NZARH Journal - Spring 1999

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Editorial
Bill Cooke

Some Impressions of Contemporary Humanism
Bill Cooke

Fear & Guilt in Dairyland
Peter Murphy

Southern Lights
Russell Dear

Is Abortion Justifiable?
Zoë During

Stranger Than Fiction
Elizabeth McKenzie

Drugs: The Problem is the Policy
John Marks

Beliefs at the End of the Millennium

Adam's Rib
Anne Ferguson

Swami Beyondawonda's Ten Guidelines for Enlightment

Does Society need Mr Geering?
Bill Cooke

Current Comments

Book Reviews

Letters to Editor

Oddities

In science, the authority embodied in the opinion of thousands is not worth the spark of reason in one man.
Galileo (1564-1642)

Editorial

The second-hand Lada

Why do we call ourselves Rationalists? Maybe it's time to drop all this talk about reason. After all, there are lots of other things we could emphasise to just as much advantage, possibly more. Moreover, the twentieth-century has been a bad one for reason. A hundred years ago the word could confidently be given the honour and dignity of a capital letter and spoken of in hushed, almost reverential, terms.

But then we had the twentieth century. And the paradoxical thing is that it wasn't only the attacks of the enemy that knocked Reason off its pedestal. Christian apologetics this century have tried vainly, like the legendary King Canute, to demand the tide of secularisation be held back - but no-one has taken any notice. It was one of the century's greatest non-Christians, Sigmund Freud, who was primarily responsible for dethroning reason. Freud it was who claimed that rationality is little more than the surface froth which merely floats on the top of, and gives belated justification to, a darker and deeper set of psycho-sexual desires and prejudices. And while his notion of sex as the principal power-house driving those subterranean desires has been challenged, his critique of grandiose Reason has not been.

Two of the greatest philosophers of the century, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, were bitterly hostile to reason, both as an abstract programme as a practical guide. Wittgenstein preferred a silent religiosity, while Heidegger wished for a blood-and-soil romanticism. The century has seen a procession of wildly popular irrational or even anti-rational populists: Gurdjieff, Jung, Velikovsky, Rajneesh, Alan Watts, Colin Wilson, von Däniken, Geller, postmodernists...

Rationality has been blamed for everything from the drabness of suburbia to the Holocaust, from pollution to Marxism, Fascism and laissez-faire capitalism. The twentieth century has demonstrated, if nothing else, that reason is far from being a catch-all panacea to all our problems.

Two things need to be borne in mind about all this. The first is that Rationalists have, for the most part, known full well that reason is far from being a miracle cure. And second, it is precisely because reason is such a fragile flower that it is so thoroughly indispensable to us all.

For those of you who have read Heathen in Godzone, it will be more than obvious that reason is less than infallible when used as the uniting principle for a voluntary organisation. At the beginning of the century, Charles Watts, founder of the Rationalist Press Association, warned his readers that "although reason is not infallible as a guide, it is the best one known to us". Joseph McCabe was similarly matter-of-fact when he wrote that reason is a "serviceable and generally reliable instrument." Nothing more, nothing less. Half a century later, Bertrand Russell criticised his opponents for irrationally over-estimating the part which reason is capable of playing. Reason, Russell wrote, is simply the right choice of means to an end one wishes to achieve. As such, it has nothing whatever to do with the choice of ends. This relates to the definition of intelligence given a couple of issues back, by Jean Piaget, the Swiss educationalist. Intelligence, Piaget thought, is what you apply when you find yourself in a situation for which you have no set idea as to how to deal with.

So, Rationalists have known all along that reason is not going to make a better god than any other idol. But that doesn't mean we must simply walk away. None of the other products that have been offered up this century - faith, mysticism, ideology, hedonism, nihilism - have been shown to be an improvement. On the contrary, they have all proved to be hollow, and easily manipulated for anti-democratic purposes. Reason, and reason alone, can provide the tools for the constructive criticism of false doctrines, extravagant claims, wordy nonsense and mystical mumbo-jumbo.

That's the amazing thing about Rationalism. It can't offer an eternal life of bliss; it can't offer eventual release from the eternal wheel of rebirth; it can't offer feel-good placebos like faith or spirituality; it can provide no assurance that you matter to God, the ultimate self, the universe, or any other metaphysical flummery. As against this dashing array of magic carpets, all Rationalism can offer is the philosophical version of a second-hand Lada. Reason can be unreliable, easily undermined, outmanoeuvred, or neutralised. But, like it or not, reason, that second-hand Lada, is all we can fall back on when all the flashy bells-and-whistles, super-charged this and twin-cam that have been shown not to live up to the extravagant promises made on their behalf. Realising that reason is so fragile, it is all the more important to nurture and value it. It's not much to go on, but it's all we have.

Bill Cooke

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Some Impressions of Contemporary Humanism

As seen from Russia and England

Bill Cooke

St Petersburg
It is difficult for those who have not been to St Petersburg to appreciate how beautiful this city is. Perhaps the best way is to look at the paintings of Venice by Canaletto. St Petersburg was founded in 1703 by Peter the Great and was designed to be the Venice of the north. Looking across the lovely (but badly polluted) Neva from the Peter and Paul Fortress to the Winter Palace, I could appreciate how successful that vision had been. No building in the central area is over about seven storeys, giving the city a wonderfully human scale. However, St Petersburg is also called "the city of bones" because it is thought the construction of the city cost the lives of 200,000 workers.

Those are the contrasts that stuck in my mind in St Petersburg. City of spectacular beauty, but also a city of suffering. The city built by the expansionist and confident Peter the Great to be his window to the west is also the city that endured three appalling years of siege by the Germans during the last war. The city that was the playground for the Romanovs and the Russian nobility is now in the most dreadful state of disrepair. The roads are in an appalling state, and most of the buildings are in more or less immediate need of maintenance and repair. While we were there, a large section of ceiling in one of the underground stations collapsed, killing about a dozen people. The story in the English-language St Petersburg press was that it was divine revenge. Apparently the Communists had pulled down a church on the site where the station now stands and God saw His chance to get His own back. St Petersburg struck me as like a wild west town: lawless, dynamic, and just a little bit frightening. We never felt in any physical danger, but the city had an edge to it.

I was in this magical city to attend a conference. Given the simple title "Science and Society", about twenty academics from Russia, the United States, England, Holland and New Zealand came together to present papers on this twin theme. A number of Russian students attended many of the papers as well. The conference was held in English; all the Russian scholars and students were all bi, or even tri-lingual, which made me feel very ignorant indeed. The conference was hosted by the St Petersburg branch of the Institute of Natural Sciences and Technology, which is part of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and St Petersburg State University. But while it was hosted by these institutions, the main powerhouse behind organising it was Dr H James Birx, Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at Canisius College, in upstate New York, and an Honorary Associate of this Association. Professor Birx gave the keynote address in the "Evolution and Humanism" session.

The conference was divided into four main themes: as well as "Evolution and Humanism", there was "Scientific Ethics", "Science and Religion", and a final session on "Friedrich Nietzsche". I gave a paper in the Scientific Ethics session on Joseph McCabe, specifically his role as a populariser of science. And in the Science and Religion session I gave a paper called "Prometheus versus Narcissus" which was a wide-ranging polemic against postmodernism. The Russians liked hearing about McCabe, because they are particularly keen on good popularisers of science for the non-specialist. On the other hand, they were bemused by my talk on postmodernism, which hasn't reached them yet. It was not easy trying to explain to the Russians that in the west we have people in high-paying university positions, complete with free e-mail access, stunning library and other facilities, who expect to be taken seriously when they sneer at universities as being sites of hegemonic discourses, or some such nonsense. "Why don't they leave?" one of the Russians asked. I could provide him with no clear answer to that.

One of the chief worries the Russians had was the alarming invasion of fundamentalist and creationist literature into their country. Many of the tracts were instantly recognisable to creationism-watchers in the west. Well, all these tracts are in Russia now, expensively produced and recently translated.

The variety of conference papers was impressive, as was the range of opinions discussed. Most of the participants were, broadly speaking, humanists, although this was not strictly a humanist gathering. The Russians were virtually all humanists. One of them, Alexander Razin, who is based in Moscow, has been a visiting scholar at the Center of inquiry in Buffalo, New York, the nerve centre of American humanism. Peter Derkx, from the Humanist University in Utrecht, Holland represented the literary, genial humanism of the European continent. His papers were highly intelligent and astute surveys of the limits of the scientific worldview, with warnings about where those limits may be. He was saying that if creationists start spouting their nonsense in his country, people just laugh, because they are seen as fanatics and are not taken seriously. He was surprised and unnerved by the power of the creationists in the United States. When told of their ability to manipulate school boards and decisions about buying appropriate textbooks, he exclaimed "But that is ridiculous!" It was beyond his ability to fully comprehend the gravity of the threat to scientific learning in the United States that creationists and fundamentalists pose.

