Being Humanist

Martin Willett, July 2009

You can stop your praying now, I am no longer an atheist.

A few weeks ago I asked Christians to pray for me [page removed] so that I could become a Christian too. Now I ask them all to stop. After thirty four years I am no longer calling myself an atheist.

The reason I no longer call myself an atheist is that it is a wishy-washy word that suggests that there are gods out there to be believed in and that believing in them is somehow normal. Atheism is far too negative a concept to be the primary description of my stance and beliefs. From now on I shall call myself a secular humanist. Secular humanism is a positive belief system, atheism is merely the absence of a presumed default position. How dare they assume that belief in God or gods is somehow normal!

Of course I am not a theist, and so technically that means I am an atheist, but that is with a small a for both am and atheist. An atheist is not what I Am. What I am is a secular humanist. I believe that religion should be kept out of politics and government, that government should not look upon religion as a good thing or something to be encouraged. I see all forms of religion as damaging. That is a political stance. I don't have any religion and my not having a religion is a political stance. Secular humanism is about politics, I reject the idea of trying to create an alternative secular religion, there is nothing good to be found in religion. I see the best way to see the back of religion for good, for the good of our species, is to be through making religion irrelevant and redundant rather than by attacking it with punitive laws. All we need to do is to remove all the privileges of religion, wherever we find them. Superstition and irrational belief has no right to special protection.

We should

Disestablish the Church of England, remove any link between the crown, the state and the church.
Abolish all state funded “faith schools”, taking them into state ownership and local authority control or remove them from the public sector
Remove charitable status from all religious organizations. Charities should renounce their links to religions or lose their special legal protection and tax status, charities should ignore religion, if an organization gives aid only in the name of a religion or only to those of a particular religion it should not receive charitable status from the state.
Replace compulsory religious education with ethical education and offer optional courses in comparative religion starting at a minimum age of 13. No courses covering a only single religion should be offered in any school, state or private.
No conscientious objection should be allowed from sex education, civics, ethics or comparative religion classes on the grounds of the parents' religious sensibilities or the claimed religion of a minor.
Give active consideration to the changing of the national flags to remove religious symbols: religions have no right to demand that patriots swear loyalty to their religion's symbols.
End the practice of teaching that religion should never be discussed or criticized.
Level the playing field with respect to marriage, allowing religious organizations to conduct marriages recognized by the state if the ceremonies are conducted in public places which do not forbid the presence of “infidels”, demand segregation of the sexes or impose a restrictive dress code. e.g. There should be access for the blind with guide dogs and without having to take off their shoes, cover or uncover their head or proclaim belief or respect for any deity.

Beyond that religion should be free, as free as any other non-state legal organization such as the Football Association or the Campaign for Real Ale, free to operate within the law without government interference, concern or support. The state should regard religion as something that some people want to engage in and others do not, just like a hobby, and not something that the state should get directly involved in or regard as worth promoting at the expense of other activities. There is a general misconception that anything that is legal should somehow be encouraged by society and the state, this is absurd. Religion should be regarded by the state in the same way as professional wrestling or dwarf tossing, it should be allowed to exist and it should be allowed to die out, it should not be regarded as something that is worth preserving simply because it has already survived for too long.

Of course I still regard myself as an atheist but it is not really what I am, it is the correct call when given two or three limited options. Am I religious or an atheist? I am an atheist. I am also an agnostic in that I do not know there is not a god or gods. It is not a matter that can be known as far as I can see but if I proclaimed myself as an agnostic many Christians would interpret that as me inviting a bit more effort to convert me to the true faith.

I am also a Bright, a person who acknowledges no supernatural explanations. This is better than atheist as a label as it puts my atheism into context as merely part of a much wider stance or rejecting all forms of supernatural belief such as fate, spirits and souls. But the problem with Bright as a label is that it is clearly freshly minted and it is difficult to even read it without seeing somebody doing huge exaggerated air quotes around it every time it is used. In contrast secular humanist is a label which has a bit of history behind it. People are very resistant to the deliberate creation of new words. Having a clear origin and purpose makes people reluctant to use a new word largely because it is seen as somebody else's word rather than just a word that anybody can pick up.

