Ethical Record The Proceedings of the South Place Ethical Society Vol. 113 No. 9 £1.50 October 2008

THE ANNUAL REUNION OF KINDRED SOCIETIES Jennifer R Jeynes When I became Programme Co-ordinator for the Ethical Society, some years ago now, I found that our Autumn Lecture programme was preceded, after the summer break, by an Annual Reunion of the Kindred Humanist Organisations. I thought this was a very good idea in principle, to stand (or sit) together, united by the conviction that it is possible to live a good, ethical (and musical) life without imaginary supernatural support. I became persuaded that Humanists/Secularists should be united by the overriding importance of our Weltanschaung (or life stance to use the inelegant English equivalent). On 21 September I felt vindicated (if that is not too hyperbolic an expression) as over 70 people heard News and Greetings from our usual friends, the British Humanist Association, the National Secular Society and the Rationalist Association (formerly the Rationalist Press Association) but also the Sonnenberg Association of Great Britain, the Freethought History Research Group (of which the late Virginia Clark and I were founding members) and most recently, the CEMB (Council of Ex Muslims) whose members are not only principled but courageous. (continued on page 21)

THE ANNUAL REUNION OF KINDRED SOCIETIES Jennifer R. Jeynes 1,21

NEW PRIZES AND FELLOWSHIPS LAUNCHED 2

IS THERE AN ETHICAL SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM OF IRAQ? Mike Phipps 3

VIEWPOINT Sue Mayer 13

ONE (ANTONY) FLEW INTO THE CUCKOO'S NEST, or how and why Prof Antony Flew, once the public face of atheism, changed his mind. Chris Bratcher 14

THIRTY FIVE YEARS OF MY 'HUMANISM' Barbara Smoker 19

ERIC S. STOCKTON (1924 —2008) Ralph !son 22

ETHICAL SOCIETY EVENTS 24 SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETY Conway Hall Humanist Centre 25 Red Lion Square, London WCIR 4RL. Tel: 020 7242 8034 Fax: 020 7242 8036 Website: www.ethicalsoc.org.uk email: librarygethicalsoc.org.uk Chairman: Giles Enders Hon. Rep.: Don Liversedge Vice-chairman: Terry Mullins Treasurer: John Edwards Registrar: Donald Rooum Editor, Ethical Record: Norman Bacrac SPES Staff Executive Officer: Emma J. Stanford Tel: 020 7242 8034/1 Finance Officer: Linda Alia Tel: 020 7242 8034 Lettings Officer: Carina Dvorak Tel:020 7242 8032 Librarian1Programme Coordinator: Jennifer Jeynes M.Sc. Tel: 020 7242 8037 Lettings Assistant: Marie Aubrechtova Caretakers: Eva Aularechtova (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 Members We welcome to the Society: Hon. Alderman Richard Barry of Hull; Barbara Bean of Enfield; Richard Fletcher and Collette Fletcher of London N5 Obituary We regret to report the death of Eric S. Stockton (see p.22)

NEW PRIZES AND FELLOWSHIPS LAUNCHED

A note from the Arts and Education sub - Commitee Two new education initiatives are being launched by the Society, in cooperation with the Rationalist Association and the British Humanist Association: The James Hemming Essay Prize will be open to any student in years I 2 or 13 (lower or upper sixth) in an educational institution in the UK and is named after Dr James Hemming (1909-2007), who was a frequent lecturer at the South Place Ethical Society, President and Vice President of the British Humanist Association, and an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Association. He was a dedicated teacher and educationist and a passionate advocate of an education system that would value and encourage every child. Adverts are going out to schools and colleges, and a webs ite for the prizes will shortly go online. The deadline for essays will be March 2009 and a prize-giving will be held in Conway Hall in spring 2009. The Harold Blackham Fellowships will be awarded to post-doctoral academics and will consist of a grant to assist in the editing of doctoral research into publishable form in a field related to freethought, reason, or humanism. The successful applicant will also be obliged to give at least one lecture on their work to the Ethical Society. The fellowships are named after Harold Blackham (1903—), Appointed Lecturer to the South Place Ethical Society, first Executive Director of the British Humanist Association, co-founder and first Secretary of the International Humanist and Ethical Union and Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Association. As a writer, educator and activist, he did more than any other individual in the twentieth century to promote the principles of Humanism. Together with the new programme of concerts now run by SPES at Conway Hall, these two educational initiatives are the second phase of the GC's strategic plan to increase the activities of the Society in pursuit of our charitable mission.

2 Ethical Record, October 2008 IS MERE AN ETHICAL SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM OF IRAQ? Mike Phipps Editor of Iraq Occupation Focus Lecture to the Ethical Society, 5 October 2008 In February 2003, between one and a half and two million people marched against the prospect of an Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. Perhaps some of you were there. Two weeks ago in Manchester, just 5,000 people demonstrated outside the Labour Party conference on the same issue. This was part of a pattern: pretty much every demonstration against the war since 2003 has been smaller than the last. Maybe this indicates the extent to which the issue has fallen through the cracks of our collective consciousness. Perhaps it is a reflection of the way the mainstream media present the problem almost exclusively in terms of the impact of events here — the death of British soldiers, or the effect on public support for the government. Clearly, it expresses a recognition that if the largest popular demonstration in this country's history could not stop the war in Iraq before it happened, then no public protest can turn back the course of events once they are unleashed. Personally, I don't believe that the people in this country have simply forgotten about the conflict. Most people remain anti-war and many are angry about it. In a YouGov poll in March 2007, 59% of people in Britain said that British troops should be brought home 'more or less immediately'. A MORI poll in September 2007 found that 41% of people feel 'angry' about the war. So there is a powerlessness in the face of these events over which people feel they have no control, as well as perhaps a fear that a premature withdrawal might increase violence in the short term. Some might go as far to say that having gone in, British and US forces must do more to stabilise and rebuild Iraq before simply cutting and running. These are the principal arguments one meets when discussing withdrawal from Iraq and they are largely motivated by legitimate ethical and humanitarian concerns. Interestingly, they are not matched by public opinion in Iraq. A poll taken at the end of February 2008 found that 70% of Iraqis want US-led forces to leave. A BBC poll taken at the same time found that most Iraqis thought an immediate US withdrawal would not worsen the situation — only 29% thought security would get worse; 23% thought it would remain the same; 46% believed it would get better. To understand the disparity, it is necessary to take stock of what the occupation of Iraq has meant over the last five and a half years, a period almost as long as the whole of World War II. A Catastrophe For Iraqi People On every level, the occupation has been a catastrophe of immense proportions for the Iraqi people. A million dead. One in two households in Baghdad alone have lost a family member. A million left disabled. Half a million orphans. Three quarters of a million unable to resume primary school this year. Five million refugees. Antony Arnove, author of The Logic for Withdrawal, wrote recently: 'Some two million Iraqis have fled their country. Another 1.9 million are estimated to be internally displaced persons, driven from their homes and neighbourhoods by the US occupation and the vicious civil war it has sparked. Add those figures up and you have close to 16% of the Iraqi population uprooted. Add the dead to the displaced, and that figure rises to nearly one in five Iraqis. Basic foods and necessities are now increasingly beyond the reach of ordinary Iraqis, thanks to soarine inflation unleashed by the occupation's destruction

Ethical Record, October 2008 3 of the already shaky Iraqi economy, cuts to state subsidies encouraged by the International Monetary Fund and the Coalition Provisional Authority, and the disruption of the oil industry. Unemployment is somewhere between 50-70%. Access to safe water and regular electricity remain well below pre-invasion levels.'

To that let us add: widespread corruption and embezzlement. Water shortages destroying agriculture. Power shortages crippling industry. Permanent damage to the country's historic cultural heritage. An Amnesty International report earlier this year concluded: 'Despite claims that the security situation has improved in recent months, the human rights situation is disastrous' with 'a climate of impunity [and] the economy in tatters.' Chaos A Deliberate Policy There is a school of thought that says that •through the deployment of inexperienced personnel and a lack of forward planninR, America made a number of errors in Iraq. I want to suggest something a bit more controversial — that much of the chaos into which Iraq descended after the invasion of 2003 was the fruit of a deliberate policy.

