Ben Whitney visits the exhibition at the British Museum.
Neil MacGregor has done us all a tremendous service with his Radio 4 series, and the accompanying exhibition at the British Museum, where he used to be the Director. Charting our human religious story from the carved figure believed to be the oldest devotional object in the world, the 40,000 year-old ‘Lion Man’, right through to the present, he has wonderfully illustrated how all cultures have devised their own understandings to help them make sense of their existence and the personal and community issues facing them at the time; death, conflict, relationships, sickness etc.
One of my constant arguments with those of a conventional religious faith is that they seem to believe that we are merely the passive recipients of our spirituality, not its creative source. To say, for example, that we can only love because a God loved us first, is clearly nonsense. I know what love is; it is an inherent part of my humanity, not some alien invader that has to be imposed from outside. The wonderfully varied objects in this exhibition testify to how the human capacity for art, literature, music and so on have constantly been the channels for expressing our deepest feelings and wishes, for good or ill. We have created our gods, and the values by which we choose to live, not the other way around.
My own quest for a ‘humanist spirituality’ has all been done within the Christian tradition. That’s a ‘given’ for me, though, of course, other paths may be equally meaningful to others. But the heart of Christianity is that its god was a human being. Its scriptures were written by human beings. Its history is a human history. And yet so much is said and done in so many churches to deflect us away from our humanity towards a supposed external source of meaning, rather than celebrating what we have discovered to be true all by ourselves.
In my book, The Apostate’s Creed, available as a free download from my website: ben-whitney.org.uk/humanist-spirituality I try to explore whether the classic statements of Christian belief can still have any value if you take away the supernatural context and see them only as expressions of what we believe to be true. Like the objects in the exhibition, we have created our creeds and invested them with truth. But it’s important that we don’t lose touch with reality in the process. The objects keep us ‘earthed’; any faith must do the same.
For example, as much as we can know for certain, it is a ‘fact’ that Jesus of Nazareth ‘suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried’. That is the human reality. People do bad and unjust things to each other, then as now, and we have to deal with it. But conventional Christianity ignores all that and jumps straight on to what was believed to have happened next. What was really going on, it is claimed, was that, uniquely, God was sacrificing his Son so that I might be saved. The human story is just a device; a pre-arranged put-up job for some deeper purpose. So the suffering and the dying don’t really matter then because this was actually all about something else. But it’s the fact that Jesus was the same as us that gives this event any meaning at all, not that he was different. Otherwise, what use is that to me?
Some might say that many of the objects in the exhibition stray into idolatry, just as taking a God out of religion drifts into blasphemy. But the very opposite is true. It is what we do and create that gives our experience value; the thoughts and insights that are our own and that we should be proud of. Religious ideas, like a Chopin nocturne or a Degas sculpture, express our own creative visions and ideals. Once you start to treat them as anything else you have walked away from the fully human person you could have been. It’s about living with our gods, not keeping them up in a ‘heaven’ where they belong.
SOF member Ben Whitney is a former social worker and Baptist minister who now provides training for schools on attendance and absence. ben-whitney.org.uk/humanist-spirituality
The exhibition Living with Gods continues at the British Museum until April 8th 2018.