Two annoying news items:
Two items in the news are getting to me at the moment.
First, two churches in this county are getting grants from English Heritage and the Heritage Lottery Fund. Apparently they are two of 24 churches in the Midlands that are going to share £1.6M for conservation.
I can think of quite a few uses for conservation money where the owners of the property concerned are not among the richest landowners in the country. My local paper reports that 160 churches across the UK have received £15M this year - and you can bet that the majority of these are C of E parish churches, attended by almost no-one Sunday by Sunday.
I just don't see why the C of E should get this kind of support.
Second, the Beeb is reporting that an advertisement is being pulled because it offends some Christians. 23 people complained. Well, I know church attendance is falling, but I'd have thought that 23 was a pretty insignificant proportion even of the few that remain.
(As an aside, why is it that when I intend to type church I almost always mistype it crutch?)
Anyway for my money anybody who subscribes to unsubstantiatable, progress-resisting mumbo-jumbo, is fair game for a little leg pulling. I subscribe to a view, which I can defend with example and argument, that the NFL provides better entertainment than any form of football played in this country. I get a fair amount of ribbing for that. So why should people who hold other less defensible positions get a protection I do not?
Ollie Killingback 12 March 2008
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Why Secularism?
Secularists believe that important decisions should always be made by weighing the evidence. No course of action is likely to be advisable if it ignores, or flies in the face of, evidence. Belief alone is not a justification for anything: I may believe that the world is round or flat, that there are aliens among us, that the opinions of someone who lived thousands of years ago are what I should base my life on, that Elvis is still alive or that the Moon landings were all faked, and so on.
A person's beliefs are their own business. But as soon as those beliefs affect the way a person interacts with other people they become a public matter. As soon as they say that their beliefs alone are correct, or that someone else's behaviour should be governed by those beliefs, or that public policy should be determined by those beliefs, or that those beliefs are beyond criticism, we have a problem. And that's what we see happening around us.
Increasingly unjustified and dogmatic beliefs that often ignore or fly in the face of evidence are being foisted upon people by organised religion. Secularism rejects this. Secularism says that public policy should be based on rational enquiry and evidence, that it is too important to allow it to be influenced by what boils down to personal opinion. There is plenty of room for whatever religion anyone wants to practice, provided that religion does not impact in an unjustified and unreasonable way on public policy, or on the way people treat each other.
Unhappily we have reached a point where powerful states and transnational organisations with diametrically opposed religious opinions are armed with terrible weapons and are squaring up to each other. This is a great danger for civilisation. It has the potential to gravely damage or even wipe out human civilisation even before global warming gets a chance to have it's effects.
So locally, nationally and internationally secularists want decisions and policy to be made on rational grounds, justified by sound arguments and evidence, not on dogmatic positions that allow no room for discussion. In fact, they tend to oppose the privileges and certainties that accumulate around religion.
What is humanism?
Humanism is the belief that it is possible to live one's life basing decisions and behaviour on consideration and respect for other human beings, and on rationality and evidence, basing ethics on shared human values. Humanists distrust dogmatic approaches, and do not feel the need for religion.
While there are religious people who call themselves humanists, most humanists are either atheists or agnostics (that is, they do not take a position on the existence of supernatural beings because we cannot know one way or the other). Humanists are not negative or nihilist, they believe that human life is valuable (many would go far beyond that statement) and that we can give life great meaning. But there is no meaning from outside, from a supernatural world.
Since we only have one life, humanists think it is important to live it well, responsibly and to the full. Most of the humanists I have met are very pleasant people to be around.
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