The organiser of today's talk (Jennifer Jeynes) originally asked me to discuss Naomi Klein's new book The Shocic Doctrine. I felt I couldn't really do justice to a work that wasn't my own, so we're discussing Iraq instead, on which I seem to have been working for far too long. But Naomi Klein's book is highly germane in this context. Her argument is that the disorientation of the public is the key to policy success. Just as individuals can be 'softened up' by techniques in detention that make them more amenable to interrogation, so this process can be replicated for entire peoples.

In some ways, the more destruction the better. The war began with 'Shock and awe'. The US tactic of military bombardment was intended both to minimise American casualties and to inflict as much damage as possible. The subsequent looting was not something the invaders saw as important to curtail: 'Stuff happens', said US Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld; 'Freedom's messy'. As Baghdad burned, the invaders launched a programme of mass privatisation, free trade and flat taxes. Iraqi companies were sidelined in the reconstruction process for purely ideological reasons, despite being able to do the work at one-tenth of the price of western contractors, whose results, lacking any meaningful oversight, were predictably poor. And the money wasted by mainly US corporations, it should be remembered, was Iraq's own. To ensure these policies took hold, local elections were overturned in favour of occupation-appointed puppets. Opponents of these 'freedoms' were repressed as Saddamists or Al-Qaeda. Over 60,000 were jailed by US forces in the first three and a half years of occupation; many were tortured.

Let me focus on just a few issues in detail. Two episodes in the war did more that any other to turn the overwhelming majority of Iraqi public opinion against the occupation. The first was the bombardment of Falluja in early 2004. If I may quote from Dr Glen Rangwala's article in Labour Lefi Briefing in May of that year: Iraqis of Falluja spent the first anniversary of the fall of Baghdad digging a mass grave in the middle of their city. US forces had placed the city under siege and subjected its residents to continuous bombardment in an effort to exact some revenge for the killing of four US paramilitary personnel who had been escorting a delivery of food supplies to US military forces. ht the process, they created six hundred Iraqi corpses, which

4 Ethical Record, October 2008 could not be taken to the local cemetery as it lay outside the city. So instead residents of Falluja had to dig up the city's main football pitch, and inter the bodies there. The massacre in F'alluja was on a scale greater than any known act of barbarity by Saddam Hussein's regime in its final twelve years. Jo Wilding travelled into the city during the siege with a medical team. US soldiers shot at her marked ambulance; she reported that they had already bombed the main hospital, destroyed numerous houses, and were shooting at unarmed civilians on sight. One senior British military officer in Iraq told the Telegraphon 10 April that US military personnel were Mot concerned about the Iraqi loss of life', and had come to 'view them [Iraqis] as untermenschen', the term Hitler popularised for those he regarded as racially inferior, as sub-humans. Falluja Not An Aberration Glen Rangwala in fact significantly underestimated the death toll. Once the dust had settled, Iraqi NGOs and medical workers estimated that between 4,000 and 6.000 mostly civilians were killed In addition, 36,000 of the city's 50,000 homes were destroyed, along with 60 schools, 65 mosques and shrines, and up to 200,000 residents were forced to flee. In my view, Falluja was not a mistake, an aberration. It was policy. It was also a war crime. The lack of concem about Iraqi casualties was also policy. It was reflected in the official refusal to keep detailed records or make accurate assessments about the number of Iraqis killed at the hands of the occupation forces across Iraq. Months later, incidentally, the US admitted that it had used white phosphorous as a battlefield weapon in the assault on Falluja. A documentary on the Italian RAI channel showed images of bodies recovered afterwards, which it said proved the incendiary, similar in effect to napalm, had been used against men, women and children who were burned to the bone. US journalist Dahr Jamail also confirmed the droppong of incendiary bombs the size of tanks, which caused large fires. 'When anyone touched those fires,' he wrote, 'their body burned for hours.' He also quotes eye witness reports, some from accredited journalists caught up in the conflict, of US soldiers entering houses and shootinG people for not oh-eying orders in English, a language that local people did not understand. There were also reports of US soldiers shooting civilians who were waving white thuts while they tried to escape the city, in some cases by attempting to swim the Euplirates, women and children included. Other witnesses saw American tanks rolling over the bodies of the wounded lying in the streets. So, in my view, not an aberration. In fact a year later, similar treatment was meted out to the city of Al-Qaim. Reports at the time spoke of 'US warplanes destroying houses and killing and injuring dozens of people, while shelling demolished government buildings and two mosques in the city. About 100,000 refugees, 40% of the city's population, have fled and are now livinertin tents. Medical volunteers say that many children and elderly people are suffering from diarrhoea and dehydration.' One journalist who made it into the city reported: 'Water, electricity, phones, roads were all cut. The city was besieged before the bombing began and went on for 18 days. The general hospital was occupied for ten days; the hospital director and one of the doctors were brutally beaten... All houses were raided, some twice a day. There is no government, no offices, no schools, no work, no markets... nothing. This is the reality of occupied Iraq.' The second incident was the emergence of the abuse at Abu Ghraib in May 2004. The Independent newspaper headlined it on 22 May: 'Abu Ghraib: inmates raped,

Ethical Record, October 2008 5 ridden like animals and forced to eat pork.' I wrote at the time: 'It is clear that we are not dealing here with a few individual acts of sadism. Notices were displayed throughout this notorious prison detailing interrogation techniques that routinely violated the Geneva Convention. Evidence from the ongoing Congressional inquiry confirms a systematic and institutionalised policy of degradation, some of which was pioneered in the Guantanamo camps. It is aimed primarily not at extracting information from terrorist suspects but at psychologically destroying innocent detainees with a view to making them into US informers. This alone underlines the desperation, isolation and deep unpopularity of the Coalition forces in Iraq.' Much later of course, individual soldiers at the lowest end of the command structure would be court-martialled in a blaze of publicity. But most observers still believe that the use of these techniques was a deliberate instmment of policy crafted for the purposes I mentioned. Religious Sectarianism Or Divide and Rule? Let me look at another issue in Iraq, that of religious sectarianism. Much is made in the media of the Shia-Sunni divisions in Iraq, divisions it should be borne in mind that were largely absent before the occupation, for good reason. In their bookIraq in Fragments, Eric Herring and Glen Rangwala explore this issue. They explain how the central state was carved up between parties and groups which used their privileged position to sell public sector jobs to whoever could pay. Elections strengthened the sectarianism that became a key feature post-invasion politics. In late 2004, a poll found that fewer than 5% of Iraqis thought their religious group should be the most important factor when choosing a party to vote for. Even a year after the constitutional referendum that created a federal Iraq, 70% of Iraqis wanted a unified country. Against their wishes, the state was rebuilt on sectarian lines. The US-led occupation organised party lists or slates that people were to vote for on a Sunni and Shia basis. Victory meant jobs, favours and kickbacks for the group in question. Thus was sectarianism institutionalised by the occupation itself. An error? Or a convenient divide and rule mechanism, that could justify an open-ended role for the military and prepare the country for dismemberment if the occupation cannot be sustained? One key event that greatly sharpened sectarian tensions was the blowing up of the al-Askari shrine in Samana on 22 February 2006. The blowing up of the 1200-year old shrine, unique in Iraq in its importance to Shia yet in the custodianship of Sunnis, has been seen by some as a major timing point in accelerating Iraq's descent into civil war. But who did it? AFP was one of the few western news agencies to pick up on the obvious point that to so completely demolish such a monument would require considerable specialist expertise. It estimated that to place the explosives necessary would have required drilling into the walls of the mosque over a I 2-hour period. Iraq's Construction Minister Jassem Mohammed Jaafar confirmed this: 'Holes were dug into the mausoleum's four main pillars and packed with explosives. Then charges were connected together and linked to another charge placed just under the dome. The wires were then linked to a detonator which was triggered at a distance.' The blast bore all the hallmarks of an expert operation, probably beyond the capability of Iraqi groups. Eyewitness accounts confirmed that the US maintained checkpoints around the shrine at all times and US and Iraqi troops were active throughout the night in the area, yet withdrawing ten minutes before the bomb detonated. Many people later asked how could the attack have been executed without their knowledge.

