Thought For The World - Nigel Warburton - Death, like love, makes life worth living…

Nigel Warburton

from Think Humanist by Humanist Society of Scotland

Thought for the day - Thursday

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Nigel Warburton 15th February
I was on the train to London a few days ago when, as we were passing through a station at high speed, there was a disconcerting jolt … we went over something on the rails. The train carried on for a few hundred yards, and then stopped… and we waited. There had been an obstruction on the track, we were told, and we had to get clearance. An ‘incident’ had occurred. Nothing more specific. After an hour and a half of waiting, and learning that the driver had had to be replaced, most of us realised what had happened: someone had thrown themselves under the train.

At this point selfish concerns about being late for appointments evaporated considerably. Most people’s thoughts, I suspect, were with the train driver and with the friends and family of whoever had taken this desperate step. But not for too long. We had to get back to our lives despite having been unwilling accomplices in someone else’s suicide. When we eventually pulled into Paddington, we bustled into the underground and got on with whatever we had to do. That’s what being alive is like. It’s a cliché, but still true, that death is all around us, often painful death, but we are shielded from it most of the time.

We rarely encounter death or even give it much thought. But perhaps we should. As a philosopher I think it is something worth thinking about quite hard. I like the classical idea that philosophy should teach us how to accept death. But it can take a real death to focus the mind. If, like me, you believe that death is the end of all experience, then there is great consolation in thinking that when it has happened there won’t be anything else. That’s it.

Epicurus was surely right when he said: when I am there death is not, and when death is there, I am not’. As he pointed out, we don’t worry about the eternity before we existed, why be concerned about the eternity during which we won’t exist in the future?

Atheists often describe believers as indulging in wishful thinking when they claim that there is a wonderful afterlife to come. But from my perspective never-ending life would be a kind of hell that would remove meaning from everything I did, like an interminable piece of music that never reached its final chord. If wishful thinking is believing something that would be pleasanter than the truth, then this is a misnomer. I don’t want what the philosopher Bernard Williams called the sheer tedium of immortality - even if it were an option. What is bad about death is what it does to other people: the ones left behind to grieve, and experience absence. Slow death, and pain in dying are terrible facts of the human condition. But death itself is nothing to fear.

Paradoxically, death, like love, makes life worth living…

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Thought for the World - Julian Baggini - Secularism

Julian Baggini

from Think Humanist by Humanist Society of Scotland

Thought for the day - Monday

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Transcript of Thought For the World's thought for the day

Julian Baggini

18th February 2008

How strange it must feel to be Rowan Williams right now. On the one hand, almost everyone has come down like a ton of bricks on the Archbishop of Canterbury for saying that the introduction of some aspects of sharia law in Britain was unavoidable. But on the other, almost everyone has prefaced their condemnation with remarks to the effect that they greatly respect his humanity and intelligence.

Bishop-baiting may be in, but special respect for religion is not yet out. As it happens, I have rather less respect for Dr Williams, but I also think that, on this issue, he so nearly said something both true and important.

The question he was addressing was how to accommodate deep and real plurality in society without threatening its essential unity. The wrong answer to this is that there should be different laws for people who hold different beliefs. This is a clear non-starter. For one thing, who is to decide to whom such laws would apply? We can't bind people by the religion, or lack of it, of their parents. So the only alternative would be for people to choose themselves which legal code to opt into. This is just absurd. Spirituality has already become something of a pick-and-mix supermarket: law cannot go the same way.

But Williams doesn't want this. For all the stones hastily cast in this debate, the right to throw literal ones was not on his agenda. As has become clearer in recent days, all he meant was that people should have the option of settling some civil disputes through voluntary means of arbitration, and agree to be bound by its conclusion.

There is, and should be, room outside the law for some diversity in how we choose to relate morally to one another. The key distinction here is between laws we all must obey, and practices that can be legally recognised but do not need to be followed by everyone.

A good example of this is gay marriage: the law could recognise this, but that wouldn't, of course, mean there was one law for gays and another for heterosexuals; or that gay marriage was being forced upon the straight community.

Williams's mistake was failing to make clear that the principle of one law for all is sacrosanct.

Secularism requires a neutral public space in which people of all faiths and none can come together to debate and legislate as equals. As long as we maintain this, there is plenty of room in private and community life for people to live by their very different, deeply held beliefs.

