IMAGINE THERE'S NO HELL!

Imagine there's no heaven, no divine revelations, no suprahuman moral code, no God, no son of God, no holy prophet(s), in fact...no religion! Imagine that human beings are not the imperfect images of some Supreme Being and that there is nothing more 'special' about humanity than the series of random physical and chemical interactions that resulted in carbon-based sentient life forms on the planet Earth (through sheer chance). To a conventionally religious person, that's pretty startling stuff. To a person like myself, it's simply the logical and intuitively natural result of intense reflection upon life. Such a world-view by necessity presupposes that we alone are responsible for creating our own values and meaning in our lives, that there is no erstwhile 'Ultimate Meaning' to the fact of human existence;  that we must apply the tools of human reason, compassion, and understanding to assure the best possible quality of life for all living things, both sentient and non-sentient, that co-populate the planet we populate.

I recently subscribed to a magazine called FREE INQUIRY, published by the Council for Secular Humanism in Amhurst New York (USA). I was gratified to find that not only does this magazine vindicate the views I have held for most of my life, there are a great many others on the planet who share similar views  (that religion is probably one of the most dangerous philosophical toxins in existence and that belief in a supreme being functionally abnegates, to a great degree, acceptance of personal responsibility for our lives and the appropriate conduct of them). The thoughts expressed above are largely taken from a compilation of opinions (on the subject of secular humanism by a range of individuals) titled Imagine There's No Heaven: Voices of Secular Humanism, but they could have come from my own writing and notes set down much earlier in my life.

Although I was inoculated with religion as a child, being given at various times (up to the age of 14) Catholic, Presbyterian, and finally Episcopalian booster shots of religious dogma, by the time I was a freshman in high school I had largely decided that so-called 'organised religion' was a lot of very odoriferous shit. Despite the fact that my mother was a devout Anglican and contrary to the precepts of my service as an 'alter boy' during Sunday church services, it  frankly took no great feat of mental gymnastics to see through all the religious flim-flam, the symbolic rituals, the group delusions, and the weekly priestly theological exhortations, and throw off the yoke of religious mysticism to embrace the fact that we human beings are even more alone in this vast, unending Universe than we think! This development was undoubtedly helped along by the fact that I was early-on an enthusiastic science-fiction fan and omnivorous reader of a broad range of subject matter; it certainly would never have occurred had I been limited to a strict diet of conventional bible lessons during that terribly vulnerable period of immature youthfulness when the juvenile mind is best compared to a sponge.

At any rate, this chasm of outlook created quite a yawning gulf between my mother and myself for the rest of our lives, from my high school years onward. It's a pity that my mother, a well-educated, broadly schooled, and intuitively intelligent woman, persisted in clinging to her Christian beliefs that a Heavenly reward lay awaiting her, across the threshold of oblivion. However, I have always felt that each person is free to develop his or her own ideas on such matters, since that space between birth and death must be filled with some sort of structured belief or we'd all end up as gibbering idiots (this reflects Marcus Aurelius Antonius' expressed sentiment in his Meditations that "...the aim of life is not to be part of the majority, but to keep from joining the ranks of the insane", or words to that effect). In that sense, better benign religious benevolence than amoral depravity or abject bestiality. This acceptance of my mother's unshakable belief in a Christian 'God' did not keep me from secretly pitying her, nor did it obviate a certain sense of scorn I felt for the persistence of her beliefs, despite the high degree of education and intelligence she possessed. I cannot count the times I wished she were free of those religious delusions, however, since we could never be close with that sort of basic disparity in intellectual outlooks; as a result we never had the sort of loving relationship that every child needs. 

The fact that I was (and am) a 'non-believer' in any sort of religious mumbo-jumbo plunged me into a sort of lonely social limbo at an early age and it unquestionably helped mark me as radically 'different' from my peers, who were all good little God-fearing Baptists, Mennonites, Catholics, Jehovah's Witnesses, Latter Day Saints, or what have you. It also helped me frame the world of human experience in a sometimes frighteningly bright focus that I believe was more notably free of prejudices and biases than that of my friends. Not a comfortable situation to be in, of course, since it takes little courage to believe in SOMETHING and exceptional courage to accept the fact that there is absolutely NOTHING in all of human experience worthy of pure faith...other than the more highly principled conventions of humanity. But that's enough of my own personal background in the greater context of secular humanism. The present point is, it was refreshing to recently stumble upon the official publication of a group that also shares these outlooks. 

