LEICESTER SECULAR SOCIETY IN PLEA TO CELEBRITY ATHEISTS TO HELP RAISE £40,000

This article appears in today's Leicester Mercury:

Leicester Secular Society in plea to cleebrity atheists to help raise £40,000

by Peter Warzynski

Celebrity atheists are being asked to help pay for the renovation of a society's headquarters.

Members of Leicester Secular Society are writing to 40 well-known people, including Richard Dawkins and Ricky Gervais, in a bid to raise £40,000 for the project.

The society is also appealing to local secularists to support the scheme to improve the Victorian building in Humberstone Gate.

Work will involve installing an accessible toilet, new kitchen, hearing loop, second fire exit and internal renovation.

The total cost is about £65,000, but the organisation has £25,000 in its reserves which it will use.

Harry Perry, president of the branch, said: "There are certain pressing problems on the ground floor where we have our meetings.

"We've appealed to about 40 celebrity atheists but I don't want to rely solely on them – we'll need our members to help us, too.

"The last census also identified that 24 per cent of the city are non-religious, so we're reaching out to them for help as well."

He said a number of attempts to secure funding had been unsuccessful and the organisation needed the full amount by the end of July.

"We approached the Heritage Lottery Fund, but it said there wasn't enough of a heritage aspect," said Mr Perry.

"The Big Lottery Fund turned us down, too, because it's too much about the building and not enough about the community.

"In fact, 95 per cent of sources of funding require we are a charity or a religious organisation and we're neither."

Leicester Secular Society has about 150 members and has used the grade-II-listed building for 130 years.

It hosts a variety of events, including talks, lectures and meetings by a number of organisations.

Leicester City Council has offered to look at ways of supporting the society with some of the renovation work.

Mayor Sir Peter Soulsby said: "We'll help where we can with the project. In particular, we'd like it to include some work to the front of the building.

"The Secular Hall is a very important building in Leicester and unique one in the country.

"It has a proud history and is a place where people such as William Morris came to talk about not just secularism but society more generally."

Donate via their website at: www.leicestersecular society.org.uk

NEW STATESMAN: AFTER GOD

Once a year or so, New Statesman runs a special issue focusing on religion. I'm a big fan of New Statesman - a subscriber actually - and enjoy it each and every week. The magazine engages with topics of religion and spirituality often and I always find their annual special "God" issue a particular treat.

This week's issue's cover is, "After God: What atheists can learn from believers". Below is an abstract from the New Statesman's website, showcasing the intelligent, reflective and thought-provoking writing to be found in this weeks's magazine on this topic:

Swept away by science and the scathing scrutiny of New Atheists, religion seems to be on the point of extinction, yet billions still cling to it. For our cover story this week, we ask some of the leading “New, New Atheists” – those who “separate their atheism from their secularism” and treat religious heritage as “a treasure trove to be plundered” – if faith has a place in modern life. Here is a preview of each contributor's position:

Alain de Botton: The three elements of religion that a post-religious society should “steal”.

“The challenge facing atheists,” de Botton writes, “is how to separate many ideas and rituals from the religious institutions that have laid claim to them but don’t truly own them ... Secularism is not wrong. It is just that we have too often secularised badly.”

1. New priest

“The most sophisticated response we have yet come up with is psychotherapy ... [But there] is also, in a serious sense, an issue of branding. Therapy is hidden, unbranded, depressing in its outward appearance. The priests had far better clothes, and infinitely better architecture.”

2. New gospels

“So, why does the notion of replacing religion with culture, of living according to the lessons of literature and art as believers live according to the lessons of faith, continue to sound so peculiar to us? The fault lies with academia. Universities are entirely uninterested in training students to use culture as ... a source that can prove of solace to us when confronted by the infinite challenges of existence ...”

3. New churches

“You sometimes hear it said that art museums are our new churches ... The challenge is to rewrite the agendas for our art museums so that collections can begin to serve the needs of psychology as effectively as they served those of theology, for centuries.”

Francis Spufford denounces the “burning simplicities” of New Atheism

This post-Christian puritanism, largely oblivious now of its history, is highly visible in the New Atheism of the 1990s and 2000s, and especially in Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion. Strange indifference (except at the margins) to all religions except Christianity? Check. Sense of being locked in righteous combat with the powers of darkness? Check. Puritanism, it turns out, can float free of faith and still preserve a vehement world-view, a core of characteristic judgements ...