Thought For The World - Brett Lock - This Life is the only life we have - Enjoy it!

Brett Lock

from Think Humanist by Humanist Society of Scotland

Thought for the day - Wednesday

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Brett Lock

20th February 2008

Sophicles wrote "No man loves life like he that's growing old", and yet many of us - me included - curse our declining powers. Those of us with no delusions of an afterlife, a second bite of the pie as it were, rue that we are slowing down, filling out, and aching, as Leonard Cohen put it, in the places were we used to play.

All around us, there are reminders of the relentless march of time. Just the other day, I was sitting on a train when the photo on the front page of a newspaper caught my eye. It took me a while to realize that the world-weary, wizen old man on the cover of whatever tabloid it was Paul McCartney, once the most instantly recognizable face in the world.

I turn 40 today. I'm surprised to be here... not because I've ever had any dangerous flirtations with drug abuse, extreme sport or organized crime, no not me, I've always been 'sensible'... My surprise is that I got here so... quickly. The year 2000, and before that 1984, where science-fiction milestones, but are now nostalgia, as I realize that I've probably had more years now than are left to me.

But far from depressing - okay, I confess, it was for a minute or two - the idea that we only have one shot at life is a liberation. It means that we owe it to ourselves to pack in as much as we can in the time we have.

The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that

belief in an afterlife is a far more depressing state than accepting that death comes equally to us as it does to a bug on the windscreen. It is depressing because people do such terrible things to themselves and to others because they believe this life must be sacrificed to gain points in a hereafter.

Whether it is denying oneself the joy of love and companionship because you believe some God frowns on sexuality, or

blowing yourself up in a crowded marketplace because your faith promises a heavenly reward, the belief that this life - this only life - is not important, not precious, not all there is, is the greatest humanitarian tragedy imaginable. Life deferred is life lost.

Well, I must sign off. There are places to go, things to do, people to meet, and a finite amount of time to do it in.

If there were sin, mine would have been that I have taken time for granted. I have passed on opportunities; I have let friendships slip away. I've stayed in when I should have gone out to play.

But no more, from today I shall let go of these regrets. There is more life to snatch for the willing, for the bold. Yes indeed, no man loves life like he that's growing old.

Thought for the World - Christopher Brookmyre - Religion is like a cantankerous & malevolent relative on a car journey.

Christopher Brookmyre

from Think Humanist by Humanist Society of Scotland

Thought for the day - Thursday

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Christopher Brookmyre

21st February 2008

It was Shrove Tuesday recently, which reminded me that the Catholic period of Lent is underway. I like to be reminded that Lent is underway, because it always cheers me up to contemplate that I have had nothing to do with it throughout my adult life. My childhood experience of Lent was of being told we had to give up things that we enjoyed, for reasons that remain very poorly defined to this day. If memory serves, the scriptural explanation was something to do with Jesus going on some kind of extreme asceticism trip while the devil was trying to illegally tap him up for a Bosman transfer to the dark side. My ability to say no to Satan was apparently going to be vastly enhanced by practicing my ability to say no to Midget Gems and Liquorice Comfits.

At the very least, we were told, Lent was good for instilling self-discipline, and helped you develop will-power. However, in my experience, the weans who already had self-discipline and will-power were the only ones who were able to give things up for Lent, so let�s get that particular cart back behind the horse where it belongs.

Lent is a horrible concept, dreamt up by people who obviously thought that February and March aren't quite miserable enough what with it being wet, freezing and blowing a gale all the time.

I can't think of another period on the calendar that better illustrates how the principle practical consequence of religion is to make life harder than it needs to be. If life is a journey, then religion is the cantankerous and malevolent elderly relative your parents insist on bringing along for the trip.

Let's call her "Great Auntie Joy". She criticises the driving, moans about the route you're taking, and generally makes the journey far less enjoyable than it would have been if she'd never been allowed inside the car.

"Turn off the radio," she says. "Don't read in the back seat. Don't eat sweets. Stop talking."

