On this occasion we began by discussing the new National Framework for Religious Education launched today (28/10/04) by Education and Skills Secretary Charles Clarke.

Secular philosophies such as atheistic Humanism are now incorporated in the Framework. Thus teachers are encouraged to provide opportunities for pupils to be exposed to humanistic ideas that were hitherto somewhat excluded from the classroom. The Education Act 1996 states that an agreed RE syllabus must reflect the fact that the religious traditions in Great Britain are mainly Christian, whilst taking account of the teachings and practices of the other principal religions represented in the country. Hence, Christianity will remain central to the new Framework but other religions and non-religious belief systems will be formally included.

The new Framework is a significant advance in the whole question of religious education but it only serves as a guide to the way this subject is taught in maintained schools. Much will depend on how it is implemented. It is high time that the strongly sectarian nature of traditional religious education should be redesigned to reflect the pluralistic society in which we live and an increasing interest in the secular basis of morality.

The new Framework may make little difference to how religion is taught in the increasing number of faith schools and academies. They will be able to teach what they consider to be appropriate to their own peculiar way of thinking. Although the Qualification & Curriculum Authority (QCA) hopes faith schools will choose to use the Framework, there is no obligation for them to do so. Faith schools run by Catholics, Jews or Muslims will doubtless continue to instruct their pupils in the tenets of their respective beliefs without giving anything more than passing mention of other religions and they may add a few scathing comments on the value of secular morality. I sincerely hope for better.

The new Framework is non-statutory and the Local Education Authorities (LEAs) will decide how to formulate the content of their own RE programmes. Local SACREs (Standing Advisory Councils for Religious Education) will continue to “Advise the Authority upon . . . religious education”. Humanists already serve in some capacity on SACREs but, as the new Framework will prompt revisions in the local RE programmes, Humanists will be enlisted where they do not already serve. It certainly looks as if humanists could play a more prominent role in education than hitherto. But remember, nothing in the Framework is mandatory.

We then went on to discuss an article which appeared in a recent issue of The Freethinker entitled ‘Miracle Babies’ produced by celestial insemination. This dealt with the astounding tale of “Archbishop” Gilbert Deya who prays over childless women and pronounces them “pregnant by Jesus”. The ladies then travel to Kenya where they “give birth” to their “miracle babies”. This story has been widely reported in the press and on BBC radio but I get the impression that Gilbert Deya has not been criticised too vigorously - possibly for fear of offending all those people who really do believe in miracles.

We can say with confidence that Gilbert Deya’s claims are rubbish and I am sure he is an acute embarrassment to all but the most devout of our religious friends. All too many people are only too prepared to believe in miracles but, on this occasion, many will prefer not to select as miraculous the absurd claims of this Kenyan-born Archbishop - who happens to have a big following in this country. We are aware that there is something sinister lurking in the background with baby trafficking at the heart of it.

Could the Archbishop’s claims be dealt with as a simple matter of fraud under the Trade Descriptions Act? - He was selling a service with wildly exaggerated claims. It is such blatant deception that there should be no need whatsoever for using DNA to reveal that the babies in question were not the progeny of the mothers in question. Clearly, DNA evidence is necessary in a court of law and has already resulted in some of these babies being removed from their ‘mothers’. But, in a society where regular bishops and archbishops really do believe in miracles, a mere case of DNA mismatch could easily be claimed to be an intrinsic part of the miraculous process and dismissed on the grounds that a miracle does not lend itself to analysis by the use of scientific evidence. In fact we have generally been led to believe that ‘true miracles’ are characterised by their defiance of scientific principles. Even the carbon dating evidence of the ‘Holy Shroud’ does not expose this piece of cleverly worked cloth as a fake in the eyes of the faithful and stories of levitating saints have not disappeared from Christian, Muslim and other hagiographies.

And while on the subject of miracles it was noted that the Pope had recently beatified the Hapsburg Karl I (1887-1922), the last emperor of the Austrian-Hungarian empire, on the basis of a miraculous healing of the varicose veins of a Polish nun living in Brazil (Sister Maria Zita Gradowska) who had prayed hard to Karl while suffering from her very painful condition. Well, I wonder why Europeans are no longer keen to be guided by the wisdom of the Vatican.

