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British Humanist Association: Reports

My Lords, I once had an alarming experience in Soviet Russia. In 1959 I was there as a tourist. I had reached Smolensk, which has a fine cathedral, so I asked the local Intourist office to get me a guide. I was provided with a real Soviet battleaxe who had probably killed an entire German regiment with her bare teeth. As we were coming out of the cathedral, she said to me fiercely, "Do you believe in God?". I hummed and hawed and eventually replied, "I suppose I don’t, really". "Well then", said the battleaxe, "Why don’t you stay in the Soviet Union?" . She clearly thought that non-believers were persecuted in Britain. Of course, we are not. We have had equal rights ever since Charles Bradlaugh was allowed to take his seat in the House of Commons. But that is not the end of the story. A friend of mine once described himself as a non-practising atheist. That is what I was for a long time. I had been brought up as an Anglican—though my father was a non-practising Jew whose favourite meal was pork pie. My wife and I were married in church, we had our children baptised, and we occasionally went to church services though I kept my mouth shut when we got to the Creed. Things have changed. When I was a law student in the USA 50 years ago, my friends and I laughed at the infamous Scopes trial, when, in the 1920s, a young schoolteacher in Tennessee was prosecuted for teaching his pupils about evolution. We thought that that was something entirely in the past. It never occurred to us that in the 21st century there would be millions of Americans who still believe in creationism. Nor did it occur to me at the time of the Cuban missile crisis that in 2010 we would find ourselves more worried by the acts of Islamic fanatics than by the threat of a nuclear world war. Religion can of course cause harm as well as good. Religious hatred still exists, as has been shown in Northern Ireland, though I think it is fair to say that that is more about nationalism than about religion. Religious groups can be blamed for teaching such manifestly absurd concepts as creationism. The Roman Catholic church, and some evangelical Christian groups, also can be blamed, and I think should be blamed, for their rejection of contraception, which has enhanced the spread of AIDS, and as the noble Baroness, Lady Flather, has pointed out, has caused great hardship and suffering to women particularly in developing countries. Religion was also responsible for the death of nearly 3,000 innocent people in New York on 9/11, and for that of the 52 people who were killed here in this city some two years later. It is not the role of humanists to go out and try to convert religious people to humanism; that is to turn humanism itself into a kind of religion. In a time of globalisation, however, surely we must all learn to live side by side. Education is by far the most important way of achieving that, which is why I entirely agree with every word that my noble friend Lord Taverne and the noble Baroness, Lady Flather, said about schools. I believe that the Government’s support of new state-funded faith schools was a profound mistake. Surely children who sit side by side in a school will understand more about each other than will those who have been to separate schools. Religion must be taught in schools, it is an essential part of history—not only political and national history but the history of art, architecture and music, because so much early art is wholly religious. However, publicly funded schools should not teach that one church or religion knows the truth and that the others do not, or indeed that any religion is necessarily the truth. Religious faith is a matter to be taken up outside the formal structure of our schools, in Sunday schools and their equivalents in other faiths. It can be taught at home or, indeed, in schools on a voluntary basis, but it should not be part of the structure. This is a very valuable debate. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, on his Motion, and I am very happy to support him.