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The Newsletter of
The Humanist Association of Massachusetts
The Humanist Newsletter for
September/October 2001
Can You Turn the Nuts and Bolts of Humanism Into
a Dynamic Secular Faith?
Thomas Ferrick, Humanist Chaplain, Sept. 30,
Sunday, at 1:30 PM in Science Center A.
A Dynamic What? Off hand, it sounds like an oxymoron. Well let me tell you
that once in a while, the secular can be inspiring. We’ll talk about that as a
new academic year begins, a time to discuss basic principles and to question
assumptions. A young, maturing freethinker has an obligation to survey the
context of his or her world, to make hypotheses, test them out, collate and
interrelate, sift again, and eventually commit oneself, contingently, to a frame
of values.
One of our assumption, I admit, is the difference between Faith and
Knowledge. The former calls for trust in the absence of evidence. Of more value
to the skeptical mind is Knowledge. Here’s the interesting question: Can
freethinkers and agnostics, on the basis of facts, have powerful feelings of
idealism and transcendence? Can you go from scientific, empirical understanding
to the emotional surge that arouses goodwill and loving service? Whoa! Isn’t
that going a little too far? And just why would we want to? All right, perhaps
it’s not for everyone. But don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it. Such
peak experiences are not uncommon to many active Humanists. The result is an
empathic attitude that engenders understanding and dialogue.
I’m Tom Ferrick and I’ve been described this way: He has been the
Humanist Chaplain at Harvard for more than 25 years; he works out of the United
Ministry Office on the lower level of the Memorial Church in Harvard Yard. A
trained counselor, he is an advisor to the Harvard Secular Society, edits this
Newsletter, leads seminars and performs weddings. His talk, which will be
followed by an extended Q and A, will be only the first of many in the Humanist
Forum line up throughout the year ahead; (please see below for news of the
second, on October 14).
I’m suggesting in this half hour talk a line of thought which transcends
our ideology. We have maintained that our way of thinking, Naturalism, is our
"holy grail." I'm talking about empiricism, rationality, free inquiry,
etc., the stuff of our worldview. And I want to defend the pre-eminence of all
that. But in a pluralistic world, we might fall back on our name -- and stress
the human. Once we make our intellectual case, let's add one further
characteristic: empathy. This allows us the opportunity to engage with believers
of all kinds in the furtherance of agreed human goals, doing so comfortably and
eagerly. Our strength has been our weakness. Most of our arguments are
intellectually unassailable; the logic is impeccable. But the alien listener is
turned off. If we care about him or her, we should become a listener as well.
Finding areas of agreement, we create solidarity. And on that we can begin to
build. This is not a ploy I'm suggesting, a way to win points or even to enhance
humanism. I think it’s a more enlightened way of serving humanity.
Our philosophy has made us extremely confident about our own identity, and
so we have little need of defensiveness, of caustic stabs, cutting sarcasm. Our
approach to ‘the other’ is open, trusting, and genuinely friendly. What we
are, and how we think doesn't reach the level of his faith, but to the extent
that his thoughts are secular, there we find common ground. And, inviting the
play of human feelings, we can build bridges of trust. Talk about a positive
humanism!
Readers could prepare for this Talk and Discussion by submitting their own
concise definitions of a Humanist.
Intelligent Design: A New Holy War Against
Science
Paul R. Gross, author of ‘Higher Superstition"
October 14, 1:30 PM, Science Center A.
Readers may have heard that a Conference on
Science and Religion will take place later in October at the Memorial Church. It
will be interesting to witness the dialogue between empirical scientists and
religious believers. Some considerable good may come of it. Anticipating the
event, we have asked Prof. Paul R. Gross to speak about that subject in general,
and about Intelligent Design, the faulty notion that, contrary to Darwin, life
on Earth provides signs of a creator’s mind and hand.
Now, a prolific writer, and professor
emeritus, University of Virginia, (where he taught and was provost), he accepted
an invitation to speak for us in the Science Center, auditorium A, on Sunday,
October 14 at 1:30 in the afternoon. When asked for an introduction, he replied:
I will offer a short account of the origin, purposes, and organization of The
Wedge, a program and cultural movement housed in the Center for the
Reconstruction of Science and Culture, Discovery Institute, Seattle, Washington.
