I believe for every drop of rain that falls a flower grows – Every?

I believe that somewhere in the darkest night a candle glows – Well, yes, probably. So what?

I believe for everyone who goes astray someone will come to show the way – Why do we have prisons? Which way was Cranmer shown? Captain Scott, ‘Mad’ Mike Hughes, Anne Boleyn, Peoples’ Temple, Steve Irwin?

I believe above a storm the smallest prayer can still be heard – By ‘heard’, do you mean aurally perceived or receives a response? You mean the latter, don’t you? I draw your attention to Benson et al., 2006 (STEP).

I believe that someone in the great somewhere hears every word – Who? Oh, you mean God. How do you know?

Every time I hear a newborn baby cry or touch a leaf or see the sky – We can all do that, and be moved, but…

Then I know why I believe – Really?

‘I believe…’ has become commonplace as a way of asserting what one cannot possibly know. Often, ‘I believe…’ is spoken when declaring something that is demonstrably untrue, which provides self-delusive self-assurance. I no longer feel comfortable speaking or writing the term. A hypothetical approach is more rational, in that it inspires methodological inquiry and the accumulation of evidence upon which to establish a properly robust belief. Once adopted and practised, that need not be a long-winded process. The English language is rich with alternatives: I consider, I think, I judge, I feel, I suspect, I suppose, I guess, I deduce, I infer, and when it is justified, I know.

In an online conversation last year, an English caller to a Bible-literate American rationalist’s YouTube channel prefaced unsupportable, indeed unfalsifiable, claims about his God with ‘I believe’ twenty-four times. Some examples:

Caller: I believe He [God] knows all things that are able to be known. I believe He knows my thoughts. He knows, and I believe, the future is a knowable thing. I believe that since we have suffering, and if I believe He’s created the best possible world, that all the suffering, either in a direct or indirect sense, creates a greater good.

One asks: ‘Yes, but for your beliefs to be worthwhile, and before you adopt them, surely your God needs to exist. Does He?’ The reply is likely to be prefaced with ‘I believe…’

Just like the majority of his Christian colleagues, the caller provided no plausible verification of his beliefs, and none of the above can be verified. Indeed, there is no reason to believe them at all. He had just absorbed them in a way that no serious free thinker ever could. Indeed, he was tackled on believing in the absence of some sort of evidence and he remained defensively (more likely vacuously) confident of his method. The host was arguing the topic of the existence of natural evil being permitted or perpetrated by the caller’s tri-omni-God and ran circles around the caller for half an hour.

Host: What’s prohibiting God from creating the world without natural disasters? 

Caller: So, I believe the Lord created the world in harmony and unity and there’s been a fall [Adam’s], and what you’re seeing are effects. Those effects would be implemented in many ways. What we’re seeing it in the realm in which we live, we see it as natural disasters, natural evil. If we lived in a very different reality, it would be different. But the, the fact is uh there are consequences for things. That is, you can’t have uh…the fall and sin and then no consequences. If there is an actual ontological effect of a cause and a fall, you have to have the effects of that. Um…

The caller’s beliefs were asinine, and his defence inept. Rather than argue with knowledge, he chose to present his reasoning using his inadequate understanding of basic syllogistic philosophy. Each time the caller waded stickily through a set of his beliefs, the host pointed out how he had just contradicted one or other of the omni- characteristics (-potent, -scient, and -benevolent) he had already said he believed applied to his purported God. Each next argument undermined another of the omni-s, round and round.

In addition, he had no comprehension of what the host had meant when he said, up front, ‘My claim is your God doesn’t exist.’ Having been told that, both directly and also in the title of the discussion he had voluntarily entered—Your god is imaginary. Prove me wrong—the oblivious caller just assumed that both were discussing the question with a biblical mindset. For instance, he assumed that Adam’s Fall and Sin were included in the host’s worldview and spoke of them as if presumed by them both. So naïve. So unaware of his situation. I was disappointed that the host did not question this, but he had plenty else to discuss.

Across the entire continuum of Christianity, from fundamentalist to moderate, belief is treated as a valid alternative to knowledge. It is a basic method in religion, and the religious and the uncritical then apply it to any preferred idea or ideal which cannot be supported with evidence, and thus it becomes true (to the believer). Believers who want to believe something simply embrace belief, even if (as is often the case) a belief contradicts reality or erroneously explains an unknown.

Credimus: We Believe

My atheism is consistently reinforced, indeed enhanced, by the BBC’s religious broadcasts on Radio 4. If I am awake early enough, Prayer for the Day is often the cause of incredulous hilarity (perhaps pity for the presenter), while other programmes, such as Thought for the Day, Sunday, and Sunday Worship, even the perversely fascinating annual relay from the Keswick Convention of beaming, arm-waving evangelicals, provide regular entertainment.

Having a lie-in on 19 January 2025, my disbelief received a boost from Radio 4’s Sunday Worship. The topic was Celebrating the Nicene Creed, which compelled my drowsy mind to enjoy a little critical analysis. Poet-priest Malcolm Guite and Canon Susanna Gunner were celebrating the Nicene Creed, marking the seventeen-hundredth anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, which formulated the Creed in 325 CE. Guite’s animated amazement when considering its antiquity was preposterously exaggerated.

[I]t is worth pausing for a moment to consider how astonishing this anniversary is. The Nicene Creed has summarised, expressed, and opened out the heart of our shared Christian faith for seventeen centuries! Almost nothing else in our culture and heritage has lasted that long.

This creed has persisted through wars and revolutions, through changes of dynasty, the birth and development of languages, the rise and fall of empires. It has even survived the tragic divisions of Christendom. For even as Churches and nations battled each other over different understandings of church order, of scripture and of sacrament, they still held this creed in common.

As soon as the preacher had marvelled that the Nicene Creed has survived for seventeen centuries, I started thinking of reasons it was far from unique in that respect. Has nothing else in our culture and heritage lasted for at least seventeen hundred years? What did he mean by ‘our culture’? Human culture? No. British culture? No. Exclusively Christian culture? It had to be.

The first thing to enter my mind was flint arrowheads and scrapers. They are firmly embedded in our culture as markers of past cultures, and today, not only are few people unaware of these ancient artefacts, a reasonable number of people like Phil Harding (of Time Team fame) are still knapping them skilfully. Even after such tools were replaced with bronze and iron, the practice continued for various uses; for instance, flints for tinder boxes and firearms were knapped right up into modern times. Wikipedia tells us that ‘Brandon [Suffolk] knappers made gun flints for export to Africa as late as the 1960s’, meaning that flint knapping has been practised since long before the Palaeolithic, for several million years.

How about the old cottagers’ method for farming, butchering, and sharing a pig, which before refrigeration would be too much for a single household to use efficiently? Instead, each time pork and pork products were required (everything except the squeak), the community would co-operate and divide the parts of a single pig among everybody, blood and liver first, the economical way to keep a village supplied with protein until the fridge-freezer made it unnecessary. The practice—which for ancient practical reasons probably predates the Nicene Creed—can be seen in medieval illustrations and read about in journals, and was even recorded as still happening only forty years ago during conversations with elderly country folk.

Mythology includes Noah’s Flood. The story was composed maybe five thousand years ago, and it is, of course, untrue, yet Bible adherents have known it well for a long time. Reality includes Eratosthenes’s calculation that the Earth is round, deduced from shadows created by vertical rods set at different locations, centuries before the authoring of the Nicene Creed. That has been common knowledge ever since—well, until now, when an increasing number of inconsequential nutters attempt its refutation. If our planet were not roughly spherical, a lot of irrefutable knowledge would be rubbished and very little would make sense anymore.

All of the above and much more arrived in reality or ancient myth, in the distant past, and all have lasted in cultural awareness as long as or much longer than the Nicene Creed. So, what’s so special about the Nicene Creed, written in 325 CE and still in use (by a minority of the world’s inhabitants) today? It’s an old survivor, but in that not at all astonishing. Also, by today’s standards, the beliefs it affirms are arguably arrant trumpery moonshine.

When it comes to Creeds, I have known, memorised, chanted, and disbelieved the Apostles’ Creed (see green box below) since I was a boy chorister, and can still recite it, but I had only vague awareness of the Nicene Creed, which is more of a Catholic thing. So, in order to write this essay, I had to look it up and get learning.¹ It seems to me that the Apostles’ Creed, as used today in the Church of England, is just a seventeenth-century précis of the Nicene one, perhaps a translation from a Latin version.

Nowhere in the BBC service was the Creed spoken in full, and what they did chant was not from the Nicene Creed of 325 CE but instead the first verse of the extended 381 CE Constantinople version, in English. Since it was specifically the anniversary of the 325 version that the service was celebrating, you might think somebody would have considered that (but we understand that the chanting of dogma requires only vacuous autopilot).

Nicene Creed, 325 CE (verse 1)

Original Greek: Πιστεύομεν εἰς ἕνα Θεὸν Πατέρα παντοκράτορα, ποιητὴν οὐρανοῦ καὶ γῆς, ὁρατῶν τε πάντων καὶ ἀοράτων. [Pistévomen eis éna Theón Patéra pantokrátora, poiitín ouranoú kaí gís, oratón te pánton kaí aoráton.]

English: We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, poet/creator of heaven and earth, visible and invisible.

Latin: Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, factorem caeli et terrae, visibilium omnium et invisibilium.

English: I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of all things visible and invisible.

BBC English, 2025: We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.

Once the congregation had chanted the first verse, the preacher proceeded, discarding all the rest (box). That first verse translates Greek to English, literally, as: ‘We believe in one God the Father almighty, poet/creator of heaven and earth, visible and invisible’. So, where did ‘of all that is…’ come from, slightly but significantly skewing the meaning of the final phrase? Later, the second preacher’s reasoning leant heavily on ‘of all that is…’ and its context, yet it is not in the original, which naturally piques a critic’s interest. It is just added in the Latin and English conflations of the original and Constantinople editions (box).

