognise a ‘thing’ as belonging to the group ‘human being’, then I must acknowledge what aspect of being a ‘human being’ make such things worthy of being treated with respect. Then I must decide what respectful treatment actually entails. Crucially, the treatment we decide upon must make reference to the feature we found so respect-worthy. Phew.

So, what does that mean? Why do we think humans deserve this ‘respect’? Arguably, what marks humans out as beings worthy of the kind of respectful treatment we don’t think we owe to animals (few would claim it is equally disrespectful to mock a dog for example), is our rationality and our autonomy. This is the Kantian idea that what makes us worthy of certain treatment is our powers of reasoning and the ability to adopt and follow our own rules. It is true that many of our other features demand specific treatments or attitudes from others, for example our ability to feel pain means others are morally required to avoid (and protect us from) injury, but it is our features of rationality and autonomy that require others to treat us with what we call ‘respect’.

Deciding what respectful treatment of human beings actually entails must therefore recognise and refer to them as reasoning and autonomous beings. ‘Respectful treatment’ must therefore endorse and encourage the manifestation of reason and autonomy. Respectful treatment does therefore not entail backing quietly away from views which others might find offensive. In fact, exposing the potentially offended to these ‘offensive’ views is arguably the epitome of ‘respect’. A mocking, critical, offensive or challenging statement about religion requires the religious believer to use those powers of rationality and autonomy to either challenge in return, or assess and alter their own views. When we criticise anyone’s deeply held views in this way we are recognising that the believer has those rational powers and we are asking them to fulfil them. That is real respect.

Satirising religious views can therefore be defended not only because writers, artists, commentators and everyone else has the right to express themselves, but because the potentially offended have a right to have their powers of rationality and autonomy respected by those who disagree with them. The potentially offended have a right to see and hear material which simply by existing, recognises and respects the very features that qualify them as human beings.

Eve Hendrick is a Campaigns Volunteer at the British Humanist Association.

Marilyn Mason explains why humanists should act together on climate change – and why we need another humanist interest group.

Global Warming

The ground at night - a detail from the H4BW website

“Global warming” might not sound too bad right now, as we come out of one of the coldest winters in recent years to an delightful April sunny spell. But, counter-intuitively perhaps, global warming and the melting of the polar ice-caps, which cause changes to ocean and air currents, appear as likely to cause freezing winters in Britain as they are to intensify desertification in hotter parts of the world and to bring other unpredictable extremes of weather. Globally, we seem to be seeing more of these extremes: not just our unusually snowy winter, but more floods, more droughts, more forest fires.

“Climate chaos” is in fact a more apt description of our future, and the chaos is unlikely to stop at climate. We can expect increasing conflicts over diminishing resources such as oil, land and water, escalating extinctions of wildlife, more frequent humanitarian disasters, and mass migrations of refugees from areas where food crops no longer grow.

The end of this century, when most of us will be safely dead, is often given as the time when a 2 or 4 degree rise in the Earth’s temperature will cause this chaos, but of course it won’t suddenly start then – it will be a gradual process and may already have begun in Africa and Australia and even closer to home. If future humanity and the planet’s ecosystems are to survive in anything like good shape, radical action is needed now.

Acting together and personal choice

Organised Humanism in the UK has been surprisingly slow to take on the ethical challenges of reducing carbon emissions and mitigating climate change. Individual humanists are doubtless doing their bit, convinced by the scientific consensus that things will go very ill for our children and grandchildren, perhaps even for some of us, if we do not change our wasteful life-styles. I’m sure many of us switch off our lights and computers, eat less or no meat, avoid unnecessary travel, cycle, recycle, buy less stuff and local stuff, go on climate change marches, join environmental groups and campaigns, write to our MPs… but we have done little collectively. Why is this?

I can think of several reasons. Firstly, existing humanist organisations have their hands more than full with the day-to-day concerns of their members and the wider non-religious public: the provision of advice and ceremonies for the non-religious, campaigns for recognition and equality, and other domestic issues. The BHA can campaign against faith schools securely supported by its membership, but is there less consensus about human responsibility for climate chaos? the best ways to tackle it? whether it is really happening?

