Ethical Record The Proceedings of the South Place Ethical Society Vol. 117 No. 6 £1.50 June 2012 GUEST EDITORIAL – NOT SO JUBILANT! The last thing I anticipated when the Editor commanded (sorry, politely suggested) my jaundiced (sorry – absolutely objective) observations on the UK’s elderly, ballot-dodging (sorry – unelected), despot-dining, definitely, head of state’s celebration of 60 years of mass subservience – was a good laugh. However, there have been several opportunities for a giggle. It was amazing that the monarchy’s unofficial, full-time, taxpayer-funded propaganda machine – the BBC – thought so little of the unusual spectacle in the Thames Pageant - 1000 boats floating down the Thames behind the monarch and consort... that it asked unbelievably inexpert commentators to tell us about it, well away from the river. Not often that I wonder where Jennie Bond, the retired royalty prime know-it- all is ...... They didn’t know the difference between a boat’s bow and stern, called a Dunkirk veteran named John ‘Jim’ throughout, had a mock ‘knighting’ ceremony for some obscure reason, said a milliner had made Nelson’s headgear for Waterloo (as all ER readers know, Nelson died at Trafalgar 10 years before ksffffffffj Editorial continues on page 3

RAWLS’ CONTRACTUALISM v. BENTHAM’S UTILITARIANISM Sam Fremantle 4 THE RIGHTS OF ATHEISTS AT THE UN Leo Igwe 7 THE ETHICS OF VOLUNTARY AMPUTATION Moheb Costandi 8 VIEWPOINTS Edmund McArthur, John Dowdle, Sue Mayer 11 POLITICS AND NEO-DARWINISM by Tom Rubens REVIEW by Chris Purnell 14 “A PERVADING SPIRIT CO-ETERNAL WITH THE UNIVERSE”: 200 YEARS OF THE NECESSITY OF ATHEISM Graham Allen 15 FILM PROGRAMME (LOOKING IN LOOKING OUT) 23 ETHICAL SOCIETY EVENTS 24 SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETY Conway Hall Humanist Centre 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL. Main phone for all options: 020 7405 1818 Fax (lettings): 020 7061 6746 www.ethicalsoc.org.uk or www.conwayhall.org.uk Chairman: Chris Purnell Vice-chairman: Jim Herrick Treasurer: Chris Bratcher Editor: Norman Bacrac Please email texts and viewpoints for the Editor to: [email protected] Staff Chief Executive Officer: Jim Walsh Tel: 020 7061 6745 [email protected] Administrator: Martha Lee Tel: 020 7061 6741 [email protected] Finance Officer: Linda Alia Tel: 020 7061 6740 [email protected] Librarian: Catherine Broad Tel: 020 7061 6747 [email protected] Hon. Archivist Carl Harrison [email protected] Programme Co-ordinator: Ben Partridge Tel: 020 7061 6744 [email protected] Lettings Officer: Carina Dvorak Tel: 020 7061 6750 [email protected] Caretakers: Eva Aubrechtova (i/c) Tel: 020 7061 6743 [email protected] together with: Angelo Edrozo, Sean Foley, Alfredo Olivo, Rogerio Retuerma Maintenance: Zia Hameed Tel: 020 7061 6742 [email protected]

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SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETY Reg. Charity No. 251396 Founded in 1793, the Society is a progressive movement whose aims are: the study and dissemination of ethical principles based on humanism and freethought the cultivation of a rational and humane way of life, and the advancement of research and education in relevant fields. We invite to membership those who reject supernatural creeds and are in sympathy with our aims. At Conway Hall the programme includes Sunday lectures, discussions, evening courses and the Conway Hall Sunday Concerts of chamber music. The Society maintains a Humanist Library and Archives. The Society’s journal, Ethical Record, is issued monthly. Memorial meetings may be arranged. The annual subscription is now £35 (£25 if a full-time student, unwaged or over 65)

2 Ethical Record, June 2012 Waterloo in 1815)..... Even better was the display of the (I kid you not) monarch- shaped ice-cream scoop, solar-powered waving monarch (not doing much waving in the constant drizzle) – and the diamond jubilee sick bag with the instruction, ‘bling it up’, above the picture of the queen ...... There were thousands of complaints – from monarchists! The phrase which will be indissolubly associated with the whole weekend – and please don’t blame me – will be bladder infection. I lost count of how many times I read or heard it. The queen’s husband was diagnosed with one of these and spent several days in hospital. He missed the service at St Paul’s but then we many non religious weren’t included either, only people of various ‘faiths’ were included in the prayers. In these ecumenical times, I rather fancied a Roman Catholic or Jewish Jubilee. A jubilee set by the pope is a year of indulgence (not that sort of indulgence, obviously, the sort the sale of which was implicated in the Reformation); traditionally every 25 years, sins are forgiven in return for acts of piety or repentance. The Jewish one is a year of restoration or restitution every 50 years, proclaimed by a countryside blast of trumpets (Hummel? Walton?) Not only that, during this time land is left uncultivated and land that had been sold reverted to its former owner. Perhaps we could get back all the land that has been taken from citizens by monarchs down the centuries..... Slaves are also emancipated – if only those many in Britain who are still slaves to the myth of monarchy could be so released. It may not be so long. Princess Diana was intentionally excluded by name and photograph – the large one on the banks of the Thames showed the royal family’s four children at the time of the Silver Jubilee, so Charles was not married. Is that not rude, not to say cowardly? Many Diana fans will not forgive Charles his callous treatment of her and bringing his mistress into the family since and in line to be queen. Again, it is royalists who loathe the thought of this. The couple are still not legally married; royalty cannot marry in a register office. It isn’t even Republicans casting such aspersions, we have better ones.

The Telegraph, no lefty leaning organ it, was quick off the mark on Monday 11th June: ‘Prince of Wales presents a real danger to the monarchy’, claimed its columnist, Allison Pearson: ‘We know far too much about Prince Charles’ foibles and past errors to revere him as we revere his mother’. Her column also includes another infelicitous term we are destined to hear regularly I think in the forthcoming debate, ‘What will it feel like to have a monarch who is on public record as wanting to be reincarnated as his mistress’s Tampax?’ It was the C19 political commentator, Walter Bagehot, who defined the monarchy as the ‘dignified’ part of our (unwritten) constitution. Monarchists have already given ground on the issue of choosing our next head of state theoretically as there are numerous public opinion polls asking whether people want William instead of Charles. So the idea of choice is becoming more familiar. Yet the one essential quality Charles needs to be monarch is already lost beyond recall, I venture to suggest – his dignity. Jennifer R. Jeynes

Ethical Record, June 2012 3 RAWLS’ CONTRACTUALISM VERSUS BENTHAM’S UTILITARIANISM Sam Fremantle Lecture to the Ethical Society, 4 December 2011

