Humanist/Freethought Books

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Origins of the Christian Faith: An In-depth Critical Study

by Steve Cooper

Privately published 2000. 126pp. pbk $11 (inc. postage) from The IN Group 138B Princess Street, Kew VIC 3101.

Please contact James Gerrand to purchase.

Review, by James Gerrand

I found this book a fascinating revelation of how the original teaching of Jesus to a Jewish sect was subverted by the Apostle Paul to become a doctrine for gentiles. The New Zealand author was a committed Christian, Church elder and worker for forty years. "In mid life I urgently needed to know without doubt the truth about my religion". His book is the result of much study for this search for truth. His conclusion is that he still approves the ethical teaching of Jesus but totally rejects the Pauline Christian religion based on redemption through faith.

Steve Cooper points the difficulty of deciding on any truths contained in the Bible. The first ten books of the Old Testament are probably based on fiction and written 500/1500 years after the events recounted. Its 39 books are believed to have been written or collated during the Babylonian exile of the Jews 586-538 BC. They record a large part of the Jewish sacred texts which set out the religious and ceremonial laws and observances demanded by their prophets. It contains a great deal of the history, tradition and myths of the Jewish people. It was the necessary text for the Jewish religion to emphasise their national uniqueness and affirming faith in their special tribal god Yahweh. It was this faith that exhorted them on their exodus from Egypt to conquer and massacre the then Palestinians. Some 3,000 years later this same faith has led the present day Zionists to dispossess again the Palestinians.

The earliest manuscripts of the 27 New Testament books date from the fourth century AD with any original documents having been lost. Half of the books were written by the apostle Paul probably about 55-65 AD. There is no historical evidence for the existence of Jesus. If there was such a person he was the leader of one of many Jewish sects. He left no written record of his teaching. Any acts or words of Jesus would have had to be passed from one person to another for some thirty years before written into Mark's gospel about 70 AD. The two other synoptic gospels of Matthew and Luke largely agree with Mark on the teaching of Jesus - compassion for the needy, poor and sick and to children; repentance and living a righteous life keeping the ten commandments.

The Jewish people of Jesus's time were awaiting the coming of the Messiah as foretold in the Old Testament. The Messiah was to save them from their enemies (then the Romans) and reign over the nation of Israel for ever. According to Mark Jesus did not claim being the Messiah until he asked his disciples whom they thought he was. When Peter replied "You are the Christ" Jesus charged them that they should tell no man of him. But at his trial Jesus was sufficiently convinced to openly proclaim that he was the Messiah. However his reported last words on his crucifixion "My God, why have you forsaken me?" proclaims him as being human not divine and reveals his disappointment at not being the Messiah.

Cooper points out many contradictions in the accounts of the three synoptic gospels. Mark did not mention any virgin birth for Jesus, Matthew and Luke do. Luke states that an angel proclaimed the coming of the christ child to bring peace on earth and goodwill toward men. But later Luke has Jesus stating that he has not come to give peace on earth but rather division. And Matthew similarly reports Jesus has "not come to bring peace but a sword." Such statements do not occur in Mark.

The fourth gospel, that of John, was written long after the others, about 110-130 AD. By this time Paul had changed the purpose of the Messiah from saving the Jewish nation to being the spiritual saviour for Jew and Gentile. John proclaimed the Paulline message "everyone who believes in him (Jesus) may not perish but may have eternal life". Jesus is no longer the Son of Man but the Son of God and so co-equal with God. Three centuries later Roman Emperor Constantine, having made Christianity one of the state religions, convened and chaired the council of Nicea which established the doctrine of the trinity - Father, Son and Holy Ghost - as official church dogma. Thus began the thousand years of the Dark Ages - an intellectual darkness studded with cruel and intolerant bigotry in the name of Christianity.

Part two of the book is an interesting account of how the apostle Paul took over the Christian message. Paul, born Saul in a Greek community in Tarsus, was a well educated Jew who wrote beautiful Greek. He is portrayed as a very clever politician who was adept at gaining support even if it meant changing his words to suit the audience or the readers of his many epistles. In the Acts of the Apostles he is first reported as attending the stoning of Stephen, the early Christian martyr. He then had his famous conversion on the road to Damascus, becoming Paul promoting a new version of Christianity that would appeal to gentiles whilst watchful not to offend the Christian Jews led by Peter and James. Faith in Jesus is the only requirement for acceptance into the family of God. Jesus becomes the sacrifice to take away the sins of the world. Paul demanded obedience to this faith from his followers.

Cooper sees this salvation by faith as the biggest deception the religious world has ever seen. The Catholic Church, the product of this faith, grew and developed tremendous power and wealth, backed by the demand for obedience to this doctrine. Belief contrary to it could mean loss of liberty and property or death by burning at the stake, all in the name of God.

The pagan ritual of a blood sacrifice was taken into the Christian church with its celebration of the holy sacrament - the bread representing the body of the sacrificed Jesus and wine representing his blood.

