lAgLb9cciIDec 7c): The Proceedings of the South Place Ethical Society Vol. 102 No. 9 £1 October 1997

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Photo: Norman Barrac Prof. Paul KURTZ (SUNK Bnffalo, US), (left) and Pref. Valery KUVAKIN (Moscow). watch as Jim HERRICK (London) affixes a plaque for a new "Center for Enquiry" at Moscow State University , on 4 October 1997. RUSSIAN HUMANISM ON THE MOVE Seventy years of state-sponsored anticlericalism did not eliminate the need for open- minded consideration of the fundamental questions of humanist philosophy. The Russian Humanist Society, founded in 1991, organised its first International Conference at Moscow University on 2-4 October 1997. entitled Science and Commonsense in Reforming Russia. Accommodated in the gigantic, 50 year old edifice of Moscow State University were humanists from Germany. Slovakia, Poland, Holland, Norway, Britain and the United States, besides the majority . contingent from Russia itself. Sessions were addressed by humanists from the above countries. One of the main topics of discussion was the rather large incidence of believers in the paranormal and religion in Russia today. A bevy of students from the School of Journalism attached to the University acted as translators. These journalist students were by no means all ultra-rationalists themselves, many believing in telepathy, precognition, and UF0s. Nevertheless, they were extremely interested in debating these questions and were prepared to change their minds. Guests were made very welcome by their hosts. Useful contacts between the participants resulted and we look forward to exchanges of journals and further visits should ensue.

CAN WE SURVIVE OUR OWN DEATHS? Antony Flew 3 PSYCHOLOGIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE Laurence Brown 13 WHO WROTE THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS' Norman Golb 15 VIEWPOINTS M Chisman. J Nichols. M Pertiu, K Papas 22 ANNUAL REUNION, 1997 23 SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETY Conway Hall Humanist Centre

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Officers Hon. Representative: Terry Mullins. General Committee Chair Diane Murray.Vice-Chair: Barbara Ward. Hon. Treasurer: Graham Lyons. Hon. Registrar: Ian Ray-Todd Editor, Ethical Record: Norman Bacrac. Note: Lecturers were not appointed by the A.G.M. of 28 September. The question of a panel of Lecturers is under review. SPES Staff Administrative Secretary to the Society: Marina Ingham Tel: 0171 242 8034 Librarian & Programme Coordinator: Jennifer Jcynes. Tel: 0171 242 8037 Hall Manager: Stephen Norley. Tel: 0171 242 8032 for Hall bookings. Assistant Manager: Peter Vlachos. Steward: David Wright. New Members Marina Ingham, Ilse Meyer Obituary We regretfully report the death of SPES member P. R. Roberts. Cosette Pretty Cosette Pretty (whose death was reported in the Sept. ER), a member of the Society for quite a long time, died in July. She will be remembered by old members for her participation in many of the Society's activities, including rambling both in the countryside and on city walks, as well as thc warmth she showed everytime she met her many long time friends at Conway Hall. Forever lively and active in many directions, Cosette eventually 'retired' to Robert Morton House in 1986, while only marginally slowing down and losing none of the enthusiasm for living. She was a much loved mother and grandmother and a very memorable personality to all who knew her. L.L.B.

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2 Ethical Record, October 1997 CAN WE SURVIVE OUR OWN DEATHS?

Professor Antony Flew Based on a Lecture to the Ethical Society 20 July 1997

Whether we are to live in a future state, as it is the most important question which can possibly be asked, so it is the most intelligible one which can be expressed in language. Yet strange perplexities have been raised about the meaning of that identity or sameness of person, which is implied in thc notion of our living now and hereafter, or in any two successive moments. Joseph Butler ( I 692-1752)'

It is because the idea of a life after mortal death, and above all the threat of an eternal life in torment, appears so immediately intelligible, and so overwhelmingly formidable, that Butler and so many others have not bcen and are not greatly distressed by the indefeasibility in this life of "the religious hypothesis." For they could be confident that in that infinite future all would be made plain. The solution to the Problem of Evil would be revealed, wrongs would all be righted, and thc divine justice vindicated.

The promise of such eschatological verification is, of course, paradoxical. Unbelievers are eventually to learn the grim truth, but only when it will be too late for prudent, saving action. To our protests that we never knew, and could not have known, the response will be that made to a parallel protest by an old-time Scots Judge: "Well, ye ken noo!" If however it is the believers who are mistaken, then they will never be embarrassed by a posthumous awareness of their error, any more than we can expect to enjoy the satisfaction of saying to them, "We told you so!" For, as the Epicureans used to urge, it will be for us mortals after death as it was before we were born:

If it is going to be wretched and miserable for anyone in the future, then he to whom the bad things may happen has also got to exist at that time. Since death prevents that possibility..., we can know that there is nothing to be feared after death, that hc who does not exist cannot be miserable. It makes not a jot of difference.... when immortal death has taken away his mortal life.'

Setting the Problem: The Great Obstacle Surely Butler was right. "Whether we arc to live in a future state, as it is the most important question which can possibly be asked, so it is thc most intelligible one which can be expressed in language." Surely we can understand the fears of those warned of thc fate of the damned and thc hopes of warriors of Allah expecting if thcy die in Holy Wars to go straight to the arms of the black-eyed houris in Paradise. Of course wc can: they both expect - and what could be more intelligible than this? - that, if they do certain things, then they will in consequence enjoy or suffer certain rewards or punishments. And, if this future life is supposed to last forever, then clearly the question of whether or not we shall have it (and, if so, the consequent problem of ensuring that we shall pass it agreeably) is of quite overwhelming existential importance. For what are three-score years and ten compared with all eternity?

Now wait a minute. the sceptic protests. Surely something crucial is being overlooked. For this future life is supposed to continue even after physical

Ethical Record, Octobet; 1997 3 dissolution, even after the slow corruption in thc cemetery or the swift consumption in the crematorium. Of course we can understand the myth of Er' or stories of Valhalla. But to expect that after my death and dissolution such things might happen to me is to overlook that I shall not then exist. To expect such things, through overlooking this, is surely like accepting a fairy tale as history, through ignoring the prefatory rubric: "Once upon a time, in a world that never was ..."

That first exchange gets us to the heart of the matter, by establishing two fundamentals. One of these is that the essence of any doctrine of personal survival (or personal immortality) must be that it should assert that we ourselves shall in some fashion do things and suffer things after our own deaths (forever). It is this, and this alone, that warrants, or rather constitutes, what John Wisdom so correctly characterised as "the logically unique expectation."' It is important to emphasise that this is indeed of the essence: both because some doctrines employing the word immortality have from the beginning not been of this kind - Aristotle on the alleged immortality of the intellect, for instance - and because others, which started as genuine doctrines of personal immortality, have been so interpreted and reinterpreted that they have surreptitiously ceased to be anything of the such. (These latter have thus suffered "the death by a thousand qualifications."5) It is also, it seems, sometimes necessary to point out that personal survival is presupposed by, and is no sort of alternative to, personal immortality.' For, as was famously said with regard to another remarkable claim to survival: "It is the first step which counts."

The second fundamental is this. Any doctrine of personal survival or personal immortality has got to find some way around or over an enormous initial obstacle. In the ordinary, everyday understandings of the words involved, to say that someone survived death is to contradict yourself, while to assert that we all of us live forever is to assert a manifest falsehood, the flat contrary of a universally known universal truth: namely, the truth, hallowed in the traditional formal logic, that "All men are mortal."

Possible Routes Around or Over That Obstacle We may distinguish three sorts of ways in which we might attempt to circumvent or to overcome this formidable barrier, although the route-finding image becomes awkward when we notice that most living faiths have incorporated elements of more than one. Let us label these three ways "Reconstitutionalist," "Astral Body," and "Platonic-Cartesian."

(i) The first of these cannot be better explained than by unrolling a pair of quotations. One is an epitaph composed for himself by Benjamin Franklin. I copied it from a plaque erected not on but beside his grave in Christ Church cemetery, Philadelphia: "The body of B. Franklin, Printer, Like the Cover of an old Book, Its Contents torn out, And stript of its Lettering and Gilding, Lies Here, Food for Worms. But the work shall not be lost; for it will, as he believ'd, appear once more in a new and more elegant Edition Corrected and improved By the Author."