It is fair, I believe, to say that before the publication of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice that the predominant stance in moral and political philosophy was some sort of utilitarianism. It is also fair, I believe, to say that since the 1971 publication of A Theory of Justice, utilitarianism has been on the back foot in moral and political philosophy and that Rawls’ book was largely responsible for its retreat. More popular nowadays is some form of egalitarianism or contractualism, of which Rawls’ theory supplies only one version. So should Rawls’ book have been so influential? In what follows I can only offer a tentative sketch of an answer to that question. As shall become apparent my answer will be no – roughly speaking, there was nothing wrong with utilitarianism, it wasn’t broke, and there was no need for anyone to try to fix it. Two Rival Conceptions of Society Rawls’ theory is not a simple one; utilitarianism is, comparatively so, so I shall start by explaining that, and stick to its simplest form – classical, hedonistic utilitarianism. This holds that all our individual moral behaviour, and the organization of the institutions of society, should be directed at one aim, and one aim only, maximizing happiness (it’s the fact that it aims at happiness that leads to its description as ‘hedonistic’). To illustrate by an example: supposing the British government is considering whether to build a new motorway. To make that decision they obviously need to weigh up the benefits to the motorists against the costs to local residents in terms of the impact on their happiness. But it doesn’t stop there; they also need to weigh up the likely impact on future generations in terms of pollution and global warming. Finally, when all the possible costs and benefits to all the people that might be affected by the decision are taken into account, that decision should be taken which would lead to the most net happiness. All the decisions of individuals and governments should ultimately be made on the same basis. Now Rawls maintained that the utilitarianism described above is most readily arrived at by applying the principle of rational choice for one person to society as a whole. He speculates that it might be rational for one person, deciding how to lead their life, to aim at maximizing their happiness. So, for example, they might be prepared to undergo a lot of hardship at the start of their career for the sake of knowing they would enjoy a comfortable retirement. The comforts of their retirement would more than compensate for their earlier hardship. So it might also seem rational to apply the same principle to society, allowing hardships for some to be compensated for by the greater gains to others. But, Rawls argued, that would be to conceive of society in the wrong way – as some kind of superperson whose losses in some parts could be compensated for by gains in other parts. That is to overlook a critical difference between the kind of reasoning that is appropriate for an individual and for society. While an individual might reasonably view greater benefits in their old age as compensating for lesser losses in their youth, it is not reasonable to view gains 4 Ethical Record, June 2012 to some people over here as compensating for losses to other people over there. So utilitarianism inappropriately applies the principle of rational choice for one person to society as a whole. In so doing it fails to take seriously the separateness of persons. This objection to utilitarianism is shared by a broad range of political philosophers who do not all endorse Rawls solution. Related to this is Rawls’ alternative conception of society as a cooperative venture for mutual advantage, where people’s first moral duty – the duty of justice - should not be to promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number, but to comply to the rules of a just society in return for the advantages that others’ compliance to the same affords you. Rawls’ picture of a just society, then, is one of individuals getting on with their own business, whilst rigorously observing the rights of others to do the same. It is a very American picture of society, and it is no coincidence that Rawls was himself American, though very much on the left of the political spectrum by the standards of that country. The proper motive to be just, then, is the motive to reciprocate, while, at least according to Rawls, for utilitarianism it is the different motive of benevolence, or sympathy, which is supposed to move people to maximize happiness.

Justice as Fairness (Rawls) Classical Utilitarianism (Bentham)

Starting point Starting point Society is a cooperative venture So ciety should adopt the for mutual advantage principle of rational choice for one man Motive to be just: Reciprocity, Motive to be just: Conception of Justice Sympathy/ Justice as Fairness benevolence

Principles of Justice Conception of Justice/Principles Rawls’ 2 principles of justice of Justice Utilitarianism – maximizing happiness

Rival Principles of Justice So much for Rawls’ conception of society. But what principles should society conceived of as a cooperative venture for mutual advantage adopt? To answer this question Rawls came up with a seemingly very clever idea, his conception of ‘justice as fairness.’ This held that those principles are just that would be chosen by people to govern their association if they were rational and self- interested, and knew that they would have to cooperate with other self-interested people, but were ignorant of what position in society they occupied. As Rawls put it, this knowledge was obscured by a ‘veil of ignorance’. So an agricultural worker couldn’t choose principles that were especially suited to an agricultural worker because he or she didn’t know that he or she was an agricultural worker. Rawls’ rationale for this was that the assumption of the veil of ignorance is necessary in order for the contracting parties to reach agreement, otherwise they would all opt for principles that favoured their social position. Rawls considered Ethical Record, June 2012 5 the possibility that these imaginary contractees would choose the principle of utility – this is indicated by the curved arrow in the diagram (page 5) - but argued that they wouldn’t, and that they would instead choose Rawls’ own principles of justice; the liberty principle that stipulated that everyone should have the greatest liberty compatible with an equal liberty for all, and the difference principle which stipulated that the worst off group in society must be as well off as possible. Why, according to Rawls, would the imaginary contractees prefer his principles to utilitarianism? Rawls argued that it would be rational for them to be very risk- averse. Rawls’ principles make sure that anyone ending up in the worst position would still be as well off as possible, while to choose utilitarianism is to allow a chance that you might end up very badly off in return for a greater chance of being pretty well off. Justice as Fairness and the Separateness of Persons Rawls’ argument that it would be rational for the contractees to prefer his principles rather than the principle of utility has failed to convince many people who otherwise sympathise with his objections to utilitarianism. Amongst these are Thomas Scanlon and Brian Barry who espouse a different form of contractualism in place of Rawls’. Rawls made a fundamental mistake, they argue, in his conception of ‘justice as fairness’, which holds that just principles were ones that would be chosen by rational self-interested people in ignorance of their position in society. Contrary to Rawls, they maintain that it would be rational for people in this position to choose the principle of utility rather than Rawls’ two principles. But what this shows is not that the principle of utility is right but that Rawls’ model was wrong. In fact, it replicates utilitarianism’s chief defect of not taking the separateness of persons seriously. For it may be rational for someone to run the risk of being very badly off for the sake of a greater chance of being pretty well off, but the way this would translate into a real society would be to allow some people over here to be very badly off in order that others over there would be pretty well off. But those who fare badly are not compensated by the advantages of those who do well. Their solution was to come up with a different contractualist model, which supposed people know their identities but are not self-interested and are instead motivated to act reasonably and impartially towards each other. Those principles would be just which no one so motivated could reasonably reject. This contractualist model, they claimed, would come up with the result that Rawls clearly was aiming for, and decisively reject the low levels of advantage that utilitarianism might allow. Reciprocity and Utilitarianism I can only give a very brief utilitarian riposte to Scanlon and Barry’s contractualism. In my view, by introducing the new motive of impartiality, Scanlon and Barry’s contractualism lost sight of the original raison d’etre of Rawls contractualism, which was to come up with principles to correspond with the motive of reciprocity. Reciprocity might actually mean that, in 6 Ethical Record, June 2012 circumstances similar to ones where utilitarianism would suggest that the advantages to the pretty well off would outweigh the disadvantages to the badly off, low levels of advantage could be justified to the badly off. For the current generations in rich countries such as the United Kingdom owe their relative advantages to the fact that may people have been prepared to put up with (at least for much of the time) very low levels of advantage – namely, our ancestors. Reciprocal fairness might turn out to require people to put up with whatever level of wellbeing would be produced if they were asked the question, ‘if you knew that in order for you to receive the advantages of social cooperation you would have to make sacrifices for the benefits of others, and you also knew that your answer could not affect your own well-being, how would you choose to distribute those benefits?’ The motive of reciprocity would not, then, lead to different results to the motive of benevolence after all. It may lead to utilitarianism. THE RIGHTS OF ATHEISTS SHOULD BE PROCLAIMED AT THE UN Leo Igwe

