"Revelation Trumped by the Constitution"
Ellery Schempp speaks on Sunday, Oct. 5th
Harvard's Science Center, A, at 1:30 PM
Because religious freedom
is a cornerstone of our Constitution, the practice of religion has
thrived mightily in this great democracy of ours. Humanists have no
argument there. Only when religion imposes itself on secular life,
especially public education, do we vehemently protest. That
admirable habit had one of its early beginnings in 1956 when a high
school junior in Pennsylvania refused in good conscience to
participate in morning devotions. Punished by his principal but
supported by his parents, Ellery Schempp decided on a long court
fight. With the backing of the ACLU, his struggle led to a victory
in the U.S. District Court and much adverse publicity. In 1963, the
Supreme Court combined his case with that of Madalyn Muray O'Hair
and ruled eight to one that mandatory prayer and devotional Bible
reading in the public schools were unconstitutional. A required
daily practice in the schools for thirty-seven states came to a
virtual stop. While Ellery Schempp is now in the history books, he
is also alive and well, and will speak at our first Forum of the
year on October 5, in Hall A of the Harvard Science Center, at 1:30
PM.
Mr. Schempp has led a
fascinating life in the sciences. He is a Phi Beta Kappa from Tufts
and earned his doctorate in Physics at Brown, 1967. He has worked at
Bell Telephone Labortories, at the University of Pittsburgh, the
American College of Switzerland, the Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory, GE Medical Systems, and many other research facilities,
especially in the area of bio-medics (MRI), and energy utilization
and storage. All this has led to his being now a Senior Partner in
the Harvard Consulting Group. He still finds time to tutor
twenty-six children in math and science. And time to speak for
Humanist and Unitarian-Universalist audiences. We are honored to
have him on our platform.
Other
Events of Interest
On October 11, an all day
event, the first New England Humanist Conferece will be held at the
Unitarian Universalist Church of Worcester. At least seventy
Humanists are expected to attend; they will hear such notables as
Tony Hileman, Executive Director of the AHA, Fred Edwords, editor of
The Humanist, and the political analyst, Chip Berlet. It's purpose
is to extend Humanism to the far corners of our six-state area, to
establish more chapters and fellowships, and win greater
recognition. For more information, call Tom Ferrick at HAM's number,
(617) 547-1497.
On October 12, at the
Ethical Society, 33 Garden Street, the Longy School of Music, in
Cambridge, Tony Hileman will give the platform address at 10:30 AM
on "Humanism's New Beginnings." The public is invited.
Also on October 12, Fred
Edwords will speak to members and friends of the Community Church of
Boston, (in the U U family, 565 Boylston Street, (Copley Square), on
the new Humanist Manifesto, so brief and timely. Humanists will be
especially welcome.
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The Bright Idea.
A
Memo to Students from the Humanist Chaplain
You are already aware that, from
a religious point of view, Harvard is a tolerant environment. While you
are free to believe whatever you want, or nothing at all, a great number
of sects thrive on this campus served by thirty-six professional guides,
the members of the United Ministry. I, as the Humanist Chaplain, am one of
them and fortunate to have an office on the lower level of The Memorial
Church. Being Humanist, my religious credentials are certainly suspect,
but my philosophical fervor and ethical clarity are enough to qualify for
membership among the university chaplains.. I want to testify, after two
and a half decades, that working with the United Ministry and with the
Memorial Church has been gratifying and fruitful, and to this day I enjoy
many strong friendships.
That does not mean that I shy
away from expressing my naturalist views or am seduced into piety. I’m
comfortable with my atheism without inflicting it upon the credulous. My
central truths have an empirical foundation; but much about life is
mysterious. That keeps curiosity alive.
This being said, I was pleased
to read Daniel Dennett’s article in the New York Times this summer,
called The Bright Stuff.. He is the much-admired professor of philosophy
at Tufts University, and the author of "Darwin’s Dangerous Idea –
evolution and the meaning of life." He was introducing a new name for
the hundreds of thousands of us Americans who are naturalists, who
"don’t believe in ghosts or elves or the Easter Bunny – or God.
