If you are able to contribute financially, or if you can help in any otherway, please send an email to humanism@iheu.org postbag Reformation and diversity It is indeed "Time for a new reformation" (David Boulton, SOF 47, May 2001), but its main radical characteristic should be summed up in one word: diversity. Ecumenism involves the realisation that what unites us is more significant than what divides us and our differences can enrich rather than impoverish us.
I am a part-time vicar of a non-exclusive Christian church. It's the only one in the parish, and so has the opportunity and the responsibility for serving the whole community in all its diversity. Some of us are radical in the Sea of Faith sense and others are more traditional, though the differences are not straight-forward. One person might be radical on one issue and conservative on another. We also aim to support people with non-religious, humanist views at times of great moment for them, such as funerals.
We want our church members not to have to pretend to belief as if it were morally superior to uncertainty, and to see faith as a journey, not an arrival. We may wear different labels at different times on that journey, but the church can welcome everyone. Indeed the realisation of our unity demands that we accept our differences; the teaching of Jesus points clearly in that direction.
Our coming of age requires us to realise that in a free society we cannot cajole or humiliate everyone to think like us, so why not take the road of mutual respect instead, be open to each other and learn from each other? I regret that the Churches, weighed down by exclusiveness and neofundamentalism, have not grasped this nettle yet, thus steadily building up a groundswell of alienation. There is no shortage now of angry or contemptuous people who articulate a deep lack of empathy and respect for Christianity and by implication often for other religions too.
Such lack of respect is what makes work on diversity so needed in the religious or spiritual sphere. SoF can be a force for this if its enthusiasts can respect the realist, traditional or otherwise, helping to create a climate and culture in which it is safe not to pretend we all believe the same thing.
DAVID CHARLES-EDWARDS 236 Hillmorton Road, Rugby CV22 5BG CWA. David@BTinternet.com Send your letters to:
Patti Whaley, Letters Editor SOF 145 Petherton Road London N5 2RS email 101335.3561 @compuserve.com comment in the mouth of one so ultra-rational.
The SoF belief system is hovering dangerously close to anarchic solipsism. If man really is the measure of all things, rampant relativism rules - absolutely, and metaphysical flat-earthism is here to stay. To dispense with even the possibility of the Other, of some spiritual reference point superior to our limited, petty, sometimes wicked, selves is to remove totally the religious dimension and any need for dialogue about it. The corollary of such reductionism is simple, honest atheism, with attention being diverted to ethical and social concerns. At this level it is possible (and desperately necessary) to postulate a reasonable, objective code of behaviour along the lines of the Golden Rule: unfortunately moral morons such as Hitler, Stalin and Saddam are hardly responsive to, or indeed hardly perceive the need for, tenets of rational civilised conduct.
So, I remain an agnostic because I consider that a rigid stance vis-a-vis matters metaphysical is simply not intelligent and leads not only to a closed universe, but also to a closed mind. I console myself with the possibility that "there is more in heaven and earth, Horatio Cupitt, than is dreamt of in your philosophy".
DH CLAMPTON 24 Horndale Avenue, Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria LA13 9AS e e e e Cupitt's "irrationality" As an agnostic I have viewed with interest and admiration the efforts of SoF to hack away the tangled undergrowth of traditional belief. However, may I suggest that the movement, in turn, risks falling into the trap of orthodoxy with its insistence on nonrealism? This was brought home to me on reading Don Cupitt's reported description of the Anglican Church as "disgusting" ("Time for a new reformation?", SOF 47, May 2001), an alarmingly irrational One-sided I do not dispute David Boulton's application of the myths of "a chosen people" and "a promised land" to current troubles around Israel (‘Bad tidings from Zion", SOF 48, July 2001) but regret that, having chosen to describe Israel's sometimes shocking actions, he completely ignores the other side - a position many Christian organisations adopt.
The reason for the Arab refugees was warfare caused by Arab nations trying to destroy Israel, and the number of Arab refugees was roughly equalled by Jews expelled from other Arab lands where they had lived for ages. And how speak of Israeli atrocities without mentioning Palestinian ones? How ignore the fact that Israel has had to face the threat of extinction from the day it came into existence?
One may argue that the Jews should never have been given that homeland, but those of us alive at the time understand why it was. Israel accepted the nominated small area. There could have been two nations cooperating and at peace, but the Arabs wouldn't allow even that. Yes, "the promised land" is a good example of a myth with harmful results. But if that is to lead to wider comment on today's tragic situation, let's have the whole picture.
DaviD HaTTON 31 The Granary, Clare, Suffolk CO10 8LL SOF 49 / September 2001 iB .| Contaminated thinking As anew subscriber I found your editorial ("Bad tidings from Zion", SOF 48, July 2001) a dispiriting introduction to Sea of Faith thinking. To ascribe to the Judaic "origin-myth" the state of Israel's injustices towards the Palestinian people is historically (and conceptually) inaccurate. The Zionist movement was overwhelmingly secular in its ideology: religion was anathema to the majority of its leaders - there was fierce resistance to the word God in the 1948 Declaration of Independence - and Zionism's aim was the supposed "normalization" of the Jewish people within history by securing a state which would exist like any other state.
