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The Ethical Record Vol ISSN 0014-1690 The Ethical Record Vol. 99 No. 1 £1 January 1994 A PERSONAL TESTIMONY Anthony Freeman 3 THE NATURALISTIC ETHIC OF ORGANIC WHOLENESS Mae-Wan Ho 8 A SPECTRUM OF PHILOSOPHY 1793-1993 Peter Heeles 12 THE WORKING MEN'S COLLEGE Brenda Colloms 19 VIEWPOINTS Jim Addison, Paddy Smith, Tanya Korobova 23 ETHICAL SOCIETY PROGRAMME 24 EDITORIAL — TIME TO END OUR NUCLEAR MACHISMO The end of the cold war should, rationally, have seen the UK cancelling its Trident submarine programme, the ostensible reason for which was to deter the Russian hordes allegedly anxious to overrun us. We shall not cancel it, because in these matters we are governed not by logic but by emotions of pride and status. We shall therefore continue to claim to need an 'independent' nuclear force, so that even without US involvement we could ourselves make a conventional war nuclear — which is why we have never promised not to be the first to use nuclear weapons in any conflict. The reason given for our need to target 500 nuclear warheads on the USSR was that otherwise we should be 'sheltering under the American nuclear umbrella', which would be just too shameful, (although apparently perfectly honourable for all the other members of NATO). The independence is, of course, a pretence. Although its submarines are built here, the Trident missiles they fire have to be sought from the US, which will sell them to us thanks to our 'special relationship' with that country. If he really wishes to slow the arms race, President Clinton should ignore our pleas and axe the whole Trident project. The 'special relationship' between the US and us has, at times, been very dangerous for the UK. The government which allowed American cruise missiles to be based at Greenham and Molesworth committed treason, because those bases made this country a target should war have broken out between the US and the USSR over Nicaragua; the USSR, quite legitimately, had sent a few Migs to enable it to fight the US-backed Contras. This enraged the US which regards the whole of America as its back-yard. Both our main parties (and maybe most voters) have been guilty of nuclear chauvinism. It was Attlee, Bevin and Morrison who first decided to.make a UK bomb. Nye Bevan famously remarked that without our own bomb we would 'go naked into the conference chamber' —but although we kept the bomb we've never been near the conference chamber! Neither we nor the French take part in the START talks between Russia and the US. We modestly maintain that we have too few bombs to be worth counting. Nevertheless we, and the French, told the Americans that on no account are they even to add our bombs to the west's total of nuclear weapons — which ploy stalled arms reduction negotiations nicely for years. continued on page 2 SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETY Conway Hall Humanist Centre 25 Red Lion Square, London WCI R 4RL. Telephone: 071-831 7723 Appointed Lecturers Harold Blackham, T.F. Evans, Peter Heales, Richard Scorer, Barbara Smoker, Harry Stopes-Roe, Nicolas Walter. Officers Honorary Representative: Nicolas Walter. General Committee Chair: Diane Murray. Vice Chair Barbara Smoker. Treasurer: Don Liversedge. Editor, The Ethical Record: Norman Bacrac. Librarian: Edwina Palmer. Registrar: Marion Granville. Secretary to the Society: Nina Khare. Tel: 071-831 7723 Hall Staff Manager-Stephen Norley. Tel: 071-242 8032 for Hall bookings. Head Caretaker David Wright. SPES FEATURES IN LORDS' DEBATE ON HUMANISM IN SCHOOLS The 1980 case (Barralet and Others v. Attorney-General), in which it was determined that the South Place Ethical Society was not a religious charity, was taken by Government spokesman Viscount St. Davids to give guidance on what is meant by religion (Lords' Hansard for 17 December 1993, 1497-9, viewable at Westminster Reference Library). The debate was on Humanism and the School Syllabus. Lord Dormand had asked whether HMG would include humanism in the religious education syllabus for schools. Viscount St. Davids replied that each syllabus is agreed locally, and as humanism is not a religion, there is no requirement that it be included. He added, significantly, that a syllabus might deal with non-theistic ways of life such as humanism. He refused to be drawn by St. John of Fawsley's (Stevas) question, "Is it not better to descibe humanism as inhumanism, and call a spade a spade?", saying that he was not permitted to make personal observations. SEA OF FAITH NETWORKmeets in Conway Hall every 3rd Tuesday at 12.30 pm. Next meetings: Jan 18 Feb, 15. Anyone interested may attend. continued from front page We hypocritically lecture the newly independent