The other comes from chapter 12 'The Night Journey" in the Koran. As usual, it is Allah speaking: "Thus shall they be rewarded: because they disbelieved our revelations and said, 'When we are turned to bones and dust shall we be raised to life?' Do they not see that Allah, who has created the heavens and the earth, has power to create their like? Their fate is preordained beyond all doubt. Yet the wrongdoers persist in unbelief."

4 Ethical Record, October; 1997 This direct Reconstitutionalist Way is blocked by the Replica Objection. This is that the "new and more elegant edition" would not be the original Founding Father, Signer of the American Declaration of Independence, but only a replica, and that Allah spoke more truly than his Prophet realised when he claimed, not the ability to reconstitute the same persons, but only the "power to create their like." The force of the Replica Objection is all the greater, and all the more decisive, in as much as the "new.., edition" and "their like" arc both to be the creations of a quasipersonal, rewarding and punishing Creator, not just things that occur unintended.'

It is clear that Aquinas, unlike some of our contemporaries who think to follow him, appreciated all this. But his Reconstitutionism incorporated an element of our third kind. For he believed that a soul, which is a substance, in thc sense of something that can significantly be said to exist separately yet is more emphatically not in such separate existence a whole person, survives what would normally be called death and dissolution. This soul will eventually be - shall wc say? - incorporated into what, had provision not been made for this element of partly personal continuity, might otherwise have had to be dismissed as merely a replica of the original person.'

About this Thomist response the only thing we need to say at this stage is that this sort of semisoul, which is not by itself a whole person, must be exposed to all the objections that can be brought against a full Platonic soul, which is, or could be. Also, to the extend that the Thomist soul is not a whole person, its claim to constitute the essential but sufficient link maintaining personal identity is bound to weaken.

(ii) To explain the Astral Body approach it is best to think of cinematic representations - for example, in the movie version of Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit - in which a shadow person, visible only sometimes and only to some of the characters, detaches itself from a person shown as dead, and thereafter continues to participate in the developing action, at one time discernibly and at another time not. This elusive entity is taken to be itself the real, thc essential, person.

It is not, however, essential for our present purposes that an astral body be of human shape, much less that, even after the traumatic detachment of death, it should remain - as in those decent old days it did - neatly and conventionally clad. The crux is that it should possess thc corporeal characteristics of size, shape, and position, and that - although eluding crude, untutored, observation - it should nevertheless be in principle detectable. If it were not both in this minimum sense corporeal and in principle detectable, it would not be relevantly different from the Platonic-Cartesian soul. If it were not in practice excessively difficult to detect, no one could with any plausibility suggest that such a thing might slip away unnoticed from the deathbed.

The vulgar, materialist notion of souls - a notion Plato derides in the Phaedo (77D) - satisfies the present, studiously undemandinv specification for astral bodies, that notion of souls surely was, as near as makes no matter, that of Epicurus and Lucretius. There seems reason to believe that many of the early Christian Fathers thought of souls as something less than totally and perfectly incorporeal.'" So their souls also must for present purposes be classified as astral bodies.

The Way of thc Astral Body runs between a rock and a hard place. For the more we make astral bodies like the ordinary flesh and blood persons from which they are supposedly detachable - in order to make sure that each person's astral body can be identified as the real and essential person - the more difficult it becomes to Ethical Record, October 1997 5 make our that it is not already known that no such astral bodies do in fact detach themselves at death. lf, on the other hand, we take care so to specify the nature of our hypothesised astral bodies that the falsification of the hypothesis that such there be. while still possible in principle, is in practice indefinitely deferred, then we find that we have made it impossibly difficult to identify creatures of too, too solid flesh and blood with any such perennially elusive hypothetical entities. Under these and other pressures those who have started to attempt the Way of thc Astral Body tend so to refine away the corporeal characteristics of these putative bodies that they become indiscernible from Platonic-Cartesian souls.

(iii) The third, Platonic-Cartesian Way is, of course, the most familiar. It is based upon, or consists in, two assumptions. The first is that what is ordinarily thought of as a person is in fact composed of two utterly disparate elements: the one, the body, earthy. corporeal and perishable; the other, the soul, incorporeal, invisible, intangible, and perhaps imperishable. The second assumption, and equally essential, is that the second of these elements is the real person, the agent, thc rational being, the me or the you.

Traditionally these assumptions have been taken absolutely for granted; in discussions of survival and immortality, they still are. They are rarely even stated and distinguished. Still more rarely do we find anyone attempting justification. The founders of the British Society for Psychical Research hoped that its work might serve to verify what they feared that the advance of all the other sciences was falsifying: a Platonic-Cartesian view of the nature of man. In the middle decades of the present century J. B. Rhine cherished the same hope, and believed that the parapsychological work done in his laboratories at Durham, North Carolina, had indeed supplied the hoped-for verification. This is neither the place nor the occasion for yet another demonstration that these desired findings were in fact presupposed in prejudicial misdescriptions of that work, rather than supported by it."

But it is perhaps just worth mentioning that when people construe out-of-body experiences as evidence for a Platonic-Cartesian view they make exactly the same mistake. If a paticnt claims to have "seen" something "when out of the body", something that she could not have seen with her eyes and from her bed, then the more economical as well as the more intelligible thing to say is that she "saw" that something clairvoyantly from hcr bed, rather than that it was "seen", equally clairvoyantly, by her temporarily detached soul.

What Butler Saw as "Strange Perplexities" Whether or not the two assumptions that together define the Platonic-Cartesian Way can in the end be justified, it most certainly will not do, notwithstanding that this is what usually is done, to take them as from the beginning given, as if they either required no proof or have been proved already. The truth is that it is very far from obvious that disembodied personal survival is conceivable, that is, that talk of persons as substantial incorporeal souls is coherent. For in their ordinary, everyday understanding of person words - the personal pronouns, personal names, words for persons playing particular roles (such as "spokesperson." -official." "Premier," "aviator," etc.), and so on - all these are words employed to name or otherwise refer to members of a very special class of creatures of flesh and blood.

In this ordinary, everyday understanding - what other do we have? - incorporeal persons arc no more a sort of persons than are imaginary, fictitious, or otherwise nonexistent persons. "Incorporeal" is here, like those others, an alicnans

6 Ethical Record, October: 1997 adjective.” To put the point less technically but more harshly: to assert, in that ordinary, everyday understanding, that somebody survived death, but disembodied, is to contradict yourself Hence the incorrigible Thomas Hobbes was so rude as to say that, "If a man talks to me of 'a round quadrangle', or 'accidents of bread in cheese', or 'immaterial substances',.... I should not say that he was in error, but that his words were without meaning: that it is say, absurd."

(i) This absurdity is very rarely recognised and admitted as such. Even Richard Swinburne, whose theological trilogy constitutes the most formidable of all contemporary defences of theism, is sometimes inclined to take these two Platonic- Cartesian assumptions as given. Thus the second sentence of The Coherence of Theism reads: "By a *God' he [the theist] understands something like a person without a body (i.e., a spirit)..." Later we are told that "Human persons have bodies: he [God] does not."4 Again, in the course of a discussion of "What it is for a body to be mine,- Swinburne, having first listed various peculiarly personal characteristics, tells us that "we learn to apply the term `person' to various individuals around us in virtue of their possession of the characteristics which I have outlined."

This, surely, is all wrong. If persons really were creatures possessing bodies, rather than, as in fact we are, creatures that just essentially are members of one special sort of creatures of flesh and blood, then it would make sense to speak of a whole body amputation. Who is it, too, who is presupposed to be able sensibly to ask which of various bodies is his, or hers? How is such a puzzled person to be identified, or to self-identify, save by reference to the living organism he or she actually is?

As for Swinburne's suggestion that we could, and even do, learn to apply the word "person" to "various individuals around us" by first learning how to pick out certain peculiarly personal characteristics, and then identifying persons as creatures of the kind that possess these characteristics, this constitutes a perfect paradigm of the literally preposterous. For the manifest truth is that our only experience of any peculiarly personal characteristics is, and indeed has to be, of these as characteristics peculiar to that particular kind of creatures we have first learnt to identify as mature and normal human beings.

