No point Bereaving an Atheist’s Bereavement.

It has now been a year since my father died and amongst the condolences and sympathies that have surrounded me with much kindness. There is one question which arises time and time again and that is do I have any more of a sense that my dear old dad is waiting somewhere, waiting to meet me again in some presumed afterlife?

To a lesser extent there is another question that is possibly more common than the one above that arises in my mind.Do I believe I will see him again? Would I want to believe that everything that had been a part of his personality had somehow managed to outlive his now non-existent body? A third question might be is it good to believe something you know to be untrue if it assuages pain?

I do not believe it an act of callous insanity to say that after all this time that I do not. I have experienced the circles of grief that all people who have someone close to them die go through. The intermittent stages of shock, disillusionment, despair, guilt, shame and slow cruel repair and back again. However bad it has ever got or however hopeless I have ever felt any potential faith that I could have acquired has never arrived. In fact I cannot see what benefit to me there could be to believe he is waiting somewhere and that I will see him again. For me to believe such a thing is to want to long for my own extinction and worse to put my own life on hold until I supposedly meet him again surely. I have missed him everyday of the last year but I see no relief or optimism to be attained through thinking I might one day see him again.

Such a wish in my view takes the edge of life and in fact abnegates it in the hope that there might be something beyond death which no one can ever know. I will grant that no one can ever be completely certain either way but to build a belief on uncertainty seems absurd to me. Further more there is no evidence that people lack in either happiness or morality through not believing in it. I feel fortunate to not have to live with the hope that my dad is sitting in some celestial room somewhere drinking tea and waiting for me. While he is dead there are so many other people who are still alive. Surely the first step forward for anyone bereaved would be turn there eyes away from the tragedy of having lost a loved one to the fact of that there are so many love ones and potential ones still here. That does not besmirch the memory of the dead but is possibly the best and true honor you can do them. There is one way in which the dead do live on and that is in our memories, our genes and what they did for us whilst they were here. These things until we ourselves die live on. Isn’t that good enough?

The experience of death in close proximity also does something else which actually is very positive. That is it makes us aware and almost too aware of our own death. This might lead some people to be gloomy and pessimistic but that doesn’t have to be the case. Suddenly at the ripe old age of 25 knowing that I only have so many decades left on this planet and I might as well start enjoying it and savoring every day, however tough that sometimes might be. Prior to my Father popping his clogs I had no sense of how finite and fragile life is and it might just be in a perverse way the best thing that ever happened to me. The pivotal kick up the arse that I need. One big part of me longs every day for him to still be here and part of me will always want to give everything to just to have half an hour with him so we can have a coffee together and discuss anything, however trivial. But I did go for coffee with him dozens of times and had dozens of interesting conversations with him about both the trivial and the important. I had him for 24 and a half years and relish and value every moment.

To me his conscience, ego and personality went out like a light bulb when his heart stopped one June day on a London train station and he has since ceased to exist. Tough facts that the most diehard atheists find tough to rest with but like knowing that someone you fancy does not fancy you back one eventually comes to accept it as fact or as highly likely. I am not immune from wanting to believe things that are appetizing to the mind or I would wish to be true. I have seen beautiful insects, which I have for a split second hoped, would be him reincarnated and looked up and seen stars that I likewise wanted to be him. But human psychology is more powerful than any God is. The mind can spin a yarn and tale to make meaning out of anything; that is pure necessity and you do it more when you dream than you do when you are awake. The very presumptuousness of human beings reflects this and it is ineradicable as you think before you even think as a reaction to every event you experience. That capacity is bigger than all the worlds religions and superstitions combined. In fact if the big bulk of theology tells us anything it is the inherent necessity of our minds to make meanings out of the world around us. Whether it is being to get across a road safely or what beliefs we have about the cosmos and our place in it. The existence of a belief in God is a testament to human imagination in human culture. It being held in common belief for much of human history no more proves the validity of a deity than the fact that for most of human history Women have been second class citizens or even worse. It is only in relatively recent history that the later has changed. Does the previous centuries and centuries of male power over women make the assertion of female inferiority any less absurd?