I have heard it proclaimed at the UN that the rights of women are human rights. I have also heard it proclaimed that the rights of gay people are human rights. These proclamations changed the way human rights are perceived around the globe. Personally I have yet to hear it proclaimed at UN, or at our regional and national human rights bodies that the rights of atheists, agnostics and freethinkers are human rights. I do not want these rights to be implied or assumed as currently the case in most countries. I want them to be expressly declared as universal human rights. The reason why such explicit protection is urgently needed is because non- believers are particularly vulnerable in some parts of the world, notably Africa. In parts of Africa where fundamentalist belief holds sway, religious non- believers are treated as if they are not human beings, as if they do not exist or do not have the right to exist. The right to freedom of religion is of no avail to those who wish to eschew faith altogether. On the contrary, freedom of religion is often understood as freedom to profess a religion – the religion sanctioned by the state, by one’s family or community – not freedom to change one’s religion or freedom not to profess any religion at all (as contained in article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). (from the Richard Dawkins website)

Leo Igwe was the Western and Southern African representative to IHEU, the International Humanist and Ethical Union. He has bravely worked to end a variety of human rights violations, including anti-gay hate, sorcery, witchcraft, ritual killing, human sacrifice, “untouchability”, caste discrimination, “child witch” superstition, and anti-blasphemy laws. He is presently enrolled in a three year research programme on “Witchcraft accusations in Africa” at the University of Bayreuth, in Germany. Ethical Record, June 2012 7 THE ETHICS OF VOLUNTARY AMPUTATION Moheb Costandi Lecture to the Ethical Society, 13 May 2012

In January 2000, a number of British newspapers ran stories about Robert Smith, a surgeon at the Falkirk & District Royal Infirmary who had amputated the legs of two patients at their own request. The news stories incorrectly described the patients as suffering from Body Dysmorphic Disorder. They further stated that the director of NHS trust running the hospital at which Smith works described the amputation of healthy limbs as ‘inappropriate’; since then, no British hospital has performed a voluntary amputation.

The first documented case of Body Integrity Identity Disorder, BIID, dates back to a medical textbook published in 1785, by the French surgeon and anatomist Jean-Joseph Sue. Sue described the case of an Englishman who fell in love with a woman who was an amputee, and wanted to become an amputee himself. He offered a surgeon 100 guineas to amputate his leg and, when the surgeon refused, forced him to perform the operation at gunpoint. Krafft-Ebing’s Psycopathia Sexualis Subsequently, the pioneering neuropsychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing described three cases of what appear to be BIID in his classic 1906 book, Psycopathia Sexualis. ‘Even bodily defects become fetishes,’ wrote von Krafft- Ebing. He describes a 28-year-old factory engineer, who ‘complained of a peculiar mania, which caused him to doubt his sanity.’ He continues: Since his 17th year he became sexually excited at the sight of physical defects in women, especially lameness and disfigured feet. Normal women had no attraction for him. If a woman, however, was afflicted with lameness or with contorted or disfigured feet, she exercised a powerful sensual influence over him, no matter whether she was otherwise pretty or ugly. In his dreams... the forms of halting women were ever before him. At times he could not resist the temptation to imitate their gait, which caused vehement orgasm with lustful ejaculation... He thought it would cause him intense pleasure to mate with a lame woman. At any rate, he could never marry any other than a lame woman. This is followed by the case of another man: He used to limp about the room on two brooms in lieu of crutches, or when unobserved, go limping about the streets... in his erotic dreams, the idea of the limping girl was always the controlling element. The personality of the halting girl was a matter of indifference, his interest being solely centred in the limping foot. He never had coitus with a girl thus afflicted. His perverse fancies revolved around masturbation against the foot of a halting female. At times he anchored his hope on the thought that he might succeed in winning and marrying a chaste lame girl... His present existence was on of untold misery. Finally, Krafft-Ebing describes the case of a 30-year-old civil servant: ...since his 7th year he had for a playmate a lame girl of the same age. At the age of 12, puberty set in, and it lies beyond doubt that the first sexual emotions 8 Ethical Record, June 2012 towards the other sex were coincident with the sight of the lame girl. For ever after only halting women excited him sexually. His fetish was a pretty lady who, like the companion of his childhood, limped with her left foot. He sought early relations with the opposite sex but was absolutely impotent with women who were not lame. Virility and gratification were most strongly elicited if the woman limped with the left foot, but he was also successful if the lameness was in the right foot. His sexual anomaly rendered him very unhappy and he was often near committing suicide. Amputation Love The first modern case studies of BIID were published in the Journal of Sex Research by John Money. Money referred to the condition as apotemnophilia, meaning, literally ‘amputation love,’ and distinguished it from acrotomophila, or a sexual attraction to amputees. The suffix ‘philia’ denotes that BIID is a paraphilia, or what is commonly called a perversion. To this day, few psychiatrists know of the condition; and most of those who do know of it consider it as a fetish in which the stump of the amputated limb is fetishized because it resembles a phallus. Most BIID sufferers, however, describe their feelings in terms in terms of identity, instead. ‘It feels right,’ says one, ‘the way I should always have been and for some reason in line with what I think my body ought to have been like.’ ‘I didn’t understand why,’ says another, ‘but I knew I didn’t want my leg.’ Other sufferers describe their experience in similar terms: ‘My left foot is not a part of me’; ‘My body image has always been as a woman who has lost both her legs’; I will never feel truly whole with legs.’ And one explains that ‘just as a transsexual is not happy with his own body but longs to the body of another sex, in the same way I am not happy with my present body, but long for a peg-leg.’ So while there can be a sexual component to the condition, most BIID sufferers do not give sexual motives for wanting an amputation. This led Michael First, a psychiatrist at Columbia University in New York, to rename the condition. He initially considered calling it ‘amputee identity disorder,’ but then settled with BIID. To date, there have been approximately 300 documented cases of BIID. Most of these are male, almost all of whom desire amputation of a limb on the left side of the body. More often, it is the arm that is affected rather than the leg. All of these so-called ‘wannabe amputees’ know exactly where they want the limb to be cut off, to the millimetre, and almost all of them remember seeing an amputee at a very young age and thinking that they should have been born like that themselves. ‘When I was three years old, I met a young man who was completely missing all four of his fingers on his right hand,’ said one 21-yr-old female BIID sufferer, ‘and ever since that time I have been fascinated by all amputees, especially women amputees who were missing parts of their arms and wore hook prostheses.’ Most wannabes also pretend to be an amputee prior to having the limb removed, by tying the limb back, or using a wheelchair or crutches to move around the house. This behaviour could be analogous to cross-dressing in transgender Ethical Record, June 2012 9 individuals before they undergo sex reassignment surgery. But just as some transgender people are content cross-dressing regularly without going through hormone treatment and surgery, so too some wannabe amputees are content pretending. This suggests that BIID occurs with varying severity, with the mild form manifesting itself as an attraction to amputees, and more severe forms manifesting as a desire to amputate. There is overlap between the two, with some wannabes also being attracted to amputees. If people who are attracted to amputees (or ‘devotees’) are also considered as suffering from BIID, then the condition may not be so rare. BIID came into the public eye in the early 1970s, with the publication of a series of readers’ letters in Penthouse. The letters were sent in response to an initial letter from a one-legged woman describing men who were attracted to her, and became so popular that they led to a regular column called ‘Monopede Mania’. It’s not just limbs that are affected, however. Some BIID sufferers desire having their spinal cord severed; others feel strongly that they should have been born with multiple sclerosis or some other affliction. In Psycopathia Sexualis, Krafft- Ebing notes that the French philosopher Rene Descartes was attracted to cross- eyed women – and may, therefore, have suffered from a mild form of the condition. A Faulty Mental Picture of the Body BIID can be thought of as a body image disorder. The body image concept dates back about one hundred years, to the work of the neurologist Henry Head, who studied many patients with damage to the parietal lobe of the brain. Head found that these patients had profound disturbances of bodily awareness, and postulated that this region of the brain encodes what he called the body schema, a postural model of the body. Subsequently, the pioneering neuropsychiatrist Paul Schilder built on this and coined the term ‘body image’. We now know that the brain encodes multiple neural representations of the body, some of which are static, and others dynamic. These representations manifest themselves as a mental picture of the body, its form and movements. The brain generates these representations by integrating touch, proprioceptive, and visual information, and this occurs in a region called the right superior parietal lobule. It is currently thought that BIID occurs because the affected limb is not represented in the body image, so that sufferers have no sense of ownership over it. Early evidence for this idea comes from Ramachandran’s lab at the University of California, San Diego. In a very simple experiment, Ramachandran and his colleagues recruited a small number of BIID sufferers seeking leg amputation, and then prodded the affected limb while recording their brain activity with magnetoencephalography. This showed that the touch elicited a response in the primary somatosensory cortex, where sensory information from the leg is initially processed, but not in the superior parietal lobule, where the information would normally be integrated with the other types of sensory information to generate the body image. 10 Ethical Record, June 2012 This suggests that BIID occurs as a result of a discrepancy between the body image and the physical form of the body. This would create cognitive dissonance, or contradictory thoughts and feelings. Other body image disorders include anorexia, BDD, and transsexualism. The body image also distorted in obesity. The idea of amputating healthy limbs is anathema to most surgeons, but I would argue that in some cases it might be the best possible treatment option. My rationale is simple. Psychotherapy and drugs are completely ineffective in alleviating the condition, and BIID sufferers will go to any length to be rid of the unwanted limb. Some build home-made guillotines, blast their unwanted limbs off with a shotgun, or lie under a jacked-up car and try to crush it. One particularly popular method is to submerge the limb in dry ice for several hours, in order to damage the limb irreparably and thus force doctors to amputate. In May 1998, a 79-year-old man from New York travelled to Mexico for a black- market leg amputation, and then died of gangrene in a motel about a week later. Offering a clean surgical amputation to those BIID sufferers who really want it would therefore minimize the harm that they might cause to themselves by taking matters into their own hands.