I don’t expect the puritan call will lose its appeal to the young and the zealous, but maybe we are entering a phase of greater tolerance in which, having abandoned the impossible task of trying to abolish religion, atheists might be able to apply themselves to the rather more useful task of distinguishing between kinds that want to damn you and kinds that don’t.

Jim Al-Khalili: “It is time now for the New, New Atheists”

Believing in a god is fine by me, if it is important to you ... But what I, and many other atheists, take issue with is the arrogant attitude that religious faith is the only means of providing us with a moral compass ...

Our society is no longer predominantly religious. Atheists are the mainstream. This is precisely why we should set out our stall to be more tolerant and inclusive ... The New Atheists have laid the foundations; maybe it is time now for the “New, New Atheists”.

Karen Armstrong: “The biblical God is a starter kit”

Most of us are introduced to God at about the same time as we hear about Santa Claus, but over the years our views of Santa mature and change, while our notion of God often gets stuck at an infantile level ... The biblical God is a “starter kit”; if we have the inclination and ability, we are meant to move on. Religion, too, is a practical discipline in which we learn new capacities of mind and heart. Like premodern philosophy, it was not the quest for an abstract truth but a practical way of life.

Richard Holloway: The former bishop of Edinburgh calls for a “critical sympathy towards religion”

A good approach here is not to try to stop the revelation argument from going round and round but to ask a different question, thus: given that there probably is no God, where did all this stuff come from? To which the obvious answer is that it came from us.

So it’s a mistake to do what most unbelievers usually do at this point, which is to dismiss them as fairy tales ... The word to grasp here is myth: a myth is a story that encodes but does not necessarily explain a universal human experience.

The wrong question to ask of a myth is whether it is true or false. The right question is whether it is living or dead, whether it still speaks to our condition.

LIVE AND LET LIVE OVER THE ISSUE OF FAITH

This appears in the Op-Ed column of today's Leicester Mercury:

Live and let live over the issue of faith

There has been a rather heated debate taking place over the past week about the place of religion in our society. First, there was an outcry over a judge's ruling that the saying of prayers as part of the formal proceedings in a council meeting was unlawful. Then, Cabinet Minister Baroness Warsi spoke out against "intolerant secularisation". And leading atheist Richard Dawkins entered the fray with the findings of a survey which he felt showed that religion was largely irrelevant in our society.

Isn't the answer to this faith versus secularisation debate really rather simple? Surely, it all comes down to that old saying: "Live and let live". As the Bishop of Leicester states in his column on the page opposite, nobody is forced to worship in this country against their conscience. We share his hope that we might all become more relaxed about this subject.

The most difficult issue is to what extent religion should play a part in public life. It seems to us that there are two aspects to this. The first is that there are a large number of people in this country who do adhere to a faith. It seems fair enough, then, that this should play some part in our public life and institutions.

If people want to send their children to faith schools, for instance, that seems a reasonable liberty in a tolerant society. To insist that faith schools should not have state funding would automatically deny that option to the vast majority of believers.

The other aspect is the fact that religion is interwoven into our traditions and culture. Churches are part of every village, town and city across the UK. In Leicester, mosques and temples have become part of our landscape. Similarly, religious services form a time-honoured part of many public events. This is part of the rich tapestry of our culture and that is a great strength of this country. We do not see why the saying of prayers in a council meeting, for instance, is any way objectionable. Those who do not want to say them are perfectly entitled to refrain from doing so.

Let's be honest, in this country it really is very easy to take religion or leave it. There is no societal pressure to follow a faith. It is very much a personal choice. We see no need to change the balance which currently exists. To each his own!

Has atheism become a religion?

Very interesting article in the Huffington Post, reproduced below. I like the different stance it takes on the topic, which reveals some of the nuances between how atheism is regarded here and across the Pond. It's thoughtful and thought provoking and adds a subtly distinctive flavour to the debate.

Has Atheism beome a religion?

By David Lose

Before you dismiss the question out of hand, consider these four inter-related bits of evidence:

1) As recently reported in the New York Times, military personnel who identify themselves as "Atheists" have requested chaplains to tend to their spiritual needs. As the Times article notes, "Defense Department statistics show that about 9,400 of the nation's 1.4 million active-duty military personnel identify themselves as atheists or agnostics, making them a larger subpopulation than Jews, Muslims, Hindus or Buddhists in the military." Having their own chaplains, the article explains, would give Atheists a sense of legitimacy and help validate their own system of values and beliefs.