6 Ethical Record, October 2008 The immediate reaction to the bombing was a series of little-reported joint demonstrations, blaming the US for the atrocity. US journalist Dahr Jamail reported: 'The Sunnis were the first to go to demonstrations of solidarity with Shia in Samarra, as well as to condemn the mosque bombings. Demonstrations of solidarity between Sunni and Shia went off over all of Iraq...Thousands marched while shouting slogans against America. Baghdad had huge demonstrations of solidarity, following announcements by several Shia religious leaders not to attack Sunni mosques.' At the same time, however, a series of weffiorganised attacks began by unidentifiable men in balaclavas in Shia areas across the country. Right on cue, a number of US military sources began to feed stories into the media that Al Qaida was no longer seen as the main threat to peace and security: the greatest danger, according to the new narrative, was sectarian strife. The Role Of Psychological Operations Would allied forces cynically manipulate public opinion in this way and deliberately stoke up sectarian conflict? Anyone who has studied US operations in Vietnam, El Salvador and elsewhere in recent times knows that 'psychological operations' play a significant role. Key operatives from these conflicts were involved in dirty tricks and death squads, individuals like John Negroponte, the former US ambassador to Nicaragua who plotted with the contra terrorists to try to topple the elected Sandinista government in the 1980s — I remember this well as I was living there at the time. All these characters resurfaced in Iraq. Directing them was Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who also has direct experience of counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam and Central America in the 1970s and 1980s. Men of this background, it scarcely needs saying, are pretty contemptuous of human life — remember Henry Kissinger's comment on the 1980s Iran-Iraq War: `I hope they keep killing each other.'

We may never know the level of official involvement in events of this kind. But the rationale behind such a strategy — so at odds with the official justification for the occupation — isn't hard to find. As sectarian violence rose, attacks on US personnel fell. The deliberate creation of fear and chaos can pacify the population and thwart the development of a united resistance to the occupation, probably the thing the US fears most. Widespread 'religious cleansing' took place across Iraq after the Samarra mosque bombing. Much of it was consciously promoted by the US military. The Independent's Robert Fisk observed in early 2007: 'US forces in Baghdad are planning a massive and highly controversial counter-insurgency operation that will seal off vast areas of the city, enclosing whole neighbourhoods with barricades and allowing only Iraqis with newly issued ID cards to enter. The campaign of 'gated communities' - whose genesis was in the Vietnam War - will involve up to 30 of the city's 89 official districts and will be the most ambitious counter-insurgency programme yet mounted by the US in Iraq.' Just two weeks ago, this forced creation of exclusively Sunni and Shia areas was officially deemed to have made a bigger contribution to the pacification of Iraq than the 2007-8 military 'surge'. Not such a bad thing then for the occupation from the standpoint of positive media coverage in the US in an election year. Even so, we should be a little cautious about the 'sectarian strife' narrative. Most of the arms in Iraq today are in the hands of the 170,000 US and other occupation forces Ethical Record, October 2008 7 and the tens of thousands of mercenaries mostly contracted by the Pentagon but also the British Ministry of Defence, which spent I 65m on hiring private security companies in Iraq in the first four years of the occupation. One beneficiary, by the way, is the UK company ArmorGroup, headed by Malcolm Rifkind, which earned 50% of its £129m revenues from Iraq last year. These private security contractors, incidentally, are completely outside Iraqi jurisdiction and some, like Blackwater, have been involved in high-profile attacks on civilians. There are also about 250,000 US-trained army and police. Some of these units too have been implicated in sectarian violence, including a secret force that was operating from within the Ministry of Interior until recently, which the Iraqi government claims has now been dismantled. This is not to downplay the existence of sectarian militias. But we should recognise that one of the reasons President Bush ordered the surge at the start of 2007, despite the growing unpopularity of the war at home evidenced in the Democratic gains in Congress in the 2006 mid-term elections, was precisely because US forces were the biggest victim of violent attacks in 2006. The Pentagon's own figures show that two- thirds of all attacks in Iraq in the first half of that year — not counting those by the official armed forces — were against US and UK military personnel. September 2006 saw more attacks on US forces than any previous month since the occupation began. On average, US forces were being attacked by insurgents every fifteen minutes. The US response was to arm and license Sunni militias to enforce their rule, just as earlier they had turned Shia forces into American clients. Once again, when in trouble, stoke the sectarian tensions. And that's another reason for ending the occupation of Iraq. As long as each side of the sectarian divide, itself largely created and bolstered by the Occupation, feels that it can outbid the other in the competition for US resources and empowerment, then it has a vested interest in the perpetuation of the conflict. Remove the occupation and you destroy that rationale. In the absence of the possibility of one side or the other securing the US materiel necessary to outflank the other, each side would be motivated to seek an accommodation with the other. Iraqi Culture Destroyed There are a great many under-reported aspects of the occupation of Iraq which I don't have time to go into here. There is, for example, considerable evidence of a war on Iraqi academics — hundreds have been assassinated. The destruction of books, documents, PhD theses, along with the looting and burning of national libraries, museums, university libraries, valuable paintings and sculptures have been of such a systematic character as to constitute a coordinated attempt to destroy Iraqi culture. This may be central, perhaps, to the propagation of the myth that there is no Iraq, just Sunnis, Shias and Kurds. This historical deception has particular appeal to those US policymakers, such as Senator Joe Biden — now Barack Obama's vice presidential running mate — who believe that in the long term the partition of Iraq is the solution that will best serve US interests. Even the concept of Iraq's civil society has been debased. Chosen organisations are fimded by the US State Department , groups that former US Secretary of State Colin Powell described as 'an important part of our combat team'. Millions of US dollars have been allocated to women's NO0s, for example. Much of this money was spent on organising conferences, usually outside Iraq, and training selected women leaders to act as cheerleaders for the occupation. One, the Independent Women's Forum, was

8 Ethical Record, October 2008 actually founded by Vice President Dick Cheney's wife! Let me mention another book in this context — Haifa Zangana's City of Widowswhich highli2hts these issues. She argues that these hastily created organisations have been irrelevant to the needs of most Iraqi women and have impeded the work of genuine grassroots groups. Female illiteracy is at its highest since the 1930s, privatisation is destroying free public services, and unemployment 'has fuelled prostitution, back- street abortions, 'honour killings' and domestic violence.'

Her book also highlights the fact that over I ,000 women have been raped by occupying troops and Iraqi forces. In one case in 2006, a I4-year old was gang-raped and then killed along with her entire family. Despite eye-witness reports, a US spokesman initially ascribed the killings to 'Sunni insurgents'. Two US soldiers later got life sentences for this horrendous crime; other cases rarely get to court.

Incidentally, it's not just Iraqi civil society organisations that get corrupted in this way. Let me quote from the UK-based aid worker Conor Foley's forthcoming book. The Thin Blue Line: How Humanitarianism Went to War:

'In April 2003, I attended a meeting in London involving most of the major international NGOs with British offices. The war in Iraq was ending and attention was turning to the post-war reconstruction effort. A high-ranking official from the Dept of International Development (DFID) gave an off-the-record briefing about what this would entail. He announced that the British government had earmarked £210 million for the reconstruction of the country and that it would be encouraging bids from humanitarian agencies. A shocked silence ensued as it dawned on everyone that this amount was double DFID's entire humanitarian relief budget of two years previously. The world's second largest potential producer of oil is not a natural candidate for humanitarian assistance and everyone knew there were far greater areas of need elsewhere. We also knew that this assistance was being given for political reasons: to shore up support for a controversial invasion. Nevertheless, virtually no agency wished to rule itself out of receiving project funding, as they began to make clear in their presentations.'

The Surge The latest phase of Iraq's misery began in 2007. The 'surge' — the increased deployment of US troops in 2007 - is credited with stabilising Iraq. It's a funny kind of stabilisation where nearly a million more refugees fled the country for Syria in that year alone. And most of those who have returned have been driven to do so by lack of money rather than because of any improvement in the security situation.