The 'Affirmations of Humanism: A Statement of Principles' sums up the guiding precepts of secular humanism fairly well. I have taken the liberty of reproducing them below, at the bottom of this page. They state, as well as any words may in a compact venue of this type, what non-God-fearing human beings ought to believe in and illustrate why the philosophy of secular humanism is the ONLY rational salvation possible for this ravaged, exploited planetary ecosystem.

As I have read through many of the articles, papers, and opinions found in this group's publications, I have found much merit and many resonant vibrations. A case in point: A treatise by Oxford University professor Richard Dawkins titled "Viruses of the Mind", that was originally delivered as the 1992 Voltaire Lecture (sponsored by the British Humanist Association), strikes a chord with this segment associated with a subject that has always pushed my buttons...the 'reversed ball cap'.  Dawkins draws parallels between the viruses that afflict computer programming and 'viruses' (ideas) that similarly impact the human mind (also a computer, of course), but in the course of his discussion, he uses the following illustration. "Less portentous and again especially prominent in children, the 'craze' is a striking example of behavior that owes more to epidemiology than to rational choice. Yo-yos, hula-hoops, and pogo sticks, with their associated behavior fixed patterns, sweep through schools, and more sporadically leap from school to school, in ways that differ from a measles epidemic in no serious particular. Ten years ago, you could have traveled thousands of miles through the United States and never seen a baseball cap turned front to rear. Today, the reversed ball cap is ubiquitous. I do not know what the pattern of geographic spread of the reversed ball cap was precisely, but epidemiology is certainly among the professions primarily qualified to study it. We don't have to get into arguments about "determinism"; we don't have to claim that children are compelled to imitate their peers' hat fashions. It is enough that their hat wearing behavior, as a matter of fact, is statistically affected by the hat wearing behaviors of their fellows." 

Dawkins goes on to say "Trivial though they are, crazes provide us with yet more circumstantial evidence that human minds, especially perhaps juvenile (i.e. immature or incompletely formed mentalities) ones, have the qualities that we have singled out as desirable for an informational parasite. At the very least, the human mind is a plausible candidate for infection by something like a computer virus, even if it is not quite such a parasite's dream-environment as a cell nucleus or an electronic system unit. Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are great that you won't know it, and may in fact even vigorously deny it. Accepting that a virus might be difficult to detect in your mind, what telltale signs might you look out for? I shall answer by imagining how a medical text might describe the typical symptoms of a sufferer (arbitrarily assumed to be male).

1) The patient typically finds himself impelled by some deep, inner conviction that something is true, or right, or virtuous (or even 'cool'): a conviction that doesn't seem to owe anything to evidence or reason, but which nevertheless, he feels as totally compelling and convincing. We doctors refer to such a belief as "faith".

2) Patients typically make a positive virtue out of faith's being strong and unshakable, in spite of its' not being based upon (physical, tangible) evidence. Indeed, they may feel that the less evidence there is, the more virtuous the belief (see below). This paradoxical idea that lack of evidence is a positive virtue where faith is concerned has something of the quality of a program that is self-sustaining, because it is self-referential (see information on "Viral Sentences and Self-Replicating Structures" in D. R. Hofstader's  'Metamagical Themas', Harmondsworth, Penguin Press, 1985).  Once the proposition is believed, it automatically undermines opposition to itself. The "lack of evidence is a virtue" idea would be an admirable sidekick, ganging up with faith itself in a clique of mutually self-supporting viral programs.

3) A related symptom, which a faith-sufferer may also present, is the conviction that 'mystery', per se, is a good thing. It is not a virtue to solve mysteries. Rather, we should enjoy them, even revel in their insolubility.

Dawkins goes on to elaborate on the subject of religious faith as a mind-virus in a very articulate and highly cogent manner, but his use of the symbol of wearing a ball-cap reversed greatly tickled me, since this affectation is a recurring subject of fascination for me in today's commercially co-opted fabric of American social sub-culture.  

