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British Humanist Association: Reports

My Lords, I am delighted to be participating in this debate. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, for securing it and introducing it with great energy and eloquence. I had hoped to take one line in this debate, but since it has gone almost entirely one way, I thought that I should tilt the balance and try to raise issues that are in danger of being ignored. In recent years we have witnessed a clash between two kinds of dogmatism. For secularists, religion is at best a nuisance and at worst a source of positive mischief; religious people should therefore be kept out of public life or kept at as much a distance as possible. Religious people resent this and become aggressive, which further feeds secularists’ anxiety. They become even more anti-religious and a vicious cycle is born. What is the way out of that? That is my main concern. A way out is to develop a kind of secularism that is sensitive to religious aspirations, that understands what religion is about and what it means for religious people, and to develop a view of religion that recognises the importance of secularism. That is a large philosophical and cultural debate. In my own field of moral and political philosophy, that is where the energies of a large number of people are currently concentrated—rethinking the traditional understanding of religion. Thanks to the Enlightenment, a particular view of what religion is about has become dominant. If one looks at a pre-Enlightenment way of understanding Christianity, one will see that that is not how it was understood. Even to equate religion with faith is something very peculiar to modernity. When one talks about religion, immediately questions arise. If you think of religions like Hinduism, for example, they have very little to do with beliefs and are primarily concerned with practice. If you think that religion has to do with God—well, Buddhism has nothing to do with God. It is agnostic, and Jainism is positively atheistic. When we talk about religion, it is important to bear this in mind and not to homogenise different systems of thought. With that proviso, it is worth recognising that when one talks about religion, one ought to appreciate that it is grounded in recognition of a sense of mystery and a sense of finitude of human life. There are experiences that we cannot easily make sense of and we also recognise that as human beings we have certain profound limitations. In one form or another, religion is an attempt to come to terms with these two. It is in that sense a corrective to human hubris, and also a corrective to the illusion of human omnipotence and human omniscience. If one therefore understands religion not in terms of God or of dogma but as a certain sensibility that recognises the finitude of human beings and which also recognises that there are large areas of human experience that we do not fully understand, then any well considered form of humanism should recognise it as an important and valuable dimension of human life. After all, humanism is concerned with human beings, and human beings—as I argued earlier—do appreciate that certain elements of human life include recognition of religion. I am entirely in favour of a secular state—but what is a secular state? In the debates in India, where for the past 60 years we have been spending an enormous amount of energy in trying to understand what secularism is, secularism is basically about the relation between state and religion. This relationship can take any number of forms. If, for example, you had to install a wall of separation as the Americans have done, then the state will not be able to interfere with religion. And if it did not, it would not be able to abolish the practice of undecidability, or sati or many other things which derive their sanction from religion. So the wall of separation is out. A secular state is basically a state that pursues secular goals, is guided by secular public reason, and does not make its membership, namely citizenship, and the concomitant rights dependent on subscription to a particular religion. That is basically what a secular state is about. The question is: why should the state be secular? There is nothing inherently good or bad about the state being secular. It should be secular because that is the only way in which certain important values can be realised. What are these values? There are three. The first is liberty of conscience, by which I mean respect for deeply held beliefs provided that they are rationally defensible. The second is equality of treatment—that regardless of whether one belongs to this religion or to that one, or to no religion at all, all should be treated equally. The third is that the state should be constituted so that all its citizens feel that they belong to the same community and no section feels alienated. These three—liberty of conscience, equality of treatment, and what one might call fraternity or a sense of community—are the three fundamental political values, and the secular state is the only state that is capable of realising them. On that we must insist and we cannot compromise. That does not mean that the state cannot and should not co-operate with religious institutions or that, if it were to do so, it would somehow lose its caste or get corrupted. In modern society we face acute problems, and in solving those problems the state has its own limitations. Its administrative reach is limited, its moral reach is limited, it relies on certain motivations, and it is necessarily impersonal and bureaucratic. Therefore when there are problems where it cannot reach, we might need to rely on organisations that might be able to fill the gap. I can think of areas—spaces—where religious organisations might be able to deal with drug addicts or the rehabilitation of prisoners, or to foster better understanding between different communities and, in so doing, promote community cohesion. In other words, religion—with all its limitations, which I fully recognise; and I am not a religious person—can be a force for public good, and there are areas of life and groups of people for whom it can be an important source of motivation. In so far as it is a source of moral energy, it would be foolish for secularism or humanism to ignore it all together. What therefore needs to be done is for the state to lay down certain basic principles or parameters within which public discourse and political action can take place. We can have religious schools. I am not particularly in favour of them but I know that they can promote certain important values and mean a lot to parents. But there are religious schools—I know of two Muslim schools for example—where art is not taught and music is not taught, because they go against Islamic principles. The question therefore is for the state to lay down certain parameters, and as long as these parameters or standards are met, religious schools may be allowed to function. I would say the same about adoption agencies and lots of other things. Secular principles are absolutely crucial, but there is no reason why a good humanist may not engage in a critical dialogue with religious persons. After all, every view of the world has its limitations. Secularism has its own limitations and religion may be able to contribute something useful.