In Baghdad, 10% of the population took flight as US troops 'surged' in. In April, Sadr city was targeted. Within two weeks, over 500 people had been killed — 25% of them women and children — and 2,500 seriously injured. There were widespread reports of random shelling by US planes and helicopter gun ships as well as of people slim in the head by US snipers. In one air strike alone a major hospital was damaged and 30 people wounded. US shelling has destroyed at least 310 buildings, police sources estimated.

The surge is regularly portrayed as a success in the mainstream media. In fact, the number of US soldiers killed in Iraq in 2007 was greater than in any year since the occupation started. Attacks against US forces intensified. But the media coverage almost disappeared. This is a war that many journalists find too repetitive or dangerous to report. As for Iraqis, in the first six months of 2007, they suffered a fivefold increase in Ethical Record, October 2008 9 the number of bombs dropped on their country, compared to the same period a year earlier.

All of this material is freely available, mostly in the mainstream. I know, because for the last two and a half years I have spent my Sunday momings editing the Iraq Occupation Focus fortnightly electronic newsletter, details of which are on our website at wwwiraqoccupationfocus.org.uk A failure to recognise what is happening to Iraq is in my opinion to flunk a test of historic importance. The Unforseen Consequences Of 'Liberal Interventionalism' I read a great deal of the new, aggressive liberalism, associated with Martin Amis, Nick Cohen and others, complaining that in its toleration of intolerance, liberal thinking is in danger of descending into a wishy-washy pluralism, a cultural relativism. In our willingness to accommodate diversity and other belief systems, we are told, we are in danger of jeopardising the foundations of a free society. What is needed, they say, is for liberalism to stand up and fight for what it believes in and to go into battle against the fundamentalists, extreme nationalists and other enemies. The result is liberal interventionism, which is undergoing something of a revival, from the Balkans to Afghanistan and Iraq. The policy is also a convenient add-on for govemments, whose main justification for intervention has collapsed. Once the Blair Government's claims about Weapons of Mass Destruction proved to be bogus, the Government resorted to the argument that it was acting on a duty to protect Iraq's people from an evil dictator — the classic position of liberal interventionism. Yet the consequences of such military deployments are often the very antitheses of what liberals claim to want to achieve. It seems to me that if liberalism is to stand for anything, it must mean the universalisation of the Enlightenment values it seeks to propagate — universal human rights, universal social justice, universal equality before the law, and so forth. Five and a half years after the invasion of Iraq, we are light years away from these simple, basic ideals. Once again, the entire experience of the practice of so-called liberal interventionism has debased the very principles it purports to proliferate. In the case of Iraq, this is not accidental. An invasion based on deceit about non- existent weapons of mass destruction, an occupation which may have more to do with energy security in a world of diminishing resources, or the search for regional hegemony by the world's leading superpower — such an invasion based on the most illiberal of motives cannot be transformed seamlessly into a humanitarian mission of reconstruction driven by the worthiest ideals. The forces occupying Iraq cannot rescue that country from the chaos and destruction that they have helped to create. This is probably true too for the politicians they have put in place. Zaid al-Ali, a British Iraqi lawyer who has worked with the UN in recent years and interacted closely with most of the leading politicians in Iraq, says this in a recent article: It is worth considering what type of person would accept to collaborate with the occupation forces in Iraq. If Iraq has become the most corrupt country in the Middle East, it is because the senior government officials are actually amongst the most corrupt people in the country. If violence is increasing, it is because the government is involved in promoting it. If Iraq is rife with sectarianism, it is because it was the only system on offer by a political class that depends on sectarianism to be relevant. If the reconciliation process is failing, it is because senior politicians prefer to eliminate their opponents than to compromise. If public services are continuing to deteriorate, it is

10 Ethical Record, October 2008 because senior officials are not affected in any way, and so they don't care. But there are many Iraqis who are competent, honest, and non-sectarian and who would be willing to rebuild their country, so long as the circumstances are correct. What this means in practice is that the US army must leave in order to create enough space for these people to contribute.' So, How To Proceed — Not Withdraw And Forget First, we must recognise that a precondition for doing good in Iraq is an immediate end to the military occupation of that country. But this is not enough. Australia is the latest country to withdraw its troops from Iraq, the last in a long line of mainly smaller European countries that have deserted George Bush's 'coalition of the willing'. None of them has taken any step to put right the chaos and destruction for which they share responsibility. `Withdraw and forget' seems to be the watchword of the hour. It may yet become the position of the Brown Government. But while this may be an attractive option for governments seeking to disengage from a policy disaster in time to win re-election, it is hardly an ethical approach. Last year, the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research (TFF) whose board member Hans von Sponeck was formerly UN Humanitarian Coordinator, issued an important paper on the future of Iraq. It observed: The invasion and ongoing occupation is a political, intellectual and moral disaster. A withdrawal that leaves Iraq at its own fate without any war reparations, aid, opportunities for socio- political healing, etc. would be yet another.' So what should be the key political, economic and humanitarian steps that might accompany the complete military withdrawal of occupying troops from Iraq? What should happen to the tens of thousands of Iraqis, including children, still detained with no prospect of legal process? Who will clean up the cluster bombs and depleted uranium warheads, which in heavily bombarded areas such as Falluja have caused a huge increase in birth defects? How can Iraq extricate itself from oil extraction contracts signed away by its puppet government and return to full sovereignty over its economic affairs? What can be done to heal the trauma whose long-term effects distort the development of all post-conflict societies, often violently? What kind of financial compensation should the perpetrators pay for their illegal and immoral occupation? Hans von Sponeck's paper puts forward a number of detailed proposals to end the occupation and move on toward reconciliation and normalisation. At the heart of their proposal is a commitment to the sound liberal principle of international law, a recognition that a resolution to the situation in Iraq must be linked to a broader end to conflict in the Middle East and that any such process must place the dignity and respect of human beings at its centre and be based on the territorial integrity and economic sovereignty of Iraq. Equally it must allow, on the basis of the UN Human Rights Charter, a full investigation of crimes and human rights violations committed both by the occupation and the twelve years of international sanctions that preceded it. TFF's Plan To this end, ft put forward a ten-point plan. The first step is a complete withdrawal of all foreign troops, mercenaries and bases and an end the occupation of Iraq. This will also involve reducing the scale of the US embassy, the de facto ruler of today's Iraq, which is the largest anywhere in human history, and planned to have a staff of 4,000 of which about half will be security and intelligence. This is simply incompatible with Ethical Record, October 2008 11 Iraq's sovereignty. In place of the occupation, TFF propose a properly-funded and structured UN peace mission, drawing on partners such as the Arab League, OSCE and EU. This would necessarily entail a transitional military mission to fill the security vacuum created by the removal of the Occupying forces, which should be made up of countries not previously involved in the occupation — but this is envisaged as a temporary operation pending the development of an authentically self-determined political process. The scope of the broader mission would focus mainly on the human socio-psychological and cultural dimensions of the conflict. "It would involve reconciliation and forgiveness, human healing, neighbourhood re-generation, schooling, health, psychiatric healing — the country has hundreds of thousands of clinically traumatised people, children and youth in particular — and empower civil society in general." TFF also call for a complete cancellation if Iraq's debt and compensation for damage done by the war, occupation and previous sanctions. Iraq must regain full sovereignty over its oil resources and receive 100% of the revenues.

