‘Religion in my Life’ is a new regular feature for Sofia. We invite individuals to reflect on their experience of religion and their opinions on the role of religion in society. Whom will we invite? People that we think will have something interesting to tell us! Most likely they will be people with some sort of public profile and who do not have a conventional religious faith, but there are no hard rules.
For this first installment of the feature we have the thoughts of Tom Bulman, a Milton Keynes activist widely known and respected in the community. I hope you find what he has to say as fascinating as I did.
Tom Bulman grew up in London and, after travelling widely, studied for a BSc at London School of Economics. He has since worked in education in various capacities, in London and later in Milton Keynes, with a special interest in helping young people get into work. For many years Tom was also Community Organiser for the Citizens:UK Alliance of community groups in Milton Keynes. Working with Churches, Mosques, Schools and other community groups, such the Q:Alliance and Transition Town MK, Tom coordinated grass-roots campaigns “to promote a thriving, inclusive and fairer Milton Keynes”. Notable successes include getting major local employers to become accredited real living-wage organisations, and pressing the Thames Valley Police, together with Milton Keynes Council, to commit to action against hate-crime. Tom is a passionate unity cyclist. He enjoys cycling himself but is also passionately committed to getting more people on their bikes, for the health and well-being of the individuals as well as environmental benefits that come from replacing motorised transport with active transport. Tom provided us with written answers to our list of questions, and we followed-up this up with a discussion.
Interview with Tom Bulman
What is your personal experience of religion?
As a child in west London I was taken to church at Christmas and Easter by my parents, neither of whom went to church any other time, as far as I know, unless as a tourist visiting a temple away from where we lived. When I was 22, near the end of three years bumming it far and wide writing travel articles for a small American newspaper, I spent a few weeks in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand where my dad had stayed 30 years before, including 10 days of strict silence. Learning to meditate there, at least trying it, remains the most profound experience of my life. I think about it often, though it’s less important to me now, entering my 60s, to
know it’s there as an escape if I need it. Since I started travelling away from UK in my teens, I’ve always enjoyed visiting temples, sometimes trying at prayer, sometimes not, always loving to watch people at their most focused, loyal and giving. I noticed that most people I’ve seen in or around temples behave more pro-socially than away from them, that religion is generally a force for good, despite its problems and my own agnosticism.
In conversation, more fascinating details of Tom’s visit to the Buddhist monastery emerged. For example, he had a photograph of his father alongside a Buddhist monk, Buddhadasa Bihikku, and it was from showing this photograph to monks in monastries in Bangkok that they were able to identify the monastery visited by his father, which was in a remote rural location. Tom found the monastery and met Buddhadasa. Buddhadasa died some 3 months after Tom’s visit, so he had been just in time.
Tom said that although he usually responds to questions about religion by saying that he is not religious, on reflection he might say that he is a Buddhist.
Does the idea of ‘God’ mean anything to you?
Shortly before my father died of Alzheimer’s and other things at 91, I hauled him out to a pub for a pint I wanted and he didn’t really. He wasn’t in the best of moods by then, but I managed to pop the question I so wanted his answer to. As you get closer to death, how do you reflect on your own religious belief? I knew he loved religious scripture and had written a book, unpublished along with all his great writing except a letter or two, called Without God. But I had this idea he would say he was getting more religious, perhaps seeking safety from fear of death in the arms of the lord. He leaned forward over his hardly touched pint, so close that I could see the cracks all over his face, the crust of all his religious wisdom, even his piercing blue eyes seemed to be cracked, and whispered, so quietly and so definitely, I am an atheist. When I think of God, unless I’m talking with somebody about their god, all I can think of is nature, ever changing yet always there. I enjoy talking about creation, but for practical purposes I think more about the sun rising and falling, my breath rising and falling, and my death contributing to the future of it all. One other thing I was dying to ask my dad, and did, over that pint. What do you think happens to you after death? He leant forward again. Slowly, definitely. Oblivion, he said. Somehow I felt elated to hear his two one-word answers. Atheist and oblivion.
In discussion, in emerged that Tom’s father, John Bulman, had been a member of the Sea of Faith. A letter that John wrote to the SOF magazine in 2002 is printed below. We hope to publish some of the text of John’s book, Without God, in a later issue.
How do you respond to the SOF assertion that religion is a human creation (rather than a revelation from God)?
Totally. I think I’m closer to other creatures than to God.
Do you think or believe that life has meaning?
Certainly. Every action has a reaction, we are all in a web of cause and effect, and the beautifully tiny reality of our life makes a beautifully tiny and still meaningful contribution to all others.
Tom works with great energy for the good of the community and finds meaning in his work.
What role do you think religion can and/or should play in society?
Religion does and should offer space for personal reflection. This makes our lives more meaningful and enjoyable. Let’s be quiet sometimes so we can enjoy society most of the time. One of Tom’s community cycling events
As an example of the value of religion, Tom talked about the role of the City Centre Church of Christ the Cornerstone in Milton Keynes following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, on 31st August 1997. There was a national outpouring of grief of which he was a part, and he wanted somewhere to go, a ‘temple’, to share the grief. The Church of Christ the Cornerstone filled that role, and the Church ministers had the right words to express the grief of the community.
I asked Tom whether it mattered that it was a Christian church, or whether it could have been the temple of another religion, and he said that in order to fulfill the national role it was appropriate that it was the religion of community and therefore, in the UK, it worked best as a church
And finally, anything else at all that you would like to say to us?
Thanks for inviting me to reflect in writing, albeit rather rushed, especially the end, and please go on getting others to do it too.
John Bulman’s letter
This is the text of John Bulman’s letter to the Sea of faith magazine in July 2002. (SOF 54, page 21)
I was excited to see the change in SOF with its May 2002 issue. Its theme gave me hope for a new central drive to the Network.
The brain sciences are leading us to a revolution in our beliefs comparable to those we attribute to Copernicus, Newton, and Darwin. They conclude that our minds, including their concept of the deciding ‘self’, are wholly determined by our material brains, structured by our genes and informed by our entire life experience.
The notion of ‘no-self’ or ‘atman’ is of course as old as the Buddha, and has been approached by western philosophers for centuries, as excellently illustrated by your Bluffer’s Guide. Now it is ‘science’, and will become common knowledge.
The realisation that ‘I’ am not the possessor and director of ‘me’, the objective organism I seem to inhabit, is liberating. It also finds support in Christian metaphors. We are all creations of the universe, truly innocent, forgiven and loved, and we must forgive (or love) our neighbours as ourselves.
Our problem, the ‘original sin’ which we inherit in our human nature, is our false sense of separate identity, and thus of transience, moral uncertainty and guilt. To guide us to total liberation, or ‘heaven’, by an emotional abandonment of ‘self’, has been the true task of religion and all its arts. Perhaps Don Cupitt’s advice to ‘float free’ in ‘emptiness’ is equivalent.
Your editorial rightly suggests that with such lightness we will seem to suffer loss. Are we mere automata? Where is the glory of human freedom, which the Greeks taught us? Worse perhaps, where is moral agency and moral responsibility? I like your thought that “our ‘I’ might be a vitally important myth for us”. In fact we are ‘given’ freewill even if it is not ‘ours’. We must make decisions, now without divine moral guidance. For social good, as we perceive it, we may have to prosecute our fellows, even make war. However, if we have achieved selflessness we may hope, as you say, to burn with a self-less loving – and in burning may perhaps find other means