Perhaps it stems from our lack of (or freedom from) individual leadership. Humanism brings together freethinkers, and has no system, democratic, autocratic or sacred, for choosing, or following, personal leaders. Pronouncements from religious leaders on the environment and what their followers should do about it have been coming thick and fast recently (on the coat-tails of science, of course), but humanists have no equivalent figureheads. Many of us would resent being told what to think or do, even about something on which there is overwhelming agreement, including, remarkably, not just scientists but  the world’s politicians. Despite their failure to achieve fair and legally binding agreements at Copenhagen in December 2009 and at Cancun in December 2010, disagreements between world leaders seem to be about how best to mitigate climate change and who should bear the financial burden, not about whether to bother.

For humanists, whether or not to bother about climate change remains a personal choice. Some may in fact prefer the line of “skeptical environmentalist” Bjørn Lomborg that we should focus first on the problems that we can overcome, problems such as poverty, education and hunger, and that the resulting growth in prosperity will then produce environmental solutions; for example, less deforestation, stable populations, and technological advances. But the new humanist interest group Humanists for a Better World (H4BW) recognises that these global problems are indeed interrelated: for example, poverty can exacerbate deforestation and thus increase carbon emissions; education, particularly of girls, can help to stabilise population and thus reduce demands on land and water. Working and campaigning on these issues does not preclude working and campaigning on environmental sustainability, and the environment cannot necessarily wait while we solve these other problems: forests may not recover from the damage we inflict while, say, extending agriculture or growing bio-fuels; extinctions tend to be irreversible; and as developing nations develop out of poverty they pump yet more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, thus accelerating climate chaos. We need to act on all fronts, though not necessarily all of us on all fronts all the time.  H4BW intends to enable and encourage collective and individual humanist action on many of them.

The unique humanist position

Being a humanist should not involve ignoring the fate of people who live far away or who will exist in the future, or indeed the fate of other species; neither should it entail the Pollyanna-ish belief in human perfectibility and inevitable progress that some accuse us of. Progess is certainly not inevitable on most of the issues that H4BW is concerned about, and there are far too many vested interests and too much short-termism around to feel great confidence about solutions emerging in time without considerable pressure for change . Human beings can choose to act for the common good or not, but I hope that enough humanists are concerned enough to be a real presence in environmental campaigns and to add a strong collective voice to the pressure for change.

Humanists can offer something distinctive and constructive to the debates about sustainability, climate change, renewable energy and peak oil. We may well be more rational and far-sighted than most politicians about the economic and human costs of global warming and the investment and actions necessary to mitigate and perhaps ultimately adapt to it. Unlike some “deep greens”, we will not dismiss out of hand the technological solutions that are probably our best hope if we are to have enough food, clean energy and water. Unlike some commentators, we will tend to accept the scientific consensus rather than denying that there is a problem or hoping that it is just part of a natural cycle that will sort itself out or about which we can do nothing. Unlike a few of the more misanthropic environmentalists, we are unlikely to gloat over the mess that humanity has got itself into and rejoice that at least the planet and cockroaches and rats will survive even if we don’t. Unlike some religious believers, we will not oppose family planning or look forward to “end times” and eternal paradise or anticipate rescue by a deity if this life fails.

We know it’s up to us, we surely hope that our children and grandchildren and people in the most vulnerable parts of the world are not going to have lives immeasurably worse than ours, and we know that humanist ethics require us to consider the consequences of our actions – or inaction.

“Four out of five people think that the number of cars in use is having a serious effect on climate and two thirds agree that everyone should reduce their car journeys. These figures apply as much to car drivers as to anyone else. However, the figures suddenly drop when people are asked whether they are willing and able to match words with actions. Less than half said yes to reducing car journeys. Another 12 per cent admitted that they could use the car less, but did not seem willing to. And 23 per cent say that people should be allowed to use their cars as much as they like.” (British Social Attitudes, published January 2008)

I believe that committed humanists are more willing than most to match words with actions, and that together we can help to bring about much needed change and counter any perception that humanists believe the Earth exists just for us to exploit, that there is a “great gap at the heart of …liberal secular humanism”. To do so, humanists need to be more vocal and more visible, and I hope that the new website H4BW.org.uk (still in development) will enable many more of us to be so, and to work together on climate chaos and the other linked global issues. Though Humanists for a Better World will be mainly a virtual community sharing news, ideas and actions, we hope it will occasionally have a physical presence too, as there is always considerable positive interest when humanists appear at demonstrations and meetings, and support from the British Humanist Association will tie us in to existing structures and networks. Do please have a look at the website and take action as and when you can.

Marilyn Mason was a teacher for 20 years before working as Education Officer of the British Humanist Association (BHA) from 1998 to 2006. She is a campaigning member of South West London Humanist group, affiliated to the BHA and co-founder of H4BW.