A WMD — Free Zone Needed The Middle East needs to become a zone free of Weapons of Mass Destruction. The west's hypocrisy of having one policy for Israel and another for all other countries in the region has to end. In Iraq, a Truth and Reconciliation Process will be vital in overcoming the trauma to which the country has been subjected. People-to-people co- operation and civil society exchanges should be established. Finally, a long-term rezional conference needs to be organised, working toward a comprehensive settlement for the entire region, including its two core conflicts, Iraq and Israel-Palestine. The Middle East is already one of the most militarised regions in the world,' argues the I hh. 'The Bush administration's $ 60 billion plan for arming selected countries against the alleged threat from Iran is once again based on a complete misconception of how to create peace and stability. The international public should voice their strong opposition to this initiative.' I EF s full proposals, complete with timelines, are set out in considerable detail. They are evolving through discussion — since publication, for example, a new point has been added, that those outside who have committed crimes against Iraq in the years of sanctions and again by an illegal invasion and occupation should also face justice. More importantly, these ideas are being acted upon. In the US, Congressman Dennis Kucinich has developed a twelve-point peace plan for Iraq. Plans are being made for an intemational roundtable in Washington DC to coordinate these initiatives later this autumn. Iraq Occupation Focus Calls For Justice For Iraq In Britain, in July, Iraq occupation Focus held a conference of over 100 activists, many of them Iraqis, which itself adopted a statement calling for Justice for Iraq, which is now being used as a campaigning tool to solicit the widest possible support for a principled withdrawal from that country. It suites very simply: We call on those states responsible for the invasion and occupation of Iraq to terminate their illegal and immoral war, and express our solidarity with the Iraqi people in their struggle for peace. justice and self-determination. In particular, we demand: I. An immediate end to the US and UK-led occupation of Iraq;

12 Ethical Record, October 2008 Urgent action to fully address the current humanitarian crises facing Iraq's people, including help for the more than three million refugees and displaced persons; An end to all foreign interference in Iraq's affairs, including its oil industry, so that Iraqis can exercise their right to self-determination; Compensation and reparations from those countries responsible for war and sanctions on Iraq; Prosecution of all those responsible for war crimes, human rights abuses, and the theft of Iraq's resources. We demand justice for Iraq. Thirty years ago, the US military ended their involvement in Vietnam. Today, the Vietnamese are still suffering the human and environmental consequences of that war on their country. It would be an outrage if the British — and the other perpetrators of so much harm in Iraq — were simply allowed to withdraw and forget. There is an ethical alternative to this. Let's embrace it.

VIEWPOINT A Regrettable Omission I sent the following to Cultural Bloomsbury:- "I was amazed on viewing your website on Cultural Bloomsbury to see no mention of one of the most historically important features and buildings of the area — South Place Ethical Society and Conway Hall. Situated on Theobald's Road, it was and is the home of freethought in the UK and the centre of rationalism and the move away from the grip of superstition in Britain and the reforming of the squalor and degradation of Victorian London. It has given a voice to many of the most important progressive reformers and campaigners of the last 150 years, and given an affordable venue for regular musical performances. I sincerely hope you will rectify this omission in Bloornsbury's radical history " Sue Mayer

SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETY Reg. Charity No. 251396 Founded in 1793, the Society is a progressive movement whose aims are: the study and dissemination of ethical principles based on humanism, 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 monthly. Memorial meetings may be arranged. The annual subscription is £18 (£12 if a full-time student, unwaged or over 65).

Ethical Record, October 2008 13 ONE (ANTONY) FLEW INTO THE CUCKOO'S NEST, or how and why Prof Antony Hew, once the public face of atheism , changed his mind. Lecture to the Ethical Society, 12 October 2008 Chris Bratcher

For over half a century, Antony Flew had been a stalwart of atheism in debates over the existence of God, and wrote classic books on the subject: God & Philosophy in 1966 — which I bought hot off the press as a student - and ThePresumption of Atheism, a decade later. As recently as 2003, he signed the Humanist manifesto III. Then, in 2004, at a symposium at New York University, as he disarmingly puts it, 'to the surprise of all concerned, I announced at the start that I now accepted the existence of God'. He has now, at the age of 84, charted his intellectual journey in a book, There is a God (Harper, 2007, as yet unavailable in a UK edition).

The book is co-authored by one Roy Abraham Varghese. Much of it has been compiled by him from Flew's published and unpublished writings and interviews. Varghese wrote the preface, an article that appears as an appendix, and editorial link passages, and probably assembled many of the justifications at the 'religious' end of the book. These though not identified as his, have a distinct voice, and go beyond the reasons Flew gave for his conversion at the time. It doesn't matter that the arguments offered are an admitted compendium of borrowings, or even draftings by another, but it has brought into question how much of Part II of the book, labelled 'My discovery of the Divine', is his own: accusations reminiscent of those made of Bertrand Russell's late political writings on Vietnam, said to be written under the undue influence of Ralph Shoenman. The best evidence on the matter (and a possible prime source for Varghese) is a half hour interview with Joan Bakewell in March 2005, which is still available in audio, as well as truncated text form on the BBC website. I am sure Varghese is the 'prime mover' of the book. The real trouble is that Flew has always been a stirrer with anti-establishment political views: but not from the Left. In late 2006, he and 11 other academics urged the British government to have Intelligent Design taught in schools.

Theology And Falsification I pick up his journey at Oxford, where, as a postgraduate, he wanted to study philosophical issues raised by Psychical Research with H.H.Price, the Professor of Philosophy there who championed it. Instead he was recommended to Gilbert Ryle, and did well enough as a practitioner of the new linguistic approach to philosophical issues to be appointed to a temporary lecturership. At that time, philosophical issues of theology had been pretty much left to theologians and students of medieval philosophy, and debates between Christians and atheists were played out at gatherings of the Socratic club run by C.S.Lewis. Then A.J.Ayer's bookLanguage , Truth & Logic came out. Ayer argued that religious propositions were meaningless, because they could not be verified. Flew promptly (in 1950) read a paper to the Socratic club for the first and only time, as the starter to a symposium. "Theology and falsification", as it came to be called, was a slight piece, but as Flew now puts it, it 'set off ripples of thought that helped stir up the stagnant pool of theological discourse', and it has been widely anthologised. As he dwells on it, I'll take you through it.

Flew begins with a parable. Two explorers come across a clearing in a jungle. One claims it must be tended by a gardener, the other, not. They keep watch, but no gardener is ever seen or heard. The believer falls back on an invisible, etc, gardener.

14 Ethical Record , October 2008 At last the sceptic despairs, 'But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?' Flew insists that he was not taking a verificationist line over the meaningfulness of God talk, like AJ.Ayer, but just suggesting that qualifications made to escape falsifying evidence may wholly dissipate an assertion. He argues in the paper that nothing is asserted if no fact is incompatible with it (presenting it as a point of logic, rather than content).

Hew poses the falsification issue in the form of a question in the face of suffering: 'What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love, or the existence, of God?' . His fellow symposiasts' comments are worth a diversion. Richard Hare, shortly to become Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, thought that Hew was 'completely victorious', but... Imagine, he says, a don with the delusion that all the other dons were out to get him. Such is their cunning, no behaviour of theirs counts against his theory. Hare coined a word, bilk, for BOTI-I views of dons, and went on to say that Hume had shown that differences between bliks about the world cannot be settled by observation about what happens in the world, because they determine what we will accept as evidence or an explanation, and how we walk through life. Presciently, he made an aside: "I do not know in what direction Flew is walking; perhaps he does not know either". The other symposiast, Basil Mitchell, a philosopher of religion who later took over the running of the Socratic club, tried to steer a middle course; one with which Flew now identifies. The believer does grant that the `no show', or apparent indifference to suffering, of God is evidence against His existence; he just, for reasons of faith, believes it is not conclusive.

Hew's first book was on his first love: A new Approach to Psychical Research (1953). It is a rattlingly incisive trip around the archives of the Society devoted to the same, making crisp points about the quality of the evidence, the terminology of the subject and the distinction between describine and explaining. Hew now deplores its rather tart style of writing —I think he need make no apologies. In his Bakewell interview, he said that he thought that the subject too has the problem of falsifiability (although, as an enquiry, it makes no claims), and that he finds the notion of a soul unintelligible, and has no expectations of a future life. He explored the issues as editor in Body. Mind and Death (1973), in Readings in the Philosophical Problems of Parapsychology, and in a book The Logic of Mortality (both 1987). In 1961, he wrote a classic study of Hume, Hume's Philosophy of Belief. which he now wishes he could rewrite —not just, as you might imagine, over the issue of miracles, but because he has come to reject Hume's scepticism, particularly over causation.

