Blood, Bombs and Bullets: Cowardice in the Face of Terrorism by C.J. Wilton

I suppose it’s time I offered an opinion on the Oslo massacre. I’m never been much of a devotee of contemporary, up to the minute, news articles as they have a tendency to be filled with conjecture and hearsay. Give me history any day, when the facts are more-or-less established and the experts have rendered their analysis to parchment.

As such, I enter this discussion with a personal air of intrigue and mischief, offering opinions so soon after the fact. Why? Well, because I have a personal and somewhat mercenary interest in the events of the last few days. Our own Ellie Haycock is already booked to attend the World Humanist Congress, that is (or was?) to take place in Oslo, in a few weeks time; and I myself – dithering as I do – have yet to make a decision on whether or not to go too.

This could be for any number of reasons, the most likely one being concern for my own safety, but as I’m not directly privy to that information, I can only conjecture. Indeed I haven’t been so unsure as to my own motivations (or lack of them), since I decided to become vegetarian several months back.

Personal cowardice seems the most primal and therefore the most likely cause, but there is also a sense of ambivalence over attending the congress that predates recent events. I am fast becoming an impoverished student and one that is – perhaps unusually – apathetic to travel. I have never caught a plane or lived in a foreign country on my own, which could itself be another source of fear, enhancing and inflating that of the terrorist attack.

Yet, if we let fear govern our actions we let the terrorists win, as a friend informs me. A glib sentiment when one is not the principle agent of the choice on the table, but a compelling one, nevertheless. I am a firm proponant of the sentiment - often attributed to Edmund Burke - that: all it takes for evil to thrive is for good men to do nothing. The trouble is, I was never wholly intent on going in the first place, but now – for ideological reasons – I feel compelled to attend, to show the flag and do what I feel to be right, regardless of all prior considerations. I'm staring into a deep chasm and am tempted to jump!

There is a real danger here analogous to that of Anders Behring Breivik himself, the danger of making a knee-jerk, irrational and polar-decision based on sentiment and ideological frustration. In his case it was to kill innocent people to highlight his ideological concerns, in my case I now feel compelled to reciprocate in the most obvious and formulaic manner to juxtapose this madness at the risk of expending resources that I can not afford to lose.

The comparison seems trivial but I think they are logically equivalent; we are both jumping to an extreme to ensure that our ideologies are acknowledged, the only difference is one of degree. I expend money to validate my views, where as Breivik expends lives. Of course, the latter is morally repugnant, abhorrent, diabolical; but that does not affect the logic of the respective scenarios.

It is this desire to assume the polar opposite position of people and ideologies we find despicable that drives us into folly. In an article today, neurologist and renowned horseman of New Atheism, Sam Harris speculated that this incident will be the trigger to a whole new round of apologetics in favour of Islam by moral relativists who call themselves liberals. People who will defend Sharia Law and the rights of Muslim extremists to belittle, beat, torture, maim and murder women, children and homosexuals in the name of cultural diversity. – A knee-jerk reaction to one deluded, right-wing, Christian, terrorist; who himself took a violent, knee-jerk reaction against those he saw as enemies of the Christian-West; expounding his own dogmas in blood, bombs and bullets in the best traditions of religious extremism.

In the words of Penn Jillette, “The lesser of two evils is still evil and the enemy of my enemy is not my friend.” – We need to recognise that swinging, pendulously, between extremes like some morally grotesque human-tabloid, may be easy, even intuitive, but that does not make it right. Reason and evidence, applied in the most unbiased and objective manner, is – as ever – far superior to decisions based on emotionalism, sentiment and faith. Had we been built by any sane creator, the former would naturally precede the latter; but we are not. We are evolved survival machines, prejudiced, simplistic and crude; but we have, through natural selection, developed faculties that outstrip those baser instincts. – It’s long past time they became ubiquitous throughout society.

 

Then what are you for?!! by Stephen Fry.

A new animated short, created from the Intelligence Squared debate that took place on the 19th October 2009. It saw able humanists Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry square off against the truly baffled Archbishop Onaiyekan, who couldn't seem to comprehend why the Catholic Church was under fire from every morally minded person in the world; and the truly baffling tory MP Anne Widdecombe, whose infamous reputation precedes her. 

