Ethical Record the Proceedings of the South Place Ethical Society Vol
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Ethical Record The Proceedings of the South Place Ethical Society Vol. 113 No. 4 £1.50 April 2008 S. Root', Donald Rooum's Wildcat (see page 8) BLASPHEMY REPEAL — IS THIS THE END? David Nash 3 UN VOTE MARKS THE END OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS 7 VIEWPOINT - HOW HITLER FAVOURED CHRISTIANITY Doncdd Roount 8 DONALD ROOUM,CARTOONS SINCE 1980 8 PERSUED BY DEMONS - A RATIONAL APPROACH TO THE DRINK PROBLEM Terry Liddle MENTAL ROUGHAGE FOR CONSIDERATION Albert Adler 13 THE FREE WILL DEBATE CONTINUES A Reply to Chris Broacher Tom Rubens 14 ON BEING JEWISH Isaac Ascher 19 ETHICAL SOCIETY EVENTS 24 SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETY Conway Hall Humanist Centre 25 Red Lion Square, London WC I R 4RL. Tel: 020 7242 8034 Fax: 020 7242 8036 Websne: www.ethicalsoc.org.uk email: [email protected] Chairman: Giles Enders Hon. Rep.: Don Liversedge Vice-chairman: Terry Mullins Treasurer: John Edwards Registrar: Donald Rooum Editor: Norman Bacrac SPES Staff Executive Officer: Emma J. Stanford Tel: 020 7242 8034 Finance Officer: Linda Alia Tel: 020 7242 8034 Lettings Officer: Carina Dvorak Tel: 020 7242 8032 librarian/Programme Coordinator: Jennifer leynes M.Sc. Tel: 020 7242 8037 Lettings Assistant: Marie Aubrechtova Caretakers: Eva Aubrechtova (i/c); Tel: 020 7242 8033 together with: Shaip Bullaku, Angelo Edrozo, Nikola Ivanovski, Alfredo Olivio, Rogerio Retuerna. David Wright Maintenance Operative: Zia Hameed New Member We welcome to the Society Mike Ward of Farnham Humanists Obituary AL (Lawrence) Payne (1911-2008) Member A .L. Payne has died. His widow Nan tells us that Lawrence was always interested in ethical issues. He first took a stand against a belief in God and in church-going at the age of live, when he refused to continue to go to church with his mother, seeing no point in it! He was an ardent pacifist. speaking for the Peace Pledge Union in the street in Chelsea in 1938/39 and working as a farm labourer during the war, being a conscientious objector. Lawrence met Nan at the work camp of the International Voluntary Service for Peace in 1945 and married a few months later. Neither of them could have contemplated a church wedding, nor did they have any of their daughters baptised. JRJ THE HUMANIST REFERENCE LIBRARY The Humanist Reference Library is open for members and researchers on Mondays from 12noon-4pm and on Tuesdays to Fridays from 2 - 6pm. Please let the Librarian, Jennifer Jeynes, know of your intention to visit the Library. Tel: 020 7242 8037/4. Email: [email protected] SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETY Reg. Charity No. 25 1396 Founded in 1793, the Society is a progressive movement whose aims are: the study and dissemination of ethical principles based on humanism, 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 renowned South Place Sunday Concerts of chamber music. The Society maintains a Humanist Reference Library. The Society's journal, Ethical Record , is issued eleven times a year. Memorial meetings may be arranged. The annual subscription is 18 (£12 if a full-time student, unwaged or over 65). 2 Ethical Record, April 2008 BLASPHEMY REPEAL - IS THIS THE END? David Nash Reader in History, Oxford Brookes University Lecture to the Ethical Society 17 February 2008 Author of the recently published Blasphemy in the Christian World, Oxford University Press (£35) ISBN 978-0-19-925516-0 The law against blasphemous libel died quietly in the House of Lords on 6 March 2008. Yet as a concept blasphemy may not be wholly extineuished since it still offers to trailblaze a path for religion and religious offence to become the cornerstone of the new politics of cultural identity. Blasphemy has been adaptable and has had a considerable longevity. In ancient Greece it comprised speaking ill of the gods, disturbing the peace, and dishonourine principles of government. Early Christianity allowed for some religious plurality of opinion which was eventually proscribed by the Council of Nicea which defined both the nature and virtues of orthodoxy. Heresy effectively overshadowed blasphemy in the high medieval period but the distinction between the two was already evident. This occurred as the thirteenth-century church ministered more directly to the pastoral needs of the laity and discovered all manner of religious lapsed practice and religious error. 