Faced with this sort of threat every day, the American contingent could be described as militantly secular and rationalist. Timothy Madigan, another Honorary Associate of our Association, gave a very interesting talk called "Huxley, Huxley and Flew: Agnosticism, Religious Humanism and Atheism", which outlined approvingly the trend toward an unabashed atheism among freethinkers. All the Americans had stories of blockheadedness and occasional disruption from fundamentalists, on and off campus. They were united in appreciating the extent of the danger these people pose to the open society and the need for a clear and firm response to them. They represented a variety of disciplines: anthropology, philosophy, sociology, social sciences, history. John Xanthopoulos, a social scientist based in Florida, summed up the American attitude with the term "despairing optimism". The fundamentalist threat to the open society was so awful, hence the despair, but he argued for a long-term optimism. He saw the three threats to fundamentalism as technology, democracy and capitalism. As none of those three look under any significant danger for the foreseeable future, maybe the fundamentalists can be overcome. This is far from being a done thing though.

The Russians struck me as in a transition period as regards humanism. Only ten years ago, of course, they were a part of what was technically an atheist state, so there is a strong legacy of seeing the religion issue as of little concern, having been effectively dealt with. But now they are beginning to see the negative effects of the fundamentalist invasion from the United States, as well as the undemocratic repercussions of the Russian government's recent heavy-handed response to this threat, which involved sanctioning only the Russian Orthodox Church, Islam, Buddhism and Judaism as official religions. All the others have to apply for various official permissions to conduct their business. Religion, in other words, is becoming an issue and these Russians were beginning to appreciate the need for an organised response. With this in mind, the St Petersburg branch of the Russian Humanist Society opened while the conference was on. Along with the American contingent, I had the privilege of attending the opening function. They run a journal, called Common Sense, a copy of which is now in our library. In return I donated them a copy of Heathen in Godzone. The Russian Humanist Society is composed very largely of engineers, technocrats and scientists, so is certainly not lacking in intellectual firepower, but it will have its hands full combating the fundamentalist menace to that country.

Over the next few issues, the NZ Rationalist & Humanist will print some a selection of the papers presented at this conference. All the scholars I asked were very generous in handing their material over to me, even though in this "publish or perish" climate, they are under pressure to get their work published in more august periodicals than this one. I understand the proceedings of the conference are to be published in two volumes, with Professor Eduard Kolchinsky, Director of the St Petersburg Department of the Institute of Natural Sciences and Technology, Russian Academy of Sciences, editing one volume, and Professor Birx editing the other volume.

I left St Petersburg exhausted from a long conference, and from the heat. Russian buildings are built with cold in mind, so don't tend to operate too well in unseasonal heat. It was around 28 to 31º, which isn't too hot, but it was like that 24 hours a day, because the sun did not set the entire time we were there. There was little temperature or light change from the middle of the night to the middle of the afternoon, which was quite disconcerting. It only lasts like that for a short while, I was assured. I don't think I will ever forget that beautiful city.

The RPA Centenary Conference
From the city of St Peter to the cradle of English capitalism. The Rationalist Press Association held its Centenary Conference in Birmingham. I attended this conference as the delegate of the NZ Association of Rationalists & Humanists, which paid for my accommodation in Birmingham, and my train ticket to the city from London. Some of the best-known names of world Humanism were at this conference, including three more of our Honorary Associates: Paul Kurtz, Antony Flew, and Lewis Wolpert. It certainly was a privilege to meet people whose books and articles I have read over a long period. The calibre of addresses at this conference was very high indeed. Helena Cronin spoke very positively about Darwinism for policy makers, and without fulminating about social darwinism even once. In fact she emphasised the innate predilection for co-operation that natural selection fosters. Hers, it has to be said, was the most optimistic talk of the conference. The general mood was one of concern for the future. Colin Campbell, an eminent sociologist, and author of Towards a Sociology of Irreligion, one of the most comprehensive sociological studies of freethought, was not optimistic. He saw the basic framework for rationalism as seriously under threat from relativism and from the easternisation of the west. The spread of woolly new age theories, which allow one to pick and choose a pot-pourri of fanciful notions posed to massive threat to rationalism in Campbell's opinion.

There was even a postmodernist at the conference - Helen Haste, a psychologist from Bath. Her paper was entitled "Are we irrationally afraid of the irrational?" Professor Haste told us that rationality is a very dangerous thing and that we should have the maturity to be able to embrace a little ambiguity - as if the two are mutually exclusive. Fortunately nobody took this seriously. I had come across Professor Haste earlier at the conference when I was speaking to Jim Herrick, editor of the New Humanist. I was telling Jim of my paper on postmodernism in St Petersburg. Without invitation, Professor Haste burst into our conversation and told me that to be critical of postmodernism, I must be either very stupid, know nothing about postmodernism, or be afraid of ambiguity. I would like to able to say I then replied with a witty retort. Faced with such a generous range of follies to choose from, I must confess to have been floored by such willingness to use personal abuse as the first gambit in a conversation. This sort of rudeness is surprisingly typical among people anxious to accuse rationalism of being hegemonic and marginalising.

The keynote address was given by Professor Colin Blakemore. There was a significant police presence for his lecture because animal liberation extremists had threatened his life at the conference. Fortunately nothing came of this, although Professor Blakemore said that a police escort is a more or less permanent accompaniment for him nowadays, after defending the testing of animals for scientific research. He was interesting about this. He outlined the procedures that must be gone through before testing on animals is permitted. The criteria, as you would expect in a civilised country, are strict. He was in favour of these strict criteria, but reiterated his defence of testing animals for the sake of scientific research. His argument was convincing, in my opinion. Certainly, whatever merit the animal liberationist arguments may have is entirely negated by their willingness to use terrorist tactics to see them brought to fruition.

The outstanding speeches, for my money, came from Sanal Edamaruku, and Babu Gogineni. Sanal Edamaruku is the secretary of the Indian Rationalist Association and founder president of the excellent on-line magazine Rationalist International (formerly the International Alliance Against Fundamentalism). The Indian Rationalist Association has in the region of eighty thousand members. And this organisation is based mainly in Kerala, on the southwestern coast of the country. It's not for nothing that Levi Fragell, the IHEU president, said earlier this year that the future of humanism lies in India. As with all the other Indian organisations, the Indian Rationalist Association (with the unfortunate abbreviation of IRA) is doing magnificent work among the poor of India, educating them and wising them up to the large number of charlatans who roam from village to village, deceitfully getting money or food from credulous people with a few magic tricks they pass off as signs of their divine power. Babu Gogineni, the executive director of the IHEU gave a feisty and provocative speech upbraiding the whole humanist movement for a certain lassitude and complacency. To my delight he also criticised our now-departed postmodernist.

Generally, though, the atmosphere was low-key and restrained. The theme of the conference was "Thinking ahead - rationalism in the 21st century". But most of the prognostications about the twenty-first century were pretty gloomy. There is a sense in which the RPA is trapped by the successes of its past. It was so successful in its first fifty years in getting high quality rationalist literature to the general reader that commercial publishing houses eventually stepped in and were able to marshall their greater resources to take this market away from the RPA. The general mood of the RPA Annual General Meeting, which I attended in London a couple of weeks after the conference, was that they must get into a huddle and think things over. Watch this space.

As is often the case with conferences, the best parts of them are outside the formal sessions. It was a delight to meet such prominent freethinkers. Antony Flew is a genuinely friendly man as well as being a philosopher of distinction. I was trying to persuade him to write something against postmodernism. He agreed there was a need, but thought he'd probably written his last book. Lewis Wolpert is a speaker of genius. Paul Kurtz is another genuinely friendly man, an understated powerhouse. Sanal Edamaruku impressed me very much as a man on a mission. Both he and Babu Gogineni are impatient to get freethought moving. They are future leaders of our movement: that much seems plain. John Metcalf, secretary of the RPA, managed to find me a bed at midnight, after I arrived exhausted from the trip from St Petersburg. Jim Herrick, who has edited the New Humanist so brilliantly for a number of years, was never still for long. Such is the fate of a conference organiser. The success of the conference was largely due to him. And as for Nigel Collins, a bookseller specialising in rationalist books, well I could have married him. I bought three or four Joseph McCabe books from him and he let me photocopy a very rare pamphlet McCabe wrote in 1928. Such things dreams are made of.

Research in London
Speaking about Joseph McCabe, the next part of my English excursion was to research him in London. The library at Conway Hall is one of the wonders of the world. A very fine collection of books, as you would expect, but made even more lovely by the beautiful room it is in. Fine paintings and busts of freethought heroes line the top of the bookshelves. Jennifer Jeynes, the South Place Ethical Society librarian, knows this library very well indeed, and was unflaggingly helpful to me. Over in Islington at a property owned by the RPA, Nicolas Walter, author Humanism: What's in a Word and the "Rationalist Notes" section of the New Humanist, was also extremely helpful and positive. I was able to go through the full collection of publications at both locations to track down the huge number of McCabe articles, reviews and references.

But the best thing that happened was that I met his granddaughter. She is, naturally, very proud of her grandfather and was extremely helpful to this total stranger from the antipodes who was snooping around. The book I am writing about McCabe will certainly be considerably better for all this assistance. I don't think I'm giving away too much by divulging that at the time of his death he was working on an historical romance and a detective story! Having lived in Joseph McCabe's head for the better part of two years, he still has the capacity to surprise me. And you've got to admire people like that.

Bill Cooke is a Lecturer at the School of Art and Design, Manukau Institute of Technology and is editor of the NZ Rationalist & Humanist

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Fear & Guilt in Dairyland

Peter Murphy

Brother Bryan McKay, a teacher and lay member of the Marist Order was convicted in Hamilton of a series of sexual assaults between 1978 and 1980 on seven schoolboys that had been placed in his care. At least one of these boys had also been the victim of a certain Father Brown, a local priest who committed similar assaults on altar-boys while they were supposedly "on duty". Both Brown and McKay served very short sentences and have received protection form the Church while the victims have not been so lucky. It is worth noting that a simple confession may be all it takes to allow for absolution of such a sin within the Catholic Church. It is possible that Father Brown heard the confession that saved Father McKay's soul from hell. There is one sin that can never be absolved by the Church. It is called apostasy, or doubt. According to Catholic beliefs, any loss of faith by the victims of Brown and McKay ensures that their souls are in peril. For a Rationalist this might seem laughably absurd, but for the young men who were raised within the Church and thoroughly indoctrinated it can mean a lifetime of suffering. What follows is a letter on this issue I sent to the Waikato Times.

Lindsay Freer, Catholic Communications director, is quoted in your edition of 19.1.99 commenting on the Bryan McKay case. His extraordinary statements deserve a response. Mr Freer claims that McKay is " paying the price for what he did". Is he really? McKay remains a member of the Church and a member of the Order (Marist Brothers) that has allowed him an income. By the act of confession his conscience has been cleared. This convicted pervert has not been removed from the possibility of reoffending. He is free. Meanwhile his victims are accused by the Catholic Church of victimising the perpetrator. The sentence served amounted to one month for each of the victims. The man served no more than a few days in jail for each of his separate perverted assaults. Perhaps the Catholic Church is unaware that McKay would have, unlike fellow crims, been spared the harsh realities of having to do time in the company of other violent criminals. The conditions of McKay's parole are suspicious. How could it be that the offender managed to get a two-thirds reduction in the sentence imposed? It is worth noting that sexual abuse of children is one of those monstrous acts that proponents of the death penalty believe deserve the ultimate punishment. Those of us who are more merciful believe that for the protection of society paedophiles should be imprisoned for life or castrated. Whether Bryan McKay has paid, or is paying, any sort of fair " price" for his disgusting behaviour seems debatable to say the least.

In response to Mr Freer's question "what more do people want", please allow me to make some suggestions and propose a suitable course of action. The public would be well pleased if the Church took steps to ensure that child abuse within its organisations cease immediately and that all past incidents were fully investigated. The public would like to see such compensation to be at the expense of the Church and its members and that no creative accounting be employed to shift the cost to the public purse. To realise these goals the Catholic Church might immediately cease all collusion with paedophiles, cease all protecting, defending or sheltering of these perverts.

On May 7 another Catholic priest, Patrick Thwaites was found guilty of sexually molesting a boy and facing further charges of indecently assaulting a boy on the West Coast in the mid 1980s.

The Catholic Church could instigate a policy of immediate co-operation with the police in investigating each and every complaint of abuse involving their priests or lay brothers. The Catholic Church could suspend without pay if charges are laid and use whatever influence it has to oppose bail. If the accused is later acquitted the Church would make up the pay and reinstate the accused. If the accused is convicted the Church could immediately excommunicate the pervert. The Church could use its resources to oppose parole at every opportunity to ensure a full and appropriate sentence is served. The Catholic Church could fund an independent research project, perhaps employing local non-Christian graduates in History and Law, to establish the extent of such offending with the Church throughout the history of this country, and to measure the response by the State and the Church to all complaints ever laid. The Church could assist this project by unconditionally opening all records and files both in New Zealand and overseas to such research. Naturally enough, confidentiality of innocent parties would be respected and full satisfaction by way of compensation would be paid by the Church to victims or their descendants.

Alternatively, the Church could continue to collude with perversion by protecting the abusers from prosecution, by sheltering them, by minimising the effects of their violent behaviour, by stigmatising the victims and by refusing to pay adequate compensation. This course would leave the public to wonder how widespread such perversion is in the Catholic Church, and how it reaches. The State might then by forced to consider whether it is proper to continue funding such an organisation by way of rates rebates and direct public funding.

As for the victims. It seems unlikely that magic words of apology and confession are appropriate however much store the Church might place in mumbled incantations. Satisfaction is overdue. It is past time the Church was judged on this issue.

Peter Murphy is the convener of the Waikato Freethinkers.

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Southern Lights

Off To Hell

Russell Dear

I wonder if, like me, you parade your rational beliefs - enjoy confrontations with members of the opposite camp. Mind you, a lot of good it does me. I never seem to be able to deliver that perfect riposte which silences all opposition. I suppose I shouldn¹t be surprised as they are always able to retreat down alleys I won't follow, into a labyrinth of irrationalism. Still, it does the local religionists good to know there are a few thinkers out there who are prepared to take them on in the media if they should step too far out of line.

I wonder too if, like me, you have a few Christian friends who care enough about you to include you in their prayers. One friend (we will call her Marge but that's not her real name) says she has been praying for me for many years. Although she doesn't like my lifestyle she apparently feels that I have a soul worth saving. She recently lent me a remarkable book but before I describe it I should explain that I use the word "friend" here loosely. I've known and worked with Marge for many years and had numerous conversational duels during that time. Anyway, the book (A Divine Revelation Of Hell by Mary K. Baxter) purports to be a true account of how, over a period of 40 days, God revealed visions of hell to the author and commissioned her to tell the story in written form to the world. The book is even dedicated to God without whom, it says, the book would not have been possible. Marge's motivation was to so frighten me by the grotesque images of hell that, not wanting to end up in that place, I would rush to seek my salvation in God - Marge's God, of course. She told me that others who had read the book had felt that way. Well, I decided to give it a go.

I should have known better. It was the ravings of a demented mind, full of descriptions of God dispassionately showing the author sickening scenes of some of the more well-known manifestations of hell. From a pit, surrounded by fire and brimstone, a woman cries to Jesus who is showing the author the scene. Her bones are full of worms and dead flesh (recurring themes in the book). "Please let me out of here", the woman cries. Jesus turns away without a word, as though from a picture in a gallery, to show the author yet another gross scene from hell. Chapter follows chapter of this nonsense with headings like; "The Left Leg of Hell", "The Right Arm of Hell", "More Pits", and so on. If it wasn't so absolutely ludicrous it would be amusing. How could anyone not laugh at this nonsense published as fact. At least no reputable publishing house was responsible for producing the book - just a private affair under the auspices of the "National Church of God".

I gave up on the book, I have to admit. But where does that leave me? What should I say to Marge? On the one hand, Marge is a sad case and it would give me no satisfaction to hurt her feelings. On the other, she is impugning my character. She is clearly saying that my lifestyle is evil and will only lead to hell. That surely deserves some form of firm response. She has judged me and found me wanting in the eyes of her god. Does her god (i.e. her belief system), I wonder, give her that right? It probably does. Christians tend not to be very tolerant. Many are extremely critical of those they believe hold conflicting views. Oddly enough, the worst criticisms often seem to be reserved for those other Christians who belong to different denominations.

No doubt some of you have had similar experiences. If not, I wonder what your response would be if such a thing happened to you. What would you do? Let me know.

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Is Abortion Justifiable?

An examination of the evidence

Zoë During

Eye of newt and toe of frog
Wool of bat and tongue of dog...
Finger of birth-strangled babe
Ditch-delivered by a drab
Make the gruel thick and slab
Double, double, toil and trouble
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

Shakespeare well knew that many new-born babies were killed by their mothers not necessarily birth-strangled nor ditch-delivered, but rather "overlaid" or smothered, left exposed to the elements, or starved of nourishment, their little bodies often left in London dust heaps or thrown into the Thames. Infanticide has been practised over the centuries and throughout the world, from Polynesia to Asia, and there is still a good deal of it about today.

Rather than kill their live babies women have mainly limited their families by abortion. Lucky rich women have usually been able to pay doctors for relatively safe abortions. But the majority of women, poor women have had to go to backstreet practitioners or swallow dubious potions or use knitting needles on themselves. Attempting illegal abortion by such means has always been dreadful and dangerous and greatly increased maternal mortality.

The World Health Organisation estimates that worldwide there are 20 million abortions each year, half or more being illegal, these causing up to 78,000 maternal deaths and hundreds of thousands of disabilities. A New York statistic is illuminating. For the three years before abortion became legal in that state, the maternal death ratio averaged 51 per 100,000 live births. For each of the three years immediately following legalisation it dropped to a mere 38, and there was the additional bonus of a 5% reduction in the neo-natal mortality rate. Thus not having access to legal abortion unjustifiably kills mothers and babies, while legalising abortion saves lives.

Why are women driven to kill their babies or abort their foetuses? Because of overabundance. Nature ensures that the species survives by overabundance. There is an enormous wastage of sperm and ova, and this continues after fertilisation, with the loss of at least 50% of embryos and foetuses, mostly in the first three months, and often before the woman knows she is pregnant, and many of the discarded embryos are genetically defective.

Even with this considerable foetal wastage, the normal fertile women produces babies far too easily. Without any effective means of contraception she could have 20 or so babies over her reproductive lifetime; far more than most women can provide for adequately and so throughout history she has tragically resorted to infanticide and abortion.

Desperate women abort foetuses regardless of the law, which means that the essential decision a government can make is not "shall we allow women to abort?" but rather "shall we have women terminating their pregnancies with shame, misery and danger, or doing so safely or decently?"

While in the past sepsis and haemorrhage made abortion ten times more dangerous than childbirth, modern legal abortion carried out in the first three months is ten times safer. There has not been a single death from abortion in New Zealand since the Abortion Supervisory Service was required to keep figures. But for every woman, even today when it is so safe, abortion is always a serious matter, an unfortunately necessary decision, one which is never made lightly.

And so let us agree in desiring that there should be as few abortions as possible. The only proven way of achieving this is firstly by making good sexuality education part of mandatory health education in schools, and secondly, by ensuring that an efficient and affordable family planning service is accessible to all. This is what the Netherlands already does, with the result that it has the lowest abortion rate in the world. The Netherlands' rate is only 5.6 per 1000 women, (ages 15-44) while ours in 17.5. Even so, some abortions will always be necessary because of contraceptive failure.

Abortion cannot be unjustifiable killing unless, surely, there is the killing of a human person. So when does human personhood begin? Human life begins with a sperm uniting an ovum. Questionnaires and polls show that people differ as to when the conceptus, the potential human person actually becomes in their view an actual human person.

Those who believe that there is a human person at the "moment of conception" are few. Indeed New Zealand abortion law only applies after implantation, thus freely allowing the use of IUDs and morning after pills. Some people on the other hand believe that only after birth, when the foetus becomes a child and interacts with the world it is truly a person. For most people, however, the moral significance of aborting a potential human being increases as it develops. Little significance is placed on aborting a very early embryo, and it remains low for the first three months of foetal life. For most people it is very important that abortion be done as early as possible and very early abortion is only possible when the law enables it to be simply a matter between a women and her doctor.

Not only are modern democratic societies pluralistic in their beliefs and views regarding abortion, but the Catholic Church itself is also pluralistic, with the American group, "Catholics for a Free Choice" within its ranks, and others like Teilhard de Chardin, who believed that a human person only exists (ONLY) with self-awareness.

Let us consider in a little more detail the so-called "moment of conception". There is, in fact, no such moment. First, the cytoplasm of sperm and ovum unite, then the nuclei, and not until 38 hours after the sperm has penetrated the ovum does cell division begin. Implantation in the uterus takes place from the fifth to the thirteenth day over which period twinning may occur, the one unique individual becoming two. The foetal nervous system takes time to mature. For sensory input to get to a sufficiently developed cortex, myelinisation of nerve pathways is necessary. There is (NO) absolute consensus among experts that the foetus has conscious awareness, no ability to feel pain for the first three months and this is when 95% of abortions are done. Myelinisation of nerve pathways does not begin until the twentieth week and is completed only after birth. The early foetal responses are purely reflex.

An increasing majority of people in democratic societies hold liberal views regarding abortion. In our recent past doctors performing illegal abortions were occasionally charged but almost never convicted. Had juries believed they were "unjustifiably killing" they would certainly have been found guilty. It is surely arrogant, undemocratic and unjustifiable that the tiny minority of ideologues who believe that human personhood begins at conception; that abortion is "unjustifiable killing" or murder, the term they usually prefer to use; should try to impose their minority moralist opinion on the rest of us.

In a modern society a woman's reasons for seeking abortion are many and varied. Some, particularly ignorant teenagers, have unprotected impulsive intercourse, often when drunk. In New Zealand only 20% of girls or women use a contraceptive at first intercourse while 80% of Dutch women do so. Believing contraception to be sinful raises the likelihood of abortion and there has always been a high incidence of abortion among Catholics. In New Zealand, Pacific Island women have a high rate of abortion, second only to Asians. Very often a woman simply does not feel well enough to cope with a baby, especially when it is another baby. Phil Silva's Dunedin multidisciplinary study found among the thousand mothers of five year olds he surveyed, 80% complained of symptoms relating to a degree of physical ill health, and 60% to symptoms of psychological ill health, the poorest state of health particularly depression being related to the number of young children in the home.

So, to summarise. No woman should be forced to bring an unwanted child into the world. Only she knows her particular circumstances, her state of health, her ability to help her child reach his or her potential for physical, emotional, social and cognitive well-being. Only she knows if she can do this without detriment to any older children she might have. Moreover, unwanted children are at risk of being abused and neglected, of leading poor quality lives.

Surely we all should be doing our utmost to reduce the abortion rate; firstly by ensuring that every child receives a good health education, sometimes called "Education for Life", covering boy-girl relationships, human sexuality, contraception and the responsibilities of parenthood; and secondly, by ensuring that an efficient contraceptive service is freely available to all.

Finally, women who do find themselves with an unwanted pregnancy should be able to abort their foetuses legally as early as possible, and decently and without shame. When they thereby frustrate the further maturation of a tiny organism whose nervous system is insufficiently developed to enable it to feel or think or know, it is certainly not unjustifiable killing. It is rather continuing what nature does herself, selecting better quality human beings, selecting those that the mother really wants, those that she can rear to become useful, happy human beings.

Dr Zoë During, MBE, is a longtime campaigner for better health for New Zealanders. She is an Honorary Associate of the NZARH. This article was originally presented as an address at a debate on abortion sponsored by the Auckland University Atheists and the NZARH, held on August 4 at the Conference Centre, Auckland University.

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Stranger than Fiction

Geology in the Human Body

Elizabeth McKenzie

Although geology is generally thought to encompass processes beneath the earth's surface, it has much farther-reaching applications. New syntheses between geology and microbiology (due to Gaia theory) have revealed a close relationship between microorganisms and some types of mineral formation. This type of research is producing solutions to long-standing problems, such as kidney stone formation and other types of biomineralization in the human body. Examination of human kidney stones by Japanese petrologists reveal strong similarities with stromatolites, laminated structures formed by microorganisms in many different environments. Human kidney stones are made up of layers of the minerals apatite or struvite (carbonate or calcium phosphate). The implications from this research mean that the nucleation of kidney stones may be started by microorganisms, such as bacteria, like grains of sand nucleate pearl formation. So, why didn't we notice them before?

The bacteria thought to nucleate kidney stones are very small - 'nannobacteria', and have only revealed themselves since the recent developments in high resolution electron microscopy.

So, what other microbe-mineral interactions are going on in your body?

Bacteria living in your saliva cause the build-up of brown calcite crystals behind your bottom teeth (which the dentist scrapes off). Ninety percent of your cell diversity is bacterial. Although your 10% of human cells make up a large volume, you carry a vast symbiotic community of bacteria within you. Without these bacteria, you would not be able to digest food or fight off infection.

What implications does this have regarding the philosophy that regards humans as being 'special'; or 'unique'? If we are a walking community of bacteria and eukaryota, and not a discrete package, then which bit of us is the part that is 'made in God's image'? What makes us 'human'? Given the vast numbers of humans on this planet today, one wonders what proportion of the bacterial biomass we carry within us.

If you're interested in this topic, check out: http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc98/8_1_98/bob2.htm and "Are bacterial proteins part of the matrix of kidney stones?" Author: Daskalova, S. et al, Source: Microb. Pathog. Year: 1998 and "Nannobacteria: an alternative mechanism for pathogenic intra- and extracellular calcification and stone formation." Author: Kajander, E. O; Ciftcioglu, N. Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA Year: 1998 and "Bacteria to blame for kidney stones?" Author: Vogel, G. Source: Science Year: 1998.

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Drugs: The Problem is the Policy

John Marks

In 1954 Aldous Huxley wrote "That humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with artificial paradises seems very unlikely. Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape...is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul". And there is no society anywhere in history that has not used an intoxicant. There will thus always be a demand for drugs. "Where there is an influx and outflow of people no system, however secure, can prevent contraband entering the institution". So said the Governor of Edinburgh Jail in 1993, about drugs in prisons. If you cannot keep drugs out of a totally closed society like a prison, how is this expected in an open, free society? There will thus always be a supply of drugs.

In order to control drugs, that state must actually have a lawful supply of drugs. If it is too lax with the supply, we get the problems now seen with alcohol. If it is too strict with the supply, criminals meet the demand. If the state is so restrictive as to deny itself a lawful supply altogether, it does not get rid of the supply: it simply hands it over, by abduction, to the gangsters. And the drug market is the second largest in the world, after weapons. Hence gangsters have a vested interest in the return of prohibitionist governments. Although free markets promote consumption, black markets (under Prohibition) peddle consumption. Only regulation controls consumption.

Before 1920 drugs were freely available and there was no "destruction of society". Then America introduced the Prohibition against drugs and alcohol. This gave a huge market to gangsters and the violence over "turf wars" led America to abandon the Prohibition against alcohol in 1933. Unfortunately the Prohibition continued against drugs and so American cities (and increasingly European cities) are being torn apart again by the Prohibition. In contrast to America, Britain rationed drugs via family doctors from 1920-1971. Accessible trans-Atlantic travel enabled American "drug refugees" to come to England in the 1960s, so in 1971 the ration was restricted to consultant psychiatrists. All agree the British system was supremely successful. Even the "restricted" British system of psychiatrists' clinics was successful until some London psychiatrists found the "inkeeping role" distasteful and managed to persuade many of their fellows to desist from operating the ration - leading to American-style gang-warfare in our cities.