But what does the above have to do with my Father you might ask? Certainly not much at first sight perhaps. But scratch the surface and actually quite a lot. My proposal is that no nice and pleasing belief actually can actually really alleviate the pain of having someone close to you die. Also any belief that cannot be validated is in essence a complete waste of time. No one ever gets over death, all people can do is learn to live with and actually isn’t there something vaguely absurd about wanting to get over the death of your Father? I am only a year on from the brutal fact and my feelings are far from pretty. Bereavement is an enormously heavy meal and all the people who experience it can do is swallow it. Actually my biggest mistake has been to delude myself that you can avoid the horror and pain that must be felt by anyone who has someone they love die. You have to give in and allow it to permeate your entire body and then you can move on and get on with the rest of your life.

Finally I can say I don’t feel like I miss anything through being faithless. I have feelings about my Father and his life and what he did for me while he was here. But I have feeling or thought that he is up on some cloud or that his ghost is following me down the street on some sunny day (a strange idea) or that he has grown wings and is running errands for some imaginary God. I do not berate other people for their own private convictions about an afterlife or a Divine creator but similarly I do not respect their views anymore than I should respect that someone likes Yogurt when I do not. People do not grow in emotional strength by believing their thoughts, feelings or beliefs are somehow so sacred that other people must tiptoe around them. This does inoculate people from the harsh side of life anymore than avoiding newspapers inoculates someone from the harshness of the world. Anguish can’t be avoided in life so perhaps it is best we all whatever we believe or in my case don’t believe start learning to deal with it, however difficult that can be.

Freedom and Education

Am I from Mars or is it too much to ask that schools become far more Libertarian? Meaning why can't schools be internally shaped to the pupils within them so they can participate within the decisions that directly affect them and have the lessons tailor made to fit the specific needs and desires of the children themselves?

The most famous example in the world of a school which is run like this is probably Summerhill in Suffolk in England. It has now existed since 1921 and despite the British Governments attempt to close it down in March 1999 it is still going. There are roughly speaking several hundred schools run along democratic and libertarian lines in the world today. I have as yet to find any genuine evidence there is anything substantially wrong with them. Most of these schools are possibly the most organised schools you could want with them having rule of law and forms of conflict resolution. The key difference between a school like this and a conventional one is all rules and decisions are made democratically and there is little or no coercion or compulsion placed upon children. One myth that I have heard time and time again wqhich is almost always completely unsubstantiated is that children leave places like this without the capacity to read properly or get a job. Again to just use the example of Summerhill many of the people who have left Summerhill have gone on to a do a variety of jobs. Also if this was genuinely correct OFSTED would have used this as a tool to shut down Summerhill long before March 1999. The only thing they could use against Summerhill was the fact that the lessons were not compulsory.

To my knowledge there are not many schools like this that have failed because of how they are organised. They have usually been shut down by local authorities under very flimsy pretexts. There was a famous case in 1965 when a comprehensive school called Risinghill In Islington in London was closed down because the headmaster Michael Duane ‘esteems cordiality among the major virtues,' and ‘Sometimes in avoiding terror the school has abandoned awe.' as the school inspectors of the time reported. This as well as the fact that Michael Duane rather contentiously at the time prohibited the use of corporal punishment led to the Inner London Education Authority. None of the above proves that there is anything intrinsically weak about Libertarian education but rather the lengths to which people with power whether high or low will go to defend it. If schools can very easily run their own affairs without coercion and compulsion this sets a major precedent for the rest of society; a precedent which is dangerous to every authoritarian everywhere. If children can learn and develop and act responsibly without force then surely adults can to. People might start getting strange ideas if they see their children learning without compulsion and having more rights and freedoms than they currently. It will also put the good people of OFSTED out of a job.