VIEWPOINTS Sharia Law in the UK While I support and applaud Chris Purnell (Viewpoints, ER May 2012) in respect of his opposition to the BNP, the EDL and his general stand against racist anti-immigration attitudes, he is quite wrong in what he says about Sharia Law. I will assume that he is simply being naive. One Law For All, which is opposed in principle and practice to ALL religion- based law, has been campaigning for a number of years against the employment of Sharia law in Britain. It is true that Sharia has not been incorporated into British law, but it does operate through the Arbitration Act at tribunals and through Sharia Councils. Though restricted to civil matters, it is extremely pernicious and detrimental in respect of the rights of women and children. Chris seems to have forgotten that Islam does not recognise the principle of equality of the sexes, nor the rights of children. This is not unique to Islam, but it is Islam and the response of the authorities (police, child protection, local councils) that is the major problem in present day Britain. When dealing with child custody, divorce and inheritance, decisions are likely to be quite different from those of the civil courts. The ‘voluntary’ nature of these arrangements is, to put it mildly, open to question. Women and children in the communities concerned are in no position to refuse the suggestion that matters should be dealt with under Sharia; many of them are unaware of their rights under British law. There are even cases where domestic violence has been dealt with under Sharia, a process with which the police and social services have, to their shame, connived. Ethical Record, June 2012 11 The One Law For All campaign has an excellent website which lists plenty of reasons for opposition to Sharia. One Law For All, incidentally, shares absolutely Chris’s attitude to the BNP and the EDL and specifically rejects them as allies. It is run by people who have, unlike Chris Purnell, lived under Sharia law. In particular, Maryam Namazie has lived in Iran as a woman, an atheist and a communist, so she knows what she is talking about. There can be no defence of religious law and it is sad when it is defended by a humanist. A brief comment on Mazin Zeki (Viewpoints, ER May 2012). In attempting to reply to both Purnell and Liddle, Mazin has conflated their views. Neither in his original talk nor in his reply to Mazin’s letter did Terry even mention, let alone defend, multiculturalism; his concern was the link, historic and political, between socialism and secularism. Terry shares absolutely a disdain for Sharia law, so he cannot be accused of confusing faith and identity. He is one of the most uncompromising atheists I have ever met. Incidentally, it would be nice to have a definitive definition of multiculturalism so there can be an informed debate. Edmund McArthur - London SE7 The Myths of Christian Europe I agree with much of what Kenan Malik said in The Myths of Christian Europe? (Ethical Record, May 2012) but would go further. When I discuss with school students the claims that Britain has a Christian culture, I ask students to name the Christians our weekdays and months are named after. They are invariably unable to do so for the very simple reason that all the names involved are based upon pagan gods, Roman emperors or simple numbers. They all then realise there is nothing Christian about the names of our weekdays and months. I have previously nodded my head in silent agreement whenever claims have been made that it was medieval Muslim scholars who achieved developments in medicine, mathematics and science generally. However, I have begun to question these accepted ideas recently. Recent research on the Antikythera Mechanism has revealed astonishingly sophisticated technological developments achieved by the Ancient Greeks, such as Archimedes. Regrettably, as in other areas of Europe, the Roman war machine snuffed out the culturally superior Greeks, which led to a situation of complete stasis within Dark Ages Europe. Greek knowledge and understanding carried over into the Eastern areas of Europe into Muslim areas, where they acted as a simple repository of that knowledge. Arguably, neither the Roman Empire (with an official Christian state religion after 325CE) nor the Muslim world (dominated by its own official religion) contributed much of substance to existing Greek knowledge. It was not until the Renaissance and Enlightenment eras began that accelerated development of new and more advanced knowledge and technology was once again advanced.

