32 – When We Grow Up

Author: David Boulton. Published March 1998 in issue 32 of Sofia.

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Contents

Articles
Reviews
Poetry
Regulars and Occasionals

Editorial

EDITORIAL Sea of Faith The quarterly magazine of the Sea of Faith Network Hobsons Farm, Dent, Cumbria LA10 SRF Editor: David Boulton When we grow up... ur Network is growing. Not QO) vxcecsir, and nothing like as fast as the fundamentalist peddlers of certainties or the New Age salesmen of aromatherapy for the soul, but growing nonetheless. Growing in membership, but growing, too, in the range and breadth of our activities and publications. And growing, to be sure, in influence: non-realism, religious humanism, is on the map. What is still vaguely called “the Sea of Faith view”, like it or not, is now on the agenda.

Can we cope with growing up? To be honest, the strains are beginning to tell. As we grow, so the demands on the precious time and finite energies of those who run the Network grow too.

Hopefully we don’t do too many things we ought not to do, but we surely fail to do much of what we ought to do.

Where, then, do we find the skills and passions and energies to sustain our growth? How do we put together a strategy for greater effectiveness?

Your hard-pressed steering committee has decided to follow up the endorsement it received at last years AGM for appointing a Development Worker. We are not looking for a Director General, a Chief Executive or a bossy-boots who will run the Network for us and free us to devote more time to our families, flowers or other fancies. Instead, a Development Worker would work with the Chair, the steering committee and the membership to help us form a cohesive strategy for future development, including assistance with strengthening our local groups and making the Network a more efficient means of exploring and promoting religious faith as a human creation.

In making this appointment — the Network’s first paid officer — the intention is to strengthen rather than weaken the Network’s informal and essentially voluntarist ethos. We know that if we become too rigid, too organised, too bureaucratic, we die.

The autonomy of our local groups, our minimalist constitution, our informal modes of decision-making and our resistance to anything smacking of hierachies are all essential ingredients in the SoF mix, and ones our Development Worker will work to maintain and strengthen.

The appointment will be an act of faith! A full- or _ part-time Development Worker must be paid a decent wage, and attendant expenses (travel, accommodation, IT, etc) must be met. Can we afford it? Well, actually...No. But we must, and we shall. That’s why the Chair has been writing to members soliciting donations for a one-year experiment.

If our thousand or so members and associates respond with a gift of £20 or more, we'll be able to go ahead. We don’t propose to let SoF become like one of those dreary churches which expends all its energies on begging for funds to enable it to beg for more funds... With a sensible and sensiblyfunded development strategy we won't need to beg. Instead, we'll be better-equipped to promote our message: that the death of supernaturalism and the twilight of the old gods opens up new horizons for the human spirit.

So...donations, payable to Sea of Faith Development Fund, would be welcomed at 27 Cotes Road, Barrow-upon-Soar, Leicestershire LE12 8JP.

The Editor Sea of Faith Hobsons Farm Dent, Cumbria LAIO 5RF SCUBA Diving Not a new title for the movement! I opine that to be a lost cause at this late date.

Yet the point made by Bernard Spurgin [Sea of Faith, Winter 1997] is worth considering, although his aim would not necessarily be achieved even by the drastic treatment he commends. “I believe” he wrote, “we must eliminate the word ‘faith’ from our name, not because it is inherently unsuitable but because it is liable to be read with meanings we do not ourselves attach to it.” He was in particular concerned about the term’s supernatural connotations since, as he observed, “we hold all religion to be of human origin and to have no other origin”.

First let me draw attention to the fact that it is a waste of time and effort to attempt to organise current vocabulary to suit our preferences or prejudices.

Other people will simply not heed us.

They will continue to use words in ways that may make us wince.

The best we can do is, untiringly, to make perfectly plain what we mean when we use particular words. Let us also decline to get entangled with other interpretations, offering instead words POSTBAG we consider more suitable in the given contexts.

So, what do we mean by “faith”? That is for each to decide. Personal habits of thought, which lie behind what we say, are too strong for any communal or committee decision to have much effect.

Through experience we may learn (often slowly) to divest ourselves of nuances which have trailed along with us throughout our lives but are gradually seen to be inappropriate, or incompatible with our changed perspective.