It is of course possible to be a secular humanist and have a belief in a god, gods or the supernatural, just as it is possible to be a fan of The Village People and be straight. If you say you are a secular humanist the assumption is you are probably an atheist but it is not part of the definition. Secular humanist also goes beyond belief, knowledge and assumptions into being a positive philosophy. The lyrics of Imagine suggest a secular humanist stance. The song does not say that there is no god or that the concept of gods is absurd it suggests that we would do well to operate as if there were no gods and no afterlife, that is a secular humanist approach. We would be significantly better off if we put aside all forms of superstition and beliefs in the supernatural and religions that divide us and instead come together as people. All humanity shares common goals of peace, trade and the quest for knowledge.

If you choose twenty people from across the planet at random you are almost bound to have at least one Christian and one Muslim in your net. What they have in common as religious believers is not very impressive, they are similar in the way that dogs are similar to horses, but as human beings what they have in common is much more impressive. If only Shakespeare had known some more modern science he could have made Shylock's “cut us do we not bleed” speech significantly more impressive. The concept of a brotherhood of Muslims or Christians is thoroughly evil and damaging, a permanent source for potential conflict just waiting for a spark to ignite it. Anything which draws a fundamental distinction between them and us is a potential source for a cleavage which may result in hostility. Religion is not alone in this, other cleavages exist between races and language groups. The distinction is that religion is artificial and optional, it is a cause for war that we can well do without. In contrast language and racial distinctions are real, but there is no reason to imagine that they must either endure for ever or be a reason to go to war. Abolishing the central role of religion in public life and at the heart of personal and national identity will not abolish war, just as stopping smoking will not make you immortal but it is a blindingly obvious first big step to take.

Religion is by far the biggest single cause for warfare and hostility in our species today. Our social and economic structures have grown so fast that we have left behind any possibility of a genetic basis for hostility. It is never in the genetic interests of a modern man to go to war, he has nothing to gain and everything to lose. War began in our deep past as biologically driven, it made sense to war for territory and breeding females, as Common Chimpanzees do. By the time small close family bands gave way to tribes the genetic advantage and purpose of war evaporated, it is only in really backward areas such as New Guinea and the Appalachian mountains that kinship feuds have any lingering genetic drivers behind them.

“Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship ...Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.”

Hermann Goering, Luftwaffe Commander, Nuremberg Trials 1946

For the vast majority of people today war is simply a bad thing, a risk not worth taking, the only people who can ever expect to do better through war are those who are truly oppressed under the status quo. Of course wars always offer opportunities that can be grasped and some people do well out of wars as the stakes are raised. Some people can do really well out of a war: Eisenhower, De Gaulle and Tito clearly had a good war, but Joseph Kennedy Junior did not, as a rule sitting it out well away from harm's way paid better odds, as found by Frank Sinatra, John Wayne and Ronald Reagan. For the species as a whole it is clear that war is a bad thing, the loses of the losers more than outweigh the wins of the winners, peace pays a real dividend to the whole of mankind, war only to a minority of winners.

To make out that religion was the root of all evil would be absurd. It is not religion that causes the problem but a particular kind of mindset that goes along well with religion, the concept that the end justifies the means, the idea that ideas can be suppressed by suppressing the people who hold them and the idea that faith is a virtue.

Some religions are relatively benign and do little more than waste their believers' time but nasty religions can also survive in more benign forms waiting for their opportunity to morph into something much nastier. Americans looking at their own Muslim population often struggle to see what the problem with Islam is, because it is not manifested in America today. Islam in the USA is a small minority religion, it spreads by a little conversion, a little intermarriage and quite a lot of breeding. American Islam is rather similar to Islam in Britain twenty five years ago, far too small and weak to be a threat to anybody, far too weak to flex any muscle. That is how Islam operates. When the numbers are small they ask for tolerance and increase their numbers. As they grow in numbers they change from asking for tolerance to demanding respect, but in the way that gangsters do, not by demonstrating that they deserve it but by using unreasonable behaviour to get the world to give it to them. If their numbers grow larger still they will seek a slice of power, then a big share of power, then all the power. Once they have all the power they will read those other parts of the Qur'an which tell them that a Muslim government should not be tolerant and infidels should be crushed. This pattern can be observed throughout the world. Only in a few places does secularism flourish in a country with a large Muslim population, such places are of course much better places to live than those places where Islam is intolerant.

