New President of the British Humanist Association appears on BBC Radio 4

[philosoraptor42]

I originally posted this on the 'Atheism' LJ group, but I wanted it on my own journal too.

It concerns a link found on the following site:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/programmes/sunday/prog_details.shtml

The Presidency of the British Humanist Association has formerly been held by the jazz singer George Melly, the comedienne Linda Smith, the agony aunt Clare Rayner and the scientist Sir Julian Huxley. The Association's newly-appointed President is the Guardian's Polly Toynbee. She spoke about why she has taken on the role and her plans for the future.

Here's the direct link to the audio file of her discussing her position as the new BHA president:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/realmedia/sunday/s20070902z.ram

I'm afraid you need RealPlayer to listen.

Read on if you need a transcript of the interview:

Interviewer: What do the jazz singer George Melly, the comedienne Linda Smith, the agony aunt Clare Rayner and the scientist Sir Julian Huxley have in common? Answer: They have all held the presidency of the British Humanist Association. Now the association has appointed a new president: the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee. I asked her why she’d taken on this role.

Polly Toynbee: It's quite an honour to be asked I’ve always been a strong humanist. I’ve been an honourary associate of the National Secular Society. I’ve always fought the corner very hard against undue influence of religions in our public life and I don’t think it’s ever been more important in my lifetime. Now it used to be a rather eccentric cause; I mean ‘why are you taking on this poor rump of religion’, but religion is back and rampant and curiously has a lot of defender in government who are willing to give it much more space than it used to have in the past.

Interviewer: You said that this is indeed… that there is indeed a clash of civilisations, not between Islam and Christendom, but between reason and superstition. Do you think superstition i.e. – in your terms – ‘religion, is now central?

Polly Toynbee: It’s certainly gaining ground. I think it’s extraordinary that under ten years of a Labour government we should have many more religious schools; that the whole new cadre of schools – ‘the academies’ – so many of them should have gone to religious institutions. We’re due to see sixty new Muslim schools for instance. Already in our society we’re getting de facto segregation because of where people live, often in ethic and religious ghettos. To institutionalise it by having more religious schools I find deeply shocking; very alarming for the future. And that’s something that I certainly want to campaign against very hard.

Interviewer: But why are you so passionately opposed to religion… and not just passionately sometimes, a bit more, one gets a real sense of anger. You are angry that in the twenty-first century religion should play such a part in people’s lives.

Polly Toynbee: The part it plays in people’s private lives is their own business. I’m angry that it should play a part in… in our national life, and certainly in the education, or indeed in the lawmaking. I mean we are the only democracy in the world that has a theocratic element where twenty six bishops sit in the house of lords and have some power and influence over the process of law-making. That’s unheard of in any other democracy.

Interviewer: But you can’t say to people who are strongly religious ‘you should keep it to your private life’ because they believe that what’s at stake here is people’s souls. What they believe is that their faith has to affect and permeate all parts of their life.

Polly Toynbee: Oh, of course, I mean one expects them to be part of the thriving diverse arguments in a democracy, and to take their chance along with someone else, everybody else.

Interviewer: But you’re at war with religion not just in terms of the Church of England or in the political importance of religion, but religion generally. And aren’t you bound to be defeated, because every single opinion poll that seems to be conducted say, regardless of how many attend Church or whatever at weekends, perhaps around sixty to seventy per cent of people have a real spiritual sense and it seems that comes from generation to generation? We are born with it, it is part of us, and for you to try to, as it were, dispense with it, some would say is an impossible ambition.

Polly Toynbee: That all depends on what opinion polls you look at and, usually, who has conducted them. If you ask another way most people are atheist or, at least, agnostic. They don’t believe there is a personal God who listens to their prayers. They don’t believe there is a force outside them, guiding individual lives-

Interviewer (interrupting): No, that’s an argument about an interventionist God. It’s not an argument about a sense of the spiritual or the transcendent; about something outside you, beyond ourselves which most opinion polls I’ve looked at seem to suggest the majority of people have.

Polly Toynbee: I think it’s a matter very often of semantics, of language. I mean what you call ‘the spiritual’ I would call ‘the life of the imagination’. And I think that is amazingly powerful in all human beings. I think we all live much more than half of our lives inside our imaginations, inside our creativity amongst our hopes and fears and dreams and memories. And out of that comes the creative impulse. Out of that comes all sorts of things which maybe good or bad, but are in another realm. But I locate that entirely within us. Humans have this amazing capacity, which one imagines animals don’t have. We can imagine being somebody else. We have that sort of imagination. It makes us social animals. You know, you could call it ‘the spirit’; I don’t mind the word ‘the spirit’. What I reject is any idea of superstition, or of there being, you know, a powerful being outside of us controlling our lives.

Interviewer: A lot of people would share that, but at the same time they would say ‘don’t lets beat up everything here’ because when they look at the twentieth century and they look at the achievements of non-religious and non-spiritual leaders like Mao, like Hitler, like Stalin, they say ‘at least at the heart of religion, or most religion, is a respect for the individual; a belief often in the individual’s immortal soul’ and that is vital, that respect for the individual. And they would say most non-religious governments… don’t have that. I mean we’re back into the happiness of the largest number; utilitarian view which can often make individual human rights irrelevant.

Polly Toynbee: It’s very odd this idea. The moment you’re ‘not religious’ you’re supposed to be a Stalinist or a Maoist or a Fascist, as if somehow those forms of utopianism weren’t just as dangerous as religious fundamentalism. Of course all religious people aren’t extremists and fundamentalists, but if you look at where religion nearly always leads the moment it gets secular power it’s as frightening as those extreme, utopian, secular, political faiths. Religion in itself has in it these seeds of real danger when it has power. That’s why it’s so important to keep it in the private sector.

Interviewer: So your agenda is very clearly, where you see religion has power within the political process and elsewhere, you want it out. Out of parliament, out of schools, out of anywhere where it can influence people.

Polly Toynbee: Out of anywhere where it can control other people’s lives. The idea that the religious can set the agenda on abortion, as they keep threatening to do, and have done in the past. For instance, the debate in the house of lords on the right to die, the Joffe bill, where there was a real chance that that would have passed in the house of lords were it not for the religious. They organised themselves so powerfully; they have such influence in the house of lords, that they can dictate to the rest of us whether we can choose to die at a time of our own wish when we are suffering terminal illness. Well, why should the religious order me, how I live my life? I don’t, you know… These are individual matters. How people choose to live their own life is their business. 

Interviewer: The new president of the British Humanist Association, Polly Toybee. Clearly ready for the fight.