We disagree about many things. And hold a variety of views about morality,
politics and the meaning of life, but we share a disbelief in black magic
– and life after death." He calls himself a "bright"
because naturalistic atheism could use an image-buffing. Despite some
drawbacks, it is catching on, just as "gay" has gained universal
usage over time. (The Harvard Secular Society plans to invite him to
lecture here this year).
If you are so disposed, apply
the term to yourself, because if it isn’t used, it will not spread.
There’s great merit in having a word that rises above the differences
inflicting the community of unbelievers, especially in this new age of
religious politics. I cheered on seeing Dennett on local television
drumming up interest in this wise experiment. So I’ll be calling myself
a bright, certainly not because I’m so smart, (I’m not), but to let
people know, with one word, where I stand. Maybe we’ll be surprised to
learn we have lots of company.
A
Special Welcome to All Students
Please try to attend our Sunday
afternoon programs, and feel free to call or visit the Humanist Chaplain
at Harvard, (who enjoys these days talking about Daniel Dennett and the
Brights). Find him in the offices of the United Ministry, the Memorial
Church, in the Yard, or call, 495-5986. Take a look at the Harvard Secular
Society and look up its president, Patrick Smith, '04.
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"The
Enlightenment and the Self"
Leo Damrosch, Professor of
English,
Harvard, on November 2, 1:30 PM
Modern Humanists look to the period of the Enlightenment, the 18th
Century, as the great engine of empirical knowledge, of natural
wisdom and of free thought that has formed our Humanism today. We
think of Jefferson and Franklin here in America, but especially the
French and English intellectuals such as Diderot, Voltaire, Locke
and Hume. The "New Learning" turned the old ideas about
Faith, Divine Authority, and Epistemology upside down. The Thomistic
ways of understanding the Self (substance and matter, soul and body)
were giving way to more natural concepts. In his description of his
course, "The Enlightenment Invention of the Modern Self",
Professor Leo Damrosch, for fourteen years a professor here of
English Literature, shows that the Self "can be seen as a
product of social conditioning, fragmentary and artificial, and yet
also as a fundamental core of stable personality." He may
contrast for us the pragmatic outlook of a Franklin with the morally
driven attitudes of a Kant or Rousseau. It's the latter, along with
William Blake that he has studied most intensively -- "geniuses
of astounding originality" he calls them -- and we listeners
will be the beneficiaries.
He will be addressing our Humanist community which combines Harvard
students and members of our Massachusetts Humanist Association at
their second meeting of the year in Harvard's Science Center, Hall
A. Don't miss this examination of some major roots of modern
Humanism, especially if you have a hero or two among the many giants
of the period.
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This
Month’s Book Review
A Non-Racist Explanation
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
By Jared Diamond (W.W. Norton and Company, 1997
One perpetual question is why
some societies have become more "advanced" and capable of
dominating other societies throughout the world. Most of the explanations
advanced in the twentieth century have depended on racial stereotypes.
Diamond shows why racist explanations are unscientific and can be rejected
as untrue. He spent 33 years of anthropological research in New Guinea and
makes the flat statement that New Guineans are "on the average more
intelligent, more4 alert, more expressive, and more interested in things
and people around them than the average European or American." Yet
there society is weak and powerless compared to ours. Why so, if they are
just as smart or perhaps even more so?
Diamond advances several causes,
all of them dependent to a great or lesser extent on geography. Humans
began in Africa where they were confined for several million years by the
Sahara Desert. As hunter gatherers they began to fan out into other
continents more than 60,000 years ago because the Ice Age made the Sahara
area less arid. They first reached Eurasia, then about 40,000 years ago
some got to Australia, and they reached the Americas about 13,000 years
ago.