Swinburne thought to deflect the ferocity of such critical onslaughts by making thc emollient point that no one has any business to argue, just because all the so-and-sos with which they happen themselves to have been acquainted were such- and-such, that therefore such-and-suchness must be an essential characteristic of anything that is to be properly rated a so-and-so." This is, of course, correct. Certainly it would be preposterous. and worse, to argue that because all the human beings with whom you had so far become acquainted had had black skins that therefore anyone with any other skin pigmentation must be disqualified as a human being.

Incorporeality. however, is a very different kettle of fish, or, morc like, no kettle and no fish. For to characterise something as incorporeal is to make an assertion that is at one and the same time both extremely comprehensive and wholly negative. Those proposing to do this surely owe it both to themselves and to others not only to indicate what positive characteristics might significantly be attributed to their putative incorporeal entities but also to specify how such entities could, if only in principle, be identified and reidentified. It is not exclusively, or even primarily, a Ethical Record, Ocwher, 1997 7 question of what predicates these putative spiritual subjects might take, but of how they themselves might be identified in the first place, and only after that reidentified as numerically the same through an effluxion of time.

(ii)Thc main rcason the need to aitempt answers to these questions is so rarely recognised must be, surely, the easy and widespread assumption that common knowledge of the untechnical vernacular equips us with a concept of incorporeal persons, and hence that what ought to bc meant by talk of the identity of such entities is already determined. It is this assumption that supports and is in turn supported by those reckless claims to be able to image (to form a private mental image of) personal survival in a disembodied state. The assumption itself is sustained by the familiarity both of talk about minds or souls and of talk about survival or immortality. Since both sorts of talk are without doubt intelligible, does it not follow that we do have concepts of soul and of mind, as well as of disembodied personal existence? No, or rather, ycs and no.

Just because we can indeed understand hopes or fears of survival or immortality it does not follow that wc can conceive, much less image, existence as persons, but disembodied. No one has ever emphasised and commended incorporeality more strongly that Plato. Yct when in the myth of Er he labours to describe the future life awaiting his supposedly disembodied souls, everything even that master craftsman of the pen has to say about them presupposes that they will still be just such creatures of flesh and blood as we arc now and hc was then.

On the other hand, the familiarity and intelligibility of talk about minds and about souls does entitle us to infer that we possess both a concept of mind and a concept of soul. But these particular semantic possessions are precisely not what is needed if doctrines of the survival and perhaps the immortality of souls or of minds are to be viable. Thc crux is that, in their everyday understandings, the words "minds" and "souls" are not words for sorts of substances, nor words, that is, for what could significantly be said to survive the deaths and dissolutions of those flesh and blood persons whose minds or souls thcy are. To construe the question whether she has a mind of her own, or the assertion that he is a mean-souled man, as a question, or an assertion, about some hypothesised incorporeal substances is like taking the loss of the Red Queen's dog's temper as if this were on all fours with his loss of his bone, or like looking for the grin remaining after the Cheshire Cat has vanished.'n

This distinction is crucial to my argument. Certainly the fact that we can say so many sensible and intelligible things about minds or souls does show that we have concepts of minds or souls, just as the facts that we can talk sensibly about grins or tempers shows that we have concepts both of a grin and of a temper. But none of this shows, what is not the case, that we can sensibly talk of grins and tempers existing separately from the faces of which they are configurations or of the people who sometimes lose them or - and this is vital - that we can talk sensibly about the mind or soul surviving the dissolution of the flesh and blood person whosc mind or soul it was.

(iii) Earlier I mentioned, and described as reckless, claims that we can not merely conceive but also image - form mental pictures of - disembodied survival. In the twentieth-century literature this claim was, I believe, first made by Moritz Schlick:

8 Ethical Record, October 1997 In fact I can easily imagine, e.g. witnessing the funeral of my own body and continuing to exist without a body, for nothing is easier that to describe a world which differs from our ordinary world only in the complete absence of all data which I would call parts of my own body. We must conclude that immortality, in the sense defined, should.... be regarded .... as an empirical hypothesis, because it possesses logical verifiability. It could be verified by following the prescription "Wait until you die!' '7

A more puckishly picturesque version was later provided by John Wisdom: "I know indeed what it would bc like to witness my own funeral - thc men in tall silk hats, the flowers, and the face beneath the glass-topped coffin.?'°

What Schlick and Wisdom really were doing when they engaged in these misdescribed exercises of imagination was causing themselves to have the kind of nonperceptual visual experience that might conceivably by suffered by an incorporeal subject of consciousness, if indeed such an entity could conceivably be said to exist. Precisely because it would be by the hypothesis incorporeal, such a hypothetical subject of consciousness could not be identified with Schlick or Wisdom or anyone else. So the kind of conscious experience under discussion would not be an experience had by a person. in any ordinary understanding of that crucial term, but one had by a hypothetical we know not what, for which no means of identification has yet been provided. In consequence this hypothetical we know not what has not been provided with any mcans of reidentification through time as one and the same individual we know not what.

That second and consequential point is surely much the more important of the two. For in most of our exercises of imaging we arc not ourselves among the objects of that imaging. So we might easily be tempted to think that we were on these occasions imagining what it would be like for us to survive, but disembodied. But a long series of great and less great philosophers, working on the false assumption that persons, or at any rate, their "selves", are essentially incorporeal, have tried but failed to suggest any criterion for the identity of such postulated incorporeal entities.

The Problem of Personal Identity To say that Flew will survive what would ordinarily be accounted Flew's death is to say that someone or something then living will be the same person as I am now. So our present problem is, if not the same as, at least inseparably connected with, the philosophical problem of personal identity, the problem, that is to say, of what is meant by the expression "same person"'9.

(i) Swinburne, who recognises similarly serious and heavy problems about the Coherence of Theism, and who in that book labours long and hard to solve those problems, quickly concludes, about persons: in "The identity of a person over time is something ultimate, not analysable in terms of bodily continuity of memory or character."2° Given this conclusion, Swinburne allows - while still taking to ffir granted that people are essentially incorporeal - "We may use bodily continuity to reach conclusions about personal identity."'

This will not do. For what we actually use bodily criteria for is to establish bodily continuity. And this is not just a usually reliable criterion for, but a large part if not the whole of, what is meant by personal identity. (It would be, wouldn't it, if persons just are, as I maintain that we all know that we arc, members of a very special sort of creatures of flesh and blood?) Ethical Record, October; /997 9 Starting, like so many of the great and good, from the false assumption that people are, if not essentially incorporeal, at least not essentially corporeal, Swinburne proceeds to address the problem of personal identity, the problem, that is, of what it means to say that this at time two is the same person as that at time one. And, like everyone else who has started with a similarly false assumption, Swinhurne first tries somehow to give an answer in terms eithcr of true memory or of honest hut possibly mistaken memory claims.

Then, once again like so many others, Swinhurne both overlooks the theoretical possibility and actual frequency of honest yet mistaken claims to be the same person as did this or suffered that and fails to appreciate the decisive force of Bishop Butler's refutation of any circular analysis of "being the same person as did that."" In consequence, whatever difficulties other people might confront in trying to reidentify some putative person as the same as the one who did that particular deed, or who enjoyed or suffered that particular experience, Swinburne is inclined to assume, first, that there must be a true answer to all possible questions about personal identity, and, second, that the putative person in question must always be . in a position to know that true answer - if only he would tell us, and tell us true.

But now, first, if there is or even could be a true answer, the question to which it is a true answer must already have sense. It must, to particularise, already make sense to speak of a disembodied person, and to go on to wonder whether "the identity of a person over time is [not] something ultimate, not analysable in terms of bodily continuity or continuity of memory or character."

Arguing against Penelhum. Swinburne mistakes it that the objection to giving an account of the identity of disembodied persons in tcrms of memory claims is that such claims could not be checked, which he contends that they could be. But the decisive objection, put first and classically by Bishop Butler, is that true memory presupposes, and therefore cannot constitute, personal identity. (When I truly remember doing that, what I remember is that I am the same person as did it.)