This insertion surely parallels the massive translation problems associated with the English Bibles, highly magnified there through multiple translations and copies of unaccredited lost documents, which cannot be checked. We have at least some idea of the original sources of the Nicene and Constantinople Creeds, and each more-or-less mirrors the other, even if there must be some doubt as to their accuracy due to the former being available only as a tattered sixth-century copy and the latter as a relatively modern, frequently referenced but never dated icon.

So, the preacher continued:

‘We Believe’! When the creed was translated into Latin … it was Credo (‘I believe’), but in the original Greek and now in our modern English translation the plural We is restored. We join together and say, ‘We believe’, and that plural pronoun is important. Our faith is something we hold together, something that draws us together.

He hits one of my most sensitive critical nerves. Belief. It is significant because of its almost universal subtext: ‘True or not [all too often not], I have chosen to believe’, rather than: ‘It is true, and I can verify it to your satisfaction, so belief is a secure conclusion’. Belief is not optional, not a preference. Genuine belief should be firmly bedded on a foundation of reason and evidence, not personal or collective inclination.

Although item by item, ‘I believe’ or ‘We believe’ are declared with dogmatic confidence, these creeds say nothing about truth; indeed, just the opposite! They claim what cannot be confirmed or falsified. What they do contain is a sequence of incredible beliefs which have no foundation in evidence or reality, only in strictly imposed, routinely observed, inflexible doctrine. Creedal beliefs are so important an aspect of Christianity that they are taught, spoken and multi-repeated in chorus, so as to embed themselves in tragically malleable minds, later to be regurgitated as facts.²

These beliefs are, of course, constantly sustained with implied or overt threats of Hell—routinely reinforced by the creed text itself—ranging from relatively benign separation from God to extreme eternal hellfire, depending on which denomination of priest is preaching. Hell, ‘lite’ or profound, is universal in Christian doctrine, deeply entrenched in the minds—or hearts, if they prefer (see below)—of believers. Contradictions of religious beliefs are met with illogical attempts to dilute the immutability of real truth—think ‘my truth’, ‘our truth’, or ‘alternative truth’, all anathema to a critical thinker.

As Mr Guite told his congregation: ‘We join together and say, “We believe” and that plural pronoun is important. Our faith is something we hold together, something that draws us together.’ Who needs truth when given permission to believe anything you want to by the simple application of faith (in the Hebrews 11:1 sense), and you can confidently convince yourself of it in the secure company of others around you by reciting a Creed over and over?

Faith is foundational to Christian belief, so when pressed for clarity, Christians draw our attention to its definition in Hebrews, to which they confidently adhere.

Hebrews 11:1 Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. (NIV) Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. (NRSVUE/ASV)

Fair enough. Any of those translations provide confirmation of what Christians want ‘faith’ to mean, to themselves, but when we ask for evidence, they reach for the 1611 King James version, the only one where the word evidence appears, ignoring the more competently translated modern Bibles they might cite until decisively challenged.

Hebrews 11:1 Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. (KJV)

Assurance and conviction are not evidence, just attitudes, but if they can point a finger at the word in the old 1611 version, now they have proved their assertion with evidence, so then they can get bogged down in spurious inquiry about what ‘things not seen’ might mean: air, atoms, gravity? In any of its translations, faith as prescribed by Hebrews 11:1 is the antithesis of critical thought, but it provides secure validation for those who are obliged to believe, circumventing the inconvenience of evidence. Fortunately, there are alternative definitions of faith.

Faith is the excuse people give for believing something when they don’t have evidence. Faith is not a virtue. Faith is gullibility. It’s evidence that determines whether or not your perception of reality is reasonable and in conjunction with the world as it is. – Matt Dillahunty (recent)

Having faith is believing in something you just know ain’t true. – Mark Twain (1835-1910)

The sermon was continued by a second preacher:

Susanna Gunner: In its opening sentence, the Nicene Creed speaks of God as Creator. Creator of what? ‘Of heaven and earth’, it says and then, ‘of all that is, seen and unseen’. That tiny word ‘all’ is huge. As far as humanity goes, it means each one of us, those we love as well as those we find difficult to love, and the millions we’ll never meet, some living quite near us perhaps but forced to the unseen edges of things by circumstance of many sorts. We’re all of God’s making, all gathered together in this utterly inclusive creed.

She spoke ‘God as Creator’ without any hint of the jolt that ridiculous affirmation of ignorance would trigger in our minds if we were to say it. She simply continued expounding this never-yet-demonstrated ‘fact’ or faith-based belief, displaying what ought to be a very uncomfortable cognitive dissonance of modern knowledge versus demonstrably incorrect biblical creation dogma, underlain by the ‘obvious’ assumption of the existence of the creator Himself. We often hear preachers citing the Genesis creation account with not a hint of their ever having considered its limited explanatory capacity and utter incorrectness. It’s in the Bible, so just read it with the confident air of authority assumed to accompany your priestly status.

Having without any justification established the veracity of God’s creation, she proceeded by addressing that tiny word ‘all’, which she declared is ‘huge’, encompassing the entirety of humanity. Of course, she diverged from the Nicene Creed, which does not contain that ‘all’ concept at all—‘all that is, seen and unseen’—and, using that common clerical method, reckless extrapolation, claimed that it specially referred to ‘each one of us’. That is not what it says.

Then—inexplicably forgetting to make the arguably ludicrous claim that we are, of course, all made in God’s image, because Genesis 1:27—she confidently asserted that we are all gathered together in this wholly inclusive Nicene Creed. However, something she failed to acknowledge was that many of us don’t count ourselves among this ‘all’, and I feel confident we’re not unusual in that. That is as daft as her colleague’s astonishment at the apparent social longevity of the Creed.

Demonstrably, her presumption of total inclusivity is wrong. The Christian Creator is ‘known’ only to Christians, a mere fraction of the world’s human population, and no matter how convinced the speaker is that that ‘tiny word, all’ encompasses everybody without exception, she’s easily shown to be wrong, though her blinkers will remain firmly in place. There are billions of adherents to non-Christian religions, plus those wicked unbelievers. She’s learnt that silly but widespread dogma from her seminary instructors, who in their turn were taught likewise for generations, and they all just trot it out when preaching, but without reflecting on its palpable wrongness.

Her Bible may assert that we all know God in our ‘heart of hearts’, but that is beyond investigation and patently untrue. Only we know the contents of our brains. It is merely words in an old book, and just because Luke said so (Luke 2:35: ‘…so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed’), nothing is proved. (It should be unnecessary to remind people that the heart is a blood pump, not the locus of consciousness.) Our thoughts are inaccessible to other people, including ardent but naïve Christians who think they know better because it is written that a long-dead saint reputedly, but unverifiably, said so. Here is the passage routinely quoted at unbelievers, ‘proving’ that despite our actually knowing otherwise, we all know God.

Romans 1:19-20 …since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

Those of us who have the capacity for honestly interrogating our own brains do not detect the presence there of such asinine beliefs. The Bible is wrong, the priesthood is wrong, and their congregants are wrong. The service continued in conventional fashion, but that is enough to reveal the uncritical, or we might even suggest infantile, reasoning displayed.

Secular Belief

It is unfortunate that, today, the assertion of belief is commonplace in secular discourse. BBC News is a regular culprit, reporting without question or nuance what people say they believe or stating that scientists believe they have made an important discovery, for instance, when the existence of the long-sought Higgs Boson particle was confirmed by two magnificent experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in 2012.

As the moment of the official announcement approached, the BBC’s science correspondent Palab Ghosh set the scene, his report based upon reliable information already leaked to the press. Statistical confidence was reported to be 99.9999%, but Ghosh chose to say that the scientists had now just about managed to confirm what they had long ‘believed in their heart of hearts’. I was impressed by the probability percentage but not by the presenter’s portrayal of the scientific method, which a responsible science correspondent should have etched onto his ‘heart of hearts’! No proper scientist simplistically believes anything, and certainly not in his/her biblical ‘heart of hearts’. Hypothesis, yes. Theory, yes. Belief, no.

St Columba’s Well is a minor tourist attraction in Invermoriston, by Loch Ness. A sign announces:

It is believed that a well, or spring, has been on this site since early Pictish times. Until the 6th century AD the water was considered to be poisonous, causing boils and ulcers to appear if splashed on the skin. Then in AD 565 St. Columba drove out all the evil spirits around the well and blessed for all time the water coming out of it. The water was then clean and pure and was said to have great curative powers.

Confronted with such information, we have choices: soak it all up uncritically (usual) or analyse it (sensible). ‘Believed that’, ‘considered to be’, ‘evil spirits’, ‘said to have’? Does anybody actually know any of this guff? Did Columba really visit Invermoriston? Did he really visit and—as reported by 7th-century St. Adamnan—encounter and banish the monster to the depths of Loch Ness with a sign of the cross? What is true about this sorry little seepage? Clean and fresh maybe, but what do they mean by ‘pure’?

And finally, I invite you to a communal face-palm. By no means uniquely, a MAGA supporting American tells a reporter that a) he does not believe a fact that can be conclusively proved to be true (based on news and court records) while b) believing something which is patently untrue (a Trump fantasy), and that because of his conviction that law and order is ‘absolutely important to him’, c) he has chosen to vote for a repeatedly convicted criminal:

Interviewer: Is law and order important to you?

Trump supporter from St Louis: Absolutely.

Interviewer: And [your] shirt says, ‘I’m voting FELON 2024’. What does that mean?