12 Ethical Record, June 2012 Yes, we should thank the Muslim scholars for holding safe the Greeks’ knowledge after the Romans had largely stamped it out but we should not confuse the Muslim role as a repository with that of the original Greek role of creating the knowledge in the first place. To truly understand traditional Christian values we should recollect how a scientist like Bruno Giordano was burned alive at the stake in 1600 for holding a belief that the Sun was at the centre of our solar system.* David Alton gave a lecture on 9 May about Church of Rome followers executed at Tyburn during the Tudor Elizabethan era. He uttered not one word of condemnation for similar murders of Christians during the reign of Bloody Mary (Elizabeth’s older sister and previous Queen). Perhaps he could not bring himself to condemn murder carried out in the name of one sect (Roman) against another (Protestant). Who says religious bigotry and hypocrisy is dead? John Dowdle *In this connection, note the current 20 episode series by disaffected Christian Richard Holloway, on Radio 4, at 1.45pm weekdays called ‘Honest doubt’. [Ed.] Population Matters I think it is perverse and insulting for Roger Martin, Chair of Population Matters (Ethical Record May 2012) to vent his frustration, (about the lack of funding for reproductive health issues on population grounds) on women activists. In his article, he accuses feminists of “continually waiting in line for funding” and “insisting on funding only from an SRHR (sexual and reproductive health and women’s rights) approach” in trying to raise the funding for contraception, abortion, FGM and other reproductive health issues. I suspect that their attitude towards Population Matters may be due to a perception, right or wrong, that its Chair thinks that women, if he calls them feminists, are too stupid to understand the relationship between reproductive health issues and population control – that they do not understand the obvious and major impact of women’s rights to birth control on the financial, agricultural, environmental, ethical issues - on energy, “the laws of physics” and simple arithmetic as aspects of over-population - “as well as health”. And even if there are women who think that the health of half the world’s population, mothers and their children should rightly be a top priority, why wouldn’t they? It is not an either /or issue. I wonder how high in the pecking order feminists and /or other health workers are compared to the male dominated political elites in the UN and the patriarchal religions of East and West who use their influence and observer status to override or block the funding for women’s reproductive health rights? Health has always had a low priority in the corridors of male power. Maybe the ‘feminists’ observed by Mr Martin are fed up to the back teeth to have had so little support in raising the priority of birth control funding over years. The real ‘mad taboo’ is the obvious problem of religious activism in the UN on national governments. Sue Mayer – Kent

Ethical Record, June 2012 13 POLITICS AND NEO-DARWINISM AND OTHER ESSAYS by Tom Rubens Published in 2012 by Societas Imprint Academic, PO BOX 200, Exeter EX5 5YX at £8.95 REVIEW by Chris Purnell

This collection of 30 essays by Tom Rubens is best approached by first dipping into the book and picking out an essay to read on a subject one knows little about. Thus, in my case, I found his essay on ‘French Rationality in the 18th Century’ illuminating in that it mentions certain thinkers (D’Holbach, Condillac) with whom I am entirely unfamiliar. Then, as a second move into the book, turn to a subject with which one has prior knowledge - in my case Shakespeare. At page 11 of his book Rubens states that Shakespeare and Sartre’s defence of political violence is essentially the same, which rather obscures the fact that Shakespeare was a great career dramatist loyal to the protestant Tudor monarchy who was concerned to raise a variety of emotions in his audiences at the various different types of violence in which his characters engage. Whereas, Sartre in The Flies at least, was a brave philosopher, who used drama as a means to rally the French people to resist the evil of a Nazi state (that play was written in 1942 under the occupation). Shakespeare’s greatness really is that he tends to make us realise how difficult it is to make value judgments. Thus, in Hamlet we recoil against Hamlet’s engineering Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s death, only to experience sadness and catharsis when the Prince loses his own life in the course of avenging his father’s death by despatching the usurping King, Claudius. Shakespeare, unlike Sartre, didn’t have a philosophical manifesto to propound, although he was by and large loyal to established order – unless it could be shown to be manifestly evil. In Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare writes ‘Take but degree away, untune that string, And hark what discord follows!’ – and by and large he was loyal to that precept throughout his career, which brought him considerable prosperity. However, I digress, turning back to the rest of Tom’s essays, one is struck by the range of his subjects, varying from essay 7 ‘Questions facing socialism as a cultural outlook’ to essay 28 ‘Spinoza v. Kant’. There is something for everybody. He writes lucidly, and, as far as I am able to judge, authoritatively. His style is that of a good teacher who is aiming to encourage those who read his essays to revert to the works he refers to for themselves and to read more widely. SPES members and other readers of Ethical Record, particulary those who attend our Sunday lectures, will find this book a good buy and an enjoyable read.

The views expressed in this Journal are not necessarily those of the Society.

14 Ethical Record, June 2012 “A PERVADING SPIRIT CO-ETERNAL WITH THE UNIVERSE”: 200 YEARS OF THE NECESSITY OF ATHEISM Graham Allen, University College Cork Lecture to The Atheist Society, University College Cork, Ireland, 7 December 2011

On 13 February 1811, Percy Bysshe Shelley, with his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg, both young students of Oxford University, published anonymously a short pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism. Not content to have the pamphlet published in a local bookstore, Shelley and Hogg sent it to all the bishops and Heads of Colleges in Oxford. See Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit London: Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1974, p.51. [Henceforth STP] The consequences were that Shelley and Hogg were expelled and that Shelley’s relations with his father were destroyed, leading to financial hardships for the rest of Shelley’s life and for Mary Shelley and their one remining child, Percy Florence, afterwards. Richard Holmes captures the radicality of Shelley’s actions well: [Shelley’s parents] were only too aware of the social and political stigma attached to anything that smacked of – dread word – ‘atheism’, especially in an intensely conservative and wholly theological institution like Oxford. Atheism implied immorality, social inferiority and unpatriotic behaviour all in one sweep; during a time of war against the revolutionary forces in Europe, it also implied treachery, revolutionism and foreign degeneracy.(p.47) [STP] Shelley throughout his short life saw his atheism as an act of rebellion against an oppressive and unjust society. As Ann Wroe suggests, he wore his atheism as a badge of pride. Ann Wroe, Being Shelley: The Poet’s Search for Himself London: Jonathan Cape, 2007, pp.100-3. [Henceforth PSH]

He says in his “A Refutation of Diesm,” clearly thinking of himself: The atheist is a monster among men. Inducements which are omnipotent over the conduct of others are impotent for him. His private judgment is his criterion of right and wrong. He dreads no judge but his own conscience, he fears no hell but the loss of his self-esteem. He is not to be restrained by punishments, for death is divested of its terror, and whatever enters into his heart to conceive, that will he not scruple to execute. David Lee Clark, ed. Shelley’s Prose, or The Trumpet of a Prophecy London: Fourth Estate, 1988, p.129. [Henceforth SP]

The Necessity of Atheism itself is a text influenced by John Locke, David Hume and the tradition of British empirical philosophy. Shelley starts out with the argument that you cannot actively choose to believe something. Belief is passive. We can only believe what we experience, and that comes in three forms of lessening strength. First, and most persuasive of all regarding belief of the existence of something is the evidence of the senses. If God appears to us and stands in front of us and says hello how are you doing? then, of course, we must believe in his existence. Notice how belief is not an active but a passive function.

