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Dorset Humanists March 2013
Saturday, 9th March 2.00pm
Moordown Community Centre, Coronation Avenue, BH9 1TW
Annual General Meeting
Feedback from last year:
“I enjoyed the AGM … it went very well with open, interesting and friendly debate. There were a lot of points raised that made us all sit up and think. There was a good atmosphere and anyone with anything to say felt able to speak.”
“I thought it was a most well organised and interesting AGM…The agenda was clear and briskly executed … All present appeared to feel able to make a contribution, the atmosphere was open and cheerful and everyone seemed personally engaged and involved.”
The centrepiece of this year’s AGM is a review of our Aims and Objectives. What do you think the priorities of a Humanist group should be? This is a great opportunity to have your say and influence the direction of Dorset Humanists in the years ahead. You’ll hear brief reports from the officers, elect a new committee, approve some Constitution changes, and find out the identity of this year’s Humanist of the Year. Everyone is welcome to attend but please ensure that your membership is paid up to date in order to vote. Membership costs just £12pa. Ask for a membership form.
Thursday 28th March 7.30pm
Green House Hotel, Grove Road, Bournemouth BH1 3AX
Free Will?
Author and teacher Jonathan Pearce gave us a brilliantly entertaining and sceptical talk on the biblical nativity story just before Christmas. This talk on free will promises to be just as lively and thought-provoking. An excellent introduction to the age-old philosophical debate as to whether we have free will or whether we live determined, pre-programmed lives. Jonathan makes philosophical terms and concepts easily accessible, and explains how the recent developments in neuroscience have influenced the debate. He will also explore the connections between determinism and a judgmental God, and the implications for our justice system if we don’t have free will.
Forthcoming events…
Atheists and Agnostics for a Better World
Farewell Benedict XVI - see Chairman’s View
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Saturday 13th April 2.00pm
Moordown Community Centre, Coronation Avenue, BH9 1TW
Humanist Ceremonies
Humanist celebrants Maggie Pepin and David Hewitt
Humanist funerals, weddings and baby-namings have seen a surge in popularity in recent years, as more people seek personalised non-religious ceremonies that honestly reflect their genuine beliefs and values with warmth and affection.
In a special event that will be of interest to everyone considering a Humanist ceremony, Maggie and David will answer all your questions and explain how they can help create and organise dignified and meaningful occasions that best encapsulate your feelings and wishes.
Tuesday 19th March 6.30pm
Post Graduate Medical Centre, Poole Hospital. No need to book but arrive at 6.15 for a choice of seating.
‘They Go To Die’ A screening of a new film about the South African mining industry and an opportunity to meet the director.
Results UK (Poole) group have invited us to the screening of this new film and an opportunity to meet the director. Jonathan Smith, the Yale epidemiologist who made the film after living with the gold miners and learning about the particular problems of TB in the South African mining industry, will present the film and answer your questions. The film is not as gloomy as its title suggests, but it does have a very serious point, not only from the perspective of the men and families who are directly affected, but from a global perspective as the issue of drug-resistant TB gets ever worse.
www.theygotodie.com
www.results.org.uk/dying-gold
Helen Davis 01202 741148
Tuesday 26th March 7.30pm
West Dorset Humanists at the Wessex Royale, 32 High St West, Dorchester
What Humanists Believe: Humanism in the 21st Century Free entry but £2 donation appreciated.
[email protected] 07921 311518
Friday 7th – Sunday 9th June
BHA Annual Conference 2013, Leeds Distinguished scientists, philosophers, artists, writers, and entertainers are gathering in Leeds from 7 – 9 June to debate and discuss some of our biggest questions about life, the universe, and everything. Through the lens of Humanism we will explore our imagination, push the boundaries of our understanding of creation, and investigate how we engage with the world around us.
Book now via BHA website or phone 020 7079 3580. BHA member rate £172.00.
Pepinism: Dorset Humanist Amy Pepin proudly presents Olivia Grace Pepin to the world. Congratulations to Amy and Rich and grandparents Maggie and Jim.
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Thomas Hardy’s Poetry of Unbelief More than fifty people attended John Hubbard’s talk for Dorset Humanists on the poetry on Thomas Hardy. In a captivating presentation, John read and explained a number of poems which illustrate Hardy’s sense of the ‘death of God’ as announced by Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Comte and other prominent intellectuals in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. In A Plaint to Man Hardy imagines God addressing the human race and asking them why they had felt the ‘unhappy need’ of creating him for praying to. In the poem, as God disappears, he tells us that we should have faced the fact long ago: that we should depend on the human heart’s resource alone.