St Louis Man: Well, [Trump] was convicted, but not that I believe it. I believe the last election was rigged too, so…hmm…

Interviewer: So, law and order, and you’re voting for a felon.

St Louis Man: Yes, sir.

1. Since this is a theological topic and I’m a pragmatic biologist and unbeliever, I might innocently have adopted the occasional misconception.
   
   ︎
2. An editorial aside…
   
   See Charles Freeman’s study AD 381: Heretics, Pagans and the Christian State (2009) for an insightful analysis of the creation and enforcement of Christian orthodoxy. As Freeman shows, the acceptance of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed was the result, ultimately, of Roman imperial authoritarianism, rather than a rationally argued conclusion of eminent theologians. As for Gunner’s ‘utterly inclusive creed’, I hope it isn’t too crude in the eyes of ‘sophisticated theologians’ for me to point out that the Creed promulgated in 381, along with its concomitant decrees, excluded all non-orthodox (as newly defined) Christians as well as pagans in an astonishingly extreme, and extremely damaging, turn from the classical tradition of free thought. Freeman:
   
   Never before in the Greek or Roman world had there been such a sweeping imposition of a single religious belief alongside the active suppression of alternatives. The only precedent comes from ancient Egypt when the pharaoh Akhenaten replaced the mass of Egyptian deities with the single sun-god Aten in the fourteenth century BC—and even this policy was quickly reversed by his successors. [The emperor] Theodosius’ decrees were especially startling because less than sixty years earlier, in 313, the emperor Constantine had issued, with his co-emperor Licinius, an Edict of Toleration in which he promised ‘that no one whatsoever should be denied freedom to devote himself either to the cult of the Christians or to such religion as he deems best suited for himself’. As late as the 360s, the principle of freedom of speech and thought was being proclaimed by the court orators as essential to a healthy society.
   
   (See also Freeman’s articles for the Freethinker and our interview with him. The latter includes these highly relevant words: ‘The big ethical issue about Christianity is the ethics of exclusion. Jews, Muslims, pagans—you are either in or you are out.’)
   
   Not to mention the fact that 381 did not mark the end of the theological wrangling over Christian orthodoxy, nor the authoritarianism and violence that such orthodoxy required for its formulation and enforcement.
   
   ~ DJS, editor
   
   ︎

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In an entity that may take

On a number of names

All of which fall under the same

Description of a higher power

Watching over us, as if inside a tower

Worshipped in the mosque,

In churches and in the synagogue,

Just to list some of the types

Of places, among other sites,

Where religion is a major topic

Of discussion; traditions, saviors, prophets

Mysteries, dates

Of significance, scriptures…each faith

Has its own; some elect to pray, others meditate, 

In effect, to place

A call out to the aforementioned deity

When they feel it needs to be

Called upon; but maybe we exist with no creator

As the atheists say, and won’t meet a maker

In the end, or maybe the humans of Earth

Have foreign origins elsewhere in the universe

As we might’ve been born

In the image of otherworldly life forms

I was raised more or less religious

Then one day I explored Metaphysics

Which further opened my mind

“Will I know when I find

The answers on this plane of existence?” 

The question remains on this end

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The webinars will be recorded and uploaded to our YouTube channel. (This post will be updated and the video of the webinar—on which more in a moment—will appear below once the recording is available. All posts about these webinars will be accessible here, and all such posts will also be updated in due course when the webinar recordings are available, thus forming a complete catalogue of the series).

Register for Freethought History Webinar #13: G.W. Foote, Freethinker Founder, NSS President, and Prisoner for Blasphemy. With Bob Forder.

The webinar will take place on 15 September 2026 at 7 pm UK time (2 pm ET/1 pm CT/12 pm MDT/11 am MST/11 am PT) via Zoom.

About the webinar: George William Foote (1850-1915) was the founder and first editor of this very magazine, the Freethinker, and President of the National Secular Society (NSS) from 1890 until 1915. In this webinar, Bob Forder will discuss Foote’s life, career, and legacy, paying particular attention to the foundation of the Freethinker and Foote’s leadership of the NSS, including his origins, ‘conversion’ to militant freethought, and his imprisonment for publishing blasphemous cartoons.

About the speaker: Bob Forder is the National Secular Society’s historian, a bookseller, freethought book collector, and former history teacher. He is also a board member of Secular Society Limited, which (via GW Foote & Co) publishes the Freethinker. You can read his articles for the Freethinker here.

You must register to secure your place at the webinar. To do so, click here or on the image below.

With thanks to Bob Forder for suggesting these seminars and helping to organise them.

The post Freethought History Webinar #13: G.W. Foote, Freethinker Founder, NSS President, and Prisoner for Blasphemy. With Bob Forder (15 September 2026). appeared first on The Freethinker.

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On the other hand, the process by which a belief in visiting or hovering aliens is acquired by people who had no such belief previously (and were not surrounded by relatives and communities already having such a belief), is often a perfectly contemporary phenomenon. And here is why it is of no little interest for studies into religion: it is a kind of time machine. Seeing it unfold is like being there at the dawn of otherworldly beliefs. Both operations so transparently satisfy the same psychological need, the impatient craving to replace uncertainty with understanding, however rushed its determinations and tenuous its grounding. (And further parallels with religious faith will be found below.)

In other words: many people in our own times see something, often but not always in the sky, that they cannot understand, much less control, and jump to a definite conclusion: it is aliens. Before, if there was thunder, that meant there had to be gods of thunder. Now, if there is a bright light or a black smudge in the sky that current knowledge cannot account for, that means that extraterrestrials are poking around.

Here it is necessary to hurriedly emphasise that this in no way denies the enormous likelihood that life has also arisen in other parts of the universe than our own minuscule backwater. But the chasm between making that justifiable assumption, and holding that alien spaceships have crashed our borders—without even any attempts to obtain visas—is, well, sidereal.

The reason the chasm is so wide has to do with the Fermi paradox.

Enrico Fermi was as bright as can be demandingly asked for (he variously was the first to achieve a nuclear chain reaction, was the discoverer that slow neutrons were better for bombarding atomic nuclei than fast ones, and so on and on. He was the person who named the neutrino—no wonder the word ending sounds Italian.) But when, moving beyond his main field of nuclear physics, he made a celebrated remark about extraterrestrial life, he seemingly had not had the time to think it through. This was in 1950, during a casual lunchtime conversation in which UFO sightings came up. Considering the number of places in our huge universe in which advanced forms of life could have developed, he demanded, ‘But where is everybody?’ So many potential alien civilisations, yet not a single confirmedly authentic sign of any of them: few major scientific paradoxes have been worded so colloquially.

The paradox has been explained away, even though a large number of those explanations—and there are plenty to be found—do not even mention a very important last step in the reasoning.

What all the explanations do stress properly is that if life appears somewhere, there is an exceedingly good chance that it will remain at a very low level of development—single-celled or not much beyond that. Here on Earth, life consisted exclusively of single-celled and, much later, simple multi-celled organisms, for thousands of millions of years overall. That is by far the longest part of the planet’s history. Only 600 million years ago did complex multicellular life forms appear.

The short answer to Fermi is, ‘Everybody? Everybody may well be existing as something akin to bacteria or to pond scum—not as beings that can dabble with radio frequencies or build spacecraft.’

There are also more extended answers to Fermi. Next—they continue—life may also have to survive an obstacle race of mass extinctions, such as, on Earth, those ranging from the über-noxious Great Oxidation Event to murderous asteroid impacts. Then, suppose it dodges all such mega-bullets, as happened here by coincidence, lucky but certainly not preordained. There is no reason to expect that if complex life appears, some of it will necessarily go on to develop at least human-level intelligence. Plants and animals (or their counterparts in alien worlds) may very well find life niches in which they function optimally according to their needs, and settle in them indefinitely.

Sea sponges have remained sea sponges for 600 million years. Jellyfish, 500 million. The shark lineage has been around for 450 million years, meaning it has been content to remain as sharks since before there were trees, or Saturn had rings. Its current shapes have continued for 200 million years, with only some internal evolutionary changes. The crocodilians… but the point has been made.

And here comes the final argument in the dispelling of the Fermi paradox, one which, as mentioned earlier, often is not brought up. Yet it is as crucial as any. Even if and when intelligent beings develop (as we self-indulgently define intelligence), and form advanced societies (similar comment here), that does not ensure that the societies in question will in time become highly technological. That it eventually happened here is just one more in the quite improbable series of flukes that got us to where we are, for good or ill. Societies can become very complex and sophisticated and at some stage decide that this is as far as they will go, technologically; or they may have that decision imposed on them by events. Chinese civilisation is the best example of the former case, and the Maya may be of the latter.

In fact it happened to every single civilisation on our planet, save the European, and then only—as the Lord High Executioner sings in The Mikado—by a set of curious chances. Hi-tech was no foregone conclusion on Earth; there is no real reason to assume it is so in the universe at large. Alien societies may swoon over the beauty of their moons, without entertaining any earnest thoughts about actually going there.

When a culture voluntarily reaches a plateau in technological development, it may be because it loses interest or because of social self-complacency, as notably in the case of China, where it was felt that things under the incumbent emperors were as perfect as they could be—and people should not pursue change but only seek to emulate ancient sages. At this juncture it is hard to resist noting that religion could well play a part too. Here is a demonstration:

A second parallel between belief in celestial beings and in extraterrestrial visitors (after the shared fact of being adopted to patch over gaps in knowledge) refers to the figments’ imagined shape. Humans, with truly cosmic-scale conceit, conceive that gods—gods!—largely have the same shape as themselves. With aliens, while some writers may bother to devise other shapes for them, in general they are thought of as humanoid as well, with some touches as regards size and colour. Now let us take the case that they really are to some extent akin to humans. Humans, historically, cook up religions; it should then not be surprising if alien minds have similar bents. One thing that religions can be relied on to be is reactionary. Their natural tendency, once established, is to fight change tooth and nail (preferably their opponents’ teeth and nails).

