Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of the Tsunami

Paul Albrecht (Spring 2005)  

Paul Albrecht is from West Sussex, England, and may be contacted at: PaulBeryl@aol.com

The tsunami has prompted much discussion about the parts played by God and man. I have an old and valued friend who is a committed and practising member of the Church of England. Recently when I wrote that I didn’t believe in life after death but that I wasn’t troubled about it he commented as follows:

 

'Your philosophic view excludes the possibility of optimism. I can understand that this is the position held by those with a humanistic stance, but does it not then lead to reacting to e.g. the tsunami with a shrug of the shoulders and a "let's move on to the next thing" response?'

 

 I was pained by the injustice of it because it reminded me of a callous article setting out a Christian opinion about the tsunami by the pious Paul Johnson, who was blandly dismissive. He said the deaths were unimportant because the victims were going to die one day anyway, and in killing them now God was revealing his loving nature by reminding us of our mortality. How’s that for a sanctimonious shrug! I disliked being tarred with the same brush as a man I thought should be tarred and also feathered for this attitude. 

 

My friend’s question was characteristically tentative but it illustrates how far the religious are from understanding Humanists. I explained how it was possible to be optimistic without relying on irrational beliefs, but I want to correct his opinion, that may be prevalent in the C of E, that without faith one cannot be compassionate. I'm sure he would not have asked that question of a Catholic, a Muslim, or a Hindu. One of them believes that a virgin mother’s dead physical body was literally carried to heaven and united with her soul, another that his ‘sacred’ book was dictated by Archangel Gabriel in person, another that the world came from a lotus flower growing from God's navel; two believe in eternal damnation, one in an endless chain of lives. But they are kind and I, because I consider these notions to be ridiculous, am heartless as a matter of course. On the contrary, a Humanist will grieve even more deeply because he knows the dead are gone forever. He will comfort the bereaved even more sincerely because comforting one another is a vital part of being human. And above all he will care for them as best he can in this life because it is the only one we’ll have. The very essence of Humanism is concern for others, arising from a shared humanity not in submission to alleged supernatural edicts.

 

Christianity has been spread to a great extent by violence and threats of violence, threats both from the Christ of the Gospels and from His devotees, yet it tends to consider itself as having the monopoly of the milk of human kindness, as do other faith based systems. And many religious people talk as though they have also the monopoly of ethics and morality. Yet they have spent so much of history torturing and killing each other for their faith, whereas Humanists have never done any such thing.

 

My friend’s religion is now professedly tolerant towards other faiths; it has had the rough edges knocked off since it lost most of its secular power, but it is obviously still contemptuous of Humanism. The religious may disparage the faithless but Christianity in Western Europe has probably declined because its baggage of mysteries is just too much for most people to carry nowadays. Few will now accept that a god speaks from a burning bush, that the dead are raised, that virgins conceive or that demons can be driven out of a possessed man into pigs that then jump off a cliff! Why pigs I wonder? Was Christ showing deliberate disregard for the property of a gentile farmer? The pity is that no social system has yet arisen to take religion’s place. At the moment humans aren't ready for life without the Tooth Fairy but if we can win ourselves enough time we will be one day.

 

This misunderstanding of Humanism is linked to the false interpretation creationists place on evolutionists’ views about the human race. They think we believe that because man is an ape he is only marginally superior to other apes. There could be no greater distortion, but possibly we have brought it on ourselves by the vehemence our rejection of the unverifiable claim that our superiority derives from a god given immortal soul. We are indeed apes but endowed by accidents of evolution with comprehension so far above the rest that in one sense we are immortal compared with them. Consider how the works of the eminent are preserved, remembered and revered; how some people are at last working for the well being of generations who will live long after they are gone; how Keats was certain of ‘the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of imagination’; what other ape could have thought of that? So our hope for immortality is as a species; and it is an immortality in which we all share, however fleetingly. Of all the species that have existed on Earth in three billion years we are the only one to be aware of the universe of which we are a part, and we are the first species with the foresight to plan for the future. But we must channel the aggressive traits that have served us well but that now threaten a nuclear winter lasting generations; if we can, then we have the technical skills to shape our own evolution to escape extinction, to overcome natural disasters, and to save us from ourselves. We know of the imminent dangers to Earth and know how to avoid them, given the will; and we know the certain fate of our solar system and can dream of an escape from its doom in the furnace of the swelling Sun.