Your mum and dad tell you to do as she asks. They don't offer any reason why, only that Auntie Joy said so, and Auntie Joy must be respected. "But why do we have to bring Auntie Joy?" you ask. "She always ruins the trip." Mum and Dad say we have to bring her because we've always brought her. And they tell you that if you knuckle under and keep on the right side of her, Auntie Joy might give you a treat when you reach your destination.

I think we should leave Auntie Joy at the side of the road and get on with enjoying the journey. And before we've even driven a mile without her, mum and dad will be wondering why they ever brought her in the first place. Enjoy the trip. Ditch the bitch. She won't be missed.

Thought For The World - Stephen Law - What is the difference between political schools and faith schools?

Stephen Law

from Think Humanist by Humanist Society of Scotland

Thought for the day - Friday

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Stephen Law

15th February 2008

The last century or so has seen some huge improvements in our moral attiutdes. Many of these improvements concern discrimination and prejudice. It is no longer considered morally or legally acceptable to refuse to employ women, or homosexuals, or those of other races.

Nowadays, the suspicion that we are being unfairly discriminated against is widespread. Take religious discrimination, for example.

Recently, some Christians have complained that schools are permitting Sikhs to wear turbans, but are not permitting Christians to wear crucifixes. They claim this is unfair discrimination against Christians.

In order to assess whether such claims of unfair discrimination are warranted, we need to be clear what we mean by discrimination, and under what circumstances it is warranted.

The kind of discrimination I'm going to focus on is where a society or organization extends certain rights or other privileges to some, but not to others.

Actually, this sort of discrimination is not always a bad thing. Adults discriminate against children, for example. We don't allow them to drive cars, or vote. But this discrimination is justified. There are obvious differences between adults and children that explain why this discrimination is fair - most children are not sufficiently mature and responsible enough to vote or drive.

Preventing women, or those of other races, from voting and driving, on the other hand, is morally wrong. Yes, women are different to men, but these biological differences do not justify withholding the vote from women. Nor are differences in skin colour relevant to our ability to drive.

That's not to say that racial and sexual discrimination is always wrong. Women are entitled to breast screening. Men aren't. Is that unfair? Of course not. There are biological differences between men and women that justify this difference in treatment. These biological differences may be irrelevant when it comes to the vote, but they can be very relevant indeed when it comes to medical matters.

So, discrimination is not always wrong. In fact, discriminating on the basis of sex or race is not always wrong.

What makes discrimination wrong is when it is morally unjustified.

The moral is this. If we want to extend to some rights and privileges that we then withhold from others, the onus is on us to identify not just some difference between the two groups, but some morally relevant difference that justifies this difference in treatment.

If we can't meet this challenge, then we will rightly stand accused of prejudice.

Let me leave you with an example of this challenge in action.

Suppose political schools started opening up and down the country - a communist school in Putney followed by a neo-conservative school in Billericay. Suppose these schools select pupils on the basis of parents political beliefs. Suppose that each day begins with the collective singing of political anthems. Suppose children are expected to accept the teaching to be found in the schools revered political texts. Suppose that portraits of political leaders beam down from classroom walls.

What would be the public's reaction to such schools? Outrage. These schools would rightly be accused of educationally children - of forcing their minds into politically-approved moulds. They are the kind of schools we find under totalitarian political regimes, such as Stalin's Russia or Mao's China.

But notice that, if we cross out the word "political" and write "religious", we find that there are already many hundreds of such schools up and down the country. Many are state-funded.

Is this discrimination justified? Why, if political schools are totally unacceptable, do we deem their religious equivalents to be acceptable, or even desirable? What's the difference between religious beliefs and other political beliefs that justifies such dramatically different attitudes?

Perhaps there is such a difference. But unless we can identify it, we will rightly stand accused of pro-religious prejudice.

Thought for the World - Julian Baggini - Is religion a hapless Panda?

Julian Baggini

from Think Humanist by Humanist Society of Scotland

Thought for the day - Friday

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Thought For The Day
Transcript Julian Baggini 16th February 2007
Isaiah Berlin divided thinkers up into either hedgehogs or foxes, depending on whether they knew one thing or many. I’d like to propose another mammalian distinction, one of belief systems rather than individuals, between squirrels and pandas.

To some squirrels are adorable little critters; to others, they are rats with bushy tails who should be wiped out. But whatever you think of them, they thrive and propagate in the wild, without artificial assistance. Pandas, in contrast, are doomed to die out without special protection and nurturing.