2) The U.S Government reports that in 2008 those identifying themselves specifically as "Atheist" composed the 18th largest group of 43 possible categories of "self-described religious identification." The number of persons so identifying themselves almost doubled from seven years earlier. Admittedly, "Atheist" is one of the options listed under "no religion specified," but given that other options for respondents included checking "Agnostic" or "No Religion" or not answering the question at all, it appears that identifying oneself specifically as an Atheist, as opposed to simply "not religious," is growing in appeal. This points to the utility of a distinction made by Jonathan Lanman between "non-theists," those with no particular religious belief, and "strong atheists," those who view religion not only as irrelevant but as misguided and dangerous.

3) Similarly, it's worth noting the degree to which Atheists routinely, strategically, and often vociferously position what is often described as their "secular-humanist" views against religious traditions. Read or listen to any of the celebrity Atheists of the past decade like Richard Dawkins, Chrisotpher Hitchins and Sam Harris and you realize that they fashion many of their arguments not against some alternative economic, political, or philosophical position but against organized religion. Religious faith is clearly their primary opponent in the contest for the intellectual allegiance of the population, which makes it hard not to conclude that they offer their views and beliefs as a viable alternative to traditional religious systems.

4) Finally - and you probably knew this was coming - consider all the comments made by self-identified Atheists on articles published in the Religion section of the Huffington Post. Seriously. Either Atheists have way more time on their hands than the rest of the population or they've got something to prove. This assertive, us-against-them tone (in this case, against established religion) is characteristic of new religions. (Think of the Christian gospels', especially Matthew and John, stance toward first-century Judaism, for example.) As Rabbi David Wolpe observed a few months ago, there is an astonishing garrulousness to the comments made by Atheists to posts about religion that suggest not simply a lack of interest in, or even disdain for, religion but a competitive anger directed against persons of traditional religious faith. (Obviously plenty of religious folk radiate the same garrulousness, but this post is about Atheists.)

Taken together, these four elements suggest that Atheists regularly demonstrate attributes -- desire for spiritual sustenance, the importance of self-identification, offering their worldview as an alternative to other religious systems, and an assertive if not competitive style of engagement with other religious points of view -- usually exhibited by religious folk of all persuasions.

While Atheism as a movement doesn't have the formal structure, celebrations, or creedal dogmas of organized religions, we might at least identify Atheism as it exists today as an increasingly vibrant faith tradition. Still, when speaking of Atheists, why use the f-word (for "faith," silly) rather than speak of a worldview or personal philosophy? Three reasons suggest themselves.

1) It conveys that both a conventional religious worldview and atheistic worldview require a measure of faith. I don't mean this simply about the rather limited question of whether God exists, but rather about whether the material, physical dimension of life immediately apparent to our senses is all there is. The question can't be reduced, as Atheists regularly have, to observing that there are many beliefs - in the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus as well as God - that can't be proved and must be taken on faith, but rather to ask whether there is a dimension of existence that supersedes or eludes our physical senses. Ultimately, any speech about God implies such a dimension that conversation about the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus do not.

2) Religious faith - and I'd argue atheistic faith - doesn't begin and end with the question of God or a spiritual dimension to life. One needs also to construct an interpretation of life (describing its purpose, goal, worth) and set of values by which to live that life. Ethics and values are not self-evident from religious creeds -- witness, for instance, the distinct values of the varieties of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam that run the gamut from liberal to fundamentalist. Similarly, there is no self-evident value system shared by Atheists and projecting such a system requires imagination, critical reflection and, yes, faith.

Third, characterizing both organized religion and emergent Atheism as distinct faith traditions invites a measure of mutual regard and even respect that is sorely lacking in present discourse. Professing belief in God, as well as rejecting such belief, each requires equal measures of imagination and nerve. As it turns out, doubt is not the opposite of faith; certainty is. For this reason, we can hold out the hope that religious and non-religious believers alike may recognize in each other similar acts of courage and together reject the cowardice of fundamentalism, whether religious or secular. Being able to disagree respectfully is a small but significant step that believers and non-believers could take as they, together, contemplate admiring, understanding, and preserving this wondrous world we share.

Read the article, along with reader comments (and the opportunity to leave your own) on the excellent Huffpost Religion website (and don't rush off after reading just this one): http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-lose/atheism-religion_b_867217.html