TCFA God & Philosophy (1966) may be said to have plugged the anti-god of the gaps —in publishing. Hard to believe, but it had no rival at the time, and was a brilliant demolition job on natural theology. Flew is proud that it brought to the fore the crucial underlying question of how the supposed God is to be identified: 'until and unless we have a coherent concept, the question whether such a being exists cannot properly arise... Much less can we understand how that same individual (e.g. 'a person without a body who is present everywhere') might be re-identified throueh the passage of time'. Indeed; he does not, wisely, attempt a refutation, but dismisses the book as a relic. The Presumption of Atheism takes the stance that our basic 'take' on the world does not include a God, and the onus of proof lay with deists; very much the line he took in that

Ethical Record, October 2008 15 public debate over God in 1985. He by then had moved on professionally to other issues, in social philosophy, essentially grounded in the conviction we have choice: I mention that Flew now, like me, does not believe that the compatibilist account of freewill that he espoused the first book, is coherent; and that he regards descriptions in terms of agency and mechanism as distinct. This comes out in his new-found theology: the conclusion to his book sees God as the supremely perfect Agent. He was by then dissatisfied with Dawkins' account of the dominant role of genes, though not of his atheist stance. As Dan O'Hara, who was a Director of the Rationalist Press Association (RPA) from 1989 to 1998, as well as (briefly) President of the NSS, recalls, Flew was still a Vice President of the RPA when, in Darwinian Evolution, [1984], he described The Selfish Gene as a 'major exercise in popular mystification', arguing that behaviour is conditioned by the interaction of many genes each with multiple effects: he agreed with criticisms made by philosopher Mary Midgley that, taken literally, the account of genes was anthropomorphic. 'Almost Unbelievable Complexity' At the 2004 symposium in New York, Flew said his conversion had come about through 'recent work on the origin of life', 'What I think the DNA material has done is show, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements together...' What is almost as mysterious is why he did not reach this conclusion twenty years earlier, as I do not think that recent work has added to the plausibility of the argument that there has not been enough time for random processes to take effect. Indeed Flew admits as much: I rather like his reply at the time to a humanist enquiry as to whether he has kept up with the most recent science and theology: 'Certainly not'. In October 2004 in a letter written to Richard Carrier of the Secular Web, Flew said: The only reason which I have for beginning to think of believing in a First Cause god is the impossibility of providing a naturalistic account of the origin of the first reproducing organisms'. But in a further letter to Carrier of 29 December 2004, Flew retracted this: 'I now realize that I have made a fool of myself by believing that there were no presentable theories of the development of inanimate matter up to the first living creature capable of reproduction.' He was brave enough to admit that change of mind in the book, and to Joan Bakewell: 'my incredulity has stopped in the face of the evidence'. The Bakewell Interview: 'Alice in Wonderland and Deist, the disappearing cat' Joan therefore naturally asked him why then he believed in God. He responded with a quote from Einstein: 'it is a conviction akin to a religious feeling of the rationality or intelligibility of the world which lies behind all scientific work of a higher order — a belief bound up with the deep feeling in a superior mind...' Pressed, he said 'the conclusion is itself pretty thin stuff'. Somewhat nonplussed, I imagine, Joan put to him the proposition that he nevertheless now believed that there was a prime, intelligent mover behind the world. He replied 'I think so. But I'm not going over-big about this. I just think 'OK well, allowing this and let's call it Deism."Y'know, there's been far and away more excitement about this than there ought to be.' Quite the strangest non- sequitur in the interview is as follows. The explanation he gave for finding the notion of a soul unintelligible was that (following his tutor, Ryle) 'the wordmind doesn't refer to an object, it refers to aspects of human behaviour. Well his view about mind, I took to apply to the concept of soul.' Yet his Deist vision is of a Supreme Mind. Instantiated in what, or 'just behaviour', we may ask?

I 6 Ethical Record, October 2008 Flew's Book There Is A God Here Flew rows back from particular evidence as to the feasibility of abiogenesis, to "the body of chemical and genetic facts viewed as a whole", and to three questions that he sees as part philosophical. They are: 'How did the laws of nature come to be?'; 'How did life arise from non-life?', and 'How did the Universe, by which we mean all that is physical, come into being?'.

Hew assembles quotes from Einstein and a raft of Templeton Prize scientists on the question of the laws of nature and their so-called fine tuning. As to the latter, it is again curious that in the Bakewell interview, Flew says 'I don't think it proves anything but that it is entirely reasonable for people who already have a belief in a creating God to regard this as confirming evidence'. In the book, someone goes to town on it. I do agree with Flew and Paul Davies that multiverse conjectures to explain away fine tuning explain everything and nothing — just like God. Scientists are regularly no good at philosophy. That is almost a law of nature. Do we invoke God to explain it?!

The philosophical step (approved by Flew) is the jump from accepting that there are laws of nature (or law-abiding behaviour), to the assumption that something must impose that regularity on the universe. This betrays a confusion between the sense of law as a description and that of it as a prescription, such as regulations the Governor of the Bank of England might impose on the primordial chaos of the banking system. Martin Rees, who is prayed in aid, exemplifies this in saying 'Some of what we might call 'laws of nature' may... be local bylaws'. Is this then the real meaning of local policing? It is not at all clear what is meant by imposing a regularity. Stephen Hawking's comment is typical, but has a sting in the tail that Hew doesn't appear to notice: 'The overwhelming impression is one of order. The more we discover about the Universe, the more we find it is governed by rational laws. You still have the question: why did the Universe bother to exist? If you like, you can define God to be the answer to the question'.

How did the Universe, by which we mean all that is physical, come into being? Hew embraces the cosmological, or uncaused cause, argument. He seems unduly impressed by the Big Bang, although I think it is fair enough to ask what produced it — but why God? Hawking's question, 'Why is there Something rather than Nothing', is to my (and Barbara Smoker's) mind, a valid, if not scientific, question (the scientific question being 'Why is there some thing rather than no (particular) thing'). I also agree with Flew's former opponent and now admitted adviser, Richard Swinburne (the former Professor of _Natural Theology at Oxford) that we need 'states of affairs' to explain 'states of affairs', and not merely the laws that govern them, which may explain why once existent, the universe continues to exist — but why, we repeat, God?

'How did life arise from non-life?' Flew demurs over the time available, grants that the consensus view is merely 'we do not know', and then says that the real question is philosophical: 'How can a universe of mindless matter produce beings with intrinsic ends, self-replication capabilities, and 'coded chemistry'?' The first part of the trio of things to be explained, 'beings with intrinsic ends', is based on a teleological view of beings, that at best inhabits a twilight world between metaphysics and biology. As for the other explicanda, Philosophical question! What? I have to say this time: Philosophers are no good at Science. That is. almost another law of nature. In Flew's case, he is now also no good at spotting a

Ethical Record, October 2008 17 philosophical question. Do we invoke God to explain both?!

I am indebted to Donald Rooum for copying me a letter from Flew dated 23 Sept 2006, in which he writes — pretty cogently, if shakily: 'What I find so extraordinary is that there are still so many Christian and perhaps also now Muslim believers who take it that Darwin's theory of organic evolution is incompatible with an Argument from Design, rather than, as it surely is, the strongest version of it. Einstein himself saw the integrated complexity of the physical world as a reason for believing in a super intelligence (see my recent letter to the ER), and the inordinately greater complexity of the biological world provides an even stronger argument for the existence of an even greater intelligence. But this does not provide any sort of reason for believing in the Gods of Christianity or Islam. I have myself been recently converted to deism, to belief in the God of Aristotle, who, unlike Aristotle himself, had no concern about human behaviour.' Flew (or Varghese) quotes David Conway, a philosopher at Middlesex University: 'In sum, to the Being whom he considered to be the explanation of the world and its broad form, Aristotle ascribed the following attributes: immutability, immateriality, omnipotence, omniscience, oneness or indivisibility, perfect goodness and necessary existence.' I feel a headache coming on: but granted that Flew does not sign up to 'perfect goodness', ask yourselves how do we avoid his old falsification argument, which he has not renounced, to the rest of the set? A Neat Reversal Flew opens Part H of the book with a modem version of Paley's watch: the discovery of a mobile 'phone washed up (but working!) on a beach. Tribal 'scientists' decide that the noises it makes when prodded are simply physical properties of the device. Flew's approved alternative is that there might actually be voices out there. What is the cash value of this metaphor? His intended moral is that we should think out of the box — does he mean the phone box? OK , unfair, but ... He thinks that `the laws of nature pose a problem for atheists because they are a voice of rationality heard through the mechanisms of matter'.