None of the currently prohibited drugs is a serious risk to health: the risks come almost entirely from the dirty, secret, criminal circumstances in which, under the Prohibition, drugs of unknown strength and composition are consumed. Many objects more dangerous than drugs, such as knives, can be bought from any hardware store. It is the way knives or drugs are used which makes them dangerous, not the things themselves. Just as we grow up learning the dangers of knives and how to control and use them for our benefit, so the Prohibition denies us this opportunity in the case of drugs and most of the problems arise from the resulting ignorance of how to use drugs properly. So drugs are dangerous because they are prohibited, not prohibited because they are dangerous.

The Prohibition also drives users to the most concentrated form of drugs, so that people inject heroin instead of smoking a pipe of opium, just as in Al Capone's Chicago people injected adulterated meths because they couldn't get a bottle of beer or a glass of wine. Our problem is, therefore, not drugs but our drug policy: the Prohibition.

John Marks MB, ChB, FRCPsych, FRANZCP, is a Consultant Psychiatrist living in Wellington. This is his first article for the NZ Rationalist & Humanist.

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Beliefs at the End of the Millennium

Census results 1926-1996

	Ang	Cath	Pres	Meth	Prot	Christ	AOG	Pent	OtS	NoR

1926	575731	181922	331369	125278					65778	3217
	40.89	12.92	23.53	8.90					4.67	0.23

1936	625618	206587	368970	126755					75537	4654
	39.75	13.13	23.44	8.05					4.80	0.30

1945	634364	230819	376602	137755					133431	11313
	37.27	13.56	22.12	8.09					7.84	0.66

1951	726626	264555	446333	156077					137597	11475
	37.50	13.60	23.00	8.00					7.10	0.60

1956	780999	310723	483884	161823	47999	7662	747	567	173569	12651
	35.90	14.30	22.30	7.40	2.20	0.40	0.00	0.00	8.00	0.60

1961	835434	364098	539459	173838	45100	12130	1060	659	204056	17486
	34.60	15.10	22.30	7.20	1.90	0.50	0.00	0.00	8.40	0.70

1966	901701	425280	582976	186260	46090	21548	2028	1110	210851	32780
	33.70	15.90	21.80	7.00	1.70	0.80	0.10	0.00	7.90	1.20

1971	895839	449974	583701	182727	37475	33187	3599	1859	247019	57485
	31.30	15.70	20.40	6.40	1.30	1.20	0.10	0.10	8.60	2.00

1976	915202	478530	566569	173526	33309	52478	5581	4846	438511	101211
	29.20	15.30	18.10	5.50	1.10	1.70	0.20	0.20	14.00	3.20

1981	814740	456858	523221	148512	16986	101901	12528	6408	473115	167814
	25.60	14.40	16.50	4.70	0.50	3.20	0.40	0.20	14.90	5.30

1986	791847	496158	587517	153243	1839	42351	14352	15717	244731	533766
	24.30	15.20	18.00	4.70	0.10	1.30	0.40	0.50	7.50	16.40

1991	732048	498612	540675	138705	1785	81480	17226	18765	251709	666609
	22.10	15.00	16.30	4.30	0.05	2.46	0.50	0.60	7.60	20.10

1996	631764	473079	458289	121650	2778	188670	17520	39228	256593	893910
	18.42	13.79	13.36	3.55	0.08	5.50	0.50	1.14	7.48	26.06

The top figure is the absolute figure, the lower figure is the percentage.
Abbreviations: Ang: Anglican, Cath: Catholic, Pres: Presbyterian, Meth: Methodist, Prot: Protestant, Christ: Christian, AOG: Assembly of God, Pent: Pentecostal, OtS: Object to State, NoR: No Religion

Comments on census figures:

The outstanding feature of course, is the steady decline of religious adherence in the main four denominations, Anglican, Catholic, Presbyterian and Methodist, down from 86.24% in 1926 to 49.12% in 1996. This decline can be explained away, but the simple reason is that the traditional Christian world view has, for many people, ceased to be a credible explanation of, or consolation for, the modern world. Freethought organisations can only claim to have played a modest role in assisting this process. That they have played a role, however, cannot reasonably be denied. In the main, however, these figures reflect the failure of mainstream churches rather than the success of Freethought. These figures demonstrate Bryan Wilson's point that secularisation is a change of rather than simply in society.
Equally outstanding is the extraordinary rise in the No Religion option. The census question still assumes that we are, by nature, religious beings. This is demonstrated by its lumping together any who reject the conventional labels as having no religion. This is a very unsatisfactory situation, as the description hides at least as much as it reveals. The No Religion vote, and the rise in adherence for non-Christian religions, is visible testimony to the pluralistic, even post-Christian, nature of New Zealand's society.
The impressive growth of fundamentalist categories such as Assembly of God and the Pentecostal movements has been widely commented upon. It is likely that significant numbers of those describing themselves as "Christian" would also fit into this category. It would also explain the impressive growth of that grouping.
Of equal interest in the context of this study is the decline in numbers of those wishing to describe themselves primarily as Protestant. This reflects the erosion of significance of this distinction for people. Those who held this label as significant have been unable to instil the same importance of it in their children, thus further demonstrating the increasing secularisation of society. The slight rise in this category in 1996 is interesting. It either reflects the rapid ageing of this group, or it is the result of a slight rise among younger people wishing to use this label, perhaps in response to a new wave of anti-clerical literature, mainly from the United States.

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Adam's Rib

New commandments I give unto you

Anne Ferguson

My great grandfather was a Jew. It follows that it's not outside the realms of possibility that Moses was my ancestor. It does not, therefore, seem too presumptuous if, several thousand years later, one of his descendants should take upon herself the task of revisiting the Ten Commandments which he dreamed up and examining how valid they are for the present time.

The first two Commandments deal with recognising just one God and not making graven images to worship. As it is impossible scientifically to prove or otherwise the existence of a God, we'll scrub these ones. It is fact that there is a vast universe out there, which may be infinite and eternal. That should be a phenomenon wonderful and awe inspiring enough for anyone. We are all an integral part of that universe. Space travel has already begun. If we are not to muck up the world beyond as we are already mucking up planet Earth, the universe demands our utmost respect. Honour doesn't seem too strong a word.

Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. If only! Man is the only animal capable of speech and has evolved a rich variety of language. What a pity some sections of humanity feel the need to pepper their every sentence with a limited selection of words relating to bodily functions. Language is the way we communicate ideas and feelings, facts and history, an essential part of our humanness.

Remember the Sabbath Day. Some of my ancestors regarded Saturday as the sabbath, others Sunday, so which day is it? However, setting at least one day a week aside for rest and recreation is a healthy thing to do.

Honour thy father and thy mother. I think old Moses thought that "putting the fear of God" into stroppy youth might be a handy way to keep them in line. But what if parents aren't honourable? What about parents honouring children, showing them how to honour or, to use a more contemporary term, respect their fellows?

Thou shalt not kill. Fine, what about abortion and euthanasia?

Thou shalt not commit adultery. Trust in a relationship is still of great importance.

Thou shalt not steal. Still valid.

Thou shalt not bear false witness. Ditto - and that includes politicians, parents, the press. To be lied to makes one feel insecure, confused and humiliated.

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife nor his manservant...nor his ox... Is this meant to imply that women may covet to their hearts' content? As coveting had led to our consumer driven society, which is leading to the desecration of Planet Earth, this commandment demands more obedience than ever.

As "commandment" is a word which smacks of authoritarianism, which is not a state of affairs we would wish to encourage as it discourages independence of thought, the word would be best dropped. I should like, therefore, to propose that humankind henceforth adopt the following code for living. Let us all:

Honour this earth and the world beyond.
Respect all members of the human race.
Let every child born be wanted and loved.
Let the old and sick choose to live or die.
Take care of our health.
Have compassion for all dumb creatures.
Be faithful to our partners.
Be honest.
Cherish language.
If our needs are met, cultivate contentment.

This code for living was revealed to me not long ago when I was out walking, enjoying the beauties of nature and contemplating the meaning of it all. Suddenly a nearby bush caught fire. The flame formation looked for all the world like someone's kindly old granny. She seemed to be saying to me: "Go home and type up for Adam's Rib all I shall now say to you."

Actually, I made that up!

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Swami Beyondawonda's Ten Guidelines for Enlightenment

Be a Fundamentalist-ensure that the Fun always comes before the Mental. Realize that life is a situation comedy that will never be cancelled. A laugh track has been provided and the reason we are put in the material world is to get more material. Have a good laughsitive twice a day, which will ensure regularity.
Remember that each of us has been given a special gift just for entering, so you are already a winner!
The most powerful tool on the planet today is tell-a-vision. That's where I tell a vision to you and you tell a vision to me. That way, if we don't like the programming we're getting, we can change the channel.
Life is like photography: use the negative to develop.
It is true: as we go through life making heavy thoughts, thought particles tend to get caught between the ears and cause a condition called "truth decay". Be sure to use mental floss twice a day, and when you're tempted to practice Tantrum Yoga © remember what we teach in the Swami's Beyondawonda's Training Class: Don't get even, get odd!
If we want world peace, we must let go of our attachments and truly live like nomads. That's where... I no mad at you and you no mad at me. That way there'll surely be nomadness on the planet. Peace begins with each of us. A little peace here, a little peace there. Pretty soon all the peaces will fit together to make one big peace everywhere.
I know great changes have been predicted for the future, so if you're looking to avoid earthquakes, my advice is simple: when you find a fault, don't dwell on it. (Wellingtonians, take note!)
There's no need to change the world. All we have to do is toilet train the world, and we'll never have to change it again.
If you're looking for the key to the Universe, I've got some good news and bad news. The bad news: there's no key to the Universe. The good news: it was never locked.
Finally, everything I've told you is channelled. That way, if you don't like it, it's not my fault. But remember: Enlightenment is not a theocracy, so you don't have to go through the channels.