You will be able to notice a clear pattern in migration, places where Islam is in control attract no immigrants. The only reason people ever go to live in a Muslim country from a non-Muslim country is to make money from doing the work oil-rich Muslims are too stupid, incompetent or lazy to do themselves or to hide their own wealth from taxation by living in a country that doesn't need to tax anybody because it has so much oil money around that it need not bother to raise taxes, fair or otherwise. When government money is simply pumped out of the ground what mechanisms exist to keep the leaders honest, fair and respectful of the rights of their citizens? None whatsoever.

Muslims regularly stream out of Muslim countries looking for the good life their own co-religionists cannot manage to produce. Islam does not encourage science. Islamic rules on “usury” reduce the options in business finance. Islamic culture allows corruption and nepotism to run rampant by seeing them as almost virtuous natural practices. Fundamentally Islam creates problems for a society because it does not recognize a separation of religious and secular authority and government. Muhammad was a prophet, religious leader and a desert bandit turned warlord and king. Muhammad's rule has become the Islamic model, the religious empire, the caliphate or its successor the Ottoman Empire. In contrast Christianity always made a distinction between church and state, between God and Caesar, so in that respect Christianity is distinctly superior, or perhaps it would be better to say the lesser of two evils.

Judaism is of course just a tribal religion, and unable to become a great world religion because of its tribal nature. The only special thing about the Jews is that because of their geographical location near the site where food production began they happened to have copped for the distinction of being the first literate society to develop the hideously dangerous doctrine of monotheism. The monotheism of the Jews developed over time, starting out as just a variant of the normal run of the mill polytheism with the Jews having one special god who was jealous of any attention given to any other gods. This gradually developed into the idea that there was only the one god and that being jealous of non-existent gods was somehow normal.

Trying to organize atheists has often been likened to herding cats. I have come across a lot of hostility to the label of Bright by people who are thoroughly entitled to choose it as a label. They don't like it, often for reasons they can't easily understand or they can't express very well. Similarly I have been reluctant to accept the label of secular humanist for a long time for reasons which I found difficult to understand myself. Often all it takes to change somebody from one mindset to another is a sort of mental trip. You can argue with somebody until you are blue in the face and nothing will happen and then some weeks later they'll just come around and accept the argument. This seems to be what has happened to me with secular humanism, I just sort of forgot that I wasn't a secular humanist and realized that actually, yes, of course that's what I am.

This conversion has given me some more confidence to carry on what I have been doing. I am sowing seeds. I cannot make anybody change their views in direct head-on debate. What I can do is give people reasons and arguments and to lead by example, showing that it is perfectly reasonable to live without a belief in any gods, souls, afterlife or ultimate purpose. I do not expect to create lots of converts who will thank me for converting them or even perhaps be aware that my ideas have shaped their thinking but I do aim to ensure that many people do have their minds changed. This website exists to change minds, to increase the number of people who are happy to identify themselves as atheist, or non-religious, or agnostic or secular humanist, or Bright, or rationalist, or monist or anti-theist. The labels don't really matter very much. The important thing is to recognize that faith is not a virtue, that religion is dangerous and that it is not something which our societies should be encouraging. The idea that religion is unquestionably a good thing should be challenged. It isn't a good thing. It is dangerous. Religion causes division between people and feeds hatred. Religion hijacks everything good about humanity and makes out that it is the source of all goodness.

Religion is the Great Hijacker (YouTube video playlist)

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Being Humanist

Martin Willett, July 2009

Hermann Goering, Luftwaffe Commander, Nuremberg Trials 1946

Atheism | Politics | Life | Feedback | Email | Search | Forum | Blog | Home

© 1999 - 2011 by Martin Willett.

mwillett.org: Debate Unlimited