Swinburne's second mistake here, and again it is an error in which he has a host of companions. is a matter of method. In a word, this seductive and popular mistake consists in the misuse of possible puzzle cases, cases which, if they actually occurred, and were thought likely to recur, would require us to make new decisions as to what in future correct verbal usage is to bc. What is wrong is to assume that decisions, even the most rational decisions, ahout responses to purely hypothetical challenges, usually challenges we have no reason or less than no reason to expect to have to face in real life, must necessarily throw direct light upon the present meanings of thc words concerned.

The truly disturbing conclusion to be derived from a proper employment of puzzle cases is one to which Swinburne seems to have hlinded himself It is that it is possible to conceive, and even to imagine (image), situations giving rise to questions about personal identity to which, in the present meanings of the key terms, therc could be no unequivocally true or unequivocally false answer. So not even the person or persons themselves could know that answer. Consider, to reuse the example I first introduced over forty years ago. the questions that would arise if someone were told that he was going to split like an amoeba, and did. The two people resulting from this division, while indisputably different from each other, would not have equally indisputable claims to be the same person as the one who suffered the split. 10 Ethical Recod, October; 1997 (ii) Thc key to the philosophical problem of personal identity is, as so often, to start right. Against the whole Platonic-Cartesian tradition we have to insist that our paradigm persons arc standard specimens of one particular visible, tangible, utterly familiar kind or species of essentially corporeal creatures. Given this, it then becomes inescapably obvious what thc courts of justice mcan when they ask whether the prisoner in the dock is the person who did the deed. It is essentially a question about physical continuity: Had witnesses to the crime pursued the criminal, never letting him out of thcir observation, would they be able to stand up in court and honestly testify, "That is the man!"? Certainly no real life, properly constituted court is ever likely to have such superlative evidence of guilt, although aficionados of good, old-fashioned Westerns will be able to recall such scenes from movies. Nevertheless it is the import of this ideal testimony that the prosecution is endeavouring to establish by the deployment of whatever inferior kinds of evidence happen to be available.

Of course the court expects that the prisoner, like other members of our species, will possess all those peculiar characteristics that Swinhurne takes care to pick out. If it so happens that he does not, then the defence will certainly want to argue that he was incapable of forming a owns rea [guilty mind]. Again, if there has been some drastic personality change in the defendant since the commission of the crime, similarly wide-awake defence lawyers will want to argue that, in a secondary sense, the defendant is now "quite a different person" from the man who did the deed and hence should suffer some lesser or no penalty. (This secondary presupposes the primary sense: no one would say their son was quite a different person since he passed through an army camp if they were not sure that he was, in the primary sense, the same.)

Of course, too, we might some day discover that some other species, perhaps in some other inhabited world, also possessed some or all of our peculiarly personal characteristics. But, before any "survival hypothesis" can get off the ground, proponents have got to explain both how an incorporeal or spiritual substance could be identified as a bearer of these peculiarly personal characteristics, and how, even if it could bc identified in the first place, it could then be reidentified as numerically the same as some former, flesh and blood human being. Until and unless it appears that this can he done I propose to conclude with a one-verse Chinese burial song, a song sung, the translator tells us, only at the burial of kings and princes:

How swiftly it dries. The dew on the garlic-leaf The dew that dries so fast Tomorrow will fall again. But he whom we carry to the grave Will never more return."

Notes 'Joseph Butler, "A Dissertation on Personal Identity," in Butler's Wifks. (1896). 'Lucretius, de Rerum Natura [On the Nature of Things!. 'Plato, The Republic, 10.614B-621D. 'Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), P.150.

5 "Theology and Falsification," in A. Flew and MacIntyre, eds., New Essays in Philosophical Theology (1955). °Contrast Roy Holland, reviewing C. B. Martin. Religious Belief (1959), in Mind (1961): 572. Ethical Record, October 1997 11 'The Koran, translated by W. J. Dawood (Harmondsworth: Penguin), p. 234. 'Does anyone really believe that posthumous justice could he done to Hitler or Stalin if only wc had had the technology to create such replicas? 'See the Reply to Object 4, Article 2, Question 79, Book III of the Stonma Theologica - Aquinas having it both ways. "In chapter 7 of de Anima [Concerning the Soul]. Tertullian; he finds "in the Gospel itself.., the clearest evidence for the corporeal nature of thc soul... For an incorporeal things suffers nothing, not having that which makes it capable of suffering°; else, if it had such a capacity, it must be a bodily substances." (The reference is toLukc 16, 23-24, the story of Lazarus.) In chapter 9 Tertullian thcn tells a talc of "a sister whose lot it has been to bc favoured with sundry gifts of revelation." Shc is said to have testified, "A spirit has been in the habit of appearing to mc; not, however, a void and empty illusion, but such as would offer itself to be even grasped by the hand, soft and transparent and of an etherial colour, and in form resembling a human being in every respect." "For discussion see Antony Flew, ed., Readings in the Philosophical Problems of Parapsychology (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1987). "Alienans adjective" is a Scholastic technicality. Whereas, the expression "red book" is used to imply that something is both red and a book, such alienans adjectives as imaginary, fictitious, or nonexistent are not similarly employed in order to pick out a subset for some more extensive set: imaginary books, unlike red books, are not species of the genus books! "Leviathan, chapter 5. "(Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), p. 51. p. 54. "In this crucial sense of "substance" - which is by no means the only sense in which that word has been employed - a substantial soul or life could significantly, even if not truly, be said not only to preexist but to survive whatever it had "animated" or "ensouled". Perhaps the most effective way of fixing this concept firmly in mind is by appealing to examples from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, examples in which the absurdities are produced by treating words that everyone realises are not words for sorts of substances as if there were. Remember, for instances, thc subtraction sum the Red Queen set for Alice: "Take a bone from a dog, what would remain?" The answer that nothing would remain is rcjected. For the dog losing its temper would remain. °Sec his "Meaning and Verification," later reprinted in H. Feigl and W. Sellars, eds., Readings in Philosophical Analysis (1949). 'John Wisdom, Other Minds (oxford: Blackwell. 1952), p. 36. 'Can a man witness his own funeral?" in the Hibbert Journal (1956). A revised version is in A. Flew, God. Freedom. and Immortality (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1984). 20 Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism, p. 110. ''Ibid., p. 109. "See his "A Dissertation of Personal Identity." Also compare my "Locke and the Problem of Personal Identity," in Philosophy (1951). later preprinted, with revisions, in both C. B. Martin and D. M. Armstrong, eds., Locke and Berkeley (New York: Doubleday, 1968) and B. Brody, ed., Readings in the Philosophy of Religion (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976). ”Arthur Waley /70 Chinese Poems (London: Constable, 1918). See also: A. Flew The Logic of Mortality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987).

12 Ethical Record, Octobet; 1997 PSYCHOLOGIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

Laurence Brown The Centre for Critical Study, Westminster College, Oxford Summaty of a Lecture to the Ethical Society 16 March 1997

What is Psychology? 1 Psychology has been the scientific study of behaviour, since the 1880s, although from the beginning of history. psychological problems have interested philosophers, physiologists and physicians, not to mention critics).

Contemporary psychology has defined separate fields of interest - primary covering sensation and perception, learning, motivation, social behaviour (or action), language, cognition and intelligence, personality (normal and abnormal), and the relationships between brain and behaviour.

As an academic (and applied) field of study which is more than a century old, psychology acquired its current structurc after shaking off the formality of the early theorists, whose 'schools' included Wundt's 'mental chemistry': Titchener's introspective studies of the 'elements of consciousness'; Watson's behaviourism and the derivatives that include Skinner's operant conditioning; Wertheimer's Gestalt psychology and Freud's psychoanalysis.

A reliance on well-controlled empirical or experimental methods now holds the different fields of psychology together in testing the reliability and validity of systematic theories and observations. So, for example, recent studies have tested the argument that religious practices and beliefs can compensate for the adverse effects of suffcring or loss.