The second mode of evidence is reason, the exercise of my rational faculties in terms of the evidence of my experiences. Now obviously many philosophers Ethical Record, June 2012 15 down the ages have twisted their rational faculties into knots in order to apparently provide a logical, reasoned case for the existence of God. John Locke does this in his An Essay on Understanding and Shelley paraphrases Locke when he writes: “A man knows not only he now is, but that there was a time when he did not exist; consequently, there must have been a cause.” Shelley responds that yes indeed we might be in ignorance of ultimate causation (“we admit that the generative power is incomprehensible”) but that does not mean we should go racing to construct the most implausible case (i.e. God) as if it were the most logical one. Shelley says: “to suppose that the same effect is produced by an eternal, omniscient, Almighty Being, leaves the cause in the obscurity, but renders it more incomprehensible.” SP, p.38. The last mode of evidence is the testimony of others, but of course we have to be very careful with that, and so that is a pretty weak mode of evidence and not strong enough at all for the job in hand, proving the existence of an almighty First Cause. Shelley sums up his empiricist case: “it is evident that we have not sufficient testimony, or rather that testimony is insufficient to prove the being of a God…….They who have been convinced by the evidence of the senses, they only can believe it.” SP, p.39. But Shelley is not finished there, he goes on:

From this it is evident that having no proofs from any of the three sources of conviction, the mind cannot believe the existence of a God; it is also evident that as belief is a passion of the mind, no degree of criminality can be attached to disbelief; they only are reprehensible who willingly neglect to remove the false medium thro’ which their mind views the subject.

It is almost unnecessary to observe that the general knowledge of the deficiency of such proof cannot be prejudicial to society: Truth has always been found to promote the best interests of mankind. Every reflecting mind must allow that there is no proof of the existence of a Deity. Q.E.D.

We see two additional things in those passages, which widen out this short little text. The first concerns another form of necessity, or at least another aspect of the concept of Necessity that Shelley had derived partly from the philosophy of his future father-in-law, William Godwin. The idea that “Truth……always …….promote[s] the best interests of mankind” is an expression of Godwinian Necessity, which argues that cause and effect operate in the human social sphere just as systematically as they do in the natural sphere. The second feature glimpsed is the alternative, ethical and political grounds upon which one might establish one’s atheism. The assertion that to be an atheist cannot be a criminal act is a powerful argument in Shelley’s text. We still live in a world where there are blasphemy laws which appear to confuse respect for other cultures and opinions with adherence to outmoded forms of superstition and mythology. I would cite two items from Shelley’s broadside A Declaration of Rights, which he had printed so that he could post it up on the street walls of Dublin and then in England, something that eventually peeked the interest of the Home Office. Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit , p.137.

XXIV. A Christian, a Deist, a Turk, and a Jew, have equal rights: they are men and brethren.

16 Ethical Record, June 2012 XXV. If a persons’ religious ideas correspond not with your own, love him nevertheless. How different would yours have been had the chance of birth placed you in Tartary or India! David Lee Clark, ed. Shelley’s Prose, p.71.

Shelley was to come back to his text of The Necessity of Atheism two years later, when he used an expanded version of it as a note within his revolutionary poem Queen Mab. The note is to a line “There is no God” contained within the following lines from Part VII: Spirit. “I was an infant when my mother went To see an atheist burned. She took me there: The dark-robed priests were met around the pile; .... The thirsty fire crept round his manly limbs; His resolute eyes were scorched to blindness soon; His death-pang rent my heart! The insensate mob Uttered a cry of triumph, and I wept. ‘Weep not, child!’ cried my mother, ‘for that man Has said, There is no God.’” Shelley was an atheist, and he was so for political, ethical and empirical reasons. The expansions to the text in the note “There is no God” mainly involve a long untranslated quotation from Holbach’s System de la Nature (1781), which adds first to the empirical and then to the political argument against religion, and then smaller quotations from Pliny and Spinoza. ‘A Pervading Spirit’? There is, however, an additional opening paragraph, which after the rousing lines I have just read, might come as a bit of a surprise: This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken. SP, p.97. What “pervading Spirit”? Where has this Spirit come from? Why has Shelley added that metaphysical being (is it a being?) at the beginning of his revision of The Necessity of Atheism, and why is his belief in it so “unshaken”? In a passage added in “There is No God” Shelley writes:

From the phenomena, which are the objects of our senses, we attempt to infer a cause which we call God, and gratuitously endow it with all negative and contradictory qualities. From this hypothesis we invent this general name to conceal our ignorance of causes and essences. The being called God by no means answers with the conditions prescribed by Newton; it bears every mark of a veil woven by philosophical conceit to hide the ignorance of philosophers even from themselves. They borrow the threads of its texture from the anthropomorphism of the vulgar. SP, pp.98-9 Has not Shelley in his surprising additional first paragraph himself succumbed to this borrowing from “the anthropomorphism of the vulgar”? Ethical Record, June 2012 17 Is anthropomorphism, our tendency to give a human form to nature, our tendency to give a human form to the universe, responsible for religious codes and systems? Is anthropomorphism an innate part of language or something from which we should liberate ourselves? These questions, and more I could pose, pull in different directions and contain competing implications. It is clear, however, that Shelley’s writings on religion and the idea of God contain within them a question concerning anthropomorphism. Is Shelley’s atheism damaged by the presence within his writings of anthropomorphic figures and gestures? Shelley was an atheist poet who did not remove the idea of a deity from his work. One of the most important passages he ever wrote, in his “The Triumph of Life,” arrives as the poet-figure is contemplating the shade of Napoleon. Considering the fallen titan of a man, the poet writes: Why God made irreconcilable Good and the means of good; Why does Shelley need to invoke God in those lines? What kind of “God” is the atheist Shelley referring to here? The lines are a return to a central moment in Act One of Prometheus Unbound. Given a tortuous vision of human history, a vision in which every attempt by humans to gain liberty ends in increased oppression, Prometheus’s torturer states: In each human heart terror survives The ravin it has gorged: the loftiest fear All that they would disdain to think were true: Hypocrisy and custom make their minds The fanes of many a worship, now outworn. They dare not devise good for man’s estate, And yet they know not that they do not dare. The good want power, but to weep barren tears. The powerful goodness want: worse need for them. The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom; And all best things are thus confused to ill. Many are strong and rich, and would be just, But live among their suffering fellow-men As if none felt: they know not what they do. The two passages are an expression of what Shelley thought was the worst case scenario: that the means of good could never in human society be brought into union with good itself. That power and love could not be joined. That the project of the Enlightenment, the Republican ideal of a just democracy, could never be achieved. Prometheus, like the later poet-figure, is tortured by this prospect and Prometheus at least has to liberate himself back into hope for humanity. But why the religious language, even in the second passage with its echo of Christ on the cross?. Does the religious language Shelley allows himself to use cut across his commitment to the Republican ideal of the Enlightenment? Why does Shelley, convinced atheist that he was, feel the need to posit a universal force he sometimes calls “intellectual beauty,” and at other times he calls “power” or “love”? In his elegy for Keats, Adonais, he calls this universal

18 Ethical Record, June 2012 force “the One” in a stanza of the most beautiful but again Bible-soaked language: The One remains, the many change and pass; Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments.–Die, If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek! Follow where all is fled!– Rome’s azure sky, Flowers, ruins, statutes, music, words, are weak The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.

