Let you be in mine

There's an article by David Boulton (former Head of News, Current Affairs and Religion at Granada TV) in the August issue of New Internationalist. It's entitled 'Who needs religion?'. (Go here, click on 'Latest magazine' in the left-hand panel, then on the cover picture, then on the article link). Let me start by repeating something I said in a previous post:

I try not to offend people about their religion. A non-believer myself, I don't begrudge anyone the meanings they may take from their chosen faith in the way they live their lives, provided these meanings aren't evidently harmful to the interests of others; and I know that religious belief can be a powerful force for good as well as ill (and secular belief be a powerful force for ill as well as good).

It is precisely in terms of a need for wider meanings that David Boulton answers his question about the age-old and widely-felt need for religion. But there is a subtle ambiguity, or shift, in what he says about this - between the claim that religion is a source of the needed meanings and the claim that it is their only source. This is all the stranger given that his own preferred understanding of what religion is most valuably about can be rendered in secular terms. Here is the key passage:

[R]eligion gives us suitably solemn funerals, suitably sentimental nativity plays, provides us with life markers. It gives us our roots and our reassurance that there is meaning, even if it is located above the bright blue sky and we don't have a clue what the meaning means.

For all of us, perhaps, the itch whereof we canst not be healed is the deep-seated need to find or create purpose and meaning in the crazy business of living. As modern humans – homo sapiens – developed the closely linked capabilities of language, imagination and reflective consciousness perhaps a 100,000 years ago, they acquired the capacity to ask, and then couldn't stop asking, 'What's it all about? What, when, how, why...?' Facing an apparently hostile, wholly inexplicable universe, they told stories, sang songs, danced dances, invented rituals to impose a framework of meaning on an otherwise chaotic existence. They used symbols and symbolically mediated behaviour to signify who they were, creating art, ornament, design, a sense of beauty and truth to map their world, give it shape, coherence and purpose.

Today's itch may lead us to seek meaning and purpose in the quest for social justice, or art, science, astrology, shopping, or sex, and drugs. But only a blinkered, anorexic humanism chooses to ignore the heritage of religious culture: its myths and make-believes. We still need a little salve-ation, healing, from time to time; a sense of at-one-ment with ourselves and the rest of the universe; redemption as restoration; an assurance that our ludicrous inability to be the people we would like to be is ultimately forgivable and forgiven.

We may no longer look for all this to the old all-smiling, all-smiting Authority riding his chariots of wrath through thunderclouds on the wings of the storm; or to his enfeebled, cock-and-ballobsessed church; or to his rival priests, preachers and holy assassins who think they are his vicarious representatives on earth. But we can still draw inspiration and sustenance from the old, old stories – not forgetting that they are old, and that they are stories, and that we made them up.

Enabling dreams of Paradise, a world where swords will be beaten into ploughshares, a counter-reality which glimpses an alternative republic of heaven on earth, where peace is built on justice rather than conquest... this, not virgin births, second comings, holy wars and infallible books, is the real stuff: hard-core religion in action. And we have a basic need for that, even if we know the need can never be wholly satisfied, the itch never healed.

If you look at the kinds of needs spelled out here - 'to find or create purpose and meaning', 'a framework of meaning on an otherwise chaotic existence', 'symbols and symbolically mediated behaviour to signify who they were', 'a sense of at-one-ment with ourselves and the rest of the universe', 'a counter-reality which glimpses an alternative republic' - these can, of course, be provided for by religion, and for many people they are. But Boulton offers not a single reason why those needs must, can only, be met by religion. He offers no more than the insulting phrase 'blinkered, anorexic humanism'. That won't do. It won't do because, as his own article shows, people of secular belief have no monopoly on 'blinkered'; and because, as the article reveals along the way, humanism has the entire wealth of the humanly produced universe, to say nothing of the natural universe, to draw upon. For those of us so inclined, it's enough.

As the man said:

I'll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours.