A Special Request Iam a retired research physician and professor at Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts. I have been part of the Sea of Faith e-mail community for many years. I have been awarded an Eva Koch Fellowship from Woodbrooke College to pursue a research project in which I hope SoF Friends will be participants. Several } recent surveys have shown that unprogrammed Quaker Meetings, both in North America and Britain, have attracted many members and attenders who might be variously described as agnostics, religious humanists, non-realists, atheists and/or Post-Christians. They have in common a religious perspective that depends j minimally on a belief in the supernatural. This research project aims to describe whether and how their religious needs have been met within the Society of Friends. If this work is successful, it will allow mutual understanding among the participants, between them and the Society of Friends, and might serve as a model for other denominations as well. I hope you, and any one else you know who considers him/herself a nontheistic Quaker, might complete a questionnaire, which should take from half an hour to an hour of your time. Adequate numbers are a necessity to increase the validity of the survey. All answers will be treated with tenderness and kept strictly confidential (Iam an experienced medical researcher, and understand and whole heartedly support such confidentiality). Please correspond with me at the following address.
Davip RUSH Woodbrooke College, 1046 Bristol Road, Birmingham B29 6LJ England or 68 Foster St, Cambridge MA 02138, USA or email DAVID RUSH MD; rush@hnre.tufts.edu 21 SOF 46 / March 2001 by Seafarer Postscripts MAGISTERIA / WORKS > SLEAZE OF FAITH Among the millions of Hindus who bathed in the Ganges to wash away their sins in the great Kumbh Mela festival, we are told, were the multi-millionaire Hinduja brothers who that very week were shaking Britain's New Labour, Christian-Socialist-led government to its foundations.
The brothers made their first billion running an import business in Iran, first under the shah, then under the ayatollahs. Their business empire soon stretched from Iran to their native India, and from Switzerland to Britain. They prospered by assiduous cultivation of the great and the good-for-business. George Bush Snr., Margaret Thatcher, Edward Heath, John Major and later Tony Blair all signed their visitors’ book.
Devout Hindus, vegetarian and teetotal, they refused to invest in businesses dealing in meat or alcohol. Armaments, however, posed no ethical dilemmas. In 1987 a scandal erupted over an £800 million arms deal between the Bofors group and the Indian Government, involving illegal "commissions" and back-handers of £30 million. When the brothers were named as the suspected guilty middlemen, they angrily denied it, admitting a "business connection" with Bofors which involved "certain money" being paid into their Swiss bank accounts, but denying that this had anything to do with the Indian arms sale scam.
As the scandal developed, Srichand and Gopichand Hinduaja sought British passports as a means of distancing themselves - literally - from prosecution. But as any asylumseeker will be only too happy to confirm, British passports don't grow on trees. The brothers were turned down.
Some applicants might have been embittered, but not the Hindujas. They were big spenders, and they spent big in New Britain. Gopichand reapplied for a passport in March 1997 and was granted it only nine months later, by which time Peter Mandelson could fairly describe the brothers as "friends of the Labour Party and the prime minister". So, one down and one to go: Srichand, still needed that passport.
The following year, the government's Dome project was hitting trouble. In particular, its ethical centrepiece, the "Spirit Zone", was unsponsored after the churches had made it clear that the £1 million price tag was more than could be raised by raffles, sales of work and passing the plate round. Step forward the Hindujas. On June 17, they offered to underwrite the cost of the renamed "Faith Zone" by... well, £1 million actually. A few days later, certain. enquiries about a certain passport were made by certain people on behalf of a certain Srichand Hinduja. (You may have read something about this in the papers?). The results seem to have been encouraging. Whoever had said what to SOF 46 / March 2001 whom when, Srichand renewed his application in March 1999. Seven months later - the process usually takes 18 months - he was a British subject of the Crown.
The Eaith Zone was decorated with scores of texts from the world's scriptures. The one I missed was the one which said "Verily, verily, I say unto you, See, you can serve God and Mammon!" Kumb Again!
Before we leave the Kumb, | would like to share with you (as they say in California and churches) a comment by the excellent Paul Vallely in the Independent, January 13. He was writing about the "pageant of primitive prejudice" apparent in much of the British press coverage of "the greatest show on earth". Our own Tim Woodcock writes about Channel Four's daily coverage elsewhere in this issue. But this is Vallely: "To the modern western view there seem only two alternatives...: religious claims must either be demonstrably true or not. But scientific rationalism is here as literal as the religious fundamentalists it purports to scorn. It explains why our view of the mela is fixated on its trappings rather than its substance... "Yet veiled derision is only one sophisticated response to the faith of those who bathe in icy waters and tell stories of how the gods spilled four drops of the nectar of immortality into the Ganges during a battle with the demons. Such Hindu myths - like the seven days of creation in Judaism, the visit of the angel to Mohamed in Islam, or the Christian God born in a stable who was killed by men and then rose from the dead - contain truths which are not literal and yet which are more than poetic metaphor. They exist in the synapses between faith and reason, in humanity's ineluctable sense of something bigger than ourselves, in realities beyond what the material can encompass, in the things in heaven and earth not dreamt of in our philosophy of selfish individualism, in places where we cease to be consumers and become congregation... "Beyond the drops of nectar - or the childhood pictures of God as superhuman white-bearded grandad - is another level of reality, elusive but more profound. It may just be a sense of the collective goodness of the world. Or it may be of a power that is omnipotent when all human creativity and beneficence is joined. It is what makes us let go of self and reach into the ground of our being".
E CANON And while I'm in the sharing mood, how about this blast against the established status of the Church of England by another Paul, Paul Oestreicher, who happens to be simultaneously a canon emeritus at Coventry cathedral and a Quaker - a steeplehouse and a meetinghouse man. Writing in the Guardian on December 12: "It should be no part of a reformed upper house that a fixed number of Anglican bishops, simply by virtue of their office, should sit in it. To reduce the places from 24 to 16 is not the answer... That the clergy of the Church of England, along with lunatics and peers, should be debarred from sitting in the Commons is a fate from which they do not deserve to be spared... "The defenders of the status quo argue that only a state church can serve all the people. That is another fiction, and an unintended insult to other religious communities.
Arguably the Salvation Army does a little better and even the small band of Quakers have a social outreach out of all proportion to their numbers. A change in legal status will do nothing to stop cathedrals and parish churches offering all that they do now... "The traditionalist scaremongers say that to end the church-state link would be to turn the Church of England into a sect. Is the Holy Roman Church, probably by a small margin the best attended in England, a sect? Anyway, Christianity started as a small Jewish sect which eventually did well enough to sweep the Roman Empire... "Sadly, this is a time for slaughtering the cows that threaten us. The Church of England, which ought to be a threat to the golden calf of the free market, badly needs to sacrifice the sacred cow of an establishment which no farmer or city dweller, subject or citizen, will miss." And, if only to prove that you don't have to be a Paul to catch Seafarer's eye, a quote from the distinguished and best-selling Darwinian biologist Stephen Jay Gould, writing in the Sunday Times on January 21 about his new book Rock of Ages, which argues that science and religion are not in conflict because they do quite different things, science trying to "document the factual character of the natural world" while religion operates in the "realm of human purposes, meanings and values". He writes: "Tam not a believer. I am an agnostic but I have great respect for religion. It fascinates me beyond almost all other subjects... "The magisterium of ethical discussion and search for meaning includes several disciplines traditionally grouped under the humanities - much of philosophy and part of literature and history, for example. But human societies have usually centred the discourse of this magisterium upon an institution called ‘religion’.
I most emphatically do not argue that ethical people must validate their standards by overt appeals to religion - we all know that atheists can live in the most firmly principled manner, while hypocrites can wrap themselves in the banners of God and country. But religion has occupied the centre of this magisterium in most cultures. "Since every one of us must reach some decisions about the rules we will follow in conducting our own lives, and since I trust that nobody can be entirely indifferent to the workings of the world around us, all human beings must pay at least rudimentary attention to both magisteria of religion and science. "The magisteria will not fuse; so each of us must integrate these distinct components into a coherent view of life. If we succeed, we gain something truly 'more precious than rubies’, and dignified by one of the most beautiful words in any language: wisdom." Thanks, Stephen. | in ted Fale life Seas of works And finally, a lift from the North West SoF Group's newsletter, Mailing 39, under the heading "What do we do?": "In a letter to the convenor - and responding indirectly to David Boulton's November editorial (SOF 44) about Sea of Faith's commitment to action - Geoffrey Thompson reflected upon a seven month project to design, f fund and sell a high quality calendar in aid of facilities to benefit cancer patients at Furness General Hospital. Quite apart from the exceptional collection of photographs (all Geoffrey's work!), he succeeded in covering some £4,200 of production costs through sponsorship and then made a profit for the cause of over £9,000. He sees such actions not as 'do-gooding’ or 'moralising’ but as ‘a response to what and who we are within our nature’. He feels that the _ energy and support of those he came in contact with throughout the work confirms this - ‘We don't have to wait for an official organisation to do things’. Recognising his is just one of many initiatives, he ends: ‘It is good that we should encourage each other in whatever way we can, but please let us be careful not to set up another organisation!” If you, your SoF group, church, meeting, community are engaged in a “faith in action” project which might interest, inform and inspire SOF readers, write and tell us about it for our occasional "Sea of Works" series.
Meanwhile, | must reluctantly quash the wicked rumour that, following the huge success of that nude calendar featuring members of a Yorkshire WI group, the SoF national steering committee has plans for a similar fundraising project...