The tragedy that befell the Palestinian people in 1947-8 when 750,000 Palestinians were uprooted is not illuminated by describing it as having occurred "in the name of [the] myth" of chosenness. Some fled out of fear (as civilians do in every war); some were driven away by acts of terror (such as the Dir-Yassin massacre); some were systematically evicted in what we (and you) now retrospectively term "ethnic cleansing". A new generation of Israeli historians have described in detail this process, and it is slowly making inroads into the previously dominant Zionist myth that villages were abandoned out of fear alone.
It was only after 1967 that pernicious religious ideology was used to justify the continued occupation of "Judea and Samaria" (i.e. the West Bank). But to speak of "the myth" of the Promised Land sending in the planes and tanks, and powering the bulldozers, is to substitute emotionally overheated thetoric for what is sorely needed in this painful situation: a clear-sighted analysis of the moral and intellectual shortsightedness of a colonial power's oppression of an indigenous population: an oppression fuelled in this instance by still traumatic memories of recent annihilation (not that the Holocaust can ever be used to justify Israeli aggression, but I mention it as a way of pleading for a more psychologically nuanced approach).
It is only when those old-fashioned Biblical values of justice and righteousness will prevail over egregious realpolitik - and to describe such values as "myths" as if there is nothing to distinguish them from Noah's ark surely obfuscates rather than enlightens - that the historically necessary two-state solution will emerge. Until then selfindulgent and self-righteous editorials do little of value.
Meanwhile, for this new SOF fellow-traveller, a suspicion which I do not wish to entertain won't go away: that the deep underpinning of some of the tone, language and thinking of your editorial has been unconsciously contaminated by another archaic myth - the Christian identification of the Jews with the devil. Am I being too sensitive a textual reader when my frown at your description of an “arbitrary Jehovah" with his "recurrent fits of partisan smiting" turns even darker at your editorial's final words, which speak of framing "our response to those who quote scripture for their own devilish ends"?
Rabbi HowARD COOPER 37 Lansdowne Rd, London N3 1ET [It was emphatically not our intention to mirror the age-old and disgraceful association of Jews with the devil. Christians have been as adept as any at quoting scripture for their own ends, and the “devilish” end we had in mind was what Rabbi Cooper himself calls the "pernicious religious ideology [that] was used to justify the continued occupation of ‘Judea and Samaria’ (i.e. the West Bank)”.
SOF 49/ September 2001 We were also at pains to acknowledge the Jewish writers and activists who themselves continue to draw attention to the misuse of the "promised land” myth. - Editor] Thinking with the blood Duncan Park's piece (SOF 48, July 2001) was entitled "Is this a creed I see before me?" - an obvious reference to Macbeth’s "Is this a dagger I see before me?". He would have been better advised to go to Hamlet for his title: "Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing"!
I can understand Duncan's desire to reject the ten hypotheses, but he does not engage with them in any way, give reasons or offer any alternative. He merely declares them "unexciting" and goes off on a rhetorical binge, drunk on his own clever words. Ironically, for all his talk of excitement, brilliant imagery and vivid words, Duncan offers no point of view, no illumination and no argument. He espouses no values beyond the empty, adolescent "be different".
One is getting to expect this from the "pomo tendency” in SoF. "...Any direction is the wrong direction and all positions are impositions", Duncan declares. It confirms my view that postmodernism is an intellectual mule - completely infertile.
Happily, it will die in due course just like logical positivism, the mule that preceded it.
Duncan suggests that humanism was responsible for the atrocities of the 20th century: "the gulags, the death-camps, the Great Leaps Forward". Sorry, Duncan. It wasn't rationalism and secular humanism that led to these abominations but the kind of "think with the blood" rejection of rationalism that you are peddling. I am sure that Duncan himself is not a fascist, but rejection of critical thinking allied with a passion for traditional symbols leads to fascism in the end. Any approach that does not prize rational dialogue and critical reason ends up with nothing but force and prejudice to fall back on.
Duncan does not like dogmatism. Neither do the rest of us in SoF. But he confuses "credo", which simply means "I believe", with "dogma", from a Greek root meaning "good belief" - belief approved by the central authority. I see nothing objectionable about anyone offering a set of propositions for discussion, dialogue and possible assent by any or all of us.
The very essence of an undogmatic approach is to be open to and engage with different points of view.
If SoF is to make any headway then we need more critical thinking and dialogue - not less. Let us not be a "Sea of Froth" network revelling in non-thinking non-positions. Let us enter into constructive dialogue and find valid answers to pressing human problems.
Ros WHEELER herringbone@lineone.net Ivory tower My wife and I wonder in what ivory tower those who wrote the July edition of SOF live? We are a very privileged elite in a starving war-torn world. We can't help wondering if the SoF lives there too? "None shall attain that height, save he to whom the misery of the world is misery and will not let him rest." DAVID FRASER Newton Cottage, Newton, Warwickshire CV23 0ED by Seafarer Postscripts -RED /FANTASY / DAD@HAV / PURE” ‘NEW LABOUR, NEW : | )ERUSALEM?