As he makes clear in his “Essay on a Future State,” Shelley does not believe in Heaven or the Christian notion of an afterlife, but here in Adonais those concepts seem to suffuse his poetry. There is a huge amount of God, and Heaven and the Universal Spirit or Power in the poetry of Shelley. Shelley, who was a philosophical and political and ethical atheist. We have to address this I think, if we are going to legitimately celebrate Shelley’s atheism. The fact of the matter is that Shelley, rather like William Blake, turned religious language upside down and used it to celebrate human ideals and human aspirations. There are two reasons for this practice. The first reason concerns whether it is indeed possible, even today, to embody a discursive practice which is free of theological terms. The second reason takes us back to the issue of anthropomorphism and the relation it creates between poetry and religion. Both reasons have in common questions concerning the limitations of language, the fact that our language mediates, rather than accurately reflects, the world or even ourselves. Our languages are historical phenomena, stuffed with twists and turns of etymology, social usage, socio-cultural discursive pressures, institutional influences and mediations, intertextual networks of narrative and myth. Language is intertextual in a deep sense. In this sense, the word love cannot be stripped completely of the billions of previous uses it has been put to, including all the canonical stories from Echo and Narcissus and Venus and Adonis through to Heathcliffe and Cathy on to Sid and Nancy. We only understand words and phrases because of these previous uses. As Bakhtin says, we are not Adam naming the animals in the Garden of Eden. In the world we come to consciousness within, the animals have all had a legion of names already. So that love as a sign (which means as a word and a concept) cannot be stripped completely of the theological connotations of which it has long been associated. You cannot tell someone they are inspired or original without a trace of the religious past twitching into life. Religion exists within the very fibre of our languages, and though it might frustrate and pain us, and even make us despair at times, there is no easy way of flushing it out. There is no simple, effective, one-time-only atheistic laxative for language.

Ethical Record, June 2012 19 Shelley is a poet who pushes the envelope. He is a poet who tries to describe the fundamental realities and truths which he believed lie beyond the powers of language to capture. In this sense his definition of a poet is one who tries the impossible, to produce a language purified of historical contingency, including the religious and monarchical past. He also knows that such a liberated language is not available to him, and that is why he often presents himself as a tragic figure, defeated by life, crushed in his hopes. He always rises again, however, because he believes that poetry gives us a window onto permanent truths and realities. These truths and realities might have religiously-inflected names for now, but that is merely the consequence of historical accident and will eventually evaporate. You can see that last point in his great piece of poetics, A Defence of Poetry. In the Defence Shelley argues that “Poetry is indeed something divine.” What could he possibly mean by “divine” as an atheist? Well he goes on:

It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is that from which all spring and that which adorns all; and that which, if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of life. SP, p.293. In the Defence as elsewhere Shelley uses religious words like “divine” and “eternal” to refer to those ideas which he believes are permanent and unchanging. “A poet,” he says, “participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one”.SP, p.279. He says a little later “A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth.” SP, p.181. Even if we understand that Shelley is utilising religious language to express a secular idea of the permanent and the unchanging, we still have to ask what are these “eternal truths”? In a crucial section of his argument Shelley argues that the Greek “social system which is the column upon which all succeeding civilization has reposed” originated within Homer’s poetry. That is a very beautiful way of saying not only that the idea of Republican democracy emerged from Homeric poetry, but it also is to imply that those Republican democratic ideals are “eternal” in the sense that they are “true.” For Shelley what is true also has to appear to us as what is beautiful, so that in his account of the “eternal” beauty is coincident with Justice, Equality, Fraternity, Liberty. Shelley, in other words, is arguing that the aesthetic and the ethical are one and the same, that what is beautiful must also be what is good. It is this combined notion of the beautiful and the good, or what he calls tellingly “Intellectual Beauty”, which Shelley then frequently talks about in religious language. The fact that this religious language is metaphorical is glimpsed in passages such as the following:

Few poets of the highest class have chosen to exhibit the beauty of their conceptions in its naked truth and splendour; and it is doubtful whether the alloy of costume,

20 Ethical Record, June 2012 habit, &c., be not necessary to temper this planetary music for mortal ears. SP, p.282. The products of Intellectual Beauty – the greatest ideas humanity can and has had of itself and its place in the universe – come to us clothed in the language of the day. But if, as they are, they are in fact unchanging and immune from the vagaries of the day, they will be figurable only in the language of the infinite and the eternal? This is a deliberate poetic reversal of the language of religion, so that it is being used by Shelley to represent the very thing – permanent human and natural truths – which precisely supersede the historical tenets and perspectives of religion. We see this later in the Defence when Shelley discusses Dante and Milton. After Homer, Dante is the second greatest and Milton the third greatest poet says Shelley. So the “eternal truths” of poetry shine through them with great radiance. But still the light shines through the mediation of Dante’s Catholicism and Milton’s Protestanism. Shelley makes it very clear, however, that between their profound poetic truths and their historically determined religious creeds it is the former that will have permanancy: The Divina Commedia and Paradise Lost have conferred upon modern mythology a systematic form; and when change and time shall have added one more superstition [i.e. Christianity] to the mass of those which have arisen and decayed upon the earth, commentators will be learnedly employed in elucidating the religion of ancestral Europe, only not utterly forgotten because it will have been stamped with the eternity of genius. SP, p.290. In other words, eventually, in the future, the only reason we will know anything about Christianity is because those permanent poets of imagination, Dante and Milton, had something to say about it and utilised, as a kind of colour filter, its transitory forms and shades. This is also to say that what is “true” in Dante is not to do with Catholicism and what is “true” in Milton is not to do with his Protestantism. Shelley’s approach is one which can turn all the great poets into conduits for the Republican ideals of ancient Greece, since it can always strip away the transitory surfaces of contemporary beliefs and creeds. What always remained was the permanent truths expressed first in Homer’s poetry and in the Greek Republican democracy it inspired. Shelley was a Hellenist. He believed that an aesthetic renassaince had to go hand in hand with a renaissance of Republican political ideals. You could not, Shelley argued, have one without the other. Is Religious Language Ineradicable? But even understanding all this, we still have that anthropomorphic impulse to worry about. If human beings, being linguistic animals, have an ineradicable tendency to give a face and a human form to the natural world around them, then are not they doomed to accept that the religious outlook is also ineradicable within them? Does the anthropomorphic impulse make us into perpetual religious minors (perpectual children), to slightly adapt a phrase from Mary Wollstonecraft? If we cannot rid ourselves of the anthropomorphic tendency, can we ever liberate ourselves from the shackles of religion, both the political shackles of institutional religion and the phenomenological shackles of a religious outlook which countermands, irrationally, the empirical evidence of the senses? Ethical Record, June 2012 21 Shelley will argue that all social systems, the law, all science and all religions stem from poetry. Poetry is primal, it originates human systems and human discourses. Like Nietzsche, Shelley argues that poetry comes first and then hardens into religion and law and custom and dead metaphor habits. Poetry gets literalised into religion.