 

For all we know we are the only species in the visible universe to attain these heights and if so it will be our descendants and ours alone that may carry our knowledge, our heritage, our imagination and our hearts’ affections to its most distant shores. That is what makes us unique; that we are the best there has been and, if we do not cast away our chance, we may become the best there ever will be. That is the immortality within our reach. That is the achievement of which we must be proud and which we must preserve. Not the childish belief that we are special because we have been created in the image of a god we are incapable of envisaging, and before whom we must prostrate ourselves in contrition for our sins, as our ancestors did before statues of Bel and Moloch, in the hope of avoiding the fires of a hell we have ourselves devised. In the last hundred years our abilities have advanced beyond all imagining. We have learned the secrets of the atom, we have learned to fly, and by reaching the Moon taken our first step towards new havens beyond the limitless oceans of space. But for two thousand years the progress of science has been constrained by the grip of monotheistic religion, and now that grip is once again tightening politically in both the poorest and the most technologically advanced nations on Earth, threatening to halt us either by bigotry or war.

 

For centuries to come religions may well play a part in giving social cohesion; it is so much easier to accept the Thirty-nine Articles or the Catechism or the Koran and then get on with earning a living or following Manchester United than to spend ones mental powers fretting over ethics or wondering how and why we are here; particularly as the answers of a fledgling science are still beyond most people’s comprehension. Genesis needs less study and mental effort than Darwin or Einstein. But the progress of learning, that will be needed for the survival and advancement of our extraordinary species, is being hampered by myths that were written by ignorant men thousands of years ago. Powerful nations, fired by a conviction that they are doing the work of a god they have invented, are being driven by those myths towards ignorance, and towards wars that may lead to our destruction. Currently, for example, the advocates of Intelligent Design, which is based entirely on blind faith and propagated by the distortion of scientific findings, are seeking to force its teaching in state funded schools as being equally as valid as the theory of evolution; in some cases they have succeeded and they seem to have political support. If they achieve in their aims they could cripple the minds of future generations with medieval superstitions. The religious may believe what they want as long as they neither stunt the growth of knowledge nor seek secular power, but our survival, perhaps for eternity, should be more important than the comfort of children who are afraid of the dark.

 

Humanists mourn the dead of the tsunami but need not plead for their souls to a supernatural power, nor agonize over the cruelty of supposedly benign gods. In their memory we should redouble our efforts to resist those who, while charging humanists with heartlessness, would deliberately infect the minds of the next generation with superstition and a misunderstanding of the work of science. A halter may make the life of a mustang more ordered and tranquil but it is a halter nonetheless and we must seek a better way. We must exult at what in man is noble, strive to temper the greed and destructiveness that is still in our nature, and seek knowledge unhindered by ancient fantasies; not grovel for forgiveness at the feet of ineffable gods. Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ was written at a time of grief at the death of an old friend and though it hints at a wavering in his faith it is full of the fire of life and the urge not to waste whatever is left to him. Could this have been an unconscious vision of our present predicament and our ultimate future? Could it be a parable of how we and those who will come after us must ‘follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought’, to overcome the terrible challenges that are now before us, and those that will imperil our descendants as the Sun’s life draws to an end?

                          

                    The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep

                    Moans round with many voices. Come my friends,

                   ‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

                    Push off, and sitting well in order smite

                    The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

                    To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

                    Of all the western stars, until I die.

                    It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;

                    It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

                    And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

                    Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

                    We are not now that strength which in old days

                    Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

                    One equal temper of heroic hearts,

                    Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

                    To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

 

 

Paul Albrecht

Spring 2005