'Passive Blasphemy' This partly explains a model of offence and crime that I have termed 'passive blasphemy'. The church searched for opinions and expression that endaneered the peace of the community and threatened its providential relationship with God. These blasphemies did not have to be experienced, but their mere existence constituted 'a blasphemy.' Thus blasphemy was initially theorised as an attack upon communities. The origin of western blasphemy really lies in the thirteenth century, where it evolved as a crime separate from heresy. More sophisticated power structures and mechanisms appeared in late fifteenth century and these protected the credibility of religious oaths which had become vital to commercial activity. Reformation Europe enhanced the earlier guilt cultures which gave rise to enhanced interest in religious discipline. Another important aspect of passive blasphemy in this period was that pre-modem societies in the West promoted shame cultures to enable the whole community to punish transgressors through forms of public humiliation. One American jurisdiction imposed a version of shame crucifixion, while Spain stipulated the penance of muzzling and riding backwards on a donkey. In Sweden individuals were punished by an individual being required to run through a street a certain number of times as 50 men stood by levelline blows upon the person runnine. Most Calvinist countries had shame rituals which operated both inside and outside their churches. All this was linked to the conception of providence and an immanent god dispensingjudgement and punishment on the guilty —both perpetrator and importantly victim —if the victim did not pursue the perpetrator sufficiently. By the end of the seventeenth century there were initiatives as part of a European wide imposition of discipline upon unruly populations through the centralising, confessional state. This legislative change maintained a continuity of moral policing as the secular arm became the senior partner in maintaining authority. This is the Ethical Record, April 2008 3 background to such innovations as the pronouncement by the English Lord Chief Justice Sir Matthew Hale. In passing sentence upon John Taylor in 1675 Hale argued that attacks upon religion were attacks upon the law. The law thus should defend itself and the moral underpinning religion offered as English monarchy's contribution to re- establishing discipline. The relevant statute (9 & 10 William III c.32) which followed this resembles some of the French statutes pronouncing against anti-trinitarian views, denial of Christianity or the scriptures as well as some colonial American legislation. 'Active Blasphemy' Blasphemy thus became a public order issue with jurisdictions investigating the blasphemer's explicit intention. The crime changed from one that damaged society to one that primarily damaged the feelings of individuals. This became a model of what I describe as 'active' blasphemy in which individual sensibilities became the unit of offence. The power given to the individual through both English Common law and • discourses of individual rights enabled the State to increasingly avoid action in this area. As the eighteenth century wore on the enlightenment made the blasphemer into an object of study, chiefly from psychiatric practitioners. Sometimes this was also reflected in new legal codes and opinions associating it with insanity. Anti-clericalism led late eighteenth-century govemments to be suspicious of print culture and its effects upon the populace. From the end of the eighteenth century the fear of blasphemers concentrated upon ideologically motivated libertines, deists, family limitation advocates and radicals. Later nineteenth and early twentieth century secularists, atheists, anarchists and nihilists found their works scrutinised and often proscribed or prosecuted. After this courts and legislators in the West considered the imagined harm caused by the blasphemer as much as actual disturbance of the peace, calculating the danger to society of printed material remaining in circulation. Thus this era of blasphemy's history belongs as much to the history of censorship as it does to a history of religious toleration. The spread of advanced literature was frequently confronted by conservative organisations who genuinely believed that ruin would follow heterodox religious and social opinion. Across the Atlantic, the American separation of Church and State augmented by First Amendment rights intended to protect the individual's freedom of expression. In Europe these changes were much more gradually achieved and the reflected a creeping dilution of confessional status within many centralising states. In England, which was more sheltered from the French, the American or the 1848 revolutions, change occurred much more gradually still. Blasphemy's mutation into an 'active' offence really resulted in the transfer of responsibility from the state to the individual. Indeed the strength of arguments for individual rights generally meant that modem liberal states saw the legacy of statute or common law blasphemy as an embarrassment. This has been a still deeper problem for such states when they are confronted with multiculturalism. This appears here to be ambivalent since it simultaneously is an argument for integration with host hndigenous cultural expectations, yet also for the recognition of occasionally different individual rights. In societies like the Netherlands this has sparked a heated debate about the 4 Ethical Record, April 2008 'limits' of multiculturalism; whilst other societies (such as the UK) have promoted laws against religious incitement to address these problems.