II Religion is, however, the field to which psychology was applied, 'before there was much psychology to apply', most obviously in William James's Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). and G Stanley Hall's The Religious Content of the Child-mind (1900). It was clear to those early psychologists that religious experiences can be readily induced by contemplation and meditation, or by such physiological interventions as fasting, sleep deprivation, restricted environmental stimulation, or breath control, and by overstimulation or heightened arousal. None of that stops them from being evidential, and similar effects can be produced through exciting or ecstatic practices (including snake handling), by ingesting psychedelic drugs or similar substances, or from a brain disorder (with epilepsy once being 'the sacred disease').

Rather fashionable views hold that experiences of God are an artifact of transient changes in the temporal lobe, or that they are focussed in the right ('hallucinatory') hemisphere (in right-handed individuals). Whatever the mechanism, mystical experiences and meditative practices can transform everyday emotional states. into conditions of ecstatic arousal. Whether such states arc to be understood reductionistically, as artifacts, or as 'valid' religious experiences can not be resolved a priori (or by psychology), without a well-developed theory or other account of what religions and psychology (as well as other perspectives) might entail.

The minimal components of religion - from a psychological perspective involve: Ethical Record, October 1997 1 3 - a tradition, with religious ideology - practitioners, supporters or adherents who - behave or act religiously, hold religious beliefs, claim religious experiences - and show observable effects, that will not necessarily be judged to be religious.

III Prof. Swinburne's, argument for the existence of God asserts that religious experiences must be subjectively or epistemically of God or thc supernatural, and that they may entail 'public' appearances, such as resurrections or visions that others might be sceptical about. There may also be a private or personal apprehension or construal of the divine, since dreams and "spontaneous healings' can be interpreted religiously, and an intuitive or other awareness can be understood through a 'sixth sense' that conveys a feeling of confidence. Mystical experiences, on the other hand, are typically expressed in terms of nothingness'. darkness, or that God is telling one to follow a particular path.

Alistair Hardy's argument, however, accepted that directly religious communications from God could be recognised as such. Nevertheless, they might depend on credulity, or show a 'feature positive' bias.

Alternatively, life itself can be construed as a religious experience, with attributions to God's activity or design, being similar to the promises or warnings that were reported by Old Testament prophets. although Jeremiah cautiously described the Chaldeans as a foreign political threat and as God's judgment on Israel.

Might we also expect experiences of 'the absence of God' (as opposed to waiting for, or calling on Godot, who never did reply)? Arc such mythological creatures as the centaur or unicorn still experienced - as opposed to being portrayed or represented as mythological beings?

IV Psychologists hope to find the grounds on which any interpretations of experience are made, and how such percepts differ from any illusion, delusion, hallucination, misinterpretation, or supposition. As psychologists, they must be silent about questions of the truth of religion, if not about the variety of orientations to it. Although Swinburne puts the onus of proof on the atheist, one wonders how much emphasis he might give to the ambiguities and errors in any of our judgments, or to the reality of sub-atomic particles and the quantum or astronomical phenomena that must be transduced, and so detected 'indirectly'. How much weight can be put on our social (or worldly) knowledge about space-ships, and even on the currently fashionable 'false memory syndrome?' But what grounds does an opponent of any firmly held view find for rejecting others' claims to a 'religious experience' that is not supported doctrinally, or by some recognised tradition? A more psychological approach might rely on a perignosis that looks around at the societal evidence for our knowledge and experience of the existence of God (following Bowker. One might then choose from the large repertoire of specifically psychological terms to account for one's own, or another's religiousness, however that is expressed. That some religious traditions in the West still impose status-bound expectations on those to be confirmed or admitted to a formal membership, by asking them to assent (verbally) to doctrine truths, or to give anothcr 'sign' of the conformity, commitment or wisdom shows the demands to which we can be exposed by a religion. We should not be over-generalising, since people are initiated into 'mysteries of (social) life' in different ways. 14 Ethical Record, October 1997 WHO WROTE THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS?

Professor Norman Golb Institute of Oriental Studies, University of Chicago Lecture to the Ethical Society, 28 September 1997

Who is there among us who has not read, during these past years, how explorations were begun anew in the Judean Wilderness, in the hope of discovery of more ancient manuscripts such as those found in the late forties and the 1950s near Khirbet Qumran. at the northwestern tip of the Dead Sea? The public is by now well attuned to the saga of these explorations and the discovery of the scrolls that lies at their source. In fact, a few years ago, during the process of freeing the scrolls for study by all scholars, the bearers of popular culture strained for new knowledge about the subject, and applauded as thc scrolls were unshackled. The effort of the international press in exposing the unspeakable situation that had prevailed - which pitted scholar against scholar as some sought to prevent others from reading these precious texts - once and for all proved that the intelligent reading public had a legitimate interest in gaining awareness of the contents of thesc manuscripts, if for no other reason than to benefit by new insights into its own past history. The effort had to do with the public's right to knowledge of the past, and with the fundamental responsibility of scholars privy to that knowledge - a responsibility, that is, inherent in their calling as members of a learned class and employed in that capacity - to make their findings known to the public honestly and without dissimulation.

J S Mill on How to Avoid Falsehood In all this recent history, we are reminded of the observation of John Stuart Mill that the concepts of even the wisest of men should, to merit approbation, -be submitted to that miscellaneous collection ... called the public." "It is not on the impassioned partisan," he emphasized, "[but] on the calmer and more disinterested bystander, that [the] ... collision of opinions works its salutary effect. Not thc violent conflict between parts of the truth, but the quiet suppression of half of it, is the formidable evil: there is always hope when people arc forced to listen to both sides; it is when they attend only to one that errors harden into prejudices, and truth itself ccases to have the effect of truth, by being exaggerated into falsehood."

Reading the reports on the freeing of the scrolls in 1991, one may well have concluded, or at least hoped, that the danger of which Mill spoke a hundred and fifty years ago had, in the case of scroll scholarship, been averted - but such has not proved to be the case. Only a few months after the euphoria created by the cartel's announcement that the scrolls would indeed bc freed for all scholars to study, the editor-in-chief did an about-face, saying that "moral pressure" would be put on independent scholars to dissuade them from publishing any of the texts before the cartel's editors had - and this has indeed been happening, although unreported in the press. Then in 1993, almost two years after the highly-touted freeing of the scrolls, some of the most interesting of the newly-published scroll fragments were put on display at the Library of Congress and then at the New York Public Library and the San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts - exhibitions that, not unlike those on Freud. the southern plantations, and thc Enola Gay exhibition took an entirely-one-sided view on the subject being curated (in this case the question of the origin and significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls), a view totally outdated by developments of the last few decades.

Ethical Record, October, 1997 15 A Blunder of Scholarship Khirbet Qumran is the large plateau, near the various caves where the scrolls were found. Ever since its excavations in the 1950s it's been described as "the home of the sect that wrote the Scrolls." Signs have been put up greeting visitors to individual rooms of the excavation: "scriptorium" for one room, "refectory" for another, "council-hall" for still another, an so on - reinforcing the impression that the site was inhabited by monk-like Essenes or some closely related group. One of the first seven scrolls found in 1947, the so-called Manual of Discipline, actually expressed a considerable number of ideas reminiscent of those of the Jewish sect of Essenes described in the first century by Philo and Josephus. Since in that same century Pliny the Elder had described a sect of celibate Essenes as actually living near the Dead Sea somewhere north of En Gedi, it seemed entirely reasonable, early on, to assume that the few other scrolls then known were also written by Essenes, and that they had had their home near the cave in which the first scrolls were found - a home, namely, at Khirbet Qumran, the closest site of demonstrable habitation to the first scroll cave as well as to the others where additional scrolls were subsequently found. Various scholars had concluded by the early 1950s that what they called "Essenc monks" had lived and written the scrolls at Khirbet Qumran itself, which was interpreted (I quote) as an "Essene monastery". Members of the sect, it was claimed, hastily gathered up and hid the scrolls in caves above the settlement when Roman soldiers besieged and conquered it in 69 or 70 A.D., during the First Revolt of the Jews against Rome.