He ends with a neat reversal of his original falsification argument: 'What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a reason to at least consider the existence of a superior mind?' Let us try to answer this. An encounter with an Alien would do. God is a different proposition. In terms of the conditions for its existence as specified, it would have a body, hence space, to live in — in, and yet out of — the Universe, as an entity that predated it — and be a tool user no doubt, err.. 'To err (in the other sense) is human, to forgive divine'. So said Alexander Pope. Can we bring ourselves to be divine just for a day, given all Flew's past service to the secular movement? He at least hasn't swallowed Christianity. Benjamin Franklin amended Pope to: 'To err is human, to repent divine'. Flew hasn't got long to exit the Cuckoo's nest, but if he changes his mind, he yet may achieve as near divinity in this sense, as anyone is likely to get.

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

18 Ethical Record, October 2008 THIRTY FIVE YEARS OF MY 'HUMANISM' Barbara Smoker

THIS is the 35th anniversary of the original publication ofHumanism — my little book intended for teenagers. At that time the subject had become trendy in the universities, and when the publishers Ward Lock Educational launched the Living Religions series — a series of ten booklets for secondary schools, with a separate one for each major religion, written by a believer — it was suggested that there should be an additional one on Humanism. They therefore approached the British Humanist Association, asking them to recommend an author. The BHA Secretary at that time, Kenneth Furness, mentioned the scheme to members of their Council, but none of them was willing to take it on, and the opportunity was about to go by default, when Kenneth happened to meet me on an outing, and, because I had written a recruiting leaflet for the BHA ('What Is This Humanism?'), he asked if I would be interested in the writing proposition. Though I had no experience of writing for young people, and was a stranger to academe, I had always been inclined to accept any dare, so immediately agreed to do it. Time was short, as the first two or three books of the series were already in print. but I felt I had to do a bit of swotting up on Greek philosophy before starting to write. Even more daunting was the fact that the book was to be copiously illustrated. How was I to find appropriate illustrations for the book — especially the front cover? I was sent copies of the titles already in print, and they all had spectacular front covers, depicting a Buddhist shrine or Hindu temple or Catholic cathedral. Conway Hall is an admirable building, but could hardly compete with these religious edifices in artistic splendour! Before I had even started on the actual writing, I received a telephone call from Ward Lock, enquiring how the book was progressing. I white-lied that it was well advanced, and they gave me a deadline; then I began writing, day and night. I showed some passages to knowledgable friends in the humanist movement for their comments, and sent the pages on the cosmological cyclic theory to Hermann Bondi for his. (He approved of what I had written, but wanted me to add a mention of the steady-state theory as an alternative. However. I thought that would raise difficult philosophical problems, so did not do so.) The very week I was to deliver the typescript to the publishers office, the first ever recognisable photograph of planet Earth was obtained from outer space, and I decided this would make a striking illustration of the focus of Humanism. After all this hard work, the publishers' editor complained that my text was too long at sixty pages — though I had kept it to the same length as the book on Hinduism. But Hinduism. it was intimated, was worth more space than Humanism! I therefore had to delete four pages, there and then, with no time for judicious cuts throughout. I could hardly cut out some of the ancient philosophers, so, I am sorry to say, about 1500 words on ethics went into the bin. Ward Lock had not indicated the age of the target audience beyond saying that it was pupils in secondary schools. They probably had eleven-year-olds in mind, and the religious books in the series were mostly simple (not to say simplistic) enough for that age group, but I became aware that the way mine had worked out made it more suited to the later teenagers. They were the target I therefore specified when promoting subsequent editions. There was a minimal publication fee for authors, but no royalties. I tentatively asked Ward Lock about the possibility of royalties, but was told that all the series

Ethical Record, October 2008 19 authors were willing to work for next to nothing, so as to spread the word. However, I was able to negotiate a special 50% discount on any copies of the book I bought. The firm's representatives obviously imagined that I would want perhaps a couple of dozen copies for friends and relations; my idea, however, was to sell the book, mainly within the humanist movement. I therefore included it on the order forms I had printed for my Humanist Diary and anti-Christmas greeting cards. After I had made several purchases of a hundred copies a time, the publishers told me I was their largest individual customer! A reprint of the book appeared three years after publication, and another two years after that. But when I ordered another hundred copies in the early 1980s, I was told that the stock of my book was exhausted and, as the whole series had been terminated, there were no plans to reprint any of it again. But I was offered the 'film' of the book as a gift, so that I could get it done myself under a different imprint. I then handed it over to the National Secular Society, which brought out a second edition in 1984, with minimal changes. They left the film with the printers, for future use — but when a reprint was eventually required they found that the printers had gone out of business, and the film with them — into thin air. The NSS, being a campaigning body rather than a publisher, decided it was too daunting a prospect to set it all up again, but then the British Humanist Association agreed to step in. I handed over to them my original illustrations — and they lost the lot! When they finally brought out the third ('Millennium') edition, by dint of reproducing some of the illustrations from the earlier printed pages (with so-so definition) together with some new ones from the Internet (of which one or two were rather inappropriate), it not only materialised too late for the launch party but some of the contents were botched. However, they had let me increase the length of the book by sixteen pages, as well as making the cover more artistic and adding a spine — thus changing the stapled booklet into a proper book. When it went out of print again, SPES offered to take it on, and I was pleased to be able to work on it with Norman Bacrac. A further eight pages were added for the fourth edition, which appeared in 2005. Early this year it came within sight of going out of print again. Though updated only three years ago, parts of it were already out of date, so SPES decided to go for a fifth edition rather than a straight reprint. For instance, it was stated that blasphemy was still a criminal offence in British law — when, thanks mainly to Evan Harris, MP, with input from the NSS, it was finally abolished in May this year. Also, Norman suggested there really ought to be a mention of such recent superstitions as Intelligent Design. So these updatings have now been made. However, by dint of using empty spaces and making a few small cuts, we have contrived to hold the length of the book down to eighty pages, as before, so as to repeat the same cover price and thus attract more orders from schools* — of which I have high hopes! *Leaflets have been sent to all secondary schools in the UK addressed to the Head of Religious Studies and the school Librarian.

THE HUMANIST REFERENCE LIBRARY The Humanist Reference Library is open for members and researchers on Mondays from I 2noon-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 803714. Email: [email protected]

20 Ethical Record, October 2008 THE ANNUAL REUMON OF KINDRED SOCIETIES - (continued from p.1)

Some General.Committee members are catholic in their allegiances (the only time this word can be applied accurately) as they belong to more than one Humanist Group as well as SPES. We heard from Bob Churchill!, new to the BHA but wearing several hats including their membership, Groups Liaison and web manager. The BHA, a founder member of the new Accord Coalition, believe it is better to cooperate with religious groups where those groups agree that faith schools are discriminatory and unbalanced in the teaching of religion. However, the QCA (Qualifications and Curriculum Authority) has blocked the inclusion of Humanism in the RE syllabus which, the BHA has announced, it is fighting in the courts.

Denis Cobell spoke for the National Secular Society. The NSS thinks schools should be properly secular, as in France and the USA, with religion being excluded from schools altogether. In the meantime, however, even some NSS Council Members act on SACREs, the local authority bodies which plan the RE curricula. The NSS is pleased that one of Charles Bradlaugh's ambitions for the Society when it was founded in 1866,the repeal of blasphemy laws, has been achieved, with the help of Evan Harris, Lib Dem MP and outstandin2 human rights campaigner.

Jim Herrick spoke for the Gay and Lesbian Humanists. They are pleased with the increasing importance of Gay Pride events and another of their plays on freethought themes was very successful in the Library (Gawdon Bennett).

Robert Morrell spoke for the Thomas Paine Society. Next year is the 200th anniversary of the death of Thomas Paine, the still underrated thinker who was instrumental in the French and American revolutions. The TPS hope to counteract this with various events next year. Dr Ian King told us about the latest events from the Sonnenberg Assocation of Great Britain. This Society was founded after the second world war and continues to spread European peace and harmony. often in beautiful German locations.