Cooper rejects the Hebrew/Christian/Muslim God, appalled by his lack of ethics and his injustice. He regards the Christian dependency on God as pre-adolescent, seeking comfort from a mother church and the approval of a father God. (Freud regarded such belief as adolescent, with paganism being childlike and atheism the adult understanding.)

Part three deals with four concepts that Cooper regards as the principle bases for his rejection of religion. He firstly rejects the idea of life after death. Science has confirmed that our brain is the storehouse of our identity - when we die so does our identity. Then no religion is really just - each considers theirs is the only true one. As a result religion, and particularly the Christian version, has sown seeds of disunity, arrogance, injustice and war. This currently is only too painfully evident in the Middle East - Jews versus the Palestinians, in former Yugoslavia - Muslims versus Catholic Christians versus Orthodox Christians, Indonesia - Muslims versus Christians, India/Pakistan - Muslim versus Hindus , Northern Ireland - Catholics versus Protestants. Cooper asks, Do we need a religion? and answers No. But we do need good ethical standards. Cooper points out that 26% of New Zealanders now claim no religion (as do a similar proportion of Australians) and are good, ethical citizens. He stresses that a good community is one not based on saving oneself from the wrath of God in another world but on being social beings, part of a social family. It is best exemplified by an attitude of enlightened concern for the welfare of all human beings. This is the Humanist attitude.

The Blasphemy Depot: A Hundred Years of the Rationalist Press Association

by Bill Cooke

Rationalist Press Association, 2003

Review, by David Tribe

I'm pleased to be wrong. The Blasphemy Depot is a great title for a great book on a great institution. So dubbed by, Keir Hardie for its 4,000,000 copies of 52 Cheap Reprints titles, plus I5 other series and hundreds of single volumes, the (British) Rationalist Press Association, with kindred companies, has been the world's premier freethought publisher. Most of its titles are educational rather than polemical, let alone legally blasphemous. Indeed, while acknowledging its unrivalled sabotage of biblical fundamentalism and superstition generally, atheists have complained that it let religion off the hook by promoting 'agnosticism' as the label of unbelief for much of the 20th century.

Because it began as an alternative to the militant (British) National Secular Society and, as the author of this centenary history shows, has always been protective of its 'positive' image, in prior correspondence with him I predicted the RPA would veto his proposed title. Happily it didn't . Of course, as an exercise in openness the book had auspicious beginnings. It was originally to have been written by a brilliant but argumentative (I was one of the few he never quarrelled with publicly or privately) and latterly disaffected insider, Nicolas Walter. But he died in 2000 with the work barely started. Its actual author, Bill Cooke, offered to take the project over. Dr Cooke had recently written an acclaimed intellectual biography of another brilliant but 'difficult' freethinker, Joseph McCabe, but was also the author of Heathen in Godzone, an excellent history of the NZ Association of Rationalists & Humanists. The RPA should have had no doubt that no skeleton-containing cupboard would remain unopened.

His achievement is remarkable when one considers the obstacles. During research, he was based. in New Zealand a senior lecturer at Manukau Institute of Technology and during printing, in America as International Director of the Center of Inquiry. Further, many RPA records had been destroyed in a wartime fire and others were unaccountably missing or 'tidied up' (as I found when representing the NSS on the Humanist Council); while what should have been a major source - the 1949 history by Adam Gowans Whyte - was only "a tired and uncritical chronology". The upshot of this saga is that, instead of arriving for the RPA's June I999 centenary conference, its centenary history has turned up more than four years later.

It's well worth the wait. For its 87 pages of appendices and notes alone, it deserves a place in every humanist library. Here we find a record of the seminal ideas, publications and authors of the 19th and 20th centuries, of interest not just to rationalists and their religious opponents, but to anyone interested in philosophy, theology and other disciplines. In the text Bill Cooke fleshes this out into an exciting history of ideas paralleling a turbulent political history.

The RPA achieved its aim to have a mass impact, not mass membership, as far away as Australasia. True rationalists won't be surprised to find reason constantly intermingled. with emotionalism and leading to different conclusions, especially in politics, economics, war and peace, among members. Nor will they marvel at the role of personalities in the leadership. Cooke pursues all these issues with clinical detachment and shrewd judgement. He identifies four broad controversies that have divided members over the years: (1) (religious) abolitionist versus substitutionist, or Bradlaugh v Holyoake, or secular life-stance versus religious humanism; (2) agnosticism or negative (implicit) atheism versus Positive (forthright) atheism; (3) concept of rationalism as a means versus an end; (4) head versus heart in approaching social problems.

There's little I can add to or subtract from this volume. I am, however, increasingly of the view that (4) is the most significant, as well as the most contentious, of these controversies and the main reason why 'rationalism' was quietly replaced by 'humanism' on the banner of freethought in the decade after WWII. While the author valiantly downplays it by noting a few counter-currents, there's a clear stream of what is now 'politically incorrect' opinion running through the RPA's early decades. It corresponds with William James's 'tough-minded' (versus 'tenderminded') personalities in the field of bioethics. I don't mean topics like abortion, where only Baroness Wootton came out as tenderminded., but a range of broadly related themes: social Darwinism, racism, anti-Semitism (not Hitlerian), eugenics and euthanasia.

