More couples decide to tie the knot with humanism

Humanist weddings are now the fourth most popular kind among those classified as choosing a religious ceremony.

The fact that they are bracketed with the religious for number-crunching purposes annoys many humanists, but in this instance, the lumping together of religion and humanism is telling.

In the "God wars" of recent years, led by vocal atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the central assumption has been that religion is essentially characterised by its belief in supernatural entities, and that since these evidently do not exist, neither should religion. This assault on faith has ignored many of the reasons for religion's appeal. Think, for example, of why some Christians belong to the orthodox churches and others are Roman Catholics. Is it because they have reached a considered judgment on the filioque question - whether Christ proceeds from the father or is one with him? My bet is that most aren't even clear what's at stake in this supposedly core doctrinal difference between the orthodox and Catholic churches.

The reason most members of a church don't worry about this is that, in practice, they don't worry much about what they believe at all.

What they get from their religion is much more difficult to pin down. It includes a sense of something greater and other: a tradition; a community; a way of orienting oneself to life and morality; and a structure for marking the key stages in birth, life and death. Creeds are recited, for sure, often with sincerity, but rather than being at the heart of the religion, they are some of the least important things about it.

That's why all religions can adapt their beliefs, often quite dramatically, to changing times and circumstances. In Haiti, for instance, many people practise both Catholicism and voodoo, which are logically incompatible.

Humanism doesn't exert the same hold on those who believe its basic tenets. Many more people are broadly humanist than would describe themselves as such. But humanism doesn't give shape to life and community in the way that religions do. By its nature, humanism encourages independence of thought, which is the last thing a movement that seeks active, committed members should do. The strength of humanism is, or should be, the centrality of reason, and the strength of religion is the opposite: not blind faith, but the priority of practice, ritual and tradition over cerebral matters of theology or philosophy.

Humanist weddings, and other ceremonies, are unusual in that they provide a like-for-like replacement for what religions offer. Since people will always want to mark significant events in life in a shared, public way, once humanist weddings were made legal in Scotland it was inevitable that those who held broadly humanist views would take them up.

But I do not expect humanism as a mass movement to gain much from this.

The wedding statistics show the limitations as well as the strengths of humanism as an organised movement.

The self-limiting paradox of humanism is that it is most popular when it does what religions would otherwise do; but it would not be humanism if it tried to do all that religions have done.

Humanist weddings are now the fourth most popular kind among those classified as choosing a religious ceremony.

The fact that they are bracketed with the religious for number-crunching purposes annoys many humanists, but in this instance, the lumping together of religion and humanism is telling.

In the "God wars" of recent years, led by vocal atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the central assumption has been that religion is essentially characterised by its belief in supernatural entities, and that since these evidently do not exist, neither should religion. This assault on faith has ignored many of the reasons for religion's appeal. Think, for example, of why some Christians belong to the orthodox churches and others are Roman Catholics. Is it because they have reached a considered judgment on the filioque question - whether Christ proceeds from the father or is one with him? My bet is that most aren't even clear what's at stake in this supposedly core doctrinal difference between the orthodox and Catholic churches.

The reason most members of a church don't worry about this is that, in practice, they don't worry much about what they believe at all.

What they get from their religion is much more difficult to pin down. It includes a sense of something greater and other: a tradition; a community; a way of orienting oneself to life and morality; and a structure for marking the key stages in birth, life and death.

Creeds are recited, for sure, often with sincerity, but rather than being at the heart of the religion, they are some of the least important things about it. That's why all religions can adapt their beliefs, often quite dramatically, to changing times and circumstances. In Haiti, for instance, many people practise both Catholicism and voodoo, which are logically incompatible.

Humanism doesn't exert the same hold on those who believe its basic tenets. Many more people are broadly humanist than would describe themselves as such. But humanism doesn't give shape to life and community in the way that religions do.

By its nature, humanism encourages independence of thought, which is the last thing a movement that seeks active, committed members should do.

The strength of humanism is, or should be, the centrality of reason, and the strength of religion is the opposite: not blind faith, but the priority of practice, ritual and tradition over cerebral matters of theology or philosophy.

Humanist weddings, and other ceremonies, are unusual in that they provide a like-for-like replacement for what religions offer. Since people will always want to mark significant events in life in a shared, public way, once humanist weddings were made legal in Scotland it was inevitable that those who held broadly humanist views would take them up.

But I do not expect humanism as a mass movement to gain much from this. The wedding statistics show the limitations as well as the strengths of humanism as an organised movement. The self-limiting paradox of humanism is that it is most popular when it does what religions would otherwise do; but it would not be humanism if it tried to do all that religions have done.