However, in the twenty years following the discovery of the first seven scrolls and the original formulation of the Essene theory, a large mass of evidence was to come to light that gradually showed - as so often happens in the history of science and learning - that the old theory was a blunder of scholarship, resulting from its formulation at the earliest stage in the process of discovery and investigation.

Not A Celibate Monastery But A Fortress To begin with, the excavations by Father Roland de Vaux and his team in the early 1950s revealed not a celibate monastery, but graves of women along with those of men in the ancient I 200-grave cemetery adjacent to the site. The graves themselves were laid out row after row without any variations in style, as characteristically in military, post-battle cemeteries. The excavated site showed all thc signs of a well- developed military settlement, with remnants of fortifications, a siege-wall, and a reservoir system capable of supplying over 700 people with water during•an cntire eight-month period of Judacan Wilderness drought, that is, under circumstances of a siege. There was a complex of reinforced, well-built stone buildings and a prominent buttressed defence towcr from the top of which one could have a strategic view over the entire northern half of the Dead Sea region - a view that extended even to Machaerus, the Hasmonaean Jewish bastion across the Jordan in use from 100 B.C. - to 72 A.D., when the Romans captured it in the final stages of the First Revolt. Father de Vaux himself described the evidence of a ferocious battle fought at Qumran between attacking Roman forces and Jewish defenders, who in the end succumbed to the Romans; and he also states that after capturing the site the Romans themselves used it as a bastion at least until thc end of the Revolt in 74 A.D.

In a word, Qumran bore the salient hallmarks of a fortress - one of many built during the time of the Hasmonaeans (i.e., thc Maccabaeans) in thc 2nd and 1st centuries B.C. to protect Jerusalem form attack by foreign troops. It is absurd to think that such a strategic site could have been handed over to a pacifist sect such as the Essenes during that period or, all the more so, during the Revolt itself The 16 Ethical Record, October 1997 Essenes described by Pliny were a group evidently living much closer to En Gedi, who could have migrated there as refugees of war fleeing from virtually any area of Palestine. Pliny's description was written well after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., and he himself refers to his Esscnes as "throngs of refugees" and implies that they lived a rudimentary existence "among the palm-trees" - hardly a description to fit the fine stone buildings of the Qumran fortress.

A Great Diversity of Manuscripts Let us now have a glance at the scrolls themselves, discovered in eleven caves to the west and north of Khirbet Qumran. The original theory of a pious community of scribes inhabiting Qumran was based originally upon the first seven scrolls, discovered in 1947, especially on that particular one that came to be known as the Manual of Discipline. However, in the course of the 1950s fragments of over eight hundred scrolls were found, including over six hundred non-Biblical ones, 95% of them writings never heard of nor seen before. Reasonably, such a large number of scrolls could have been produced nowhere else than in a large urban centre; what's more, we must bear in mind that the poor state of preservation of most of the fragments makes it evident that many more scrolls had once been stored in thc caves and totally destroyed. We are obviously dealing with a very large phenomenon of manuscript hiding, and we must remember that both in the third and eighth centuries important discoveries occurred of Hebrew manuscripts in caves near Jericho (two contemporary sources describe these discoveries in considerable detail). What is more, since the freeing of the scrolls and the publication of photographic reproductions, we have been able to count the number of handwritings of the scribes who copied them: namely, over five hundred different handwritings, demonstrably reflecting the copying activity of at least that number of scribes - not a tenth of whom could have squeezed in at any one time into the so-called "seriptorium" of Qumran where these many manuscripts were supposed to have been pcnned.

Beyond all this, the contents of the manuscripts cannot be squared either with the idea that they were written on a desert plateau or with the assumption that they werc composed by members of a single sect. Few of the scrolls espouse doctrines associated with the Essenes, and many in fact contradict those emphasized by Philo, Pliny and Josephus. To date not a single text discovered in the caves has been found to endorse celibacy, which is so essential in Pliny's description of the Essenes inhabiting the western shore of the Dead Sea.

One group of scrolls is especially intriguing, namely the phylacteries found in some of the caves. These amulets containing verses from Exodus and Deuteronomy are to this day put on daily (except on the Sabbath) by strictly observant Jews, in literal fulfilment of the words of Deuteronomy to "bind these words that I command you this day as a sign upon your hands and as frontlets between your eyes." (The practice of wearing them in antiquity is attested by Josephus, in the Gospel of Matthew,23.5, and elsewhere.) What is so unusual about the phylactery texts found in the caves near Qumran is that they do not match up with one another - instead, they reflect different understandings as to what Biblical verses were to be bound upon arm and forehead. This unusual phenomenon has lcd a young scholar to state in his exhaustive 1992 UCLA dissertation on this subject that "the precise identification of thc practitioners ... during the late Second Temple period remains uncertain, though it appears probable that these circles constituted a broad spectrum of Palestinian and diaspora Jewry." (David Rothstein, dissertation, p. 181). These simple bits of parchment, in other words, tell the same story as the evidence Ethical Record, October, 1997 17 mentioned by me above. Until today, however, traditional Qumran scholars have supplied not the barest answer to the problem that the finding of such diverse phylactery texts poses for the original Qumran-sectarian theory. It is not reasonable to think that a pious group of sectarians under an authoritative leader living, according to the theory, in an isolated spot in the desert could have had individually divergent understandings of the manner in which the precept was supposed to be carried out.

The Copper Scroll With all this in mind, we may now turn to what growing numbers of scholars are beginning to perceive as the most important single Qumran manuscript. I refer to the Copper Scroll, the only text of a genuine documentary character ever discovered in the caves. This text contains, exclusively, descriptions of treasures and artifacts hidden away in various locations of the Judaean desert. In one column the author indicates that an item is buried at a certain place "on the way from Jericho to Sekhakha" - and there are many such genuine localities of the Judaean desert mentioned throughout the scroll. At the end of the final column the author states that at one site "a copy of this writing" may be found.

The handwriting characteristics, the reference to a copy of the text, and the frequent occurrence of placc-names all point to the fact that the Copper Sero11 is - by contrast with the other scrolls which are copies by scribes of literary works penned earlier - a genuine autograph document considered important enough to be recopied and then concealed: it is in a prime category of manuscripts. The mention of Jericho, on the other hand, reminds us of the reports of the discovery of manuscripts near Jericho in the third and eighth ccnturies, pointing still more insistently to a much wider phenomenon of manuscript hiding than that envisioned by the Qumran-Essene theory. In the Copper Scroll, in fact, there are at least eight passages referring to thc concealment of scrolls or writings along with other artifacts, many of silver and gold. The treasures are described as being hidden in cisterns, aqueducts, wadis and, to be sure, various caves. We find reference to a deposit "in Harobah, in the Valley of Achor"; and to another "in the dam in the canyon of the Qidron [ river-valley]." Both of these were part of a ramified system of wadis leading out from the area of Jerusalem. By the size and complexity of the treasures and their location in areas readily accessible through the wadi-system reaching out from the capital. we are ineluctably led back directly to Jerusalem in seeking the source of these great deposits. Moreover, in the light of the statements in the Copper Scroll, we can perceive that the earlier reported discoveries of scrolls near Jericho, as well as the actual manuscripts found in large numbers in caves near Qumran, point to an interconnected phenomenon on a large scale whose cause must be sought in significant events of the First Revolt (66-73 A.D.).

The Roman Occupation of Judaea In addition to all this, Qumran-like manuscripts have also been found at Masada, at the southern end of the Dead Sea. I must say that when I studied the reports on Masada that came into the Oriental Institute, I could not refrain from thinking about what might have been the likely history of interpretation of the various discoveries in the Judaean Wilderness if only Prof. Yadin's dig at Masada in the 1960s had preceded the discoveries at Qumran rather than following thcm. That refugees fled in considerable numbers from Jerusalem to Masada whcn the capital fell to the Romans in the summer of 70 A. D. has been carefully documented by Josephus. In sum, the discovery of the Copper Scroll, as well as of Hebrew texts both at Masada and Qumran, and near Jericho much earlier on, serves as important testimony to 18 Ethical Record, October, 1997 events that occurred in the Jerusalem after the fall of Galilee to the Romans in the late autumn of 67 A.D. Josephus describes that fall and the arrival at Jerusalem of the refugees from Galilee led by John of Gischala. He writes that the whole population of the city poured forth, that vast crowds surrounded each of the fugitives, eagerly asking what had happened.

