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"I'm right, I know I'm right, I'm always right"

The opening address to the Humanist Summer School given by the President of the Humanist Association of Ireland Justin Keating, Carlingford, August 2005.
(Originally published in the October - December 2005 issue of The Irish Humanist, the quarterly publication of the Humanist Association of Ireland.)

It's what my mother-in-law said, but she was seven at the time, what all the major churches say, and, regrettably, what far too many Humanists say. We reject the religious narrative, but we retain a religious method of thinking.

Every great movement has an elephant in its front room, which it pretends does not exist. Ours is Marxism, and subsequently Communism. Wrong to speak of Iron Laws -- there are none. Marx knew no science. And he was extremely dogmatic. Now we are in a position to know better, since the rise of ecology. And above all of the mathematics of complexity and chaos.

So I believe we should offer neither certainty nor scorn. The day after Christmas a tidal wave killed very roughly a quarter of a million people. And in a subsequent issue of' Free Enquiry (Vol 28, No. 3) there were articles by very eminent humanists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens about the tragedy. The tone of these worried me, and I was delighted to see in the next issue a letter from a lady called Susan Bury, who expressed many of my doubts.

I have no specific quote from Dawkins, but I did feel that in the circumstances the quotes from his letters to the Telegraph were "callous". James A. Haught is a journalist in Charleston, West Virginia, who writes in a similar tone, even to describing a group of opponents whom he names as "a bunch of imbeciles". Worst of all is Hitchins. He describes the Archbishop of Canterbury as "a notorious fool who does an almost perfect imitation of a bleating and frightened sheep.", and finally states "faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid." This seems to me abuse and not argument. And it is abuse of the very people I want to talk to.

The two great questions that any writer must answer are "Who do I want to talk to?, and "What result do I want to obtain?" The people that I want to talk to are all those somewhere in the middle, who had the Christian paradigm forced on them when they were defenseless children. They no longer fully believe it but they are not ready to reject it totally. What result do I want to obtain? I certainly don't want to 'win' an argument. A man convinced against his will is of the old opinion still. No honorable Humanist can resort to the very successful techniques of brainwashing, be it of children or adults. While we may very strongly disapprove of religious belief (I certainly do) we must love the believer. What we can give is an empowering viewpoint which faces up to humankind's real problems, like war and environmental destruction; we can argue for the methods of science and reason in dealing with these problems, we can offer responsible and decent behaviour, we can offer solidarity and sympathy and support, we can offer a serene love of life and of humankind and of the earth. We can offer our sense of the awe and beauty and wonder of it all. I think we should learn to speak with doubt, with gentleness and above all with love.