Under the above assumptions, then, if any aliens take it into their bulbous heads to pursue tech progress, their clerics will likely torture and set them on fire to put a halt to such rot. Q.E.D. (If the beings are silicon-based, applying heat may not be quite as immediately satisfying a spectacle as with humans, but rest assured that they will come up with something equivalently painful.) Though religion’s obscurantism ultimately failed on Earth (in that field), it could succeed elsewhere.

It should be pointed out that belief in flying saucers can emerge among people who are otherwise sceptical-minded. Out-and-out atheists are not immune.

Here is a third parallel between the two alluded kinds of belief: humans flatter themselves that if their gods occasionally reveal themselves (personally, that is, or through a family member like a son, and not merely in their manifestations like lightning or floods, although a burning bush may serve the purpose), they will do so in the particular corner of the woods of the humans in question. And in their own general timeframes, not aeons before or later. Thus the Jews’ God and the Christians’ Son of God were active in the Middle East, and the Mormons’ Jesus visited the Americas. Ditto with extraterrestrials. They show the fuzzy shapes of their spacecraft in these very times of ours, and most frequently in what is still the leading power of the day, the United States.

Assuming some extraterrestrial civilisation did manage to avoid every one of the pitfalls in development listed earlier, and reached the stage of probing the universe, it is colossal hubris to assume it would be happening just now. It is said that infinite monkeys tapping away at keyboards for infinite time would eventually write all of Shakespeare’s plays. Admitting that, nothing justifies the idea that we would be there to watch when it happened.

There is also the matter of the Earth’s ‘radio bubble’. Earthlings have been emitting radio signals since circa 1900, i.e. for roughly 130 years. The signals’ expansion in space, proceeding at the speed of light, forms the bubble. It is consequently 130 light-years in radius now. Any extraterrestrials with the proper listening equipment and finding themselves inside that bubble’s 260 light-year diameter can detect our signals. None beyond it. The reciprocal situation, naturally, would apply to any alien emitter. Every emitter is restricted to its own bubble.

So much for the Earth bubble’s contemporary size; how about its potential far reach? Signals decrease in potency as distance increases (by a power of 2; the decrease can be even faster if there is interfering space dust and such). It has been estimated that the Earth’s emissions will, in this sense, be detectable up to a distance of about 12,000 light-years. That is miserable by universal standards but, all right, it is something. It means some aliens could detect us even that far. Of course, they will detect us in 12,000 years’ time. And if they answer, and do so right away, without endless debate in their academies and parliaments about the wisdom of doing so, their reply will reach Earth 24,000 years from now.

UFO fans—sorry, today the acceptable term is UAP, for Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon—make much of the fact that many of the reported sightings have been near nuclear or missile facilities (which, needless to say, are more closely monitored than many other places). And especially that some of the sightings have coincided, so it is stated, with breakdowns at those sites, from which the enthusiasts conclude that the extraterrestrials are intervening to protect us from our technology.

This points to a fourth correspondence between the two sets of beliefs: in this case, it is the appearance of gods/aliens not only in order to fill in blanks in human knowledge, as in the first parallel drawn, but to assuage deep and very comprehensible human fears.

In any case, the rational thing to do, before scrambling to conclusions, should be the same as with religion’s alleged miraculous cures and the like. It needs to be determined, firstly, how many upsurges in UAP sightings around such sites have taken place with no technical breakdowns then taking place. And secondly, and conversely, how many times such breakdowns have taken place but without UAPs in the offing. In the absence of those data, and their analysis, the wise course would be to hold off on affirming that the aliens are here.

But—fifth parallel—belief in extraterrestrial beings is like belief in supernatural ones in that it is less about logic than about taking a leap of faith. Note that the size of the leap can be extensive. Some people hold that aliens have already set up a base on Earth. Hidden on the ocean floor.

New converts also consider it ‘proof’ of alien visitations when inexplicable sightings (at least, ones that are inexplicable at this time) are reported not by wild and ignorant hillbillies, but by NASA scientists and airline and Air Force pilots—and those people, people with serious haircuts, waver in their baseline disbelief that a darting light or dark blur perforce equals an extraterrestrial presence.

Such ‘proof’ involves not just one but two fallacies, although their effect here is interrelated. One is the venerable argumentum ad verecundiam, the appeal to authority figures. In this case, if respected figures like aviators go for it, it must be true. The second, less widely noted fallacy is that educated and bright people are immune from questionable beliefs; or, more generally, that people are of one piece, and therefore, for example, those who are wise and not gullible in one aspect of their lives are equally so in all of them. Yet one can hardly ask for greater intelligence than Newton’s, and his mystical convictions have always been an embarrassment even to many religious believers.

So yes, NASA and Air Force types are perfectly prone to leaps of faith too.

Yet a sixth coincidence can be pinpointed between beliefs in extraterrestrials and in otherworldlies. Once people acquire such ideas, they may tend (often rather quickly) to regard those who do not share them as worse than just unenlightened. ‘Having seen the light’ about space visitors, they may find there is something wrong with the disbelievers as persons—something sinister. Namely, they are conspiring to hold back or even combat ‘the truth’ that should be revealed to all. This is as fanciful as the diverse films that feed on the legitimate fascination of the subject. However, there can be a real danger if and when ‘other beings’ believers, whether paranoid like these ones or not, someday get to coalesce into cults that feel that only they are the righteous ones. And that statement is not itself paranoiac; it is history.

There is a bright side. At least, the mindset debated in this article—the hasty attitude towards something that should be left open until science catches up—generally concentrates on extraterrestrials. In modern thinking, it does not extend to other pending scientific matters. (This side of the Big Bang. For most people, the creation of the world in which the Big Bang appeared is still by godly fiat.) Before Einstein precisely accounted for it, the anomaly in the precession of Mercury’s perihelion was not held, by those who had heard of it, to be the work of a genie—or of aliens from that planet. Of the many theories today about dark matter and dark energy, none hold that they are the doings of gods or monsters or demons.

That hopefully disposes of the dispute. Anyway, this writing has to end here—it may sound strange, but there is a green homunculus at the window, apparently trying to get i–

The post Gods and aliens of the world, unite!  appeared first on The Freethinker.

I recently had the pleasure of opening a small, tidy package from Australia containing a copy of Lord Raglan’s The Hero, complete in its dustjacket. My delight was increased by having completed my set of 140 titles in the Thinker’s Library series, published by the Rationalist Press Association (RPA) between 1929 and 1951 (The Hero was #133 in the series).

The history of freethought literature inevitably focuses on the careers of thinkers and writers. However, this is just part of the story; there were the publishers too, and it was often these publishers of heretical or infidel works who suffered the worst persecution. The likes of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century figures such as Daniel Eaton, Richard Carlile, James Watson, and Edward Truelove, to name a few, deserve to be better known and celebrated.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the publication of freethought, rationalist, or secularist works, or whatever term or combination of terms you prefer, was less hazardous, but that did not mean that established publishers were comfortable with their imprimatur appearing on what many regarded as heretical works, particularly if such heresy was intended for a wide circulation. For the religious and those held in their sway, good taste could not and did not extend to heresy or infidelity.

The Rationalist Press Association was founded in 1899, partly in response to the decline of publishing associated with the National Secular Society (NSS). There was also the desire of some, such as George Jacob Holyoake and Charles Watts, to distance themselves from G.W. Foote’s aggressive and militant freethought propaganda, which appeared in this very magazine (at the time, Foote was both editor of the Freethinker and NSS President). And there were also still scars and resentments from their disputes with Charles Bradlaugh, founder of the NSS. Bradlaugh had been dead for nearly ten years, but his heroism, personality, and achievements, and the loyalty his memory commanded, still affected the ecosystem within which freethinkers operated. This schism has proved persistent.

In his The Blasphemy Depot: A Hundred Years of the Rationalist Press Association (RPA, 2003), Bill Cooke has carried out the demanding task of recording the history of the RPA and its publisher, Watts & Co. This splendid piece of scholarship includes detailed appendices which are a rich source for fellow scholars. (I have one gripe: the title detracts from the heroism of those who went before. Nobody was ever prosecuted for blasphemy for publishing through the RPA. Plenty others had been before, though, and their headquarters better deserve the title ‘Blasphemy Depot’.)

While it may be something of a stretch to suggest that Watts & Co. dominated UK freethought publishing in the twentieth century (and it will certainly not endear me to G.W. Foote & Co., publishers of this magazine!), Watts & Co. certainly published more titles than anybody else. Cooke identifies the importance of the ‘RPA Cheap Reprints’ published between 1902 and 1918, but these were paperbacks printed on paper which browned and became fragile; hence few remain in serviceable condition. The same was not true of the Thinker’s Library, and this may help account for it being remembered as the RPA’s premier series and lasting legacy.

Although several individuals were involved, Frederick Watts (grandson of RPA founder Charles Watts) and Archibald Robertson were key contributors to the Thinker’s Library concept. Cooke notes that sales were helped by Percy R. Chappell, who was Publicity Manager of W.H. Smith as well as being a Director of the RPA. Chappell was always referred to as Dudley Grant in his capacity with the RPA; as Cooke points out, being identified with expressing any form of freethought continued to involve risk in the interwar years.

The books were small hardbacks, 17 x 11 cm, and were first priced at an affordable shilling (5p). They were bound in brown clothette with a grey dustjacket. The covers of the first books in the series featured the author’s name and the book’s title with a brief description of the contents on the dustjacket. Both the front board and dustjacket incorporated a Doric column design, thus referencing the free thought of the ancients. An image of Rodin’s The Thinker featured towards the foot of the cover; what could be more appropriate?

