Author: Ophelia Benson

I was struck by this picture on the front page of the Times (New York) this morning.

It’s a good picture. It kind of gets it all in – the blue sky, the autumn trees, the capitol in the distance, the huge crowd in front, the bare stage, and the single slight figure outlined against it all. The hundred thousand people facing us, and the one guy facing them frozen in a wave or a benediction. If you hate him, of course, it’s of no interest, or it’s portentous and irritating. If you like him, it’s pretty affecting. For a lot of reasons. There’s some echo of that other senator from Illinois – and doubtless some kind of secular echo of religious iconography – and the echo of the march on Washington and the crowd filling the Mall on that day – and the beauty of the shot itself. It all adds up. I’m being a little mawkish, but…well why not, dammit?

Of course, the picture will become a depressing souvenir if things go wrong (yes, wrong) a week from tomorrow, but meanwhile, it’s a nice snap.

Giles Fraser rebukes the godless.

Humanists (and by that I mean secular humanists for now) would do much more to persuade me of their world-view if they took more seriously the idea that the human is of fundamental value.

Of fundamental value – what does that mean? I suppose the fact that I have to ask means that I won’t be persuading Giles Fraser of anything – but then, he probably won’t be persuading me of anything either.

I don’t think ‘the human’ is of fundamental value – if by that Fraser means of value independent of, say, other humans, or the (human) past, or future. I think the human is of contingent value – and that that’s enough. I don’t think ‘the human’ is of value to the universe, or to Jupiter, or to other animals. I think the human is of value to humans, and (frankly) to no one else. But I also don’t think it needs to be of value to anyone else to be of real value to us. (I also think the ways we could be of value to non-humans could be quite sinister, and that people like Giles Fraser ignore that possibility in a really silly way. Consider the way ‘the dog’ and ‘the horse’ and ‘the chicken’ is of value to us, then ponder whether we really need to be ‘of value’ to anyone other than ourselves.)

[F]rom the British Humanist Association’s website: ‘Humanists, too, see a special value in human life, but think that if an individual has decided on rational grounds that his life has lost its meaning and value, that evalu ation should be respected.’…[I]t is clear that here is an admission that the value of human life is down graded by those who call themselves humanists. Human life is something that is deemed to have no value for the individual if that individual decides that it has not.

Exactly so. We (I’ll just say ‘we’ because Fraser seems to be talking about atheists too) think that if an individual does not value her own life, then that life (while she views the matter that way, at any rate) does in fact ‘have no value for the individual.’ Indeed that’s simply tautological – if the individual decides that her life has no value, then for her it is deemed to have no value. It seems peculiar for Fraser even to bother pointing this out, let alone disapproving of it.

I am thinking, of course, about the support that so many secular human ists have given for the assisted suicide of Daniel James, the disabled former rugby player who felt, at the age of 23, that his life was not worth living. My friend Jerry, at a similar age, broke his back in a motorbike accident, and could move only his head and tongue. With these he managed to woo his caregiver, marry her, have three children by IVF, and run a pizza franchise. Humanists see the difference between these cases as hanging from the fragile thread of individual choice. That is not good enough.

What is good enough? Assuming that what one person did is what all people can do? Assuming that what one person did is what all people want to do? Assuming that what people want to do with their own lives is irrelevant? Refusing to take specifics into account?

Not only have contemporary atheists snatched the term humanist and claimed it as their own, but — in the name of choice — they have sold out on the very value that inspired humanism in the first place: the dignity of man (and woman, too). Shame on them.

But for some people, survival as a head has nothing to do with dignity. People differ. Different people want different things, different people can tolerate different things. Taking that into account might be part of the ‘value’ of human ‘dignity.’

Alan Greenspan is funny too.

[A] humbled Mr. Greenspan admitted that he had put too much faith in the self-correcting power of free markets and had failed to anticipate the self-destructive power of wanton mortgage lending. “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief,” he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

A state of shocked disbelief…that people who ran lending institutions were more excited about their own bonuses and profits than they were attentive to shareholders’ equity. Is it just me or does that seem ever so slightly naïve?

Not quite just me; Henry Waxman had a similar thought.

“You had the authority to prevent irresponsible lending practices that led to the subprime mortgage crisis. You were advised to do so by many others,” said Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, chairman of the committee. “Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?” Mr. Greenspan conceded: “Yes, I’ve found a flaw.”

Ah, have you! Well spotted!

Mr. Waxman noted that the Fed chairman had been one of the nation’s leading voices for deregulation, displaying past statements in which Mr. Greenspan had argued that government regulators were no better than markets at imposing discipline. “Were you wrong?” Mr. Waxman asked. “Partially,” the former Fed chairman reluctantly answered, before trying to parse his concession as thinly as possible.

How would things be looking now if you’d been entirely wrong?

Those atheists – what are you gonna do – they’re such a pain. They’re almost as bad as earmarks, or fruit flies, or pally terrorists, or socialists. Atheists are such dreary depressing dismal boring tedious gits that – you’ll hardly believe me when I tell you this – even their funerals are no fun. Can you believe it? Now that takes some doing, to turn a funeral into a gloomy occasion. I could see it if it were weddings or dinner parties or trips to Paris, but funerals? That’s pathetic. When you think what the funerals thrown by normal people are like – well it just makes you sorry for atheists, that’s all. Normal believing people have the best funerals – great music, brilliant food, dazzling wine, dancing till dawn, sex, conversation, prizes, jokes, a ferris wheel – there’s just nothing better. So the fact that atheists manage to turn them into dismal occasions is just half-funny, half-sad. It’s because atheists are so tightly wound, apparently.

Far from relaxing and enjoying life, most atheists I have encountered are gloomy blighters with a depressing and nihilistic message that there is no purpose to life so where’s the point of anything? They so often fall into the category defined by GK Chesterton: “Those that do not have the faith/Will not have the fun.” You only have to attend one of their dreary humanist funerals to see that – I am never going to another of those, just to be made miserable.

Well no; quite; naturally not. It would be simply foolish to keep going to dreary atheist funerals when you could be going to riotous theist ones instead. I can’t wait for my next funeral; I do love a good time.