This genial nonsense was taken from the internet (where else?).

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Does Society Need Mr Geering?

Bill Cooke

Every now and then Lloyd Geering writes another monograph for the betterment of society. When not lecturing to Continuing Education courses or leading tour groups to the Holy Land, he produces another of these short publications. They are published by the St Andrew's Trust, of Wellington, which is connected, so far as I understand, with the very liberal St Andrew's Church in that city. While this Trust has published works by other people, 15 of the 21 St Andrew's Trust publications are by Lloyd Geering.

The most recent one I have come across is called Does Society Need Religion? To any familiar with Geering's general approach, his argument will come as no surprise. Yes, he says, we do need religion, but not religion as it is know today. Instead, he offers up the same blend of religious humanism that has been the core of all his other books. No old style god, or natural/supernatural distinction, but an ecologically and socially aware recognition of the beauty of the earth, and of each other, which we may call divine. And so on.

As part of this publication, Geering has to deal with those people who can live quite happily without religion. Because if they can do that, then quite clearly our need for religion is not going to look as great. This is where he mentions our association. I will reproduce the entire passage:

"If we go a step further and set out to abolish all religion, we may find an ironical phenomenon happening. The very activity of attempting to stamp out religion can itself become a religion.

Some years ago I was invited to give an address to the Auckland Rationalists Association (sic). Rationalists, as you know, are so passionately opposed to religion in any form whatsoever that even the word "religion" is an anathema to them. One of the office-bearers took me to dinner beforehand.

He told me how he had tried to get his son to come along to the meeting. He was surprised, and somewhat hurt, by the son's reply: "The trouble with you, Dad, is that you have turned rationalism into a religion.""

Geering goes on to broaden this homily by applying it to Marxism. He ends with the grave warning that such attempts to stamp out religion are doomed to inevitable failure, not least by ending up looking like religions themselves. The human species, he concludes "have been described as homo religiosus. This can be taken to mean that humans are for ever creating religion, for they cannot live without it."

Several things need to be said about all this. First, Geering's use of an anecdote from his visit to our association seventeen years ago hardly constitutes thorough research into contemporary Rationalism. What would opponents make of a Rationalist who wrote off an entire religion or movement from a remembered incident many years previously? That person would, justifiably, be accused of superficiality and of not taking the issue seriously.

Second, Geering is wrong to use Rationalists as an example of people who want to abolish religion. He does not offer a single skerrick of evidence for this unscholarly claim. It has never been the policy of any Rationalist or Humanist organisation to abolish religion. Freethought organisations may look forward to the day when religions are unnecessary, because we have outgrown the need for childish consolations, but that is very different from saying they should be abolished forthwith. Geering's claim here is the result of prejudice, not of scholarship.

Thirdly, Geering bases these errors on an even less sound prejudice that we are homo religiosus. This notion is beloved by religious liberals of the Geering school. What this tells us is that Geering has failed to keep up with modern scholarship, but has languished in the sixties, keeping company with Paul Tillich and other vague religious liberals, who spoke of religion as "the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern." This seemed an exciting idea for a short while, but has failed as an idea, and has failed to capture the imagination of any but a very few religious humanists. It is a fact that the liberal churches are failing to keep their numbers up while the fundamentalist churches are growing.

By insisting that humans are, by nature, religious animals, Geering and his ilk are forced to paint unbelievers (of whatever stripe) as somehow dishonest to themselves, or even as not entirely human. By doing this, they are not required to engage with what unbelievers actually say, because it can safely be assumed that it will be little more than dishonest cover-up. The disastrous consequences of this attitude was made plain in the doctoral thesis of Beverley Earles, whose work obediently jumped through Geering's religious humanist hoops. This was explored closely in the Winter 1999 issue of the NZ Rationalist & Humanist.

To call ultimate concern a religious impulse is arrogant. It arbitrarily forbids at one stroke any unbeliever to be awed by the majesty of nature or to be moved by any concern to involve oneself in improving the human lot. And when unbelievers do feel these things they have to be prepared to accept the label "religious". It is an attempt to abolish unbelief by marginalising and redefining it. Well, whether Mr Geering likes it or not, Rationalism and Humanism are here to stay. They cannot be ignored or explained away by hiding behind poor scholarship or wordy smokescreens. And maybe liberal Christianity, if it wants to justify its self-conferred claim to intelligence and toleration, might like to recognise that people may be moral and aware without having to be religious, and without wanting to abolish religion.

Bill Cooke is a Lecturer at the School of Art and Design, Manukau Institute of Technology and is editor of the NZ Rationalist & Humanist

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Current Comments

Hypocrisy, 200 million - Common sense, nil
You have to wonder. Fifteen young people dead, more maimed for life, and many, many more scarred emotionally by the killings at Littleton, Colorado - and what is the response from America's political leaders? Despite results from the Republican party's own pollsters which show massive majorities in favour of tighter gun controls, particularly for those under 21, the Gun Law Bill was lost by the healthy margin of 280-147. Too many Congressmen are in the pocket of the National Rifle Association. And the bill was lost after they had effectively neutered it by passing an amendment which eased up on the proposed system of checks on prospective buyers of guns. There are a staggering 200 million firearms in the United States.

But two months after Littleton, Congress finally took the lead. The solution to this and other tragedies, it decided, was to allow the Ten Commandments to be displayed in all schoolrooms. Littleton would not have happened, Georgia Republican Bob Barr declared, if the big ten had been in the classrooms all the time.

America didn't have long to wait. Late in July a malcontent in Georgia suddenly decided to go out in a blaze of bullets. The disgruntled day-trader killed nine people before shooting himself. Perhaps Bob Barr will be able to worm out of this by saying that the Ten Commandments don't apply in the citadels of American capitalism.

Overrated and Unscrupulous
August saw the arrival of fashionable postmodernist guru, Jacques Derrida. One can sympathise with his deciding to travel out to New Zealand. A poll of British philosophers earlier this year found that Derrida (along with Karl Marx) was voted "the most overrated philosopher". And at the same time, the bestselling philosophy book in Britain was Intellectual Impostures, Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont's hard-hitting exposure of postmodernist pretensions to scientific respectability.

As if that's not enough, a new book by Christina Howells has exposed some very unprofessional conduct by Derrida. Several important concepts of Jean-Paul Sartre, for instance, have been appropriated by Derrida with only the most marginal acknowledgement, On the contrary, Derrida has attempted to put people off the scent by misrepresenting Sartre. Ion Giorgiou in The Philosophers' Magazine concluded that "Derrida has been exposed as one who has taken pains not to acknowledge his influences - had he done so, we would have found out much earlier on whose thought we ought to concentrate."

Barking up the wrong tree
No author appreciates a dodgy review; I know that. But even so, the review of Heathen in Godzone in New Zealand Books seemed to miss the point in a rather obvious way. I included the criticism, by Maurice Goldsmith, recently retired from the philosophy department at Victoria University, in the previous issues of the NZR & H. This is the letter I wrote to New Zealand Books.

"Maurice Goldsmith's review of my book, Heathen in Godzone: Seventy Years of Rationalism in New Zealand, makes some valid points. He is quite right, for instance, to point out that several important questions remain unasked in this book. The failure to ask these questions, he concludes, makes the book "a memorialising of the institution rather than a history of an intellectual movement in New Zealand."

Again, Mr Goldsmith is correct. The point he ignores, however, is that Heathen in Godzone is only claiming to be a memorialising of an institution. I state in the Preface that "This book is not an intellectual history, but the history of an association, and of the people who have constituted that association." I go on to claim that there is a need for this bald narrative account before any intellectual history of Rationalism can be attempted.

Had Mr Goldsmith noted my comments here and gone on to say that they were inadequate as the foundation for the history of an institution, or that the book would have been better served by an analysis of the intellectual history involved, then a reasonable criticism would have been made. As it stands, Mr Goldsmith's review condemns the book for failing to be something it clearly states it is not in the first place."

It will be interesting to see whether Mr Goldsmith has an answer to this.

On the slippery slope
Few people could deny the Church of England is in very deep trouble indeed. For several years it has refused to publish its membership figures - surely an indication that it had something to hide. This proved to be the case. When they did reveal them recently, they showed a calamitous decline. Fewer than 2% of Britons go to Church and not all of them even take communion.

This might have had some bearing on the decision of the Archbishop of Canterbury to come out and say publicly what Rationalists have been saying for a very long time: that the resurrection of Christ can not be demonstrated in any reliable way. The consequences for this are enormous. It means that the only relationship a believer can have with the New Testament is one of blind faith - against all the evidence to the contrary.

