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Podcast
DAVID POLLOCK [President, European Humanist Federation]: A European Humanist Perspective
20 April 12
Duration: 11.00, access the accompanying slides at the bottom of this page.
David Pollock began with an aside, showing how charity law so narrowly defines “religion” that it fails to do justice to the actual characteristics of some religions. Humanists had proposed an alternative definition:
“A collective belief that attains a sufficient level of cogency, seriousness, cohesion and importance and that relates the nature of life and the world to morality, values and/or the way its believers should live.”
The Charities Commission took this idea seriously but it was too radical for them, he said. He thought this a better definition than “philosophical belief” with all its pitfalls.
Religion is entrenched in the power structures of Europe: Churches and their social activities receive state funding in many countries; some political parties are closely allied with the Roman Catholic Church; the Holy See takes advantage of its “fake status as a state” [his words] in “opportunistic alliances”; the EU has a formal dialogue with the Churches under the Treaty of Lisbon.
The non-religious are disparate, impoverished and poorly organised: For most non-religious people, being non-religious is not an identity, so they do not group together, and the associations that exist for them are small and poorly funded; the non-religious do not have a uniform character; serious differences over the meaning of secularism cause problems.
Equality legislation on religion or belief is shot through with religious exemptions: As evidenced in the Amsterdam Treaty, the Lisbon Treaty and Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Protecting Non-Religious Identities: The non-religious lack a clear identity, and if they campaign are dubbed militant and intolerant; institutional biases towards religion result in discrimination against the non-religious [eg barring from certain jobs, taxation for purposes of which they disapprove].
Solutions, he proposed, lay in reducing the privileges of religion and the religious, whereby greater equality would be achieved.
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