Overall, the books were sturdy, attractive, and printed on good quality paper with a comfortable font size. The design would change several times over the years, driven by changes of fashion and out of necessity, the latter arising, for example, from the imposition of wartime economy standards and paper shortages. However, the dimensions of the volumes remained constant, and The Thinker almost always featured. Doubtless the attractive design was one of the keys to the success of the series. Many readers would have collected all or many titles, and this is evidenced by the manufacture and sale of a special bookcase for storage.  Anybody knowing the whereabouts of one should let me know.

Nine titles appeared in the first year, several of which had previously appeared as Cheap Reprints. H.G. Wells authored two of these, First and Last Things (#1 in the series) and A Short History of the World, which was to have the distinction of being the best seller of the series. It sold over 250,000 copies, going through several revisions and impressions.

In the early years, titles were exclusively reprints, some abridged, but with the passage of time, original titles were to feature. The range of topics is demonstrated by the publisher’s grouping of titles under subject headings. These were General Philosophy, Psychology, Anthropology, General Science, Religion, History, Fiction, and Miscellaneous. Adam Gowans Whyte, in his 1949 book The Story of the R.P.A., 1899-1949, quotes comments from the Church of England’s 1945 report, Towards the Conversion of England, as the ultimate, if perverse, tribute to the series:

No evangelism can have wide success against the continual glut of cheap scientific books written on atheistic principles…The little books are regarded as intellectual.  We must remedy the situation in which the working man, wishing to learn a little about biology, economics or geology, always finds that the cheapest (or only) literature is by an atheist…We must attack on the enemy’s lines of communication.

It seems strange that such aggressive rhetoric is generally regarded as the province of atheists. Nevertheless, the effusion chimes well with comments once made to me by that stalwart of the freethought movement and former Freethinker editor, Bill McIllroy, who told me that in his opinion no series did more to advance the cause of rationalism in this country than the Thinker’s Library.

Most of the titles have stood the test of time, although those dealing with purely scientific topics have dated in the light of modern research. One embarrassing exception is Sir Arthur Smith Woodward’s The Earliest Englishman (1948) with a foreword by Sir Arthur Keith, which explained and celebrated the discovery of Piltdown Man. Just five years later, after Smith Woodward’s death, Piltdown Man was exposed as an elaborate fraud with concomitant damage to Smith Woodward’s reputation, although he emerged as gullible, not complicit. Copies of The Earliest Englishman are among the most difficult to find.

At the start of this essay, I mentioned that I sourced the final missing volume in my collection from Australia. I would add that the reach of the series is well illustrated by other items in my collection, which feature bookseller’s labels from South Africa, Brazil, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. Oddly, the USA doesn’t feature. Perhaps this is a coincidence, or perhaps the Thinker’s Library was never marketed there?

There has been some controversy over whether all 140 titles were ever actually marketed. Some suggest that #138, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (First Edition Reprint), was never published. Incorrect; I have one.

Given its success, one must ask why the series ended and eventually went out of print.  Inevitably, some titles, particularly scientific ones, became dated and were superseded.  Perhaps with the growth of formal further and higher education, the appetite for self-education declined. Of course, the burgeoning of alternative media to the printed word has played its role. Finally, the growth of societal rationalism, and the decline of cultural resistance to it, has meant that ‘mainstream’ publishers have become inclined to publish rationalist and scientific works wherever they were judged commercially viable. In that sense, the Thinker’s Library was a victim of its own success.

Bill Cooke paid gracious tribute to the series in his book, cited above, and it seems fitting to end with his words:

Looking through the titles of the Thinker’s Library helps dispel the many prejudices about rationalists that have slowly accumulated. Where prejudice sees ‘Victorian rationalism’ and agnosticism we find a hundred years’ worth of varied ideas and outlooks. Where prejudice sees only superficial optimism, we find optimism and deep melancholy. Where prejudice sees dull didacticism we find novels, poetry and light relief. Where prejudice sees uncritical scientism, we find science valued and questioned, as we find mythology valued and questioned. Where prejudice sees stifling conformity to a brutalising reason, we find conflict, pluralism, variety and choice.

Seconded!

Related reading

Books from Bob’s Library #3: Richard Carlile’s ‘The Republican’ and ‘Every Woman’s Book’, by Bob Forder

Richard Carlile, a LOOSE CANNON

Charles Bradlaugh and George Jacob Holyoake: their contrasting reputations as Secularists and Radicals, by Edward Royle

Freethought and birth control: the untold story of a Victorian book depot, by Bob Forder

Freethought History Webinar Series Introduction and #1: What does H. G. Wells offer today? With Bill Cooke

Why bother with H G Wells in the twenty-first century? By Bill Cooke

Wellspring of spot-on forecasts: a review of ‘H. G. Wells and the Twenty-First Century’ by Bill Cooke, by Nicholas E. Meyer

Priest and Freethinker: The Double Life of Joseph Turmel, by Michael Lloyd-Jones

Joseph McCabe, Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, and ‘The Black International’, by Michael Lloyd-Jones

From the archive: ‘Secularism contains the real elements of a progressive civilisation’, by Charles Watts

The post Books from Bob’s Library #10: The Thinker’s Library appeared first on The Freethinker.

We are all, I think, products of our genes and environments. I might have a genetic predisposition to nonconformity as, when I was a child, my sympathies were for the underdog, not the powerful; for the prey, not the predator; for indigenous people, not ruthless colonisers.

My father, an emotional and physical bully, disliked me from infancy. Both my conservative parents regarded me as an embarrassing freak, a changeling, and my experiences of them led to my firm determination to be as unlike them as possible. They were my worst enemies. Fortunately, I received acceptance and love from my maternal grandparents. My grandmother often quoted to me some advice from Shakespeare: ‘This above all: to thine own self be true.’

I spent ten miserable years in Anglican boarding schools. I disliked all-male company, loathed sport (I found running for more than a minute or two painful), and soon detested Christianity as false and oppressive. The schools were, in my eyes, places of middle-class cruelty, regimentation, and heavy-duty indoctrination. With a few exceptions, like science, most of my real education began after I left school at the age of eighteen.

In the ‘Faith’ column of the Sunday Age (Melbourne), a regular contributor once said that he believed in God because he perceived order or structure in the world.

I accept there is structure and some degree of order in the universe; otherwise I would not exist, nor would any reader of these words. I don’t profess to know why the world is the way it is, and it may not be possible for anyone to answer this question. If the universe were created by a massive supernatural intelligence, however, I am satisfied that such an entity could not be good, given that I know about or see so much suffering and injustice.

Christian theologians have a term, ‘theodicy’, for their efforts to explain away why God allows suffering and injustice, but theodicy amounts to sophistry, such as that God gives human beings free will. What about the suffering of non-human animals? I think theists have abandoned the notion that bad things happen so that good may come out of them, which most people (I hope) find fatuous and unethical.

For me, the existence of congenital deformities, diseases, cruelty, wars, natural calamities (earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions), predatory and parasitic organisms, pain, death, and grief are good enough reasons for regarding the god of monotheism (Jehovah, Yahweh, Allah, God) as absurd and therefore mythical and false. And if God does not exist, then Jesus was not an avatar of God, and Mohammed was not God’s chosen prophet.

If a deity really existed, its existence should be blazingly obvious. So why do we hear sly humbug that we have to have ‘faith’: that we are supposed to accept a deity’s existence without honest and satisfactory evidence? And why are the leaders of religions so very anxious to inculcate their ideas into children—their own and other people’s—and to avoid letting children hear the views of non-believers and sceptics?

The world around me appears to be the result of many natural processes which have taken place over very long periods of time. My understanding of them is limited, but so is that of other people. I reject magic, miracles, and the supernatural; and do I not regard religious faith as ‘a good thing’. Most people, however, have some view of or attitude to the world and life, or to use the German term, a Weltanschauung, and this is mine.

We are intelligent, but imperfect, creatures living in a partly intelligible and imperfect world. We may strive, and I think should strive, to make it better for ourselves and others, but we will never make it perfect. Indeed, we may have irreconcilable opinions as to what would be perfection. Human beings are social animals, so we should normally encourage care and respect for others.

Human beings are aware that they will eventually die, and this is why a number of religions offer a supposedly eternal afterlife to faithful believers. I think this is a human conceit. I reckon that when I die my personality will disappear and, in Bertrand Russell’s words, ‘nothing of my ego will remain’. People who knew me may remember me, but they too will die. In two hundred years’ time, probably no one will know I existed. I never had to worry about the thousands of millions of years during which I did not exist before I was conceived, so why should I worry about the millions of years when I will not exist after I die?

Life is, I hope, about living, relating to others, trying to live well, and helping others to do the same. Working out and knowing the truth about things does not necessarily ‘set you free’; but lies, myths, and dogma can often ensnare and enslave.

Because I felt imprisoned for ten years as a child and adolescent, I set a very great value on responsible freedom. This means that I have not been attracted to authoritarian nationalism or political quasi-religions like fascism and communism. I have a deep dislike of anything that smells of groveldom. Freedom for myself means that I should also respect and value the freedom of other people.

Respect for other people does not mean automatic respect for their opinions. I don’t like most versions of Christianity and Islam, but this does not give me the right to be unpleasant to Christians and Muslims. However, I don’t like the way some Christians, Muslims, and a few others want privileges for their beliefs and sanctions against anyone who criticises their ideas.

I care about the world around me and avoid wasting resources or causing wanton damage. I dislike extravagance; and I make an effort to be environmentally friendly and to treat non-human animals with respect and, if needed, kindness. (I have been a vegan since about 1980.) By temperament I am non-competitive but curious: I like exploring and recording, not winning. I love forests and wooded landscapes, and I hate cold and treeless places; but I appreciate many old buildings and monuments. I like silence rather than noise, but I enjoy a few sorts of music. Also, I avoid large crowds.