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Book Reviews

The Bible in History: How Writers Create a Past,
by Thomas L Thompson (Jonathan Cape, London, 1999)

This is a very peculiar book. It is not exactly a scholarly work, though it draws on a range of modern scholarship, including the author's own. It is perhaps best approached by way of his personal history, partly supplementing that which he gives in the Preface.

Thomas L Thompson comes from an American Roman Catholic background and, like a number of other American theologians, including a close friend of mine, he was a graduate student at the University of Tübingen in the late 1960s. When he started work on his doctorate there, he was, he tells us, "so convinced of the historicity of the tales of the patriarchs in Genesis that I unquestioningly accepted parallels that had been claimed with the Late Bronze Age contracts found in the excavations of the ancient town of Nuzi in Northern Mesopotamia."

Within a short time, however, it became clear to him that this confidence was misplaced, and largely based on wishful thinking - not just his own, of course, but widely shared by others engaged in the once fashionable pseudo-science of "biblical archaeology". This approach is now thoroughly discredited as an illicit attempt to subordinate near-eastern archaeology to Judeo-Christian apologetics. Mr Thompson understandably experienced a radical paradigm-shift in his thinking. Indeed, when his dissertation was finally finished and submitted in 1971, it was apparently considered unsuitable by the relevant authorities at the University of Tübingen (which, incidentally, still maintains separate confessionally-based Catholic and Protestant theology faculties) and he was refused his degree.

Undeterred, Thompson continued his research on the Bronze Age settlement history of both the Sinai and Palestine, and worked on a series of maps for the Tübingen Atlas of the Near-East. He also produced two books relating archaeological to geological and geological data, which attempted to integrate recent knowledge of major climatic changes, settlement patterns and geo-political developments in the ancient near-east.

After returning to the USA in 1975, and unable to find academic employment (despite being awarded his doctorate the following year by Temple University in Philadelphia), Thompson spent a decade as a full-time house-painter/handyman while pursuing his theological interests as a hobby. During his period his once dangerously radical views about the historicity of the Old Testament narratives were becoming more widely shared, and in 1985 he obtained a one-year fellowship at the Catholic École Biblique in Jerusalem. After this, and still with no permanent academic position in prospect, he was forced back into further spells of house-painting. Eventually, in 1992, he came within spitting-distance of a tenured post at the Catholic Marquette university in Wisconsin. But then a front--page review in The Independent on Sunday of his latest book The Early History of the Israelite People stirred up such controversy that the fearful authorities at Marquette in consternation declared his work "incompatible with the Catholic mission of the University". In 1993 he obtained his present post back in Europe as Professor of Old Testament at the University of Copenhagen, where he appears happily free of previous sectarian constraints, but remains uneasy about the gulf which has opened up "between theology and the academic study of the Bible, especially the Old Testament", to the detriment of the former. His proposal that theologians should seek a quasi-hermetic refuge in their texts appears rather like a counsel of despair from which rationalists might gain some satisfaction.

The present book seems to me something of a curate's egg. It tries to do too many different and incompatible things and as a result fails to do any of them really well. When Thompson writes as a scientific historian, archaeologist, demonstrating in detail that the biblical narratives cannot be historical, that life in Palestine in the first two millennia BCE was very unlike what we read in the Old Testament (which reached its present form no earlier than the mid-second century BCE), that we have to say farewell not only to Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua and the Judges as historical figures, but also Saul, David and Solomon, the legendary united and divided monarchies of Judah and Israel and much else up to and after the so-called Babylonian Exile, then he seems to me both authoritative and interesting. Of course, it is this aspect of his work which will most alienated conservative Jews and Christian fundamentalists, but I have no quarrel with it.

His chapters on the geo-political ethnography, climatology, agriculture, commerce and demography of the ancient near-east, along with those on the motives, methods and chronology of the Old Testament's authors and compilers, are also very interesting. Unfortunately, these make up only a relatively small part of this rather rambling 400-page book, which lacks scholarly references, footnotes and an index (apart from a table of biblical citations and a list of books for further reading, in which several once-influential but now outmoded works are marked with an asterisk).

Too much of the book is devoted to what seems to me a highly questionable exercise: it consists of a claustrophobia-inducing, mind-numbingly repetitive and sometimes banal exposition of what the author considers the enduring philosophical and theological message of the bible. And towards this he seems to have an almost schizophrenic attitude. He is by turns meekly submissive and indignantly critical towards the biblical picture of a theocratic Jehovah. At times he resembles nothing so much as a god-obsessed preacher, determined to make a theological virtue out of the necessary abandonment of the historicity of the bible. For my money, he tries much too hard, and unconvincingly, to substantiate his doubtful claim that "it is only as history that the bible does not make sense."

Surely the bible is sufficiently compelling as an ancient collection (though not so ancient as we once imagined) of poetry, myth and folklore? I do not, of course, question that an up-to-date assessment of its historical background will greatly assist in is understanding. But why does it have to be viewed in terms of its alleged - but highly overrated religious value? Can it not simply be allowed to stand as a monument to human wickedness and cupidity? After all, its raw-edged nastiness is all part of its enduring appeal.

I can perhaps encapsulate the effect Professor Thompson's book had on me by telling a Jewish joke of the type made familiar by Rabbi Lionel Blue: "Alright, so the baby is dead! But do I have bathwater for you!" To which I can only respond: "Thankyou for your detailed autopsy report of the baby, but I'm sorry, I'm not in the market for bathwater."

Daniel O'Hara is a prominent English humanist activist, writer and scholar.

Confessions of a Philosopher,
by Bryan Magee (Wiedenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1997)
ISBN 0-297-81959-3

Bryan Magee is a trained philosopher who has had a varied working life, much of it spent in British television, where he gained a reputation for putting out intelligent programmes of topical interest or on philosophical questions. As such he is one of Britain's most successful popularisers of philosophical thought. He has also been a Labour Party MP. He has taught philosophy for only relatively brief periods in his working life.

So Confessions of a Philosopher was always going to be an interesting read. As you would expect from someone of this background, Magee can put things very clearly, which is invaluable when writing about philosophy. And yet this is no ordinary philosophy book (come to think of it, is there any such thing as an ordinary philosophy book?). In calling his work a confession, I am reminded of the two previous Confessions; those of St Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Like his two august predecessors, Magee's book is neither entirely autobiographical, nor conventional philosophy.

Instead, he covers various philosophical questions as and when he encountered them in his life. Which means that philosophical questions that he has not encountered are not discussed. This approach also frees him from the duty of going through a dutiful explanation of the movement or issue under discussion, beyond what is required for his specific purposes. This makes the book somewhat daunting for the general reader, unfortunately.

Magee's approach also frees him from the need to be boringly objective, which he certainly is not. He makes it quite clear where his preferences lie. The tedious logic-chopping of British linguistic philosophy comes in for particularly sharp criticism. He sees this sort of philosophy as little more than game-playing by clever people who have few serious philosophical problems of their own to answer. But then he also gives contemporarypostmodernism an emphatic thumbs-down, criticising its persistent confusion of impenetrable obscurity with profundity.

Magee is also in the unusual position of attacking both religious belief and humanism. Religious belief he sees as essentially a cop-out, but he goes on to portray humanism as a shallow refusal to recognise the mysteriousness of the world. Magee consistently returns to the existential terror he has had throughout his life of the thought of being dead. I have to say that this becomes somewhat repetitious, and goes a long way to explain his hostility to humanism. He can't seem to appreciate that humanists see little to be gained in never-ending anguish about death. All we can do about that is to get on with life.

Magee's heroes are Kant, Schopenhauer and Popper, and they are given extensive and intelligent treatment. It is particularly interesting to read Magee on Schopenhauer, who Magee rightly says, is one of the least understood philosophers, among English-speakers at least. Magee was a personal friend of Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper, and his observations there are interesting.

So, an intelligent and interesting book, but not really accessible to the general reader. This is sad, because he has some important things to say, even if I didn't agree with all of them. It is sad, also because it means fewer people will be exposed to his central point: the beauty and joy of living the examined life.

Bill Cooke

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Letters to Editor

Our New Honorary Associate

Thankyou very much for your letter of May 27 1999. There are many things that I could say in appreciation but, owing to ill-health, it may suffice to add that I am delighted to accept the position of Honorary Associate offered me with the unanimous decision of the Council of the Association.

I am a liberal humanist and may have differences of opinion on certain points but am fully reconciled with you on the topic of the basic aims of advocating a rational, humane and secular view of life and a tolerant, responsible and open society committed to human co-existence and well-being.

Anwar Shaikh
Cardiff, Wales

Second thoughts on Pinochet

Dear Bill

Commentary of the Papal request "that Chilean ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet be allowed to return home in peace" (NZR & H, Winter 1999) you say that "Pinochet and the army ousted the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende and were responsible for the illegal detention of tens of thousands of people."

I want here, not of course to excuse torture and murder, but to make about this particular coup a point of much more general significance. It is that the proper criterion of democratic legitimacy is not that a regime was voted in office by a free election but that it is ready in due course to be voted out in an equally free and fair election. (Very few, if any, of the regimes elected in Africa's first post-independence elections were by this stricter criterion democratic!)