We finally touched on the subject of ageism - in anticipation of a talk on this subject scheduled for spring 2005. Terry Blackmore talked about his own experience in losing his job in the newspaper industry when he was still in his 40s. This redundancy occurred at a time when the industry was preparing to move rapidly into newer technologies. Trying then to get a new job he constantly encountered the prejudice of employers who were looking for younger (and cheaper) recruits. Despite all the age discrimination he encountered, his redundancy gave him the opportunity to re-direct his skills with immensely valuable positive outcomes. Here is a case where a skilled person can be declared too old at the age of 45 and, by his own determined efforts, prove himself able to come back fighting.

It was felt that, as long as a person was competent and able to do a good job, there should be no statutory age limit. In the building and manufacturing trades, where young workers become skilled in various forms of tough manual work, older ones may have to be excluded for obvious reasons. Transferring from manual jobs to ‘desk’ jobs may be the only way open to them for continuing in employment up to a ‘statutory’ retirement age. In the professions people often rise up through a grade structure and, as they approach retirement age, they are receiving much higher salaries than their younger colleagues. They often free wheel through their final decade of employment totally unable to keep up with the newer skills of the rising younger generation. Perhaps pay scales should rise and then fall to take account of this effect!

Beyond the so-called retirement age, most people don’t even get the opportunity to continue drawing a salary and must, if they are lucky, rely on pensions. In some professions, and medicine is one of them, a retired person may be able to continue working for many years after the age of 65 and one only hopes that the need for good practice has a way of denying employment to those who show signs of age-related incompetence. We have all heard of 85-year-old judges who doze off on the bench and some of us may have had direct experience of doctors who are completely out of touch with modern diagnostic techniques and drug usages. So, while wanting to make maximum use of the special skills, wisdom and experience of older people, it is necessary that responsible jobs are filled by competent people - whatever their age. We skated around the subject without establishing any firm principles to guide us in a further consideration of age discrimination . . . but I for one would like to believe that, when I next travel on a jumbo jet, the pilot has not reached the age where his vision and central nervous system have already deteriorated to the point where he/she is a little uncertain about the exact location of the essential flight controls.

ARC

In a recent 'Times' leader a doubt was expressed about the certainty of the death of Jacques Derrida. It was that a post modernist deconstruction would inevitably "question the foundational conceptual categories of prior science - among them Derrida's own existence - which become problematised and relativised."

As Robin Young has remarked, we would-be intellectuals should be aware that Derrida was the father of deconstruction; that this kind of critical thinking could be applied to all kinds of academic pursuits such as literature, linguistics, philosophy, law and architecture. His vast output of controversial books and essays over the last quarter-century was manna from heaven for his band of aficionados, but for many of us Derrida was responsible for raising high pretentiousness to an art form.

You may well ask, what is the definition of the word Deconstruction? One Richard Doyle offers is as follows. "Instead of a simple 'either/or' structure deconstruction attempts to elaborate a discourse that says neither 'either/or' nor 'both/and' nor even 'neither nor', while at the same time not abandoning these logics either"¹. Got it? If you are still struggling with the concept, Derrida's own definition may help: "The least bad definition of deconstruction is a certain experience of the impossible."²

Derrida's cleverest ploy (here again I am using quotes to keep this article concise and manageable) "was to write in an almost impenetrably dense, elliptical and unstructured style and to claim that meaning was subject to limitless interpretation so that everything could be made to mean anything and no one (including himself) could possibly be held responsible for the meaning of what they had said or written"³. His prose was verbose and ambiguous; always asking questions but reluctant to answer them. And I am one of those who consider him a poseur "who lacked the systematic rigour of the true philosopher, and who wrote in a deliberately obscure manner to conceal the emptiness of its content"⁴.

He also concerned himself with psychoanalysis, and with the works of Freud (like many others in the post-modernist camp) as seen in numerous essays such as 'The Post Card: from Socrates to Freud and Beyond' (1987) and 'Archive Fever' (1995), which is interesting in the light of psychoanalysis being almost universally discredited as a pseudo-science with much of Freud's empirical work being seriously questioned, to put matters mildly. However, his admirers cited Friedrich Nietzsche as being Derrida's intellectual ancestor in that the 19th-century philosopher claimed to have demolished both objective truth and traditional morality. "Derida, you could say, carried on the demolition work where Nietzsche left off"³.

Yet we have Judith Butler from the University of California at Berkeley writing in the London Review of Books: "It is surely uncontroversial to say that Jacques Derrida was one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century; his international reputation far exceeds that of any other French intellectual of his generation"⁵. I would say though that it is highly controversial. We must not underestimate the power that post-modernists wield in academic circles. Their theories have pervaded undergraduate syllabuses in many disciplines with a knock on effect in post-graduate and post-doctoral studies.