In a similar context, another selection from this collection of thoughts on secular humanism (Imagine There's No Heaven) consists of an interview with the late Tai Solarin, who was one of Nigeria's leading educators and social critics. Having spent much of his life as a social activist for human rights under the most trying circumstances, he was held in high esteem by many. One of his most noteworthy achievements was the establishment of a non-religious (i.e. secular) school named "The Mayflower School", in which the principles of secular humanism replaced traditional elements of both indigenous and endogenous religious influence within the academic core structure and curriculum.

Interestingly, Solarin's comments on the intensely 'religious' nature of black Africans in Nigeria struck another resonant chord in my reflections on the American black experience, most notably both the intense embrace many 'old fashioned' American blacks have of fundamental religious dogma and the equally intense rejection of conventional religious norms that many young black Americans manifest in post-adolescent hip-hop, 'gangsta' sub-culture.

SOLARIN: "So few Africans are humanists because nonhumanists are laden with a burden that humanists have shed: fear. Most Africans are taught from birth to fear--to fear daylight, life, death. Witches, angels, the Devil, or Satan, thunder, lightning, nocturnal birds, are all objects that generate fear. The African child is brought up not to ask questions. Precocious children are silenced. Any human being so shackled is shorn of the equipment that is  strongest in the armor of  the humanist--courage. Strip the African of of all objects of his fears and he will be as courageous as any other man across the face of the world. Inject education into his or her life and you have led him half way up the ladder of humanism. The most significant aspect of humanism that would, I think, appeal to the African most is the knowledge that his or her prosperity or wealth is none of the business of anybody outside himself or herself; that we can become whatever we choose to be. My friends tell me that God makes me successful in my work. When I tell them that I share in the responsibility of feeding , in his old age, a clergyman who preached sermons all his life, would they tell me why it is not he who is feeding me? They have no answer, of course, but hold on to their time-honored beliefs."

This insight into fundamental African religiosity (which abnegates self-responsibility through sole reliance upon faith) certainly helps one to better understand why the African continent remains so miserably ignored by the rest of the world and also how it has become so easily exploited by Western capitalism in recent centuries. Reflect also for a few moments on recent outspoken comments by Bill Cosby on the status of America's blacks that have provoked a literal fire-storm of reaction across the USA. Cosby has spared no words in castigating a black American youthful sub-culture which flauntingly celebrates ignorance as a virtue, prizes ignorant reactivity as being 'cool', and passionately eschews personal responsibility as a trait of weakness. Black American youths, instead of embracing the lonely precepts of a secular humanism that stresses self-reliance and individual determinism, have replaced religious fear of God with another equally dangerous mythical mindset, the feeling that reactive masculine sexist violence provides an acceptable venue within which to continue to shirk having to shoulder the burden of individual responsibility for one's personal fate. While I am not adequately enough informed as to be able to draw more cogent parallels between the religiously fundamental heritage of African-Americans and present day black American subcultural trends, I have no doubt that these tie are operative and actively engaged even today, some hundred and fifty years after America 'freed' its slaves. As always, religion with its superstitious trappings of mystery, ritual, faith, and mythological promise, still figures substantively in African-American culture....even in the very socially antagonistic, contra-cultural adolescent world characterised by the black American hip-hop gang mentality.

But I am digressing somewhat from the main point. Neither in theory nor in application, the enlightened precepts of secular humanism can never succeed amidst widespread ignorance. One of the principal reasons why the self-perpetuating delusions of institutionalised (organised) religion remain so strong in even as ostensibly 'literate' a county as the USA is due to the fact that what passes for education in America today is almost the antithesis of the sort of 'free-inquiry' that must first obtain in the academic process. Sadly, education in America today has largely become prostituted into little more than a mass job-training program for marginally bright individuals. Instead of lifting academic standards to promote excellence in learning, Americans feel so intensely fettered and confusingly hamstrung by their self-professed belief in 'equality' and 'freedom' for all that we actually lower our standards so as to make those who fall obviously short of the mark 'feel good' about the fact that they are markedly substandard! Thus, although we may point to statistics that show a broad percentage of Americans as being 'literate', educated people, the fact is that what passes for education in America today is little better than occupational preparation for high-grade chimpanzees in factories and white collar occupations. The essence of true education, that of teaching individuals to think openly  for themselves and accept personal responsibility for freely and rationally inquiring into the fullest and broadest range of higher human potentials, seems to have mysteriously fallen off by the academic roadside in our culturally orgiastic American embrace of capitalist materialism. This 'dumbing down' of American society serves those who would exploit the gullibility of the masses (corporations and advertising) quite conveniently, as well as reinforcing beliefs in non-existent gods, but it doesn't well serve the  cause of secular humanism.