(If you can't view embedding click here.) 

The motion: "The Catholic church is a force for good in the world." This short is presented as a back and forth between Fry and Widdecombe which is not true to the formulaic format of the debate, but nevertheless gives an impression of the total arse kicking the Catholic quarter took that night.

The chairperson: Zeinab Badawi.

Walking the Ancestor’s Trail by Estelle Tidey.

The long May Bank Holiday weekend was just beginning, and I was setting off on a train heading into the unfamiliar territory of Somerset. Though I'd brought my OU textbooks with me with the optimistic intention of doing some revision for an upcoming exam, it wasn't long before I was absorbed in Richard Dawkins' book on evolution, The Ancestor's Tale. Dawkins takes the reader on an imagined pilgrimage, beginning at the tip of our particular branch of the evolutionary tree and progressing backwards through 3.5 billion years to the beginning of life itself. Along the way, the pilgrims encounter their common ancestors (“concestors”) with various living creatures; first the chimpanzees, our closest relatives, followed by other groups of primates, mammals, birds, fish, insects, plants and finally the bacteria.

I'd brought The Ancestor's Tale with me because it had inspired the event which I was on my way to participate in. First held in 2010, the “Ancestor's Trail” walk is the idea of a local science teacher and humanist, Chris Jenord. The trail represents the evolutionary tree described in Dawkins' book overlaid on the footpaths of the Quantock Hills (an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty), a secular pilgrimage for science enthusiasts, environmentalists, the non-religious and anyone who enjoys being outdoors in the natural world. As all of the above, it sounded like a perfect opportunity to take part in my first humanist event.

Participants could select their walk from trails of varying lengths, named after life-forms represented on the branches of the tree – rodents, butterflies, fungi – but I'd signed up for the full-day experience of the 13.5 mile Human Trail. After being dropped off by coach at the meeting point near Kingston St Mary, we were ready to set off for our first rendezvous – with our closest relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos – but we'd hardly walked more than a few steps before a startling fact was revealed; each step was taking us back 10,000 years into the past. Not only this, but the trail was operating on three different scales in order to ensure enough spacing between encounters with our most recent concestors. By the end of the trail, our steps would have expanded to a million years in length - and after a day's walking, would feel like it!

We soon met up with the Chimps and were entertained by a short talk about our common ancestry and by singing from the BHA Choir, who performed the first part of a song specially composed for the Trail. Music was an important part of the trail experience – as we progressed we were rewarded by the gradual expansion of the choir as more singers joined the party, plus folk music from a local group, Soulcake, the rhythmic sound of an African/Brazilian harp played by Michael Ray with a chance to sing along and, in honour of the Butterfly Conservation charity for which walkers were raising money, Jonny Berliner's “Large Blue Butterfly Blues” (written from the perspective of an ant who'd fallen victim to the butterfly's extraordinary life cycle). Other living creatures were represented by Ian Heals' four birds of prey, which were waiting for us at our meeting point with the Birds, and by several enthusiastic dogs who'd come along with their owners.

As the afternoon lengthened into evening, the trail passed through Kilve village and, after picking up our last group of fellow pilgrims, the Bacteria, ended at Kilve Beach. There, the tired walkers were able to sit down, relax and enjoy more music from the trail performers before heading back for a party and dancing to the blues band the Treefrogs.

The next morning, sore feet got a rest as we heard Dr Dan Danahar speaking on the Large Blue Butterfly and the butterfly conservation project he'd been working on in Brighton. Rather amazingly, he had managed to persuade the school where he works to dig up large areas of the grounds to create a haven for butterflies, resulting in a massive increase in biodiversity. Dan's talk was followed by Dr Jon Bridle speaking on evolution.

Soon I was back on the train home with some great memories – the moment of realisation that all of recorded human history had passed by in my first step along the trail, the sun breaking through the overcast clouds over a stunning view from the hills, the music, the fascinating facts of evolution, being able to sit down and enjoy a slice of pizza at the end of the trail and most of all the welcoming atmosphere and friendliness of the other walkers. I even found out that a secular group exists within the OU. I'm looking forward to returning next year – hope you can join me there!