But fortunately for OFSTED and the naysayers these schools are limited and a lot of people have formed views on them based on little or no experience or evidence on how they are run at all. People have formed opinions on these places based almost entirely on thin air. The other major obstacle to the development of Libertarian forms of education in society is the fallacy that children learn and develop through being programmed by adults. Most of the evidence shows that even in their most rudimentary knowledge whether it is in language or learning generally children are not programmed with knowledge but instead acquire it through their own capacities. This is not to say environment is not important. But there has been little evidence provided that proves that whether it is learning information or skills or developing a sense of morality or social responsibility children need discipline or coercion to acquire these things at all. In fact the continued and successful existence of Summerhill and the many schools around the world that are organised on similar lines disproves it is a necessity at all.

http://www.davidgribble.co.uk/

http://www.libed.org.uk/

http://www.summerhillschool.co.uk/

PROSTITUTION AND PORNOGRAPHY the shared sin of the Right and Left?

Pornography has been a contentious issue for many people right the way across the political spectrum and indeed throughout society. There are some who aberrantly whether Fascist, Marxist or of the Mary Whitehouse Conservative School see it as aberrantly disgusting. Others on both the Right and Left see it as an issue of a freedom of expression. I think in both camps there has been a massive lack of analysis as to why it is either wrong or why it is worth defending. In the case of the naysayers it is something cruel, exploitative and overly harmful to human beings. On the other side it is often portrayed as not only a Liberty worth fighting for but actually a good or great thing in itself. It often seems with for Libertarian Right that 'sex for sale' is not only something that shouldn't be punished but is something worth promoting.

So what are my views? 'Sex for Sale' has never been a particularly appealing thing whether I was going to be the buyer or the seller. But on the other hand isn’t it really just a more consistent form of the free market which our society espouses? If you can rent every other kind of labour that you have why not rent the potential labour of your body? Also to my mind it seems deeply despicable and futile to punish either the buyer or the seller. This has been the predominant tactic in supposedly curving prostitution for decades and it has not been utterly futile. Similar things have happened with Pornography, the most famous being that of Larry Flint. So my basic stance is that it isn’t something that is worth punishing for and more specifically it has of late had no effect in limiting prostitution or pornography, prostitution especially as it is is predominantly more illicit.

With the specific issue of Pornography how can it in any extreme way be limited except with enormous amounts of violence and coercion? With the availability of YouTube many couples quite voluntarily and for no wages have sex and then upload it for view on the internet. (Interestingly enough this violates the taboo of puritans who despise exhibitionist sex and those on the right who believe it should become a business). Hardly the outright exploitative stereotype that many people associate with pornography is it? It could be argued and it is perhaps is true that these people are both exploiting each other for the sake of entertaining unseen strangers through the internet. But how can you prevent this and what is the purpose of even trying?

People’s attitudes whether they like it or not are still heavily coloured by a religious attitude that still believes sex is a sin that has to be staunchly prohibited. This being almost comic as at its most basic level sex it is what is necessary for us to be here at all. But I’m guessing that’s obvious. This attitude is often espoused by the most diehard of the secular left who see Pornography and Prostitution as forms of capitalist exploitation which come the revolution will miraculously disappear. On the other hand Sex itself has almost in and of itself become a new religion and for far too many people is an all too easy substitute for any more meaningful relationship; and ironically is escape from the realities of other people. That isn’t inherently wrong and should not be a crime but it isn’t something I want to applaud either. For that reason I am rushing to start a movement to get Prostitution legalised despite thinking it as a crime is a gross stupidity. Prostitution if legalised like most things will probably degenerate into vast industrialised system where people rent their bodies for someone else’s profits. Imagine Tesco’s providing Brothels basically. That is not in my view an advance in creating either a more free society nor obviously a more just one. This is all quite voluntary no doubt but wouldn’t the men and women who either rent their bodies for money in a system which is a crime or in one where it is not be better off just not renting their bodies for sex at all? I am hardly the Ayatollah Khomeini for suggesting it; this either case this is not freedom but voluntary servitude. All of this ignores the economic system we live in where money is king and you must get it from somewhere whether it is working in a supermarket, signing on at the dole or street walking or else you will starve. So in that climate why not sell your body, whether it is with Pornography or Prostitution? This question though ignores another more fundamental question. Why is an economy where one person has to rent themselves in any capacity to another acceptable at all? Hardly one of the most philistine of questions but one that should be asked.