From where I’m standing, both religion and atheism look squirrel-like to me. Provoking affection and scorn in equal measure, both are to be found everywhere human life flourishes.

But some people who claim to be friends of religion seem to want to treat it as though it were a panda, and afford it special protection.

Sometimes it is placed in relatively pokey sanctuaries, like a ring-fenced period of time in the television or radio schedules; or a small prayer room. On other occasions the protected zone can be more extensive, such as when it means reserving seats in the second chamber of parliament for representatives of religions, or allowing denominational and single-faith schools.

If I were religious I’d be concerned that my faith were being treated as though it were a species of belief so unable to cope in the modern, harsh world that it needed its own special conservation zones to stop it going extinct.

It may be objected that a scared space is needed, not because religion is weak and vulnerable, but because society is now overwhelmingly secular. But this is a peculiar argument.

Our supposedly secular society is not an atheist one. It is simply neutral as regards matters of fundamental belief, so religion is no more in need of a sanctuary from the secular world as any other form of belief, including atheism.

For those who care about religion, there is also a worry that segregation sends out a signal that it stands apart from the business of everyday life. By separating faith schools from other schools, faith programmes from other broadcasts, faith groups from other voluntary organisations, doesn’t it give ammunition to critics who maintain that religion has nothing to do with the everyday life of ordinary people?

The challenge to religion’s various claims to special status is therefore not essentially anti-religious at all. If religion is real, relevant and vibrant, then let it enter the mainstream on all fours with other species of belief and show itself fit. Only if it were impotent and maladapted, like the hapless Panda, would it need special, protected spaces.

Thought for the World - Kate Hudson - change the world and make it better for everybody

Kate Hudson

from Think Humanist by Humanist Society of Scotland

Thought for the day - Wednesday

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http://www.thoughtfortheworld.org/p.php?file=2007-02-12_katehudson.mp3

http://www.thoughtfortheworld.org/pdf/transcript_KH.pdf

Thought For The Day Transcript
Kate Hudson 14th February 2007
One day, when I was a child, my father put a poster up at home.

It was a quotation from Che Guevara, and it said, 'Let me say, at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.'

It somehow seemed compelling but I wasn't quite sure what it meant. My father was happy to explain:

'It means he will act to try and change the world and make it better for everybody, because he loves all people, not just a few'.

The all-embracing nature of that love seemed remarkable to me, and the active nature of it too. That one sentence has inspired me probably more than anything else.

In recent years that sentence has come to my mind again, as I have become more involved with the peace movement. As a CND activist, I've had the privilege to meet a great number of people who've worked tirelessly, often over many decades, to try and prevent the suffering and sorrow of war, and to ensure that the great tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will never be repeated.

Indeed, the story of CND is the story of ordinary people's struggles: to shape a world without nuclear weapons and war, based on legality and morality; to make our governments responsive and accountable over our right to stay alive, our right to breathe air free of radioactive pollution, our right to say no to the indiscriminate killing of other peoples. Whether or not the individuals involved would think of it in this way or not, I don't know, but I would say they are motivated by a love for humanity.

And I certainly don't think this is a minority sentiment in society. I was very struck, by the selfless motivation of those who protested against war on Iraq on February 15th, 2003. Before the big antiwar demos of recent years, the largest demonstrations since the second world war had been the CND marches of the early 1980s. People demonstrated in their hundreds of thousands against siting cruise missiles in Britain, because they feared that a nuclear war would be fought in Europe. This was a matter of life and death to us, and we protested for our own survival. But when 2 million people demonstrated on February 15th 2003, they were not marching to protect themselves. They were protesting against a war on a country they will never see, for a people they will never know.

For me, that demonstration was a true expression of love for humanity, in action. For me, that love for humanity is the true heart of the peace movement, and it is something that we can all share and demonstrate.

Thought For The World - Stewart Lee - Teach all religion as myths to children

Stewart Lee

from Think Humanist by Humanist Society of Scotland

Thought for the day - Tuesday

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Thought For The Day Transcript
Stewart Lee 13th February
Last year, as I crossed a picket-line of religious protesters trying to ban a theatre piece I’d cowritten, a phrase popped unbidden into my head. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Few would disagree that the stories and sayings of religions and myths are an unavoidable part of the imaginative fabric of our daily lives, whether one accepts them as literal truth or not. From Jesus’ wise words to his tormentors on the cross, to Odysseus’ cunning use of the Trojan Horse,

everyday language is consistently and quietly informed by religion and myth.