Farming began in the Fertile
Crescent, our present Middle east. Farming required the domestication of
some of the plants growing wild in the environment, and only a few can
easily be domesticated. The Fertile Crescent had wheat, barley, and
various beans, all with considerable protein in them. China had millet and
rice. Agriculture started independently on all continents except
Australia. But it was the Fertile Crescent that had the best available
crops and that is where civilization started.. It is interesting that no
new major crop has been discovered in the past 2000 years. Our primitive
ancestors knew what they were doing.
Eurasia also has the largest
number of large animals only some of which were capable of being
domesticated. Cattle, pigs, and horses could be tamed; many others, such
as zebras could not. Those animals helped with plowing, as beasts of
burden, and their manure provided fertilizer. A farming community could
support a much larger population, and in general would have a military
advantage over a nomadic one. Then they developed a weapon, disease.
Animal diseases were transferred to humans as the microbes adapted to
humans. These diseases can develop only in a heavily populated area as
they require a large population to produce epidemics. The civilized area
gradually developed a partial immunity, but nomads were much more
susceptible to disease and were therefore at a military disadvantage.
Human do not invent what has
already been invented if they can get it from a neighboring group. Because
Eurasia is a large continent on an East-West axis, new ideas could spread
fairly rapidly. The Americas and Africa are on a North-south axis. Thus a
tribe farther north or south might not be able to use the new foods or
domesticated animals they learned about because the climate would not be
sufficiently favorable. So ideas traveled better East-west than North-South.
Diamond also shows the
geographical basis for developing writing, inventions, and why new
inventions are accepted and sometimes rejected. The greatest example is
China which in 1400 was the most advanced country on earth. But it had a
centralized government and when one ruler banned overseas trade, that
brought Chinese dominance to an end. Western Europe was divided into many
countries. Any country that rejected new advances would fine its rivals
gaining military and trade advantages, and would thus have to change its
ways or risk getting conquered. This may be why China has ended its
initial rejection of Western Capitalism.
Diamond never says that our
advanced countries are better than the more primitive ones. He only says
that they will have the military and economic advantages that will force
other nations to imitate them or be dominated by them. After all, hunter
gatherers have frequently been taller, healthier, and better nourished
than their agricultural neighbors. Peasants in the ancient, and even
modern, empires had a miserable existence. As for the ruling classes,
Diamond refers to the change from hunter gatherer to the modern nation
state as one "from egalitarianism to kleptocracy."
But what of his statement that
New Guinea hunter gatherers are more intelligent than modern Europeans and
Americans? He claims they would have an easier time surviving in our
environment than many of our modern couch potatoes would in New Guinea.
Well, maybe. This book is profound and provocative though not free from
error. His ideas will probably be resisted by many, especially those who
prefer to believe that we simply are racially superior.
Peter B. Denison
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My mother died a few months ago at age 89. As she
declined, she manifested the typical forgetfulness and occasional
confusion that many of her age are subject too. However, in her last few
months, she began to have rather vivid hallucinations.
At that point, she lived in a nursing home quite close
to the apartment in which she had resided for 25 years. As I arrived to
visit her one day, she informed me that a little girl had drowned in the
swimming pool, the one "out there." I don’t know of anything
in her environment that might have triggered off such a thought, but she
seemed quite disturbed about it because she mentioned it to me several
additional times during my visit. There had been an outdoor swimming pool
in her apartment complex and she could see it through her kitchen window.
I got her out of bed and helped her walk to the window
where she could see that there was no swimming pool outside and that, as a
matter of fact, there was at least 2 feet of snow on the ground, this
being January, 2003. She seemed reassured and the matter appeared settled.
On my visit the next day, she asked me, during our
conversation, to please be sure to send a check for $25 to whatever
charity had been specified by the family of the little girl who had
drowned in the pool. The vividness and persistence of such visions defies
the contradiction of logic.
An MIT professor whom I cared for early in my career was
panicked by what he perceived was a gang of Black men chasing him through
the streets of Cambridge. He was quite eloquent and obviously sincere in
his relation of the details of this experience. He was in the ICU at Mt.
