Humanism —and Religion Barbara Burfoot gives a personal view on humanism.
I have been an active and committed secular humanist for forty years now; active in two local humanist groups, Hampstead and Havering (Essex), and as a humanist funeral officiant. This is a personal view because humanists have no central authority and no scriptures for reference and guidance. The founder of the Humanists Officiants’ Network, who ought to know, compares attempting to organise humanists to trying to herd cats. As an illustration, the current issue of The Freethinker (the journal associated with the National Secular Society) has a complimentary death notice for Patrick Kneen, a Manx campaigner for voluntary euthanasia on page 4, and a long article by Edwin Salter arguing that with dominion over every other form of life.
This is not so. Human beings are not the Earth’s only children and the well being of our non-human siblings is vital to our survival here. I am not clear where I stand on animal rights yet. Some humanists do believe that using human embryos for research is preferable to conducting experiments on fully sentient animals.
The Sea of Faith publication Introducing the Sea of Faith speaks of ‘exploring and promoting the study, practice and enjoyment of religious faith as a human creation’. As a humanist I’m not altogether sure about the ‘practice and enjoyment’, but I am committed to the study of this crucial and enduring human creation. Religion in euthanasia is ‘both morally repugnant and socially dangerous’ on pages 10 and 11. I am not an academic or a philosopher. As one of my managers once said in tones of some distain, I am a very practical person. I am most interested in thought as a basis for action.
There is no single agreed definition of humanism.
This is mine and I don’t think many humanists would take serious issue with it: | don’t know whether God exists or not. |! know of no evidence that we have any other life than this one. We may or may not be sons and daughters of God but we are certainly sons and daughters of the Earth, which is, as far as we know, our only home.
On this Earth we share a common fate. While we are here it is our business to do everything within our power to make life as worthwhile as possible for ourselves and everyone else. | believe that all human beings are of equal value and significance. | believe that no religion or ideology is worth the involuntary sacrifice of a single human life.
Humanists have been accused of being as cavalier about the Earth and its non-human inhabitants as those who believe themselves made in God’s image the widest sense of the word has been a constant in human life for as long as there have been conscious humans around. (Whether or not Humanism is a religion has been the subject of endless, inconclusive debate among humanists).
Something which has engaged so much human time, energy, intelligence, passion and material wealth must embody worthwhile insights into the human condition as well as elements that are worthless and dangerous.
There is now a pressing, practical reason for such study. What David Boulton calls ‘religious literacy’ is vital in our increasingly interconnected and interdependent world. To give just one obvious example, if we do not understand their religious faith and what it means to them, we have no hope of persuading suicide bombers to pursue another approach to achieving their objectives or of preventing others from reaching that state of desperation. I would suggest that humanist members of the Sea of Faith should take responsibility for promoting religious literacy to their fellows.
The members of the United Kingdom’s oldest humanist organisation, the National Secular Society (NSS), founded in the nineteenth century by the radical MP, Charles Bradlaugh, to ‘wage relentless war against Superstition in general, and Christian Superstition in particular’ as well as ‘diffusing happiness through the grander circle of humanity’ might be the most difficult to persuade. I am a member of the NSS and I believe it does a useful and necessary job in terms of its original objectives and in campaigning against religious privilege under its present Executive Director, Keith Porteous Wood.
Clifford Longley, The Times Religious Affairs Correspondent, said of The Freethinker, ‘There is still no sharper eye for moralistic hypocrisy...[it] delivers its punches with rather less respect than Private Eye.’ The largest humanist organisation in the United Kingdom, the British Humanist Association, which has in the past been heavily involved in dialogue with the Churches and other religious organisations, should be the most sympathetic to the promotion of religious literacy. The BHA has made a vigorous contribution to the debate about religious education, producing videos and information packs on humanism for use in schools.
The BHA trains and accredits humanist funeral officiants and celebrants for weddings, gay affirmations and baby namings. It publishes the manuals for funerals and celebrations. They aren’t service books as a correspondent on the SoF email network suggested recently. They are more like DIY manuals. As an experienced officiant I can’t remember when I last referred to Funerals without God. The BHA’s Officiants and Celebrants’ Network is important to me. It provides a forum for the exchange of information and experience and a source of advice when necessary. One of my colleagues was recently confronted with conducting a funeral for a murder victim for the first time. ‘What did you do?’ we asked. ‘Rang the Regional Co-ordinator and said HELP! of course’, he replied.
The largest of these organisations measures its membership in the low thousands. The International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), founded in the nineteen fifties by Julian Huxley as an umbrella organisation bringing together national humanist organisations, probably has less than a million members. Most of the people whose funerals I conduct were not conscious humanists. Most of their families have never heard of Humanism. They are just people from the 30% of the British population with no conventional religious beliefs or affiliations for whom a religious funeral would feel like a travesty.
How is it then that Humanism has had such a powerful influence in the Western World in modern times? Humanists played a major part in divorce and abortion law reform and in the promotion of rights for gays and lesbians. Humanists believe that ‘the real needs of men and women here and now’ should be oe Charles Bradlaugh, founder of the NSS the basis of morality. Even those arguing from religious principles feel obliged to present their case in these terms now.
Most Christians would now support freedom of thought, speech and conscience as fundamental principles, but the most cursory glance at Christian history shows that these are not traditional Christian values. In Britain at least, those campaigning against the appointment of gay bishops feel obliged to reiterate their rejection of homophobia, their love for their many gay friends and the warm welcome offered to gays by their churches. Fifty, perhaps even twenty years ago they would have been hurling anathemas. Humanists are sometimes accused of living on Christian moral capital. I think that actually the reverse is true. More modern Christians are living on the moral and intellectual capital of the resurgent Humanism of the eighteenth century than they are prepared to admit or perhaps even realise.
Humanism with no canon, no central authority and represented by many small, disparate organisations shares these characteristics with feminism. Perhaps like feminism it is simply an idea whose time has come; a response, as Bertrand Russell suggested, to the message of nuclear weapons, ‘Remember your Humanity and forget the rest. If you can do so the way lies open to a new paradise; if you cannot, nothing lies before you but universal death.’ I think he was over-optimistic about the new paradise, but the warning is, if anything, even more relevant now than when it was first issued in December 1954.
Barbara Burfoot is a member of the Sea of Faith Network and of the British Humanist Association, the National Secular Society, the Rationalist Press Association and of the International Humanist and Ethical Union. She is also a BHA accredited funeral officiant and a member of the BHA’s Officiants and Celebrants’ Network and hopes to qualify as an accredited celebrant for weddings, gay and lesbian affirmations and baby namings in 2004.