David Hart chaired proceedings and gave the introductory address, positioning the Sea of Faith Network as the point where radical religion and humanism overlap. SoF, he suggested, stands in the radical tradition of the Reformation and Enlightenment: the tradition of the seventeenth century dissenters, of William Blake, and, in our own times, Thomas Altizer.
Karen Armstrong told how, as a Roman Catholic nun, she had been “worn out” by religion, only to become reinvigorated, outside the convent walls, by her studies of the three great monotheistic traditions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Noting that “dogma” had originally referred to that which could be experienced but not expressed in words, she suggested that the corruption of the term to mean the exact opposite - propositions recited in creeds - symbolised the corruption of religion itself. God and the divine were to be met in experience, not propositions, and the experience was wholly human. Religion was best seen as an art form, requiring each of us to cultivate a sense of the sacred as we cultivate our aesthetic senses. In this sense the atheist could be religious - and a committed atheist was preferable to a lukewarm Christian.
Don Cupitt suggested that during the last few decades the word “God” had largely disappeared from common speech. The old religious language, attitudes, feelings and rituals had increasingly come to be refocused around the word “life”. While we were busying ourselves with “the secularization of religion” we had tended not to notice “the sacralization of life”. We now ponder “the meaning of life” rather than the nature of God. Purpose is expressed in “life-styles”. We tell each other to “Get a life!” and talk of “getting my life together”. Our highest praise is often “She loved life”. Vitally important to us now are “the quality of life’, “the sanctity of life”, a “life-force”. We marvel at “the miracle of life”, “take life into our own hands”, “always look on the bright side of life”. Where we once had a religion or philosophy we now have a “life stance”, a “way of life”. Love and beauty are “life-enhancing”. This, suggested Cupitt, points the way to our new religious language and idioms. If nothing else was sacred, life was.
In a final panel session, David Hart suggested SoF had a role to play in reviving and reforming the churches. Cupitt demurred, seeing them as conservative “beyond redemption”. Karen Armstrong and Don Cupitt agreed that tolerance and liberalism were recent virtues for Christianity, T* London SoF groups’ one-day conference on “Is Nothing Sacred? _ which had had to learn them from the secular world of the Enlightenment. Karen added that to be religious is to get our priorities _ right, and religious people today should be more concerned about peo- ple sleeping in the streets than about Clinton’s sex life. _ “Sex life”: another one for Don Cupitt’s lively lexicon @ FINAL SCORE!