If in making these remarks and taking up your time with my soapbox rants in this manner, I have actually managed to flail about impotently instead of tightly ordering my thoughts and making cogent points, it is probably attributable to the fact that my daily duties with the State of California's civil service have managed in recent years to turn more of my active brain cells to vanilla custard than I had reckoned. My apologies, accordingly.  However, the overall thesis of this month's rant remains undiluted: some form of secular humanism (often unfairly dissed by the God-fearing as 'atheism'), when held to its highest precepts of rational, moral acceptance of responsibility for the welfare of all life on the planet (vegetable as well as animal), appears to be the only genuine salvation of our beleaguered planet. If you have any argument with this thesis and/or questions as to why this may well be true, please read IMAGINE THERE'S NO HEAVEN: VOICES OF SECULAR HUMANISM (and other books and articles similar to it) before dismissing the possibility.

(More information and resources may be found below:)

The Council for Secular Humanism, PO Box 664, Amherst, NY 14226-0664

Cheers, Doc Boink.......October 2004

(Return to AEOLUS AEROSPACE homepage)

(Credit for top cartoon above: KIRK, The Toledo Blade; credit for second cartoon, lower: Walt Kelly from 'The Glob'; Jesus appears courtesy of ADBUSTERS; 'World in your hands' at top, artist unknown).

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE AFFIRMATIONS of HUMANISM: A STATEMENT OF PRINCIPLES:

We are committed to the application of reason and science to the understanding of the universe and to the solving of human problems.

We deplore efforts to denigrate human intelligence, to seek to explain the world in supernatural terms, and to look outside for salvation.

We believe that scientific discovery and technology can contribute to the betterment of human life.

We believe in an open and pluralistic society and that democracy is the best guarantee of protecting human rights from authoritarian elites and repressive majorities.

We are committed to the principle of the separation of church and state.

We cultivate the arts of negotiation and compromise as a means of resolving differences and achieving mutual understanding.

We are concerned with securing justice and fairness in society and with eliminating discrimination and intolerance.

We believe in supporting the disadvantaged and the handicapped so that they will be able to help themselves.

We attempt to transcend divisive parochial loyalties based upon race, religion, gender, nationality, creed, class, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, and strive to work together for the good of humanity.

We want to protect and enhance the Earth, to preserve it for future generations, and to avoid inflicting needless suffering on other species.

We believe in enjoying life in the here and now and in developing our creative talents to their fullest.

We believe in the cultivation of moral excellence.

We respect the right to privacy. Mature adults should be allowed to fulfill their aspirations, to express their sexual preferences, to exercise reproductive freedom, to have access to comprehensive and informed health care, and to die to dignity.

We believe in the common moral decencies: altruism, integrity, honesty, truthfulness, responsibility. Humanist ethics is amenable to critical, rational guidance. There are normative standards that we discover together. Moral principles are tested by their consequences.

We are deeply concerned with the moral education of our children. We want to nourish reason and compassion.

We are engaged by the arts no less than by the sciences.

We are citizens of the universe and are excited by discoveries still to be made in the cosmos.

We are skeptical of untested claims to knowledge, and we are open to novel ideas and seek new departures in our thinking.

We affirm humanism as a realistic alternative to theologies of despair and ideologies of violence and as a source of rich personal significance and genuine satisfaction in the service to others.

We believe in optimism rather than pessimism, hope rather than despair, learning in the place of dogma, truth instead of ignorance, joy rather than guilt or sin, tolerance in the place of fear, love instead of hatred, compassion over selfishness, beauty instead of ugliness, and reason rather than blind faith or irrationality.

We believe in the fullest realisation of the best and noblest that we are capable of as human beings.

(Originally formulated by Paul Kurtz)