A Plaint to Man
When you slowly emerged from the den of Time, And gained percipience as you grew, And fleshed you fair out of shapeless slime,
Wherefore, O Man, did there come to you The unhappy need of creating me – A form like your own – for praying to?
My Virtue, power, utility, Within my maker must all abide, Since none in myself can ever be,
One thin as a shape on a lantern-slide Shown forth in the dark upon some dim sheet, And by none but its showman vivified.
'Such a forced device,' you may say, 'is meet For easing a loaded heart at whiles: Man needs to conceive of a mercy-seat
Somewhere above the gloomy aisles Of this wailful world, or he could not bear The irk no local hope beguiles.'
But since I was framed in your first despair The doing without me has had no play In the minds of men when shadows scare;
And now that I dwindle day by day Beneath the deicide eyes of seers In a light that will not let me stay,
And to-morrow the whole of me disappears, The truth should be told, and the fact be faced That had best been faced in earlier years:
The fact of life with dependence placed On the human heart's resource alone, In brotherhood bonded close and graced
With loving-kindness fully blown, And visioned help unsought, unknown.
1909-10
These were the poems John read during his talk: Afternoon Service at Mellstock, A Church Romance, Hap, A Plaint to Man, God's Funeral, God's Education, Nature's Questioning, New Year's Eve, The Darkling Thrush, During Wind and Rain, To an Unborn Pauper Child, In a Wood, The Impercipient, The Self-Unseeing, The Haunter, and Afterwards. Further poems that expand or echo the themes raised include: A Philosophical Fantasy, To Life, Agnostoi Theoi, The Sleep-Worker, The God-Forgotten, The Mother Mourns, In a Waiting Room, Haunting Fingers, Old Furniture, Shelley's Skylark, Voices from Things Growing in a Churchyard, At Castle Boterel, His Immortality, and Heredity.
Humanist Outreach David Warden will be giving a lunchtime talk on Humanism at Poole College on 27th March. The target audience is students and tutors from the College and local authority staff. He will also be giving a talk on Humanism to a discussion group in Swanage on 2nd April. Geoff Jones will be presenting Humanism to 4-9 year olds at a C of E school in Cerne Abbas on 15th April. We have also been invited to present Humanism at the annual multifaith day in May at Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury.
Send bulletin updates to [email protected] or phone 07910 886629
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Life of Wallace Over 70 people packed into the Green House Hotel to hear David Croman’s fascinating presentation on the life of Alfred Russel Wallace who developed a theory of natural selection at the same time as Charles Darwin.
Wallace was born in Monmouthshire to middle-class parents but was forced to leave school at 13 when the family fell on hard times. He worked as a surveyor before deciding to travel to the Amazon to collect specimens and to work as a naturalist. After four years, with his health deteriorating, he sailed home. Twenty-six days out of port, his ship caught fire and his drawings, most of his notes and his collection of specimens were destroyed. Wallace survived, in an open lifeboat, with only a couple of notebooks and an indignant parrot.
Two years later, Wallace left Britain again. This time he sailed to the Malay archipelago (now Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia) where he spent nearly eight years collecting and studying the local wildlife. These included the standardwing bird of paradise which is now named Semioptera wallacei in his honour.
In 1858, a year before the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Wallace wrote his essay on natural selection and posted it to Darwin. Darwin and his friends were horrified. Darwin had been working on
a similar theory for several years and now faced the prospect of being robbed of the glory. Darwin’s friends arranged a reading for Wallace's paper and for a hastily written one by Darwin at the same meeting of the Linnean Society. Darwin's paper was read first and he is the one we now remember as the man who came up with the idea of natural selection. Wallace should have got priority, but it was Darwin, the man with the connections, who got the glory.
In fact, Wallace did fairly well when he came back to Britain and he produced an extremely popular book, The Malay Archipelago, which provides a vivid, highly readable account of his travels in the East Indies.
In later life, Wallace became obsessed with spiritualism – an interest which tarnished his reputation as a scientist. He is buried in Broadstone.