One of my indulgences is books, especially old ones. They were a valuable consolation and stimulus during my childhood and some had a powerful influence, such as The Science of Life (1929) by H. G. Wells, Julian Huxley, and G. P. Wells; the poems of Henry Longfellow; The Dragon Book of Verse (1935); and stories of the Canadian forests and the beaver by Grey Owl (Archibald Stansfeld Belaney), especially The Tree (1937), which always reduces me to tears.

Unlike some humanists and ‘new atheists’, I am not a ‘cultural Christian’; and I am not attracted to ‘decaffeinated’ gatherings like naming ceremonies. My daughters were named by their parents registering their births. But if people want quasi-religious ceremonies, that is their choice. If I have a funeral, it must be non-religious.

I stand for freedom of religious and other opinions as long as they do not harm others. That means certain religious practices should not be tolerated. Child sacrifice and suttee (or sati; self-immolation of widows) were clearly wrong, and so are relics of barbarism like infant circumcision and other types of genital mutilation, as a baby or child cannot give informed consent. If people want to snip bits off their bodies, knock out two front teeth, or be tattooed, they should wait until they are adults. I am not impressed by ‘But God commands me to do this to my child.’ Religious dogma and imposition should not trump human rights, including the right of children to bodily autonomy.

I am familiar with the dispute about free will or determinism, and have been dissatisfied with the arguments on both sides. I suspect it would very probably require an almost infinite amount of data to settle the matter one way or the other, and from this I suspect that the whole subject is a false dichotomy. Human beings do not have magical powers, nor are they seventeenth-century clockwork automata. I can choose to hold my breath, but only for so long; I can decide what to eat (of what is available), but not to sprout wings or have extra eyes in my head. I know I will die, but I don’t know exactly when and nor does anyone else.

The world is a complicated place, and I think that science is a useful way of understanding it, as science sifts evidence before making decisions and is also subject to correction and revision. Science can sometimes tell if a poem on a piece of old paper was written by a long-dead poet or is a later, clever forgery. However, science cannot normally decide whether the poem is a good one. So beware of scientism, the simplistic notion that science can do almost everything. Science can be, and has been, used for cruel or harmful purposes unless it is mediated by ethics.

I think there are too many people on this planet already: the human environmental ‘footprint’ is far too high, above the replacement level of the world’s resources. People should be urged to have small families (one or two children) and birth control should be encouraged (but not forced). For population stability to work, it should be in lockstep with raising the living standards of poor countries and with the education of, especially, women. Educated women usually have more power and control over their lives.

My physical health has been reasonably good, but from the age of eighteen I was prone to recurrent, hard-to-treat clinical depression. This limited what I was able to do with my life. But most people have disappointments.

So I am an ‘Old Rat’ (old-fashioned rationalist) who doesn’t like ‘faith’, but has a romantic streak and gets a warm, numinous feeling in beech woods. (I think even Old Rats are allowed to be emotional at times.) I am proud to have been a part of the freethought movement since 1962 or ’63, which included editing The Freethinker (1972–73); and I hope that during my remaining few years of wandering through what John Bunyan called ‘the wilderness of this world’, I can be useful. There are, of course, plenty of things I regret not doing; but that is part of the human condition.

In my study, on top of my computer, are a small toy elephant, a photograph of Charles Bradlaugh, and, in a frame, some words spoken by Rudyard Kipling in 1923. They include: ‘To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you’ll be lonely often and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.’

I know.

The post Summing Up: Reflections on a Freethinking Life, by a Former ‘Freethinker’ Editor appeared first on The Freethinker.

During the vibrant and colourful celebration of Berlin’s Christopher Street Day on 25 July, one of Europe’s largest LGBTQ Pride events, darkness descended when a 21-year-old Muslim extremist wielding a van and a blade unleashed terror upon people celebrating love, diversity, and equality. As he careened through the festivities, unabated chaos erupted, leaving one person dead and 29 others injured. All this was done in the name of asserting an Islamic morality that rejects homosexuality in plain but horrific terms.

In the wake of this tragedy, it was both inspiring and heartwarming to witness the overwhelming support for the LGBTQ community, along with strong condemnations of the attacks. It didn’t take long for Berlin police to have the suspect in custody; it was a clean, open and shut case. However, and as usual, this major investigative success was followed by excuses from some on the liberal left, desperate to show that the attack had nothing to do with Islam.

The perpetrator of this horrific incident was named Abdul Ballout. Born in Germany to Lebanese parents, his journey took a dark turn when, last year, he attempted to travel to Lebanon with the intent of reaching Syria and joining the ranks of ISIS. His aspirations were thwarted when he was arrested in Lebanon, where he was imprisoned for three months for ‘incitement to religious and sectarian conflict’.

Nevertheless, legitimate concerns about the ideology that inspired Ballout were hastily deemed by some as ‘Islamophobic’, ‘racist’, etc. Some were quick to point out that while this may indeed have been an Islamist terror attack, it had no relation to Islam in itself, as a faith practised by a vast number of people around the globe. Thus, the discussion about what drove Abdul Ballout to carry out his vicious attack on the LGBTQ community has been narrowed, and his true inspiration obfuscated.

This horrific incident is reminiscent of the gay nightclub shooting in Orlando in 2016, which claimed 49 innocent people. It was carried out by Omer Mateen, who reportedly phoned emergency services during the attack and pledged allegiance to ISIS. The Islamic State, which claims to have resurrected the 7th-century Islamic caliphate, later accepted responsibility for the heinous attack. Evidently, Islamic homophobia was the motive behind this brutal and senseless slaughter of innocent people. However, the knee-jerk reaction of much of the Western left was exactly the same then as now: denial, what-aboutery, and the brushing of uncomfortable realities under the carpet. This has long, and sadly, been the predictable reaction of much of the Western left to Islamic terrorism.

As a matter of principle, one should not be labelled a bigot for seeking to understand the most pernicious current form of homophobia, which stems from Islam itself.

Eleven Muslim-majority countries have some form of the death penalty for homosexuality, and even where it is not actively carried out (and in many other countries lacking a death penalty), torture, harassment, and imprisonment for LGBTQ individuals is the norm. These severe and inhumane penalties are derived from mainstream interpretations of Sharia, where homosexuality is viewed as a grave sin. Medieval methods, including public hanging and stoning, are standard procedures in some countries to punish those who are deemed to exceed the limits determined by the merciful Allah. In pretty much all Islamic-majority countries, overt dehumanisation of LGBTQ people, based on Sharia, incites prejudice and, in the worst cases, mob aggression against them.

Is it too much to ask for a consistent and rigorous scrutiny of Islamic homophobia just as we mete out to all other nefarious ideologies in free democratic Western societies?

The inhumane beliefs about LGBTQ people in Muslim countries have taken root in the West within many Muslim communities. This is not to say that non-Islamic homophobia does not exist in the West. However, it is disingenuous for the Western left to consistently expose and condemn Christian and other forms of homophobia while conflating any mention of Islamic homophobia with anti-Muslim bigotry (or distancing such homophobia from Islam itself by blaming it on ‘Islamism’). Too many on the Western left see criticism of Islamic homophobia as ipso facto ‘racism’/‘Islamophobia’.

While any form of bigotry against people is unacceptable, we must distinguish between discriminatory beliefs and Muslims as people. Criticising appalling homophobic religious beliefs and the actions inspired by them is not bigotry; rather, it sheds light on the rampant discrimination faced by sexual and gender minorities within the broader Muslim/immigrant minority community (and, of course, the rest of society) who are in dire need of support and unconditional solidarity.

A Muslim extremist intentionally drives a van into a vibrant Berlin Pride parade, leading to horrific injuries and a tragic loss of life. This was an Islamic attack on a minority—and on Western liberal values. Yet, much of the Western media chose to embrace tepid interpretations of the attack. Even after investigators had revealed Ballout’s links to Islamic extremism, much of the media was reluctant to state the motive explicitly—something they don’t tend to do when the attacker is clearly a neo-Nazi. Meanwhile, much of the Western left decided that the problem wasn’t Islamic homophobia but, rather, that the attack might shore up support for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party and warned that ‘LGBTI people must not be instrumentalized to spread hatred against others’ (that quote comes from someone who is, as it happens, a self-identified member of the LGBTQ community themselves!).

From the Satanic Verses fatwa to 11 September 2001, Jyllands-Posten, Theo van Gogh, Charlie Hebdo, Lee Rigby, the Manchester Arena, Samuel Paty, and now Berlin, Western society seems not to have made any progress in addressing the ideology behind all these crimes. Instead, obfuscation and (self)censorship prevail. Extremist Muslims decapitate heads; spineless liberals bury them.

The threat posed by radical Islam can never be dealt with if the existence of the danger is blatantly and persistently denied. Islam, like Christianity and Judaism, encompasses a diverse range of beliefs and perspectives on social issues, including LGBTQ rights. But unlike Christianity and Judaism, Islamic homophobia is often excused away. Until all this changes, horrific events like Berlin will be the norm.

Equally, blaming Muslims for the actions of a few is not the solution. In any modern Western democracy, individuals should not bear the burden of crime by mere affiliation or shared religious identity. But sensible discourse around the deleterious consequences of Islam has never been about Muslims as people being responsible for terrorism committed by some individuals.

Legitimate criticism of Islam centres on the aspects of the religion that can lead some individuals to commit terrible acts in the name of upholding certain problematic Islamic beliefs. It is imperative that we honestly engage with the realities of Islamic ideology rather than oversimplifying or whitewashing it.