The meaning of “faith” I confine to its significance — confidence. (If I want to refer to trust, belief, credulity, I use such words.) Throughout history, a basic religious application of that root idea has been to encourage confidence in a supposed supernatural agency of some sort. Having moved away from that position, it is important to recognise that we are concerned here with selfconfidence, although that has in some ways been denigrated on religious grounds and thus, like “faith”, requires removal of no longer welcome accretions.

Confidence — purified of egotism, arrogance and insensitivity to others — is what everyone needs. “Be of good courage” was ever one of the most comforting and strengthening of biblical phrases. We are learning that supernatural overtones are inessential.

My preferred acronym would be SCUBA: Self-Confidence, Undergirded By Autonomy. For it is oneself who longs for and chooses the goal, while blessed if aided by compassionate and understanding companions.

Life on the ocean wave is a wonderful challenge once we have overcome our timidity. Sea-legs come with confidence.

— Charles Ward, Primrose Cottage, 16 Clay Lane, Wendover, Bucks

The name does need changing. Sea of Faith was a fine metaphor in the context of Don Cupitt’s original TV series and the book which followed it.

But I find when I mention my interest to anyone too young or forgetful to recall 80’s TV, let alone Dover Beach, the name Sea of Faith sound churchy and evangelical.

It's the word “faith” that cause the trouble. I don’t like it even in the otherwise excellent statement “Exploring and promoting religious faith as a human creation”. It’s religion itself we're exploring and promoting: faith is something you might acquire as part of the search, or might steer well clear of, as a dangerous illusion. Faith is personal, not indispensable.

What about Organisation (or Network) for Religious Humanism? I'd be proud to introduce myself as a member of that — nothing to apologize for at all.

— Roger Woodly, 7 Theed Street, London, SE1 8ST

Roger Woodly, 7 Theed Street, London, SE1 8ST No change please I want to say loudly and positively that I do not want to change our name. It was this name that first aroused my curiosity; not only because I happened to be already familiar with Matthew Arnold’s poem from 1867 and was in the throes of doubt and tension between what I was thinking and loyalty to both the possible God and the church, but also because the imagery that was sparked off by the word “sea” was one of myself floundering in great waves of conflicting ideas.

If the word “faith” initially provokes the association with religious faith — so what? To have faith means (to me) to believe that such and such is the case without personally having verified that such and such is indeed the case. I imagine that not one of us would have the arrogance to claim to have certain knowledge of either the existence or non-existence of a God-out-there. So as far as that goes it’s open for anyone to “have faith” either way with impunity.

The way we use “faith” ordinarily and mundanely is in such following cases: * that our fellow human beings will be truthful, trustworthy etc: * that the latest AA road maps will correctly represent how to get out of our villages/towns and reach the next: * that the SoF magazine will be on time.

All of this we take on faith — until proved wrong by experience.

What “information” could be contained in a title of an organisation such as the SoF for the enquirer, when every attempt so far in the literature to explain what we are makes great effort to point out our diversity and what we are not! What better title than the one we already have which indicates our origins, stimulates curiosity because it seems to imply a contradiction, and creates an image of vast oceans of human beings united and yet diverse.

Please don’t change the name.

— Pat M. Caddick, 10 Park Lane, Castle Donnington, Derby, DE74 2JF

Agnostics Anonymous My favoured alternative name for “Sea of Faith” is The Religious Society of Agnostics!

— John Linton, 25 Wyndham House, Plantation Road, Oxford OX2 6JJ

May I offer “All at Sea” — a far truer statement of our situation, surely?

— Kate Cousins, 43 Beaconsfield Road, Clacton-on-Sea, Essex CO15 6BU

Kate Cousins, 43 Beaconsfield Road, Clacton-on-Sea, Essex CO15 6BU Creating the faith In his letter “Creating the faith” Brian Marsden focuses on an issue which has also been of significance to me: what he calls the “antecedent capacity within us” for religion. The idea that somewhere early hominids sitting around the camp fire said, “Let’s create religion to help pass the time” - or some such version - is rather fanciful.

