When giving talks on Humanism in schools I am sometimes asked why I became a Humanist.

To begin with, in spite of a Jesuit education, by my teens religion had begun to lose it’s stranglehold and aspects of the Catholic faith, for example confessing to a man behind a curtain for one’s ‘sins,’ began to seem slightly farcical.

Also, now that religion had become somewhat less subjective for me I began to consider how the whole phenomenon of faith had come about. But with religious belief there is a problem because in delving into the origin of most faiths one has to, at some point, mentally cross over from the natural to a supernatural realm.
For believers, imbued with faith and love (or indoctrinated in childhood), the transition is usually seamless, and once the paradigm shift has been made they will seldom give this anomaly a second thought. However, with my faith considerably watered down, I began to view everything to do with religion in terms of a tenuous belief in the paranormal.

 Churches were now, for me, a result of people’s belief  that the immutable laws of physics, which hold sway throughout the vast universe, have somehow been bypassed. No matter how magnificent and imposing the church buildings, and especially cathedrals, or how awe-inspiring the services with their dramatic organ music, dazzling vestments and overpowering incense, they all hinged on someone long ago and far away believing they had witnessed an act of ‘magic’.

OLD HABITS DIE HARD

I later became a secondary school teacher and eventually opened a School of English where I witnessed  first hand how young adults from a variety of countries and cultures were able to rise above their political and religious differences when they had a common goal –  in this case, to learn English. They included Israeli and Arab classmates and students from Iran and Iraq (during the war between their countries).

Religious observation by now played no role in my life, and eventually, prompted by the horror of the Rwandan genocide, I found myself unable to believe in an all-knowing, all-powerful and all-LOVING god.

However, breaking free from childhood religious indoctrination completely wasn’t at all simple. The Jesuit adage (from Aristotle), ‘Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man’ is no empty cliché. Although I was no longer a practising Catholic I was still unable to relinquish my belief in a ‘creator’.

Instead, I toyed with the idea of an omni-MALEVOLENT god, one who created humans in order to put us through such tragedies as the bubonic plague, world wars, the Holocaust and current conflicts, and it is our task to thwart his machinations as best we can through fortitude, resilience, human kindness and scientific progress. I reasoned that, just as a reputedly all-powerful, loving god was unable to prevent considerable evil and suffering occurring in the world so an all-malevolent god was powerless to prevent some good and happiness occurring.

EMBRACING ATHEISM

This didn’t last long; one shudders to even consider an entity so totally evil. When one reads, for example, details of how victims suffered before succumbing to the Black Death, perhaps after watching helplessly as their children and siblings went through the same gruesome ordeal before them, and this happening fifty million times over, one is moved to conclude that a being so depraved was simply inconceivable. Yet this suffering did occur, so I decided that neither a loving nor a malevolent god existed and I was now emboldened to completely jettison all supernatural beliefs and embrace atheism.

Initially, I was concerned that without my invisible (and silent!) confidant of half a century life would feel empty. I needn’t have worried. After a few days,  I experienced a distinct mood shift: my misgivings were replaced by a warm positive feeling, and my view of everything – people, experiences, events – seemed to come into clearer focus.

EMBRACING HUMANISM

For instance, my perception of people, including strangers, changed. I became mindful that, in the vast expanse of time and place, our lives have coincided and our paths crossed. Personalities differ and discovering so is a never- ending real-life adventure. I imagine, in the hands of a good biographer, the life story of most people would probably be bestseller material. In short, everyone became more interesting.

I wasn’t sure what caused my new existential perspective (no stimulants were involved!) – but I did have a vague inkling…

Although the intensity of my secular Road to Damascus experience subsided over the following few days, it never disappeared. Sometime later, the experience I’d had became clear: in a godless universe, the focus shifts from a relationship with a deity to a deeper warmth towards, and appreciation of, people and the world around us.

In the words of Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘In a vast empty universe we only have each other.’