But should this source material be available as imaginative resources for everyone, or should its usage be restricted?

Last month, at The Bush theatre in London, I performed a one-man show about the last week of Jesus’ life, as seen through the eyes of his disciple Judas. On some nights, I was aware of the predictable and menacing presence of believers looking to object, but I also had lots of positive feedback from thoughtful priests and enthusiastic secularists alike.

Two years ago, right-wing Christian fundamentalists closed down the theatre piece I co-wrote, Jerry Springer The Opera, due to its religious content. Ongoing attempts to take us to court for blasphemy, and a general doubt over religious freedom of expression introduced by the government's failed Incitement To Religious Hatred bill led to the collapse of the Opera as a financially or artistically viable entity.

So given this, why return to religious themes for a new work? Well, it’s thirty years now since half of the population, as one, watched The Morecambe and Wise Christmas show together at the same time, and even longer since the majority of the nation claimed to believe in the same God, or indeed any God indeed. We live in a society where common ground is increasingly hard to find, where communal points of reference are increasingly rare. Multi-channel media narrowcasts to ever-more focused demographics rather than broadcasting to broad ones.

But what better way is there to look at, as we did in the opera for example, the most essential notions of good and evil than through the Christian vision of heaven and hell in conflict, what better known tale of betrayal is there than the story of Judas and Jesus?

Believers say religious stories survive because they are literally true, but even rationalists accept that religious tales, myths and folk-stories, while not always actually true, can be true in terms of what they tell us about human experience. As rationalists, we should be careful, in trying to block religious education in its most pernicious forms, that we do not prevent young people from accessing a treasure trove of invaluable material. As I travelled the country defending the opera, meatheads made the banal point that we would not have used the Koran in the same way as we appropriated the bible. They attributed this to fear, which is understandable, but ignored the fact that there would be little point in using Islamic stories as a short cut to bigger ideas, when they are not commonly understood by most people in the

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Thought For The World - Tolerance should not be tolerant of the intolerant

AC Grayling

from Think Humanist by Humanist Society of Scotland

Thought for the day - Monday - Darwin Day

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A.C. Grayling 12th February 2007
One of the essentials of a good community that is, a community in which each of us can build flourishing lives for ourselves and those we care about, is tolerance. Tolerance matters for the obvious reason that the diversity of interests and desires people have is sometimes so great that we don't even understand why others should think and behave as they do; and yet we acknowledge their right to do so, because we cherish the same right for ourselves.

Thus the very possibility of society turns on tolerance. Society involves people getting along peacefully all the time and co-operatively most of the time, and neither is possible unless people recognise the entitlement of others to their choices, and give them space accordingly.

But here, of course, is the familiar rub: the paradox of tolerance, which is that a tolerant society is at risk of tolerating those who are intolerant, and allowing movements to grow which foster intolerance.

The profoundly dismaying spectacle of the contemporary Netherlands illustrates this point. What was one of the most inclusive and welcoming societies in Europe has been stabbed in the heart by people it sheltered and who have grown into intolerant activists wishing to impose conformity and censorship on others by violence. And alas, it has happened here too.

The remedy for the paradox of tolerance is, of course, that tolerance can't tolerate intolerance. But this truism is often greeted with the response that if tolerance is intolerant of something, it is in breach of itself: it becomes self-defeating in another way.

The answer is to insist that although it's natural to think that tolerance is a warm, woolly, feel-good attitude, in fact it is a principle: it's an ethical demand that everyone should respect everyone else's rights and liberties. And this does the trick all by itself. Tolerance is not a demand to license just anything whatever, least of all behaviour that threatens the rights of others.

Tolerance thus has its central place in the good society along with other principles that stop it from being a merely flabby acceptance that anything goes. These are the principles of pluralism and individual liberty, which essentially require tolerance, but indicate its rational limit. Insisting on this vital point is what explains why tolerance not only cannot but must not tolerate intolerance.