"They casually mentioned the fall of Gischala.... When, however, the story of the prisoners came out, profound consternation took possession of the people, who drew thereupon plain indications of their own impending capture. But John... went round the several groups, instigating them to war by the hopes he raised, making out the Romans to be weak, extolling their own power and ridiculing the ignorance of thc inexperienced; even had they wings, he remarked, the Romans would never surmount the walls of Jerusalem.... By these harangues most of the youth were seduced into his service and incited to war; but of the sober and elder men there was not one who did not foresee the future and mourn for the city as if it had already met its doom."

Thc inhabitants of Jerusalem. as of any city facing an impending siege, obviously would have had to begin hiding their objects of wealth and-precious writings once appraised of their enemies' intentions. As the Copper Scroll clearly indicates, they took the treasures from the Temple and perhaps other strongholds of wealth and scrolls from various libraries in the city, those of sects, parties, individuals and the Temple priesthood and stored as many of these artifacts and writings as they could in hiding-places of the Judaean desert - the only arca left to the Jews as in 70 A.D. Some of the hidden scrolls were found in the third and ninth centuries in hiding-places near Jericho. More were found between 1947 and the mid- 50s in eleven of the caves near Khirbet Qumran. A few more fragments were discovered at Masada. Who knows when and where more might be found?

Sober Rumination and Lyrical Richness Yet even now, with the freeing of the scrolls for study by the generality of scholars, the new knowledge gained from them is demonstrating increasingly the heterogeneity of their contents and their origin in libraries of the capital. They also reveal at least several currents in ancient Judaism, one to be sure that was close to Essenism, another that was akin to the views of the Pharisees, still another apparently closer to the Sadducees and some others not so readily identifiable. Time does not permit a detailed description of the manifold ideas and trends reflected in these texts of prose and poetry in Aramaic. Greek, but mainly Hebrew. Many of the tcxts do not appear to be sectarian at all. Listen, for example, to this sober rumination from among the Cave I manuscripts:

When the wellsprings of wickedness are closed off, when evil is banished by righteousness as darkness is banished before light, and as smoke ceases to be - then will evil forever end and righteousness be revealed as is the sun that holds fast thc world. Thcn will all those who believe in the secrets of be no more. Knowledge shall fill the earth and perversion will cease.... The utterance is soon to come to be, truthful is the vision, and in this way you will know that it goes not back upon itself. Do not all nations hate wickedness - while yet it lurks among them all? Do not all peoples praise truth - yet is thcre a language or tongue that grasps onto it? What nation desires that another stronger than she oppress her? Who desires that an evil man should steal his money? - Yet what nation exists which has not oppressed another, and where is the people that has not stolen another's wealth? Ethical Record, Octobel; 1997 19 Two themes intertwine in this remarkable passage: the eventual triumph of righteousness and knowledge (de'ah) and the present hypocrisy of nations. The author declares that evil will someday be banished by righteousness, just as light banishes darkness - but he shows no awareness of the Manual's theology of light and darkness. Once righteousness triumphs, the soothsayers who have spoken of the Lord's mysterious ways will no longer have a cause to champion. Although the nations proclaim their pursuit of truth and righteousness in mock assent, this is only a shield hiding a lust for gain - no nation is truly virtuous. In the author's vision, no apocalyptic battles take place, and no charismatic prophets of truth appear to bring about a triumph of virtue. It is highly likely that in carrying forward this sober and expressive rumination, the author is urging an inner turnaround in the hearts of men to achieve the devoutly sought age of goodness.

Among the ncw scrolls arc many hymns and spiritual poetry from which we may perceive the lyrical richness of the Hebrew language up to the very destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D. lf, for example, you ponder with me just the following few lines, taken from a work known as the "Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice," I'm surc you'll be able to share with me some of the thrill of discovery that results from the first-time reading of what in effect is an entirely new corpus of ancient Hebrew literature of the intertestamental period:

Chant mightily to the Lord of Holiness by the seven chants of his wonders; chant unto the King of holiness, seven by seven times, the words of the chants of wondrousness - the seven paeans of His blessings, the paeans of the greatness of His...., the seven pacans of the exaltation of his kingdom, the seven paeans of the seven paeans of thanks for His wonders, the seven paeans of jubilation for His might, the seven paeans of chant for His holiness....

....The mighty murmur of song [surges] on the heights of their wings, the sound of the lords: they bless the edifice of the Chariot's throne, (there) above the cherubs' firmament, [near] the firmament of Light they sing, beneath the seat of His glory. But when the wheels revolve, thc Angels of holiness return. From amidst those wheels of His glory there is as if the glimpse of fire of the spirits of the Holy of Holies, round about, thc glimpse of stalks of fire, as the image of lightning.

A Baseless Perception of the Scrolls Keep in mind these two contrasting writings, each so keen and alive in its poetic perception, each so characteristic of the manifold and variegated Qumran writings as a whole, as I quote for your enlightenment the words placed into the official catalogue of the Dcad Sea Scrolls American exhibit of 1993 by the late president of the New York Public Library, who stated that the orientation of the writers of the scrolls encouraged (I quote) "Megalomanical self-importance and a contempt for others as well as a kind of hallucinatory relation to present events." This baseless perception of the value, or rather lack thereof, of these precious ancient documents coloured the entire exhibition at one of America's great repositories of learning, imparting a somberly negative impression of the scrolls' importance to the thousands of visitors who streamed into the Library to see thc exhibit. A hundred and fifty years removed from John Stuart Mill's quiet wisdom, the public had a clear and obvious right to a fair, balanced exhibit on the scrolls: they didn't get it, and no institution or public figure raised a question about what was being claimed in the name of scholarly rescarch.

20 Ethical Record, October 1997 Here is my own response to the New York Public Library exhibit: By the evidence of their contents, the Dead Sea Scrolls are the heritage of the Palestinian Jews as a whole, representing various parties, sects and divisions that were the creative source - so we can now conclude - of a multitude of spiritual and social ideas. Before the discovery of the scrolls, we could not draw so emphatic a conclusion about the Jews of intertestamental times. Much of their literature is still lacking and there's little chance that we will ever be able to grasp the full magnitude of the creative power of this people in the days of the Hasmonaeans and their successors. But those scrolls that were saved, relatively few though they may be, are like the proverbial "mast at the top of the mountain," inviting us toward gradually more advanced historical reflection.

The scrolls in effect offer a portrait of the underlying spiritual factors that generated events leading up to the First Revolt. We observe the tortured evolution of Jewish thinking from its early basis in Mosaic belief toward new religious and social values. The evolution was accomplished by struggle between various groups and individuals. The dynamics of a vigorous interchange of ideas created a climate of fervour and zeal in Jewish Palestine eventually leading to militant opposition to Roman rulc. These passions undoubtedly smouldered throughout those regions of Palestine where the Jews wcre heavily settled. It was, however, in Jerusalem, the religious and political capital, that they found their most intense expression.

The Romans knew that Jerusalem would be their chief prize. This was not only because it represented the polity of the Jews. Beyond this, they perceived that by its stubborn will to exist, thc city continued to carry the message to the pagan world that a final time would arrive when Rome's own swords, which had conquered so much of that world, might be beaten into plowshares, and all mankind come streaming up to the Temple of the Lord in Jerusalem (Isaiah 2.2-4 Micah 4.1-4). The Jews, for their part, deeply feared that thc Romans intended to destroy the Temple, the physical embodiment of the Jewish ideals. They hoped that by saving their collections of scrolls and thereby the words that expressed their beliefs and aspirations by literally hiding those words, until the tenor had passed - the time would yet come when the message of the Jews and of Judaism to the nations of the world might be heard again.