Veteran Humanist, David Pollock put his Rationalist Association hat on to talk about the RA. Its activities are increasin2ly directed to the internet where the youth of today prefer to read rather than the old-fashioned book . New Humanist is increasing in importance. Terry Liddle spoke for the FEIRG (Freethought History Research Group). He said there are members in seven countries now. Their publishing programme continues and the next edition of the Journal of Freethought History should be out in October. Terry finished with a rousing call not only to study history but to make it — roll on the final defeat of priestcraft and kingcraft!

Maryam Namazie spoke for the Council of ex-Muslims and their forthcoming international conference in Conway Hall. Norman Bacrac chaired for the Ethical Society. He brought news that Conway Hall has been 'listed' which means that any new building is closely scrutinised by English Heritage. Esther Williams entertained on jazz piano again and almost persuaded our sober audience to join in popular son2s. The address of our keynote speaker, Prof. Rob Tielman will be featured next month. Jennifer R. Jeynes

Ethical Record, October 2008 21 ERIC S. STOCKTON (1924 —2008) Ralph Ison My friendship with Eric began in the 1960s when he joined the Department of Science and Engineering at Isleworth Polytechnic which was still in its infancy. Eric was a chemist and he and I were soon brought together to develop a laboratory technicians' training course on which we worked together with others for many years. It was a privilege to be close to a man who when he spoke, compelled one's attention. For as he said 'when talking about serious matters one should only speak when one has something to say'. As I worked with Eric I slowly came to know more about him and soon learned that after graduating in Chemistry at the age of seventeen from the same college that once held H.G. Wells he worked for a time as an industrial chemist at British Non-ferrous Research Association [Britain's A-bomb. {EC and as he put it, 'played a tiny part in the Manhattan Project'. Then in the 1950s he decided to quit science and for a time and became a 'Commons Ranger', a job involving patrolling several square miles of London's hilly heath land on horseback. His marriage to his first wife in 1952 was dissolved some years later. In 1962 he married his second wife Catherine who was a medical doctor and several years his junior. They were happily married and Catherine bore two children, Fred and Rachel.

To The Orkneys I Left Isleworth in 1966 but remained in touch with Eric and Catherine. We met frequently until in 1977 Catherine was appointed doctor to the inhabitants of the Island of Sanday in the Orkneys. Shortly before this in the early 1970s Eric and Catherine had agreed that it made more sense for Catherine to continue her professional career while he became the "housewife". This change in life style was brought about when Catherine diagnosed a heart condition in Eric requiring the fitting of a pace-maker which Eric had to live with for the rest of his life. Neither were to know that this agreed change in life-style may have been a useful apprenticeship for Eric for what was to follow. Before they had been on Sanday very long Eric was making himself computer literate. He began writing and distributing a magazine on Sanday called the "Lady Godiva". "Lady", no doubt in recognition of the tiny hamlet in which he lived called by the same name and "Godiva" which may have had the connotation of 'revealing all'. He was founder editor of the Scottish Humanist.

He also wrote a regular column for its successor Humanism - Scotland and many articles for and letters to The Freethinker during the time of the editorship of the late Peter Brearey.

Eric also ran a website called An Atheist's Thoughts for many years, as an antidote to the BBC's Thought for the Day. His efforts have received high praise inreviews particularly by The Times. These Thoughts have recently been edited into book form (a copy of which is available in the Humanist Reference Library of the South Place Ethical Society) by Eric's American friend Mark Moore of Massachusetts.

22 EthicalRecord, October 2008 Catherine tragically died of cancer in 1981, leaving Eric with two children to care for. Later in 1983 as he writes in his own brief autobiography* 'he had the good fortune to marry Myra, a teacher who has proved to be a fine wife and a marvellous stepmother'. It is she who has patiently cared for him during his terminal illness of many months and as Eric has written 'presides over us with discretion, sensitivity and affection'. Myra and Eric's marriage is an example of how, no matter what views one holds about the larger and generally unanswerable questions, one can create a mutually caring relationship of tolerance and love. Eric S. Stockton I shall end this brief account of Eric's life with a quotation from his Epilogue in An AtheistS Thoughts for as a biologist I have no wish for my honoured friend to be misunderstood or debated about as was Darwin by all those who clearly have never read him in any depth or with any great understanding.

Here is what Eric wrote about Christianity:

I see no sufficient reason to believe in the existence of any god outside the human imagination.

I believe that Jesus was a human person — no more and no less than any other historically important person.

I do not attribute to the Bible any special authority — I think it is just one package of human writing, among many, and is open to the same critical assessment as any other.

I regard the churches simply as associations of various like-minded people who are, in my opinion, entitled to hold any beliefs they please so long as those beliefs do not take a hostile form towards people who are entitled equally to believe differently.

I attach no value whatever to survival for its own sake.

I have never assented to the doctrines of the church — I find the Christian Creeds to be unconvincing.

*Stockton, E. (2002) An Atheist's Thoughts. Sanday. Orkney. Eric S. Stockton.

Note: In 1991 Eric was invited down from Orkney to Conway Hall to give the Keynote Address at the Annual Reunion meeting, published in the Ethical Record for Nov 1991, entitled 'Humanist Strategy —A Sharpened Perspective. (Ed}

Ethical Record, October 2008 23 PROGRAMME OF EVENTS AT THE ETHICAL SOCIETY The Library, Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, Holborn, WC I R 4RL. Tel: 020 7242 8037/8034 Registered Charity No. 251396 Website: www.ethicalsoc.org.uk email: [email protected] OCTOBER 2008 Sunday 19 1100 THE DEBACLE ON WALL STREET: THE REAL PRECIPITATING CAUSE AND THE NATURE OF THE BAIL-OUT. Chris Bratcher 1500 GENIUS OF DARWIN (3 of 3) Richard Dawkins' video

Monday 20 1900 JAZZ APPRECIATION GROUP. Benny Goodman's Life Story on CD

Thursday 23 1900 INDIA: THE DARK SIDE OF SUPERSTITION AND IGNORANCE. Sanal Edamaruku

Saturday 25 1500 DARWIN AND HIS PRECURSORS. Mike Howgate (FHRG AGM at 1400)

Sunday 26 1100 POPUTATION TECHNOLOGY AND DEVELOPMENT Jerry Jones 1500 HOW TO GO FROM 'IS' TO 'OUGHT' John Edwards NOVEMBER Sunday 2 1100 THE FLIGHT FROM RESPONSIBILITY IN MODERN SOCIETY. Pattick Keeney 1500 SCIENTIFIC TOPICAL TOPICS. Mike Howgate

Wednesday 5 1900 DEFENDING THE ENLIGHTENMENT PROJECT 1stof three weekly Wednesday Seminars by Ibn Warraq

Saturday 8 THOMAS PAINE SOCIETY AGM followed by a public lecture: 1500 PAINE AND WOMEN by Chad Goodwin

Sunday 9 FOR REMEMBRANCE SUNDAY 1100 REMEMBRANCE OF 'THE WAR TO END WAR'. Richard Benefer 1500 The 9/11 Conspiracy Theories (video)

Wednesday 12 1900 DEFENDING THE ENLIGHTENMENT PROJECT. Ibn Warraq (2/3)

Thursday 13 1400 Gerald Vintcn MEMORIAL MEETING 1900 ETHICAL SOCIETY BOOK CLUB

Sunday 16 1430 SPES AGM Members only. Registration from 1400.

Wednesday 19 1900 DEFENDING THE ENLIGHTENMENT PROJECT. Ibn Warraq (3/3)

Friday 21 ANNUAL ART SOIREE. CIIANCE AND COLOUR: RULES AND RULERS 1930 Illustrated talk by Chris Gough, artist and teacher of visual thinking

SPES's CONWAY HALL SUNDAY CONCERTS at 6.30pm. £7 per ticket 19 October: No concert 26 October: Edinburgh Quartet: Haydn, Kodaly, Mendelssohn 2 November: M. Mitchell, A. Ball: Dvorak, Bridge, Franck For more info visit: www.conwayhallsundayconcerts.org.uk

Published by the South Place Ethical Society, Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, WC1R 4RL Printed by J.G. 13ryson (Printer) Ltd. 156-162 High Road, London N2 9AS ISSN 0014 - 1690