Relying on the index, a casual reader might conclude that Cooke shirks this problem, as none of these tabu words appears there. In fact the index is more of names than of subjects, and I noted I8 pages where the problem was addressed. The great time divide in RPA (and world) attitudes resulted partly from new thinking in evolution and anthropology but significantly from the rise and fall of Nazism.

A few minor points remain. It's an overstatement to say that by 1890 the-secularist movement 'had largely petered out', though it was certainly in decline. The motive of three 'young Turks' wasn't just to unseat three aging non-executive RPA directors in 1965 but, once entrenched, to supplant Hector Hawton (rightly praised for his magnificent contribution) with one of their own (who seems to have disappeared from the scene). In asking why the American Prometheus Books 'has taken over the RPA's role as the principal publisher of rationalist and humanist material in the world', Bill Cooke correctly observes that 'the quality and consistency of Kurtz's leadership during that time is surely a significant factor'. One would like to know what the other factors are.

The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox: Mending the Gap between Science and the Humanities

by Stephen Jay Gould

Jonathan Cape, London 2003

Review, by Ken Wright

Readers of earlier Gould books such as The Panda's Thumb or Hens' Teeth and Horse's Toes might be led by the title to expect a collection of essays on natural history, with an emphasis on evolution; but it is the subtitle which accurately describes the nature of this work.

Gould's message is that the humanities - especially ethics, religion and aesthetics - deal with important issues that are not amenable to resolution by the methods of science. The sciences are concerned with things as they are, whilst the humanities consider how things ought to be. Since what ought to be cannot be deduced from what is, there cannot in logic be any basic conflict between science and the humanities. Because both types of discipline benefit humankind, practitioners on each side of the divide should respect and seek to interact positively with those on the other side.

Of course, the neat trick of eliminating conflict by force of definition can work in practice only if each of the parties accepts the limited sphere assigned to it by Gould. Unfortunately, protagonists of religion, in particular, have been notoriously unwilling to restrict their authority in this way.

Gould was of course perfectly familiar with the history of the conflict between science and religion. The book contains numerous references to Galileo and other examples of religious censorship. The author argues, however, that these happenings must be understood in their historical context. When modern science emerged in the seventeenth century, it had to assert its distinctive methods against the weight of traditional scholarship. Conflict was inevitable since 'big and established boys never cede turf voluntarily, and newcomers must be prepared for a scrappy fight'.

To show that religion was not especially inimical to the emergence of modern science, Gould draws attention to the parallel conflict between science and ancient learning. Renaissance scholars sought truth and wisdom through rediscovery of the classical Greek and Roman writings, and believed in the sufficiency of ancient knowledge. Pioneers of modern science, such as Nehemiah Grew (1641-1712) and John Ray (1627-1705) felt it necessary to attack the works of the 16th century Renaissance scholars Aldrovandi and Gesner, in order to assert the superiority of their own approach.

The big difference is, of course, that Aldrovandi and Gesner could not retaliate, whereas the Catholic Church could and did. (Amusingly, Gesner's work also suffered from the attentions of a Catholic censor. In Gesner's encyclopaedic compendium on four-footed beasts, the censor blotted out the author's name not only on the title page but wherever it occurred in the 1,104 pages of text.)

Gould's use of historical context to explain the seventeenth-century warfare of science and religion leaves unexplained the recent resurgence of Creationism. He seeks to minimise the significance of this phenomenon by pointing out that the majority of professional theologians now accept the fact of evolution.

The book consists of three parts. Part I, summarised above, recounts the emergence of modern science and the struggles of its pioneers against official theology and the weight of Renaissance humanistic scholarship. Part II opens with a general attack on the practice of dichotomisation and proceeds to make the case for reintegration of science and the humanities. Part III offers some examples of fruitful collaboration across the divide, and concludes with a lengthy refutation of reductionism in science.

As in all his writings, the author frequently delights the reader by providing unusual illustrations and surprising linkages across apparently unrelated phenomena. Sadly, he passed away in May 2002.

Thinking Together: Philosophical inquiry in the classroom

by Dr Phillip Cam

Primary English Teaching Association and Hale & Ironmonger, 1995

Review, by Ann Young

Of all the philosophy for children teaching texts this is the easiest to understand and implement. It is very clear and very practical. I propose that this be required reading for all of our Humanist educators. With this as the standard for the method of 'teaching' all we need add are some suitable children's stories to inspire discussion among our pupils.

The Tenth Good Thing about Barney (by Judith Viost, Collins, 1972), Hey, Little Ant by Phillip and Hannah Hoose, Tricycle Press, 1998 (from Prometheus), and The Philosophers' Club by Christopher Phillips, Tricycle Press, 2001 (from Prometheus) are titles that would be suitable. The Prometheus children's books are a bit too instructional to be ideal but are useful in other ways. Please let me know of any other children's stories that raise Humanist issues that could be added to our list of suggested readings.

Anybody interacting with children, not just teachers, should acquire Thinking Together. It shows how to listen to children, what kind of questions to ask them to make them think, and how to think logically. Read it and refer back to it.

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