Thus men forget that All Dieties reside in the human breast. William Blake, The Complete Illuminated Books, London: Thames and Hudson, 2000, p.117 [Plate 11]. God only exists because we invented him, or if you are a Blakean because we are collectively him and her. Shelley and Blake, who never met or read each other, are remarkably similar in their understanding of religion, viewing it as the product of the poetic faculty, or what I have been calling the anthropomorphic impulse. That impulse is the impulse to humanise the world. I cannot be entirely critical of it. Where Real Liberation Lies Unlike Blake, who goes on to create his own imaginative system of mythological forms, Shelley demonstrates all aspects of atheism. There is real liberation in realising that poetry comes first and that we humans are the creators of the gods. There is also a liberation in modern science and rational, Enlightenment politics which try to see the universe as it really is and to fight for a society free of religious ignorance, bigotry and oppression. There are a number of flavours to the atheisms Shelley practices in his poetry and prose. There is Shelley the rationalist, Shelley the fierce political rebel, and there is Shelley the poet of the One, the Eternal and the unchanging Spirit of Intellectual Beauty. Shelley’s voices are often more than his critics can accommodate and he does seem to me a poet over whom more mistakes have been made than most. Like all truly great atheistic thinkers and artists, however, he is someone who repels dogmatism. You just cannot understand Shelley unless you come with an open and even loving mind. “The great secret of morals,” he writes in the Defence, “is love, or a going out of our own nature and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and the pleasures of his species must become his own.” SP, p.283. That “going out” from “our nature,” which finds its expression in the concept of sensibility, is poised between anthropomorphism and its transcendence, in that it involves at one and the same time an escape from our individual selves and yet a projection of ourselves onto the world (a putting of ourselves into and onto the place of someone else). This is a paradox, profoundly explored in Shelley’s poetry and prose, which still haunts our ideas of religion, nature and humanity.

22 Ethical Record, June 2012 LOOKING IN, LOOKING OUT 27 June - 5 July 2012 Conway Hall is very proud to present Looking In, Looking Out: an innovative series of screenings, workshops and talks, in which modern and classic cinema is examined in a philosophical context. Exploring free will, identity and consciousness; examining how we define beauty, truth and the nature of morality; our talks and panel discussions will unpack the meaning of art, reflect on what philosophy can add to our understanding of the movies and ultimately ask: what is film for? LOOKING IN LOOKING OUT - WEEKEND TICKET, SAT 30TH JUN (1100) - £15.00/10.00 MAIN HALL: 1130 London Philosophy Club on The World of Apu (1959); 1345 Lucy Bolton and Sophie Mayer; 1530 Richard Rushton; 1715 Bidisha and Ishbel Whitaker, Tinge Krishnan and Lesley Kato; 1900 Crimes and Misdemeanours (1989); 2100 L’Humanite (1999) BROCKWAY ROOM: 1130 Philosophy for All’s Anja Steinbauer and Richard Baron; 1315 Kate Taylor and Daniel Bird ; 1500 Philosophy Now; 1645 Prof John Mullarkey BERTRAND RUSSELL ROOM: 1130 The Wisdom of Film: Free Will; 1415 The Philosopher Kings (2009); 1600 The Wisdom of Film: Personal Identity LOOKING IN LOOKING OUT - WEEKEND TICKET, SUN 1ST JUL (1100) - £15.00/10.00 MAIN HALL: 1200 Insight Film Festival w/ Johannes Sjoberg and Mark Vernon; 1415 A Matter of Life and Death (1946); 1600 The Fountain (2006); 1800 Wings of Desire (1987) BROCKWAY ROOM:1130 Liam Young w/ Humanist Philosophers Group and Into Eternity (2010); 1345 London School of Philosophy BERTRAND RUSSELL ROOM: 1200 The Wisdom of Film - The External World; 1415 The Examined Life (2009); 1600 The Wisdom of Film – Time LOOKING IN LOOKING OUT - WEEKDAY TICKET, MON 2ND JUL (1800) - £10.00 1830 Mindwalk (1990); 2030 Nigel Floyd on Crash (1996) LOOKING IN LOOKING OUT - WEEKDAY TICKET, TUE 3RD JUL (1800) - £10.00 1830 Bidisha w/ Jenny Hammerton, Muriel Zagha, Pamela Hutchinson and Kira Cochrane; 2000 Sunset Boulevard (1950) LOOKING IN LOOKING OUT - WEEKDAY TICKET, WED 4TH JUL (1800) - £10.00 1830 London Short Film Festival w/ Rich Pickings will; 2015 Julian Baggini on Coen Bros. and Fargo (1996) LOOKING IN LOOKING OUT - WEEKDAY TICKET, THU 5TH JUL (1800) - £10.00 1830 They Live (1988); 2015 Eraserhead (1977) For booking information contact Ben Partridge on 020 7061 6744 Ethical Record, June 2012 23 PROGRAMME OF EVENTS AT THE ETHICAL SOCIETY Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, Holborn, WC1R 4RL. Tel: 020 7405 1818 Registered Charity No. 251396 For programme updates, email: [email protected] Websites: www.ethicalsoc.org.uk or www.conwayhall.org.uk Admission to Sunday morning lectures is free for members of SPES and £3(£2conc) for non-members. For other events, no charge unless stated. Sunday meetings are held in the Brockway Room. JUNE 2012 Sunday 17 ARE THE OLYMPIC GAMES GOOD FOR HUMANITY? 1100 Andy Miah provides some ethical scrutiny of various aspects of the Olympics, covering their environmental impact, corporate involvement, doping scandals, and the role of global movements. 1430 Debate: THAT SOCIALISM AND SECULARISM ARE NATURAL ALLIES Proposer: Terry Liddle. Opposer: Mazin Zeki All welcome

Sunday 24 ENLIGHTENED AGRICULTURE 1100 Colin Tudge presents a vision for the future of farming: ethically driven, good for the planet and good for Humanity. 27 June - 5 July – LOOKING IN, LOOKING OUT – Film programme (see page 23 for details) JULY Sunday 8 RECOVERING HISTORY IN CENTRAL AMERICA: 1100 WITHOUT MEMORY, NO JUSTICE. Mike Phipps THE HUMANIST LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES The Library has an extensive collection of new and historic freethought material. Members are now able to borrow books from the Library. Readers will be asked to complete a Reader Registration Form, and must provide photographic ID, proof of address and proof of membership. They will be issued with a Reader’s card, which will enable them to borrow three books at a time. The loan period is one month. Journals, archive material, artworks and other non-book material cannot be borrowed. Full details of the lending service are available from the Librarian Due to popular demand, the Library will now be open to the public Sunday to Thursday, 10 am to 5.30 pm, starting on 10 June. When evening courses are running, the Library will remain open in the evenings until the start of the classes. The Library will be closed on Fridays. Check the website for details or contact the Librarian. Cathy Broad, Librarian Tel: 020 7061 6747. Email: [email protected]

To receive regular Society news and programme updates via email, please contact Ben Partridge at [email protected]. Similarly, if you have any suggestions for speakers or event ideas, or would like to convene a Sunday afternoon informal, get in touch with Ben on 020 7061 6744.

Published by the South Place Ethical Society, Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, WC1R 4RL Printed by J.G. Bryson (Printer). 156-162 High Road, London N2 9AS. ISSN 0014 - 1690