In The Times obituary the point was made of the "unfortunate tendency among some to criticise Derrida without ever having read his works"³. However I would beg the reader of this article to pick up any of his books or essays and explain to me what he is talking about.

I will leave the last comment to Robin Young. "One of Derrida's key cryptic propositions was to reject the idea that time is oriented to its end. Of course, in the end he could not break from the hated old Western metaphysical notion that time was indeed heading toward an end"³.

John Bennett

The two extracts from the national press that follow sufficiently illustrate the problem which presents to governments and communities. Atheist (objective) humanists will rightly see efforts to tolerate Islam as bound to end in such frustrations until it is generally accepted that there can be no long-term accommodation with (objective) God-fearers of any religious hue.

Can some new meaning be given to 'tolerance'? Is it possible perhaps to live in harmony with those who (subjectively and a-politically) keep to themselves their preferences for a theist state? This question has, it is obvious to us in the West, to be faced by all Muslims. It seems it is up to Humanists, particularly those who have tolerant (subjective) feelings, to press for such a more realistic outcome. Whether the Muslim communities would in this event largely persist but in modified form is difficult to say. What alternative is there, short of chronic violence by both sides?

In broad terms we have armed conflict between 3 groups of believers in counter-science. They, objectively, mostly support either the Talmud/Soloman's Temple, or the Bible/Rome or the Koran/Mecca respectively - all entities of subjective significance. Neither tolerance nor confrontation, but persuasion only, can succeed.

Richard Hall was born in Kent in September 1942, but lived nearly all of his life in London. His father, a barrister, and his mother, a teacher, became divorced when he was still very young. He was brought up as an only child by his mother. He attended Dulwich College and other schools in South London, and afterwards studied physics at London University where he obtained a B.Sc. degree. After his studies he worked for a while as a laboratory assistant, later on as a supply teacher. His last occupation was in the civil service, before retiring early on health grounds. He never married and he had no children.

I met Richard in 1967, soon after I joined the London Young Humanists. He immediately struck me as very intelligent and knowledgeable, someone who used to argue in a logical and sometimes forceful manner. He was a member of several atheist/humanist organisations, both national and regional, and he attended numerous meetings at which he often participated in a lively manner. Being a rather eccentric character, he was well known at those associations. Richard was exceptionally well read and had a wide variety of interests, among them science and linguistics and politics and history.

During the last few years he suffered from several ailments and he found moving around more and more difficult. Yet he still managed to visit many places. When James Young and I had not heard from him for several weeks we went to his flat in Islington where we found him lying dead on the floor. He had been dead for about a week. Poor Richard died all alone in his flat from a coronary thrombosis. I, and many others who knew him, will remember Richard as a dedicated rational freethinking humanist.

Alex Hill

•Objectivity v. subjectivity was dealt with long ago in a book by I. Scheffler. Science and subjectivity (2nd ed. Indianopolis: Hackett 1982) but since forgotten. Raymond Carlisle is trying to relate this to humanism [and has made a first draft of a mission statement as suggested by Anthony Constable: "Our mission is to make the Ealing Humanist Association more widely known as an organisation working - with an admitted, engaging subjectivity that should continue, in the public domain - towards the early emergence of humankind from persistence of its initial religious age into an age of full scientific objectivity"]. Raymond circulated a questionnaire on Subjectivity for re-collection before, or at, the next Coffee Morning.

•The Kenyan "archbishop" [see 'Report of Meeting' above] was convicted of child-trafficking on objective DNA evidence but he continues, lost in his subjectivity, to believe in miracles [what Arthur Atkinson would call make-believe. Are there any circumstances in which an English court would accept miraculous evidence?].

•Is academic freedom still sacrosanct? John Bennett and most present thought it had been seriously eroded by under-funding, the research assessment exercises, and vested interests.

•Much about history of science, but no agreement on contribution of Arabic scholars to Western science. Ptolemy knew the earth was round: round or flat didn't matter to the church so long as the universe was geocentric as for Ptolemy. Later (Copernicus, Galileo) the heliocentric universe threatened the Christian scheme in which God sends his Son to Earth.

•Theories v. stories. Theories rest on facts, Tony emphasised, hence the "theory of evolution". Creation, as advocated by the "creationists", by contrast, is a story [the beginning of the historia salutis which dominated Europe for some 16 centuries, the whole "gesheft" now believed only by the true believers].

Thanks as usual to Maggie Adams for her hospitality.

KCR
[with afterthoughts in square brackets by RC]