states of the former USSR for their laggardliness in not handing over their nuclear weapons to Russia immediately. We pretend to condemn nuclear proliferation, but in reality we signal to everyone that greatness depends upon one's readiness to inflict a horrible death on innocent multitudes. If we bother to give any reason today for retaining the bomb, it is said, ludicrously, to be because of tyrants like Saddam presumably we have now targeted Baghdad. The usc of nuclear weapons is immoral. No regime is so vile and so long-lasting that the use of the bomb is justified to overthrow it or to avoid being subject to it. It is not better to be dead than red ask anyone from the former communist world. The views expressed in this journal are not necessarily those of the Society 2 EthicalRecord January, 1994 PERSONAL TESTIMONY Rev. Anthony Freeman* Lecture to the Ethical Society. 5 December. 1993 This afternoon I have been invited to speak to you unashamedly as a Christian priest. Not to convert you to Christianity, but to explain why a person who has taken leave of the traditional theistic understanding of God should wish to remain in the Church. In order to do this I shall be inviting you to put yourself into my shoes and to see the world through my eyes. What I offer is not a universal prescription for all, but rather a personal testimony. In this decade of evangelism the Church has been called upon by its leaders to make a special effort to present the gospel to the young generation. If we are to be heard and understood, we must speak the language of our contemporaries. If we are to convince and convert we must win their hearts and minds. Furthermore, we have to start where people are, in many cases standing alongside them in their situation of having rejected the Christian message. I have no desire to water down the gospel. I have a great desire to proclaim it in a way which is accessible to people both in its challenge and its comfort. That means removing all unnecessary stumbling blocks to faith. Positively this involves showing that Christianity belongs in the world of every day life. There are positive things which can be said about the concept of 'God' which do not conflict with the world framework of the twentieth (soon to be twenty-first) century. The Christian story needs to be recast and retold in the language of this world in which we live here and now. Negatively, the removal of unnecessary stumbling blocks means not saying more than we ought. In particular, it means avoiding reliance on unsubstantial claims to special information from supernatural sources. Even the Bible. Christians must always be willing to subject their own claims and doctrines to the same rigorous scrutiny as they would the claims of other religious sects and teachers. So I try to take as my starting point only such statements as could be accepted by anyone of moderate intelligence and goodwill who wished to hear a Christian talking about God. Three Attitudes towards the Concept of God There is today a spectrum of attitudes towards the concept of God. For convenience I shall group them into three, which I shall label theism, atheism and non-atheism. By theism I mean the belief that God is personal, self-existent, necessary Being, transcending creation and in relationship with it. To be fair to the subtleties of some theistic belief I have carefully avoided using such expressions as a person or a being. There are still scholarly theists who are quite prepared to abandon such caution in order to make clear their robust belief in an objective God. Professor Richard Swinburne, for example, on the opening page of his book, The Coherence of Theism, defines God as: 'a person without a body (i.e. a spirit) who is eternal, free, able to do anything, knows everything, is perfectly good, is the proper object of human worship and obedience, the creator and sustainer of the universe.' *Author of God in Us — A Case for Christian Humanism, SCM Press (1993). Ethical Record, January, 1994 3 By atheism I mean the belief that the term 'God' is a concept which is meaningless and/or harmful and is to be rejected. Please note that I have tried to define what atheists do believe rather than what they do not. In the past atheism has often been used in a very negative way (often as a smear word) to mean disbelief in a particular God or gods. Thus — to give a well-worn example — we are told that early Christians were called atheists because they refused to acknowledge the gods of imperial Rome. This negative way of defining atheism, simply as 'not believing in God', I have avoided because I wish to distinguish carefully between atheism and my third category, non-theism.
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