The broad targets of this energetic and well-funded program are what they call
"materialism," and "naturalism" in science; and the call is
for a revolution that will topple that kind of science from its pedestal and
replace it with a new "theistic science" that acknowledges God. The
immediately targeted enemy is what they call "Darwinism," but that
means, in application, all of modern biology and most of geology and cosmology.
This is his resume: Paul R. Gross is
University Professor of Life Sciences, emeritus at the University of Virginia.
He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, and from where he received
the Ph.D. in general physiology in 1954. He has taught at New York University,
Brown, Rochester, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University
of Virginia. From 1978 to 1988 he was Director and President of the Marine
Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Massachusetts. At Virginia he served as Vice
President and Provost, later as director of the Center for Advanced Studies, and
as founding director of the Markey Center for Cell Signaling. His research and
writing have been in developmental and molecular biology; more recently, in
science and culture. He is the author, with Norman Levitt, of Higher
Superstition, first published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 1994 and
reissued in 1998, and co-editor of The Flight From Science and Reason, the New
York Academy of Sciences and Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996 and 1997. Paul
Gross has been published in The Wall Street Journal, the Times Literary
Supplement (London), The New Criterion, and The Wilson Quarterly. He is at work,
with co-author Barbara Forrest, on a book concerned with the "intelligent
design" movement and school science in the United States.
DISEASES OF CIVILIZATION
Joe Gerstein
Certainly, the human race has derived some
significant benefits (in terms of propagating and proliferating its genes) from
the domestication of plants and animals. This allowed the accumulation of
surplus foods and consequent settled living, higher population densities and,
finally, specialization in crafts and intellectual pursuits by those who did not
have to spend all their time hunting and gathering.
However, this made us susceptible to
colonization by animal microbes carried by domestic animals, which could
adapt genetically to humans and, because of significant human population
density, spread epidemically.
Thus, pig cholera bacteria morphed into the
human cholera bacteria. As long as humans were in isolated bands, such
bacteria had little chance to spread beyond a few victims, and probably
would have died out either through killing the entire band or by the survivors
becoming immune, leaving no reservoir of bacteria. However, with tribes and villages
and animal-powered transportation, the pool of susceptibles becomes almost infinite
and the bacterium continues to spread from host to host, somewhere.
John Snow, a London physician of the 16th
century, made himself illustrious by removing the handle of the pump on a
well in an impoverished section of London. This action forced the
populace to walk over a mile to fetch water from another well, but stopped
an epidemic of cholera that had been ravaging the crowded neighborhood. The feces
of the sick had been contaminating the water of the healthy.
Plague is a bacterial disease of fleas which
inhabit certain strains of rats. It still exists endemically in several
areas of the world, including the Southwest US. A few people a year are
bitten by such a flea. Their lymph glands swell markedly (bubonic plague) and if
they do not receive timely antibiotics, they die. But we don’t see
epidemics. Sometimes this is due to antibiotic treatment of the patient
or the contacts and sometimes to the fact that the disease tends to occur
in the desert wastes where families and communities are very isolated.
Although the disease does not ordinarily spread from human to human when
in the glandular phase, if the sufferer lives long enough, it will spread to the
lungs and cause a pneumonia which can then be spread by coughing.
Of course, when this disease was brought to
Europe from the Indian subcontinent in the 13th century, it
found a totally susceptible population that had had no opportunity to develop
either antibody or genetic immunity. People were living in villages, towns and
cities, in close proximity. Voila: The Black Plague. A devastating epidemic
of pneumonic ensued which annihilated about 25% of the entire population
of Europe.
So, along with the benefits of civilization
obviously come some detriments.
Which brings me to the Extreme Cheeseburger
with Bacon which I saw advertised recently on TV. Can the SuperExtreme
and MegaExtreme versions be far off? This baby has 2 hamburg patties, a
few slices of Monterey Jack and American cheese, 3 slices of bacon and is
served on a Kaiser roll slathered with mayo. Probably about 60 grams of
artery-clogging fat per serving. One of these with an order of fries and a
frappe is probably about as lethal as the bite of the flea infected with
Pasteurella pestis, although the incubation period is admittedly longer.
This might not even exert any deleterious
effects if the ingestor of this gargantuan meal were involved in 8-10
hours a day of tilling, planting or harvesting, or was in mid- Triathalon
but, alas, he or she is likely to be sitting in front of a computer screen all
day and a TV screen all evening, so that the great majority of the
caloric material in this sandwich will be assimilated as fat rather than
be burned off as expended energy.
So well have we mastered the management of
the domestication of food crops and animals that we have a rather bizarre
paradox in our country wherein the poor are fatter than the rich!.
We have so mastered the culinary and
advertising arts, as well, that we can easily induce those already
grotesquely obese to gain another hundred pounds. There was a time when the
ability to pack on the fat was a definite survival maneuver. Food was scarce,
droughts and famines frequent. With the easy availability of food, fat
and calories, those people who have these "survival" genes are
now vulnerable to gallstones, diabetes, morbid obesity and premature
death. There are whole tribes of Native Americans afflicted with this
doleful situation, such as the Pima Indians.
And all this devastation is merely amplified
by cigarette smoke. Tobacco, after all, is the gift of the Americas,
along with corn and squash and, maybe, syphilis, to the old world.
Certainly, the first farmers and the first
practitioners of animal husbandry could never have anticipated that an
excess of food would be an affliction to their descendants, rather than
an unadulterated joy. But our civilization has managed to complete this
unenviabletask of making a vice out of a virtue.
On Tolerance and Catholicism
"Constantine’s Sword," by James Carroll
Peter Denison
In a previous article I summarized the author’s indictment of the
Catholic Church for causing and maintaining anti-Semitism. Carroll has a deep
emotional attachment to his Church and cannot leave it; it’s his whole life.
He does want to change it and thereby save it. He perceives Catholicism as the
Golden Mean between Christian fundamentalism and what he considers a
"woefully inadequate" scientific rationalism.
He also sees Roman Catholicism as the only world institution that bridges
northern and southern hemispheres, rich and poor," and the learned and
ignorant. This second claim is possibly correct in the larger sense.
His hero is Pope John XXIII who, while he didn’t live long enough to
reverse the doctrine of infallibility, was very careful never to speak ex
cathedra himself. Carroll wants a new council, Vatican III, to reform the Church
with several agenda items:
First, to address anti-Semitism. The current Pope has absolved Jews in
general for the killing of Jesus Christ, but this is hardly enough. The Church
must correct the inaccuracies in the Gospels that put blame on the Jews. (This
may not be impossible, as Catholics
have never claimed Biblical inerrancy.) Then he adds, "The Jewish rejection
of Jesus as the Son of God is an affirmation of faith that Christians must
respect. This respect must also be extended to Buddhists, Hindus, and even
people of no religion. God, he claims, is more powerful than any religion. Thus
there can be salvation outside the Catholic Church. But Carroll will not accept
that some people are saved because they are Catholic even though they aren’t
aware of it! That idea is an arrogant put down of other religious beliefs.
The Church should spread its power more democratically, and it especially
must give up its claim of infallibility. Emphasis must shift from the death of
Christ to the lessons to be gained from his life. "A New Christology will
banish from Christian faith the blasphemy that God wills the suffering of God’s
beloved ones, and the inhuman idea that anyone’s death can be the fulfillment
of a plan of God’s." Carroll has quite an agenda. Will his Vatican III
ever happen? Not very likely, but it would be wonderful if he could achieve his
goal.