The hiding of their writings by the Jews at the time of the First Revolt thus emerges as an historic act of desperation. Through such efforts, the Hebrew scriptures and many other writings of the Palestinian Jcws were given the chance of survival. When the Temple burned and blood flowed through the streets of Jerusalem, who would have believed that the daughter religion spawned in relative obscurity in the Jews' midst would adopt those scriptures and some other writings as her own and go on to flourish and shape so much of the thinking of thc western world? Who could have believed that the Jews themselves, with the message they continued to carry,. would yet return to vigorous life and renewed creativity of spirit? HUMANIST HOLIDAYS

YULE 1997 - BOURNEMOUTH - Tuesday 23rd (Dinner) - Saturday 27th (Breakfast) - this is a return visit to a very comfortable hotel with a high standard of cuisine in Central Bournemouth, not far from the front. £225 per person to cover half-board. (With full board on the 25th) and one all-day coach trip. £50 deposit by 5th November at the very latest to: Gillian Bailey, 18 Priors Road, Cheltenham, Glos GL52 5A Tel: 01242 239175 Ethical Record, October, 1997 21 VIEWPOINTS

Hubris in Hollywood The Ethical Record arrived this morning. I read the editorial by Jennifer Jeynes, [ER September 1997] with great enjoyment and feel I want to congratulate you on it. I love your transferred epithet - "The image of an untimely hearse" - and the rest of the sentence "gliding to an island refuge under a constant rain of flowers". This sentence induced in me the same feeling as Wagner's Siegfried funeral music.

In a special article in the Observer on 7 September (presumably by Will Hutton), he says after describing Diana's role as "ultimate rebel"... "However intimacy and the need to express voice cannot alone explain the response that the funeral aroused. For Diana met the need of a lonely, secular society for solidarity and warmth - and for secular saints". Again, as with your sentence, my heart was wrenched with the phrase "... the need of a lonely, secular society for solidarity and warmth".

I asked myself how much does the outlook, presence and practice of Humanism provide solidarity and warmth? Margaret Chisman - Tring, Herts

I found your September editorial, which covered the death of Diana Princess of Wales, very odd and not so much irreverent as irrelevant. Her brother, Earl [Charles] Spencer, seemed to hit the right note, in his funeral address, when he said that to "sanctify" her memory would be to miss out on the very corc of her existence. She was a young woman with many talents and good intentions but also _with human frailties. To achieve what she did, despite the stresses she was subjected to, was truly remarkable. I was particularly impressed by the powerful effect she had on the world-wide campaign against land mines. To dismiss this by making a sarcastic comparison with corrupt conservative MPs and metaphorical "ethical land mines" seems unjustifiably cold and unfeeling.

If many people have made the mistake of sanctifying her memory, despite her brother's words, surely a humanist movement should point out her human qualities and celebrate her remarkable achievements as a mcre human being. She was no bimbo. She had a sophisticated and incisive mind and understood exactly what she was doing when she broke a social taboo and held the hand of a dying AIDS patient. Why not celebrate her memory with Humanist dignity and put aside both "syrupy adulation" and untimely sarcasm. J A A Nichols MRCGP - Onslow Village, Surrey

In response to your September editorial, I would like to put to fellow members of SPES the following point:

Some of us less intellectually highpowered, can only takc what we are, our background, educational attainment, disabilities, problems, skills and good intentions, and do our best in life, responding to situations as we find them and do what we can to help. It was Diana's 'complex character' and 'mixed motives' which

22 Ethical Record, October; 1997 the crowds of ordinary people identified with, and what brought the tributes to Kensington Palace and parts of Newham where I work. All this was well understood by quite left-wing republican journalists in the Guardian, Independent, Observer and local London Press.

Where was the syrupy adulation? Miranda Perfitt - London N5

I would like to congratulate you for the editorial published in the September issue 'Hubris in Hollywood'.

The relationship between Britons and the Monarchy is a psychological phenomenon which foreigners like me brought up under different political systems, find fascinating to observe and study. Its recent decline in popularity is a fact which even the most traditional of the conservatives cannot deny.

In contrast, the most atypical upsurge of a united nation in its un-british, almost hysterical, manifestations of mourning can only be translated,in terms of the deeper psychological needs of present day people which researchers seeking scientific interpretations of social phenomena will have to establish.

Your editorial, astute to the extreme, captured the heart of the matter showing sympathy for the untimely death of a beautiful, young, very traumatised person - humane and good for conscious and subconscious reasons, without failing to point to the complexity of the political and other factors surrounding it which, no doubt will some day have to be unravelled by the historians of our times. Kyvelie Papas, MD, FRCPCH - London W2

Further comment on these matters is invited. [Ed]

SPES ANNUAL REUNION OF KINDRED SOCIETIES, 21 SEPTEMBER 1997

This year's keynote address was given by Babu Gogineni, Executive Director and Secretary General of the International Humanist & Ethical Union on THE FUTURE OF HUMANISM. The full text of this important speech will be printed in the ncxt ER.

Greetings and accounts of their activities were given by all the kindred societies, as follows:-

British Humanist Association: Robbi Robson National Secular Society: Surendra Lal Rationalist Press Association: Nicolas Walter (indisposed) Progressive League: Dorothy Forsyth Humanist Housing Association: Diana Rookledge Humanist Holidays: Gillian Bailey Gay & Lesbian Humanist Association: Tony Thorne Bob Stuckey entertained with some appropriate music with voice and piano. Marina Ingham arranged the excellent refreshments, which were enjoyed in the Bertram Russell Room, adjacent to the Brockway Room (Small Hall) where the meeting was held.

Ethical Record, October 1997 23 PROGRAMME OF EVENTS AT THE ETHICAL SOCIETY The Library, Conway Hall Humanist Centre, 25 Red Lion Square, Holborn, WC I Tel: 0171 242 8037 No charge unless stated OCTOBER 1997 Sunday 12 11.00 am A LAW AGAINST RELIGIOUS DISCRIMINATION? Keith Porteous Wood, General Secretary of the National Secular Society, has researched this possibility and been invited to present the secularist case to the Home Office.

3.00 pm THE INTERNET AND HOLOCAUST REVISIONISM Rae West has looked into the unregulated material available on the 'net' and discugses how this raises major issues concerning free speech.

Sunday 19 LOO am WORK Poems are called Works and Childbirth is called Labour. What work creates and enriches life? Why in the current market are some people unemPloyed and poor and some'worked to death? Dinah Livingstone.

3.00 pm SONNENBERG ASSOCIATION OF GREAT BRITAIN Devoted to human rights, peace and tolerance, Stuart Sweeney feels SPES is a kindred organisation to his.

Sunday 26 11.00 am A TEACHER AT MODERN DAY SUMMERHILL Michael Newman, Present Head of Science at the notorious school in Suffolk, demonstrates how 'progressive' education is faring in the 90s.

3.00 pm STEPHEN HAWKING ON BLACK HOLES - video.

Monday 27 7.00 pm We are again invited to be the guests of the Philosophical Society of England. Prof. Mark Sainsbury of King'sCollege, London will speak on HUME'S MORAL THEORY.

NOVEMBER 1997 Sunday 2 11.00 am THE ETHICS OF TAXATION. Fred Harrison celebrates a hundred years of Henry George, author of the best- selling Progress & Poverty. There will also be an exhibition by the Henry George Foundation.

3.00 pm TOPICAL TOPICS - Terry Mullins. A chance to air your views.

SOUTH PLACE SUNDAY CONCERTS AT CONWAY HALL 6.30 pm Tickets £4.00 October 12 VANBRUGH STRING QUARTET with JOY FARRALL (clarinet). Brahms Op 51 NO2, Op 115. Bartok Quartet No 1. October 19 ADRIAN THOMPSON (tenor) and HEIN MEENS (piano). Schumann Op 48. Mendelssohn 5 songs. Liszt 3 sonnets. Mozart & Beethoven Operative Arias. October 26 OLIVER LEWIS (violin) and Andrew Zolinsky (piano). Bartok Romanian Dancer. Mozart Adagio in E. Cesar Franck Sonata in A. Sarasate Romanza Andaluza & Serenata Andaluza. Saint-Saens Sonata no.l. For detailed concert programme send a s.a.e. to:- David Monis, 153 Nether Street, London NI2 8ES. Tel: 0181 445 9958

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