Auburn Hospital in consequence of an encephalitis due to allergy to a
smallpox vaccination.
We are all aware of the paranoid schizophrenics who hear
voices impelling them to kill someone…and then do so. One such serial
killer in NYC terrorized the whole city because of such messages from a
dog!
But what of people who are neither senile, overtly
diseased or certifiably insane?
We all have dreams. Some of us remember some of them.
Sometimes they are so vivid that we have to work to reassure ourselves
that they are merely dreams. "Interpreting" dreams has been a
major preoccupation of the human race since time immemorial. Are these
messages from the gods, manifestations of our repressed fears, desires and
guilty reminiscences, recapitulations of past experiences or random
circuits firing in our brains? Or all of the above? Certainly, we can
"relive" intensely painful experiences frequently and
intensively in our dreams, with the subsequent awareness, for most of us,
that such were not "real" experiences. Intense visions can
certainly be initiated by electrical stimulation of certain areas of the
brain
I used to take surviving spouses out to lunch about a
week after the funeral. Almost all had had the experience of the
"appearance" of the deceased spouse in a dream, a day-dream, a
shadow in a closet, etc. They had usually told no one about this
apparition and most were concerned that it was a manifestation or mental
instability, since it had an intense reality to it but they sensed that it
couldn’t be real. There seemed to be great solace in learning that they
were not insane but were experiencing a typical manifestation of
bereavement.
A cousin from England told me of her 9 year-old
grand-daughter’s assertion that she had just seen a ghost upstairs. The
woman reassured her that there were no such things as ghosts. The girl,
who has a Jamaican father, sat her down and explained to her that there
WERE such things as ghosts. That grammy, being Jewish, believed in eating
no pork and that Caribbean people believed in ghosts (and, apparently,
that these beliefs therefore carried equal weight in establishing the
reality of the experience). You may remember, that it was the ghost
stories of a Caribbean woman that provoked the Salem Witch Hysteria!
Population surveys reveal that about 10% of the
population have heard "voices" speak to them and have
interpreted this to be an "actual" or "real"
experience. They apparently believed that voices actually spoke to them.
Although initially startling, this is not surprising, since, in a cultural
context, this is the way gods have been communicating with humans for
millennia.
Certainly, you will remember that Jerry Falwell received
a message from God a few years ago that if he did not collect $8,000,000
in donations within a certain period of time, he would die. I don’t
recollect whether this was by the auditory route, email or whatever.
Unfortunately, the veracity of this message could not be ascertained
because his loyal minions managed to beat the deadline. Apparently, our
current President also has a direct line to a Deity.
Zeus and Apollo are living in comfortable retirement on
Olympus, because aliens have taken over the business of sexually
assaulting humans. The latest craze, alien abductions,
seems to have convinced even a Harvard psychiatry
professor of its reality, such is the sincerity with which apparently
otherwise-normal people report these experiences. Although most of us with
a scientific bent recognize such experiences as manifestations of
hypnogogic hallucinosis and paralysis with cultural overlay.
Certainly, some religious visions are
"authentic". By this, I mean that those experiencing them are
authentically perceiving an intense sensory experience that appears to be
externally-induced. I feel sure that Teresa of Avila really had rapturous
experiences which she understandably interpreted as coming from the
"divine". I suspect strongly that Mohammed’s initial visions
were "authentic" in this sense. I have considerable doubts about
the "authenticity" of most of the subsequent ones which brought
personally-convenient resolution to a variety of pragmatic problems facing
him, such as how to get hold of one of his nephew’s attractive young
wives. Joseph Smith had similar visions when an attractive young woman
appeared in his bailiwick. Ordinarily, such visions would be classified as
wet dreams.
Perhaps the best we can do in discerning which messages
from the purported "divine" are authentic and which are just
cerebral static or manifestations of lunacy is to apply the test suggested
by Woody Allen: a voice is authentic if it is deep and sonorous.
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umanist
Association of Massachusetts