As with development of language, with which belief is closely related, there is a vast period of over two million years when the modern human _ brain evolved, but leaving scant evidence of its capacities.

The increasing sophistication of paleo-anthropology — resulting in works such as Richard Leaky’s Origin of Humankind or Stephen Mithen’s The Prehistory of the Mind — is helping to sketch in the story of this vital phase in human evolution. One outstanding work which ventures out to speculatively explore “missing links” between archeology and the sociology of religion is Dudley Young’s Origins of the Sacred (Abacus): a fascinating work full of thought-provoking observations and tantalizing suggestions, which leads us into the pre-Homeric world of mythology and “realist” religion.

POSTBAG The more we know, the more the boundaries of specism seem arbitrary and untenable. Watching and listening to a monkey “answering back” at a thunderstorm is awesome in_ its significance as a threshold experience of an “altered state of conscousness” in the process of awakening to the numinous.

Young even describes the very vocal simian gathering together of the troop at dusk as a kind of “primeval vespers” uttered for self-reassurance in the face of the gathering darkness.

Interestingly, Don Cupitt in his latest excellent book Mysticism after Modernity also refers to such things, and to the phrase “religious experience” as having a very short past, but behind it there is a very long history.

He also notes the increasing likelihood of religious ideology having “been around for some tens of thousands of years and may even have belonged to other species of Homo besides ourselves”: some people, he rightly surmises, will “no doubt find this an extraordinarily disturbing thought”.

But as such it is integral to the whole, equally disturbing, Sea of Faith view of religion concerning what Brian Marsden has called our “antecedent capacities”.

— Dominic Kirkham, 94 Clarendon Road, Manchester M34 5SE

Dominic Kirkham, 94 Clarendon Road, Manchester M34 5SE Unsatisfactory Utopias A map with no Utopia for landing on/at? I agree with you that a world with Utopia expunged from its maps is distressing. Maps need a projection, an azimuth, a North.

But I fear we make a mess of Utopia when we try to detail in an abstract concept: rather, like Nirvana, it should be kept as a “tendency towards”.

Detailing in a landing-place inevitably destroys the idealism of Utopia because of Unsatisfactoryness or the Principle of Double Effect. Christians then resort to prayer and saviours as displacement activities.

There are many maps and atlases showing many paths: we just need to be discerning map readers. God is not dead, Utopia is still there: the infiniteand-perpetual has no beginning nor ending. Are we complaisant “arm-chair” tourist travellers or intrepid explorers?

The religious path is an heuristic endeavour.

— Robert Mills, Higher Thatch, Ebford Lane, Ebford, Devon, EX3 0QX

Robert Mills, Higher Thatch, Ebford Lane, Ebford, Devon, EX3 O0QX. [“Heuristic” apparently means selfeducating and self-motivating. Not many people (including the editor) know that without looking it up — Ed.] Mapping Utopia In the Winter 1997 Sea of Faith you invite replies on the subject of Utopia. I very much liked Seafarers paragraph quoting from Wilde. The same and previous issues had contributions about reclaiming our symbols and liturgy which assumes that God is a human creation. I have been thinking about this and I thought I would submit the enclosed poem for publication in the magazine (see page 11).

As well as offering some thoughts on the above topics, I strongly disagree with Don Cupitt in the last issue that the four “visionaries” he mentions are the “only really interesting religious figures since the Reformation”. What about the English Revolution, . what about Winstanley, what about Emma Martin and the Communist Church of the 1830’s and so many others? In his Witness against the Beast, EP.

Thompson has shown how Blake was in the tradition of religious and political dissent coming down at least from the English Revolution, his mother may have been Muggletonian, etc. And I certainly don’t rate D-H. Lawrence as Cupitt does!

— Dinah Livingstone, 10 St Martins Close, London NW1 0HR

Dinah Livingstone, 10 St Martins Close, London NW1 OHR Penfriend, please May I appeal for SoF penfriends to discuss theological/philisophical issues with, ie can I be a “rational humanist” and still believe in God? (I believe I can). If anyone can spare some time to exchange views on God/sacredness and rationality so I can refine my ideas I would be very glad.

— Jane Baker, 17 Gorse Hill, Fishponds, Bristol BS16 4EG