This article is adapted from ‘Alfred Russel Wallace, the forgotten man of evolution’ published in The Observer, 20 January 2013
Humanist Commandments Philosopher A.C. Grayling has offered this admirably brief ‘Ten Commandments’ for Humanists:
1. Love well
2. Seek the good in all things
3. Harm no others
4. Think for yourself
5. Take responsibility
6. Respect nature
7. Do your utmost
8. Be informed
9. Be kind
10. Be courageous
A.C. Grayling The Good Book (2011) The Good 8:11
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Letters &
Emails
Write to Dorset Humanists, 58a R L Stevenson Avenue Bournemouth
BH4 8EG or email [email protected]
From Scott Thompson
Thank you for helping to arrange such an interesting and well put together talk/discussion yesterday [the Alfred Russel Wallace talk]. I hadn't attended before but it was a pleasure to come along last night. Everyone that I spoke to was most welcoming. Also, I'm hugely excited about the next discussion topic, given that the notion of Free Will plays such a huge role on decisions made in so many areas of our lives, perhaps without any logical justification.
It's also great to see that you have a commitment to involving yourselves in charity work. It's great to see non-theists getting involved in the type of activity that far too many people fear would be lost, should the number of religious followers continue to reduce at the current rate.
Thank you, again, for a great evening, I look forward to attending as many future society events as possible. From Jane Bannister
With reference to Chairman's View (February) in which David looked at the low figure of 9% of parents who would approve of more schools being secular, I should like to see the BHA and Humanist groups support a campaign to have philosophy taught in schools as a core subject. If taught in an age-appropriate way, it would enable children to think critically from their earliest school years, as we know that small children have a sense of justice.
Correction: Please note that the original version of our February Bulletin (Chairman's View) stated that a recent YouGov survey for Prospect magazine showed only 9% of parents at state schools agree with the statement ‘Make all schools secular’. In fact,
47% of parents at state schools supported this statement compared to only 38% opposing it. The originally quoted figure of 9% was actually net support for the statement (i.e. the difference between those supporting and those opposing the statement). We apologise for this error which has now been corrected on our website.
Fund
Computers needed for 60 children The Humanist Association of Toronto has recently donated four laptops to the secular humanist elementary school in Kurukshetra, India, run by Swami Manavatavadi. These four laptops need to be shared between 60 children. Locally, the cheapest HP laptop is 28500 IC Rupees – about £335.00. Please donate to our India Fund this year so that we can help buy at least one more computer for deprived children in India. Or let us know where we can obtain used laptops cheaply.
Dorset Humanists has had a friendship link with the school since 2004 and recently we have helped pay University fees for a student teacher, Mahadevi, who teaches about 60 children in the evenings.
Their annual function “Celebrating the Dedication to Children” is on 17 March.
Donate via your membership form or contact our treasurer Dariusz Andersen.
07415 069029
Watch Swami Manavatavadi here at the IHEU World Humanist Conference in Oslo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pl4sBkZrjSE
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Dorset Humanists
Chairman’s View March 2013
he Catholic Church is the last great totalitarian system. After the moderate
liberalisation of the Vatican II Council in the 1960s successive popes, particularly
Benedict XVI and his predecessor, have been reinforcing the conservative and
authoritarian nature of this organisation. The college of Cardinals is now packed with
conservative appointees and therefore the prospects for change appear slim.
Commentators have claimed that it is the child abuse scandals which have hollowed
out the church in Europe but I think there is a deeper reason why the Church is
effectively ‘losing’ Europe. It is that the Catholic Church, as the liberal cardinal Carlo
Maria Martini has claimed, is now at least 200 years out of date. The Church prides
itself on resisting change in human culture in order to witness to the ‘unchanging’
nature of God and his ‘revelation’ to the church. But it’s clear to everyone outside the
Church that what it is intent on preserving is a medieval, monarchical and superstitious
religious culture which is itself merely a transient human construct. To resist change is
to die, and the Catholic Church is dying, at least in its European home. But tragically,
for millions of people around the world, the Church is enjoying vigorous growth in
developing continents such as Africa.
My cousin is a Catholic missionary who has just spent two months in Senegal and
Cameroon. Last year he visited Fiji, Samoa, Kiribati, The Marshall Islands, The
Federated States of Micronesia and Australia. In southern India he has been helping to
develop a school very similar to the Humanist school we support in northern India. He
belongs to a celibate order of 2000 priests and brothers, the Missionaries of the Sacred
Heart, which is operating full-time in 54 countries. The Catholic Church will never
cease its global evangelising. Humanism is, in part, a global resistance movement to
religious evangelism and we should do all we can to support our Humanist friends in
other countries and international organisations such as the International Humanist and
Ethical Union (IHEU). Our friend Bob Churchill has been working for the IHEU in
Uganda and he will be visiting us in October. Meanwhile, please consider donating to
our India Fund to support the efforts of Humanist educators in northern India.
David Warden
T