I agree that we must never allow nefarious elements to use this tragedy as a pretext for fostering hatred against migrants, foreigners, or Muslim communities. However, we also need to realise that for far too long, a rational dialogue about the sinister impact of radical Islamic ideology has been absent from mainstream public discourse. Too many Western liberals have long infantilised Muslims as fragile, in need of protection from critical analysis. This is condescending, especially when Christians, for example, are seen as resilient enough to withstand all kinds of critique, even outright mockery and contempt, of their beliefs.

Islam is a set of ideas and should be treated like any other religion. While Islam is diverse, it contains certain aspects that are inherently discriminatory, unjust, and misogynistic—even if, thankfully, the majority of Muslims do not adhere to these aspects (at least not in a fundamentalist manner). They are law-abiding people who go about their lives like everybody else. This distinction is crucial and should be firmly maintained. It is, in fact, a form of anti-Muslim bigotry to equate the legitimate criticism of harmful, discriminatory, homophobic, and anti-Semitic beliefs ingrained in certain interpretations of Islam with Muslims as individuals.

I hope that this latest evil attack on innocents in Berlin will be a wake-up call for the left, and Western society more broadly, on Islam. And I hope that this is the last time an article like this will have to be written. Sadly, I doubt it will be.

The preacherman-o-sphere: the religious misogynists exploiting our charity sector, by Megan Manson

The problem with ‘Islamophobia’, by Mark Lilly

Charlie Hebdo: An open letter to the free world from a freethinker, by Khadija Khan

The radicalisation of young Muslims in the UK: an ongoing problem? by Khadija Khan

Islamic identity politics is a threat to British democracy, by Khadija Khan

Salwan Momika and the right to burn books, by Noel Yaxley

Storm over a tea-cup? The ‘Mug-Gate’ teacher speaks out, by Matt Lovell

Three years on, the lessons of Batley are yet to be learned, by Jack Rivington

10 years since the Charlie Hebdo attack: a message from the Freethinker, by Daniel James Sharp

Rushdie’s victory, by Daniel James Sharp

The Satanic Verses; free speech in the Freethinker, by Emma Park

Confronting identity politics, a breeding ground for division and dehumanisation, by Maryam Namazie

Islam and free speech, 20 years on from Jyllands-Posten: interview with Jacob Mchangama, by Daniel James Sharp

The need to rekindle irreverence for Islam in Muslim thought, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

The post The Berlin Pride attack should be a wake-up call for the left on Islam appeared first on The Freethinker.

In subsequent centuries, some of Spinoza’s interpreters pushed alternative, religious, or even theistic understandings of his work. Most famously, the German polymath Novalis (1772-1801) branded him ‘that God-intoxicated man’. The more informed critics over the centuries, however, have reliably seen through these anachronistic re-interpretations.

Much more colour and nuance may be added to the story. There are the varying definitions of atheism to consider, the historical setting within which Spinoza worked, his own efforts to evade charges of atheism, the multiple agendas in play among subsequent interpreters, and so on. But the core facts won’t change. Spinoza was an atheist—a systematic, deeply motivated atheist.

Steven Nadler gets it.

In his succinct and elegant new book, Spinoza, Atheist (Princeton University Press), Nadler fills in the historical and biographical context, parses the relevant definitions, and performs the necessary philosophical analysis. Along the way—precisely because atheism is so central to Spinoza’s project—he supplies an admirable introduction to the philosopher’s work. This is a book that should be of interest even to readers who don’t know much about Spinoza, never mind whether he was an atheist.

I could end this note here, but I will unpack just a little more, if only to underscore why the debate in this seemingly remote corner of the history of philosophy matters.

***

Definitions of atheism are a bit like definitions of pornography. They vary significantly across time and place. And they often reveal more about the eye of the beholder than the matter at hand. Still, most people, not unreasonably, are pretty sure that they know it when they see it.

Leibniz said simply that to believe in God is to believe in a supremely powerful being that structures our world in an intentional way, is deserving of our worship, and cares about us. Either you believe that such a being exists, or you are an atheist. If you ask the person in the street (or in the pews) today, you are most likely to get a similar, straightforward understanding of atheism.

To be sure, theologians, academics, and philosophers since ancient times have offered up a variety of counterintuitive ideas of God and religion, along with correspondingly diverse ideas about atheism. Maybe God is just the beingness of beings, or the Breath of the Universe, or a way of doing things, like gardening just so, or a certain kind of experience, like the sublime vision of a reddened sun through a thunderstorm or the feeling you get from a well-wrought cappuccino in the morning. Religious authorities since ancient times have generally condemned these exotic creeds of the philosophers as disguised forms of atheism. Today, on the other hand, a healthy spirit of toleration on the subject prevails. We like to think that everybody is entitled to the God of their choice, which means that the label of atheism is equally generous—and vacuous. Who is to say whether the sunset lovers and coffee-bar worshippers are atheists or not? And what does it matter?

Spinoza, in case you didn’t know, devotes the first part of his most important work, the Ethics, to a proof of the existence of what he calls ‘God, or Nature’ (also ‘Substance’). So, the suggestion that he is not an atheist does at least have a leg to stand on, though that leg is obviously planted in the alt-God territory of the philosophers. The real trouble, however, starts with the nature of the God/Nature/Substance whose existence he proves.

Spinoza’s Nature is a far more interesting concept than the nature invoked in today’s dinosaur and polar bear documentaries. But it isn’t God in any sense that the man on the street for the past several centuries would recognise. Leibniz, Bayle, and now Nadler are clear on this point. Spinoza’s ‘God or Nature’ has no will and no intellect; it can’t choose to make things turn out any differently than they do; it won’t do anything for you that you don’t do for yourself; you can love it, in a very intellectual way, but it has zero interest in your rituals, and it won’t love you back.

The crucial point—and the reason why we can’t just let Spinoza ride off into the stormy sunset with his own private deity—is that these rather un-God-like features of Spinoza’s God aren’t there by accident. They arise in a systematic way from all the other elements of his philosophy. More to the point, these deeper, philosophical roots don’t merely permit atheism. They positively exclude the very possibility of theism in essentially all the many varieties that populate the history of religion.

For example: Most forms of theism (and all that can survive on the street) take for granted that belief in God is an act of faith. We exercise our free will by choosing to believe in God. Or not. But Spinoza denies that we have any absolute faculty of free will, and he further denies that the will has any power over belief. A supposed act of faith, in his view, posits no understanding of the world; it is merely a vow not to think about certain things. So ‘theism’, as most people understand it, never gets out of Spinoza’s epistemological gates, as it were.

Another example: Most theisms are predicated on the intuition that morality is incapable of standing on its own feet. Without a deity to issue moral commands, the thinking goes, we can’t know what is right. Without divinely ordained rewards and punishments, humans can be counted on to do the wrong thing. Spinoza, on the other hand, argues that morality is very much self-supporting. Virtue is its own reward, he says. There is no room for a belief in God in Spinoza’s moral economy (at least among philosophers). Indeed, he further maintains that such beliefs, insofar as they involve favouring an imaginary deity in hopes of receiving favours in return, are just an invitation to vice.

Another example: Most theisms suppose that it is possible to derive some immensely valuable truths from that which we cannot understand. God may be inscrutable, mysterious, forever beyond the reach of our frail cognitive faculties, according to many traditions, but the mere fact of his existence is enough to require our obedience. More than that, God can always send us a sign from the other side of our comprehension, maybe a holy book, a prophecy, or just warm up our morning coffee in a revealing way, which will tell us everything we need to know to save ourselves. Spinoza, however, insists that to understand something—anything—is to understand its causes. From that which we do not understand, he concludes, we learn precisely nothing.

In short, Spinoza isn’t an atheist in the way that some other philosopher might just have a fondness for chocolate ice cream or Broadway musicals. Even when he is talking ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, and logic, he is also talking atheism.

Why is he so obsessed with an entity that, by his own reckoning, cannot possibly exist? Here Nadler’s interpretation is at its most insightful. Unlike many of our present-day atheists, Spinoza does not take a zero-sum approach to the old theologies. There is something worth keeping in the misguided ideas about God, he suggests, even if we need to kill off the God delusion to locate it.

There is a power greater than us, whose extent and workings, though always intelligible in principle, can never be fully comprehended, a being within which we live and move as finite, dependent beings. We can find happiness and virtue, even achieve a state of ‘blessedness’, by worshipping this power. Only, this supremely powerful being isn’t God; it’s Nature. And the way to worship it is not to build altars, offer ritual sacrifices, or scrutinise Bronze Age texts but to collaborate with our fellow philosophers in pursuit of greater understanding of ourselves and our world. What Spinoza offers isn’t a theology but an anti-theology—a deconstruction of ‘God’ that maps everything of value in the idea onto purely rational, secular foundations and discards the allegedly divine or sacred remainder.

There is a positive project in this variety of atheism. Spinoza’s work is, most fundamentally, an effort to elucidate an ethics for those who have embraced a philosophical way of life. But there is a negative project, too. The message that speaks most loudly through most forms of theism (and is often covertly expressed even in the exotic alt-theologies) is this: Obey. Submit to the commands of your lord—or there will be hell to pay. This is a message that has reliably warmed the hearts of dictators, kings, and oligarchs through the ages. To paraphrase Spinoza: the key to establishing a tyranny over one’s fellow humans is to cloak the fear with which they must be held in check under the specious garb of religion, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation.

Spinoza, in other words, was a political revolutionary, and he was calling for a revolution against God, in a manner of speaking. His philosophy is a philosophy of freedom—most especially, a freedom from God. If that doesn’t make him an atheist—and not just an atheist, but a deeply motivated one—what would?

***

Given the inescapably atheistic thrust of Spinoza’s philosophy, one might further ask, how did the alternative interpretations of Spinoza as ‘that God-intoxicated man’ come about? In the most interesting cases, the short answer is that his work was, for strategic reasons, creatively misrepresented, often by his own supporters.

John Toland (1670-1722), whom Nadler discusses, is a case in point. According to his most perceptive contemporaries, Toland was a paid-up Spinozist and atheist. The word on the street was that he was ‘a genuine Spinoza chick’. Yet, as Nadler points out, Toland advocates in some of his writings for a lyrical form of ‘pantheism’ that is too spiritually infused to count as genuine Spinozism. Elsewhere he offers severe criticisms of positions commonly attributed to Spinoza. Why would an alleged Spinozist deviate so much from Spinozism? Why would he say such mean things about his supposed hero?

Here I will quibble with Nadler, who wants to take Toland at his word (at least where his word contradicts Spinoza). Toland engages in a wide range of philosophical exercises; his public-facing works on pantheism are just one aspect of his oeuvre and not the most representative. The pantheism was meant for the brothers at the lodge. It was to be part of a liturgy of sorts for the Masons. It was a halfway house, a family-friendly form of atheism for philosophical novices that would get across some of Spinoza’s ideas without scaring the neighbours. As for Toland’s criticisms of Spinoza—on close inspection, they turn out to be criticisms of positions falsely attributed to Spinoza. Their real and intended effect is to defend Spinoza against certain misinterpretations.

You don’t need to postulate access to Toland’s inner thoughts or some secret code in his texts to see this, by the way. You can just track his influence on his successors. Lord Bolingbroke, Alexander Pope, and the Baron d’Holbach, among others, got most of their Spinoza from Toland and went on to make the same atheistic moves on their way to shaping the thought-world of revolutionaries like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine. Atheism is as atheism does.

An equally pivotal case is that of Spinoza’s reception in Germany in the late eighteenth century, which Nadler also covers. When philosopher-playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) was out as a Spinozist, the meaning of the charge was unambiguous. He was an atheist, fit for the lash, or at least for instant cancellation. Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) and others came in for the same treatment in what came to be known as ‘the Pantheism Controversy’, ‘the Spinoza Controversy’, and ‘the Atheism Controversy’—which, tellingly, were universally regarded as three labels for exactly the same thing.

What were the philosophers to do in response? The short answer: re-invent Spinoza as that God-intoxicated man. Pantheism again figured as a halfway house. Those charged with theological crimes could wave the pantheism flag to say that they believed in a one-and-only everything-everywhere God after all, and not in the horrible, no-good, materialistic nature of Spinoza. The orthodox, for the most part, didn’t buy it. It was lipstick on a diabolical pig, as far as they were concerned. Among later philosophers and the general public, however, the image of Spinoza as a hermit saint, worshipping his own private deity, was perhaps too intuitively appealing not to stick.

In modern times, the reasons for the misinterpretation of Spinoza are less illuminating. Having absorbed a Counter-Enlightenment caricature of the Enlightenment as a hyper-individualist, reductively materialistic, profit-maximising creed that disenchants the world and gleefully paves the way to nihilism, some modern readers are wont to find in Spinoza’s subtle and sophisticated deconstruction of religion lots of things that don’t match the expected Enlightenment stereotype. From this they infer that he must have been religious after all. In fact, they mostly succeed in compounding a misreading of the Enlightenment with a misreading of Spinoza. Clare Carlisle’s recent book, Spinoza’s Religion, which Nadler discusses, is a case in point.

***

So, Spinoza was an atheist. Who cares? Getting the history right is always a good thing, of course, but on the seemingly arcane topic that Nadler addresses in his new book it matters much more than most people think. Through Toland and his merry band of followers, through Bayle and all those who saw through his strange, love-hate obsession with Spinoza, and through the many German philosophers who pretended not to like the naughty bits of his work, Spinoza’s atheistic philosophy spread widely and exerted a direct influence on the democratic revolutionaries of the early modern world. It rose again to great influence on those who took up the revolution anew in the struggle against slavery. If you want to gauge the impact of the radical tradition that begins with Spinoza, you just need to read the Declaration of Independence aright. And maybe a couple of Abraham Lincoln’s speeches.

The challenges that we face today are different, of course. But not all that different. I’m sure we can all name a corrupt authoritarian or two who promises to rule over us in the name of God. If freedom and democracy are to survive the assaults that threaten them today, we would do well to take a second look at the work of ‘the greatest atheist that ever was’.

Related reading

Freethought History Webinar #12: The Atheistic Radicalism of America’s Founding and Refounding. With Matthew Stewart (5 July 2026).

The radical atheism of the American revolutions: interview with Matthew Stewart, by Daniel James Sharp

Against the ‘New Theism’, by Daniel James Sharp

The rhythm of Tom Paine’s bones, by Eoin Carter

The post ‘The greatest atheist that ever was’: review of ‘Spinoza, Atheist’, by Steven Nadler appeared first on The Freethinker.

Listening to politicians today, I sometimes wonder whether they attended the same course.

Our latest prime minister, Andy Burnham, recently provided a good example when discussing assisted dying. He supports assisted dying in principle, but argues that the debate should wait until palliative and adult social care have been properly reformed and funded.

Who could possibly object to better end-of-life care?

Certainly not me. Nobody should feel driven towards an assisted death because adequate palliative or social care is unavailable.

So far, so good. We have our Initial Advantage Statement.

But agreement with that proposition does not logically require us to accept the next one: that Parliament should postpone assisted dying until end-of-life care has been ‘fixed’.

There is a rather large problem with that little word.

What does ‘fixed’ mean?

Universal access to specialist palliative care? A fully funded social-care system? The elimination of regional inequalities? And who decides when this happy state has been achieved?

More importantly: when?

‘Fixed’ has something of the quality of that other wonderfully elastic political word, ‘soon’. It sounds reassuring while committing the speaker to remarkably little.

And Parliament has hardly rushed this issue.

Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill would have allowed terminally ill adults in England and Wales, expected to have less than six months to live, to request assistance to end their lives, subject to safeguards. It passed the elected House of Commons by 314 votes to 291 in June 2025.

Then it reached the Lords.

More than a thousand amendments were tabled. Some undoubtedly represented legitimate scrutiny of an enormously important piece of legislation. Others were regarded by supporters as an attempt to run down the parliamentary clock.

Whatever the motivation, the clock duly ran down. The Bill failed to complete even its Committee stage before the parliamentary session ended.

Among its opponents were bishops of the established Church, who sit in the House of Lords as Lords Spiritual.

Their contributions are worth examining rather than simply dismissing because they came from bishops.

The then Bishop of London, Sarah Mullally, is a particularly interesting example. Before entering the Church she was a nurse and became Chief Nursing Officer for England. Her concerns about coercion, inadequate palliative care, and vulnerable people feeling themselves a burden therefore deserve serious consideration.

But during the Lords Committee stage she made a revealing statement: ‘[h]owever many amendments there are to this Bill, the Bill will never be safe.’

That is rather different from saying that the Bill needs better safeguards. If no conceivable collection of amendments could make assisted dying safe, the objection would appear to be to the principle itself.

The Bishop of Newcastle, Helen-Ann Hartley, explicitly defended the place of faith in the debate, saying that a viewpoint grounded in faith was as legitimate as one grounded in any other ‘belief or none’.

On that point I largely agree with her.

Religious believers are perfectly entitled to participate in public debate. Their arguments should be heard alongside everyone else’s.

But there is an important difference between having the right to make an argument and being given a seat in the legislature because you hold religious office.

Twenty-six Church of England bishops are entitled to sit in the House of Lords as Lords Spiritual. In a modern secular democracy, that is itself worthy of debate. Their arguments about assisted dying should carry precisely the weight that their evidence and reasoning deserve—no more and no less.

Which brings us back to Andy Burnham.

Burnham was brought up as a Roman Catholic, attended Catholic schools, and was an altar boy. He has described himself as ‘Catholic by upbringing’ but ‘not particularly religious’, while acknowledging the influence of Catholic social teaching on his politics.

It would be unfair to conclude from this that Catholicism dictates his views on assisted dying.

Indeed, there is evidence that it does not. Burnham has supported abortion and LGBT rights and has publicly challenged the Catholic Church over its position on homosexuality and same-sex marriage.

He is clearly capable of disagreeing with his Church.

But childhood religious formation does not necessarily disappear when religious observance does. Ideas about life, death, suffering, guilt, and moral duty can be instilled long before we are old enough to examine them critically. A believer might call that moral formation. A secularist might call at least some of it childhood conditioning.

Indeed, it is probably difficult for the religious to accept the idea of assisted dying because revealed religion teaches as a fundamental that our lives are a gift from God. Thus it is not for mere humans to terminate our lives, regardless of how much suffering might be avoided by doing so. Religion, if not always religious people, is always impelled to interfere in the lives (and deaths) of others, because it claims to know the truth of God. Religion, in other words, is often a form of social control.

Might some residual Catholic influence be contributing to Burnham’s instinct to postpone assisted dying?

Perhaps. We cannot know, and should not pretend that we do.

What we can examine is his argument.

If inadequate palliative and social care makes assisted dying unsafe, identify the deficiencies and demonstrate the connection. Tell Parliament what needs to change and how we will know when it has changed.

Those are propositions capable of rational examination.

Saying that end-of-life and social care should first be ‘fixed’ is not.

There is no logical contradiction between improving palliative and social care and debating whether a mentally competent, terminally ill adult should have some control over the manner and timing of their death.

Parliament should decide that question on evidence, reason, and the merits of the arguments—religious or otherwise.

Not defer it until some undefined future day when end-of-life care has finally been declared ‘fixed’.

The post When will end-of-life care be ‘fixed’, Mr Burnham? appeared first on The Freethinker.