Sir, - The editor of the Ulster Humanist, Sean Kearney, replied (January 5th) to a letter of mine criticising a list of people who, he claimed, had contributed to humanist values. They included Socrates, Rousseau, Erasmus, Voltaire and Toland. I pointed out that none of these was an unbeliever or against religion as such. Mr Kearney now says: "Of course I did not claim that these men were humanists".
Perhaps that is what he meant to say, or wished he had said. But what he actually wrote (December 5th) was that philosophers in every age, including Socrates, Rousseau, Erasmus, Voltaire and Toland, "found that religion was divisive, disruptive and dangerous, because it promotes hatred, intolerance, greed and jealousy which often leads to war." This statement represents them as being against religion, and is untrue.
There are great ambiguities in the way the term "humanism" is used. There is the weak sense, in which humanists are people who are devoted to the good and will defend pluralism and the rights of all, including the right of religious people to live and practice their religion and the right of humanists to opt out of religion. I have no quarrel with that, nor has my church.
But there is also what might be called the strong sense of "humanism", in which humanists hold that "religion is divisive, disruptive and dangerous, because it promotes hatred, intolerance, greed and jealousy. Many humanists who attained political power, particularly Marxists, drew what seems to be the natural implications of this view of religion and tried to destroy it.
Surprisingly, Mr Kearney writes: "To the best of my knowledge, there are only one or two societies in the world in which humanists have had any substantial political input", and he mentions Holland. But he seems to forget that non-religious humanists had an absolutely dominant position in the various Marxist regimes, and behaved abominably. No doubt there were many decent and tolerant humanists among them, but they proved ineffectual against the brutality of the ideologists and the bureaucrats. Hence a certain wariness of humanism and humanists among religious people is hardly surprising. The historical record of non-religious humanism is very bad indeed. - Yours, etc., Rev Colin Garvey,
The Abbey, Galway.