Allende's socialist-Communist alliance actually won only 36% of the vote. He was only allowed to become President after he had promised the Chamber of Deputies to act always legally and in strict accord with the Constitution. The Chilean army - which like few other Latin American armies had had a long record of political neutrality - acted only after the Supreme Court had declared Allende's regime illegitimate on account of its appalling record of illegality and unconstitutionality. The fact is that Allende's alliance was aiming to produce another Cuba rather than a social democratic welfare state.

As for that Papal request I find myself - for once - in agreement with the Pope. For if Pinochet is to be charged with torture or murder it should be in Chilean courts. But the now again unequivocally democratic government of Chile has decided that such charges should not be passed.

Antony Flew
Reading, England

Editor's response: This is okay so far as it goes, although I would dispute the claim that Chile now enjoys unequivocally democratic government. And it also seems clear that Pinochet would never have been brought to trial in Chile. That country's Amnesty Law of 1978 absolves all those accused of committing human rights abuses between 1973 and 1978, the worst years of Pinochet's regime. And having been given a lifetime seat in Chile's Senate, he is granted immunity from prosecution.

Pinochet and his cronies have also done everything in their power to stack the post-military system in favour of the political right. For instance, there is a category of non-elected functionaries called "institutional senators" who are appointed in a way that favours the establishment. On top of that the military are able to exercise considerable influence through the National Security Council. So despite a pretty-well continuous electoral majority for the left in Chile in recent years, their governments are hamstrung by in inability to get any reforms past the right wing, which is powerfully supported by these various institutional supports to the right wing establishment.

Given that Pinochet would never have been held to account in his own country, and given that we agree that human rights abuses were committed by his government, it seems unanswerable that he should be brought to justice outside his country. Perhaps it is time that traditional inviolability of the nation state should be tested, particularly in cases of the abuse of political power from a Head of State.

Knowing who you are

Dear Bill

At the very end of your editorial entitled "Knowing Who You Are" (NZR & H, Winter 1999), you mention how difficult a task it will be for humanism to encourage in others a self-knowledge that is not built upon negative factors. I couldn't agree more.

However, I found that some earlier observations that you made in your article did not sit that easily with me, and although I appreciated what it was you were attempting to say, I felt compelled to write regarding my concerns. Firstly I believe (as I know you do) that self-knowledge is vital for every human being. The term "knowing yourself" has become a part of the trendy language of the nineties. Even so, although we may grow annoyed with hearing so much about it, anyone who has ever set out to make improvements to their character will know that complete honesty with oneself is the vital first step in any reform programme, and if you don't know the basics of who you are, and what it is that you hope to achieve, then the whole exercise is a waste of time. Most of that goes without saying...

What really concerned me in your article was that when you introduced the Kosovo crisis as an example of negative self-awareness, you suggested that a great deal of problems in that troubled region were due to people actually "knowing who they are".

I have to disagree. In places like Kosovo, Northern Ireland, and many of the other trouble spots around the world, the vast majority of people do not, as individuals, know "who they are" at all. They do know however what they have been told they are, and that is a very different aspect of knowledge altogether. I strongly suspect that this is what you meant to say.

Religion in particular, and more especially Christianity, stifles self-awarenesss, as it does self-esteem and personal value. For those born with its yoke on their shoulders, especially in poorly-educated societies, the opportunity for self-knowledge seldom arises, and when it does it can carry terrible penalties for the individual who dares to voice the desire to seek it. Thus it is that generation after generation marches to the same drumbeat, and questions are never asked, nor greater wisdom sought, even in the face of the most terrible consequences. This is not self-knowledge. Rather, it is a mindless acceptance of ideological dogma, often mixed with nationalistic fervour.

We can all dream of a better world, and as you rightly say, humanism and reason offer solutions to those willing and able to accept them. However, like so many before us, we will doubtless die with disappointment as a companion, but at least it won't be at our own humble efforts to make a difference.

Peter E Hansen
Auckland

Editor's response: Fair point. I certainly wasn't advocating remaining in ignorance about ourselves, as you recognise, but only that it would be useful if we could know who we are in such a way as not to define our self-knowledge in terms of hostility to other people. As to whether such people have "real" self-knowledge, that's a difficult one. We may think not but they do, and they are the owners of the self-knowledge in question. I was limiting my criticisms not to whether that is real self-knowledge, but what the consequences of such self-knowledge is.

Brickbats and bouquets

Dear Bill

I have just purchased the Winter 1999 edition of the NZ Rationalist & Humanist - my very first contact with your journal and society, and I must say that it is interesting; a thought-provoking alternative perspective and non-intimidating, by virtue of its openness. A much-needed breath of fresh air.

But one point of note: Anne Ferguson's article, Adam's Rib (page 18) smacks of typical feminist arrogance and intolerance. This appears out of place in a publication which is purportedly liberal and humanist.

Ferguson sketches a convincing argument against a close-minded scripture-inspired condemnation of the seven deadly sins; sins she courageously describes as very human characteristics. But she then contradicts herself when she takes a sly dig at President Clinton. She speaks of "one can't help the way one feels" and "an exuberant affirmation of the joy of being alive." In the same breath, she chides the president for not showing self-restraint. What a contradiction, if ever there is one!

How can One enjoy the richness of human sexuality when restrained by social conventions - alluded to by Ferguson's mention of a "civilised society". Each of us is born unique in some ways; and it is manifestly unfair that all must adhere to one common standard usually arbitrarily determined by self-professed pillars of the community. Each person's level of sexual activity should not be constrained by the so-called "average". Ferguson's article appears to be building up to a dig at the president (who is only guilty of being a man); and therefore is as close-minded as the religious right.

Don't misunderstand - I do quote the scriptures from time to time but only when it means sense. I do not exclude any principle simply because of ideology. For the record, I do believe in a divine creator but not one who is loving as portrayed in the two testaments. I am not a conservative "square"; I am liberal enough to accord each type his own space though I need not agree with his personal choice. I don't foist my views on others though I take great pleasure in publicising them. Ferguson, then, is guilty as sin in my books (and yours as well) for attempting to place judgment on what is basically a person's right to sexual freedom (including promiscuity, revolting as it may seem to you).

On a related note, Ferguson's is precisely the sort of fascist feminism that I decry; the sort that expects all to bow to feminist dictates or be blacklisted. A truly open, enlightened society tolerates all views including unpopular rightist ones; and each is allowed a place of their own for their expression without being persecuted by anyone, radicals or conservatives. For example, I was recently accused by a Maori taxi-driver of being a hypocritcial violence-prone Chinese. It is true that ethnic Chinese are brutal and gravitate towards organised crime. But not all Chinese are like so - I am certainly not. And what about the Maoris always portrayed as peace-loving people (as seen on a TV commercial for the America's Cup in which their womenfolk sing beautifully): the ugly truth about Maoris using the fist to discipline their own is brought to light in a recent TV documentary. Political correctness has emboldened the traditional victims to make all kinds of outrageous allegations against anyone seen as a member of the oppressors. If the humanist movement is to gain mainstream legitimacy, it must first rid itself of dangerous baggage such as political correctness.

On a different note; humanism's fight against religions and superstitions will never gain ground unless it addresses constructively the fears and guilt of the masses which drive them to seek solace in religions. The evil-minded are quick to prey on these deep-seated insecurities in everyone of us for some profit, eg money, power through harnessing the collective might of a muted sheep-like congregation. Until humanism addresses these insecurities which can hardly be overcome by the person in the street, religions (false and evil) will always have a following.

Finally, I agreed with weary recognition your page 14 commentary on the mind-boggling behaviour of the papacy - brings to mind the detailed accounts of similar misbehaviour of the notorious medieval popes in Barbara Tuchman's March of Folly (1984).

Jonathan Koh
Auckland

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Oddities

Nostradamnonsense

I don't understand it! We're still here and yet I clearly said "In the year 1999 and seven months, from the sky will come a great King of Terror, He will resurrect the King of Angelmois. Before and afterwards Mars rules happily." I can't be any clearer than that, now can I?

Honorary Associates - Focus on...

Anwar Shaikh, our latest Honorary Associate, who has conducted a lonely and dangerous campaign to enlighten the world about the true nature of Islam.

Fifty Years Ago

Christians may be lacking in humour, but it is at least doubtful whether their Lord is similarly deficient. When the leaders of the various Christian churches ask him for information and advice on the same topic does he tell them all the same thing, as any sober-minded Saviour would? By no means. He tells the Pope one thing, the Patriarch of Constantinople another, the Archbishop of Canterbury still another, and so on down to the Moderator of the Church of Scotland at the foot of the scale. And the layman has to believe blindly, or be guilty of heresy and blasphemy. Scylla and Charybdis had nothing on Jesus and Satan!

NZ Rationalist, October 1949

The Last Word

Atheism is not a religion. It does not involve prayer, ritual, belief in supernatural entities, or any other mark of similar belief or observance. Promiscuously to apply the term "religion" to any intellectual commitment is to empty the term of meaning. Religions place the source of life's values outside the human sphere, which is one reason why atheists reject them. To criticise religion is not to make a "religious assessment"; it is just to make an assessment. Our ancestors believed that invisible powers struck us with lightning if we dared to eat pork. Religious advocacy now dresses itself in sober polysyllables, but that disguises nothing; it still promotes the superstitions of mankind's infancy.

Anthony Grayling (English philosopher)
Philosophers' Magazine, Summer 1999.

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