He has a beautiful vision of tolerance, a view which throws a challenge to
us atheists and humanists. Are we so tolerant? The atheists who ran the Soviet
Union actively persecuted religions (in violation of their own constitution);
the Chinese Communists do so now. Are we American humanists really as tolerant
as we say? I have heard believers put down as misguided, stupid, illogical, or
worse. The Christian Church has despised Jews and then advocated tolerance, or
at least non-violence. One writer for Free Inquiry wanted to forbid children
from wearing crosses or rosaries in public school. We should learn a lesson from
Carroll and respect religious people, not only as individuals, but the
legitimacy of their beliefs. Theism may be incorrect, but many thoughtful and
intelligent people are believers. We all have ideas, political, social,
philosophic, economic which are probably wrong, at least partially. Organized
religion is a social phenomenon. Some people like James Carroll feel strongly
drawn to the commitment and fellowship of their religion. There is no reason why
doubts about some of the formal beliefs should force them to leave an
organization they love. Religious people should respect us and our beliefs, and
we should do the same for them.
Humanist Connections and Items of Interest
If you’re driving to our forum, parking will be available in the
Littauer Lot behind the Science Center. To get there you must enter from Oxford
Street at the Maxwell Dworkin Bldg - across from the Museum of Natural History.
On entering, take a left, right, and left again to reach our assigned area,
marked LITT. It is just steps from the Auditorium A entrance of the Science
Center where we meet.
***
Harvard Students should take a look at the Harvard Secular Society.
Joining will guarantee both fun and challenge. Contact its president, Ram
Chandra Gowda with all your questions. Discussions, from stem cells to world
government, are possible, from the Falun Gong to Fundamentalism.
***
All Students should think about the greatest medical and moral crisis of
modern times: the AIDS pandemic. There’s much you can do. If you didn’t sign
up at registration with the Harvard AIDS Coalition, contact Ben Wikler ’03, (wikler@fas)
or call him, 617-230-1643. Harvard justifiably takes a few knocks, but what it
is doing in this titanic struggle should make us all proud. And Bono wants your
support.
***
Another announcement for the Harvard Community: A Conference on Science
and the Spiritual Quest takes place at the Memorial Church, October 21-23.
Scientists, theologians, philosophers, and others will tackle the thorny
interface of religion and science. Even an arranged dialogue is preferable to
none at all; we’ll all learn something.
***
Many of our friends in the Ethical Society will be happy to learn that the
Humanist Forum’s beginning time is now 1:30 on Sunday afternoons. As for their
first meeting – on Clean Elections – it will be on September 16, at 10:30 at
the Longy School, Cambridge. And the Humanist Association will cosponsor a
special event there on October 28, when Faye Girsh of the Hemlock Society will
speak on the Right to Die.
***
A member of the Humanist Association sent us the full amount of her tax
rebate as a contribution and added: "I can’t think of anything that would
tweak Bush’s nose more than to give it to the Humanists." She’s more
than generous, she’s right.
***
Humanism is a rational philosophy, informed by science, inspired by art,
and motivated by compassion. Affirming the dignity of each human being, it
supports the maximization of individual liberty and opportunity consonant with
social and planetary responsibility. It advocates the extension of participatory
democracy and the expansion of the open society, standing for human rights and
social justice. Free of supernaturalism, it recognizes human beings as a part of
nature and holds that values, be they religious, ethical, social or political,
have their source in human nature, experience and culture. Humanism thus derives
the goals of life from human need and interest rather thqan from theological or
ideological abstractions, and asserts that humanity must take responsibility for
its own destiny. It is understood that there are as many definitions of Humanism
as there are Humanists. Opinions range from religious to secular humanism.
Individuals are invited to join us in the search for one’s own unique
definition and experience.
(With appreciation to our friends, the Humanists of New Jersey).
This Newsletter is a project of the Humanist Association of Massachusetts,
a Chapter of the American Humanist association. Joseph Gerstein is president and
Tom Ferrick is the executive director, editor of the Newsletter, and a Harvard
chaplain. Annual dues for membership in HAM are $35.00 and include the
Newsletter. Opinions expressed are not necessarily thjose of the Association.
Material may be reproduced without prior permission but proper attribution is
requested. Reader responses are most welcome. Please inform us of any address
change or if you want it discontinued. Tel. 617—547-1497. |
umanist
Association of Massachusetts
