My oldest brother was assigned to visit the vicar in advance of the ceremony. We were atheists who had no idea what normally happened at vicar-led funerals in crematoria. Would we have to sing hymns? We hoped not but, in case we did, I suggested Jerusalem because I’d once heard Dad — a great music lover — say he quite liked it.

The funeral, as it turned out, was horrible. In a monotonous voice, the vicar raced through the minimal notes he’d taken about Dad from my brother: where he was from, who his family were, what he liked doing his spare time. He got one place name wrong. Never mind — it was only the place where my Dad loved walking and where his ashes would be scattered. There were no hymns and just one prayer, if I recall correctly. Then there was a bit of twaddle about eternal life as my Dad — an atheist with no hope of resurrection — was “popped in the oven”, as the Rev Ed Tomlinson puts it. (More of him in a moment).

I came away from my father’s funeral feeling flat and vaguely betrayed. Was that it? I was embarrassed for those of  his friends — his former work colleagues, now retired — who’d given up their time and travelled some distance because they wanted to show us — Dad’s family — how that they had liked and respected him and to say their goodbyes. And this was the miserable send-off we’d given him! I won’t dwell on the abysmal failure of that particular rite of passage to fulfil the emotional needs of the bereaved as expected of such occasions; suffice to say I carried the bitterness of my regret for 14 years, until my mother’s funeral provided an opportunity to make things right, at least in my mind.

The Rev Ed Tomlinson, vicar of St Barnabas’s Church in Tunbridge Wells, recently launched a rather unseemly attack on humanists and their funerals. I don’t think Mr Tomlinson would have approved of my father’s funeral, even though it was conducted by a vicar, rather than by one of the humanists he disdains. No, to be “sincerely Christian in character” funerals should be theatrical occasions full of music, ritual and mumbo jumbo, it seems. The pop song chosen by the bereaved because it meant something to the deceased and means something to them has no place in a funeral, whereas the “gorgeous liturgy of the Requiem Mass” does have a place even if the deceased hated it. It’s not the bereaved people’s feelings that matter here. Of course it isn’t.

Mourners who chose a non-religious ceremony were conned by “humanists” making money from death. “I am not the one who suffers,” he said. “Along with my fellow Christians, I will still have the gorgeous liturgy of the Requiem Mass to look forward to. Whereas the best our secularist friends (and those they dupe) can hope for is a poem from nan combined with a saccharine message from a pop star before being popped in the oven with no hope of resurrection.”

The risible comment about humanists “making money from death” is a charge he repeats in a second post here, in which he says,

I am not, like the humanist, running a business and seeking financial gain from funerals. Rather I was and am ordained for the advancement of God’s kingdom on earth.

Post proof or retract, bitch! Yes, humanists do get paid for conducting funerals and so do vicars. Unlike vicars, however, humanist celebrants do not receive a salary and lodgings, etc, from their employer though they may pay a levy to their humanist organisation, if they belong to one. If Mr Tomlinson waives his fee — as one might infer from all that ‘financial gain v advancing God’s kingdom’ stuff — then he’s the exception, rather than the rule. In any event, for the amount of work that goes into a typical humanist funeral ceremony, humanists receive meagre recompense. It is not the thought of financial gain that inspires people to become humanist celebrants. They do have to eat, though.

The suggestion that people are being “duped” by secularists is screamingly funny coming from a peddlar of religion, of course.

Having attended a number of religious funerals — and many more humanist ones — I am satisfied that one of the better decisions I have made in my life was, on the death my mother, to ensure that she didn’t fall into the hands of any religious clergy and to conduct her funeral myself using the humanist model. The music I chose and the words I spoke before commiting her body for cremation reflected her bereaved family’s feeling about her. The centrepiece of the ceremony was a tribute to her life that celebrated the vibrant person she was. It included a poem from her youngest grandaughter. And, because I was running the show, I took the opportunity to make reparation to my father’s memory for the betrayal that was his funeral, saying:

Thinking about her led me to also think about my father, Bill, and that I should include him in today’s tribute. I never felt the eulogy delivered at his funeral did justice to such a decent and such an accomplished man.

So I made the eulogy at my mother’s funeral about each of them and about both of them and the life they shared together. Thus, he too finally received a tribute that befitted him and properly expressed our feelings for him. That it took place 14 years after that production-line vicar’s ceremony means I can only imagine how my experience of bereavement at that time would have been helped, had he had a humanist funeral instead of one that Mr Tomlinson might reasonably describe as insincerely Christian in character.

In fairness, Tomlinson’s bugbear isn’t so much that more and more people are wanting to have less and less religious content in the funerals they arrange — though that obviously bothers him a lot too (snigger). It’s more that cultural Christians are still showing deference to religion by asking for vicars and then expecting them to conduct what are essentially non-religious funerals. On that I am in total agreement with him.

People who are attracted by the idea of a funeral ceremony totally unfettered by the dead hand of religion might like to check out the ceremomines information on the website of the British Humanist Association who today issued a press release in response to Mr Tomlinson’s rantings. Tana Wollen, BHA Head of Ceremonies, said,

Committing the dead to a god or gods that you don’t believe exists or sending them off to an after-life you believe is fictional, even with the accompaniment of a sonorous liturgy, doesn’t feel right. Humanists hold that we have just one life: this one. A humanist funeral which pays tribute to how someone has lived, to what they have done for themselves and for others, with music and words particularly fitting to them can be a joyous occasion.

OK, that was my bit to publicise the BHA. My absolute favourite response to the vicar’s hissy fit comes from another clergyman: none other than the Rev David Robertson of the fanatical Free Church of Scotland who, beneath Ed Tomlinson’s second post, comments:

Ed, Ed, Ed,

What business is it of yours what music is played at funerals? You’re just there to go through the motions. Who really wants the commemoration of their death to be marred by the tuneless caterwauling of the elderly adherents of some ghastly Middle-Eastern death cult, anyway? People have priests at these things only for the sake of tradition. You religion is not relevent anymore, nor are your opinions.

Amen. Well said, David.

When has prayer ever even seemed to work? For every prayer that has ‘worked’, there are a billion more that get ignored, so anyone thinking of sharing an account of how a prayer has worked for them can think again unless they can also share an answer as to why they don’t work for everyone. And by ‘work’, I don’t just mean made someone feel better or more positive about whatever their problem was or made something happen that can easily be attributed to causes other than prayer. I’m talking about intercessory prayer: prayers that saved a dying child’s life, for example.

This isn’t a trick question. I don’t mind admitting that no anecdotal evidence will convince me that prayer has saved the life of a single creature in the history of the universe, however miraculous a recovery was made and however much the recovery may have mystified doctors. My point is that stories of such recoveries are extremely rare, if they happen at all. It’s not as if the media are full of them, nor is it the case that most religious people shun orthodox medicine in favour of prayer — mais non! they see it as supplement, surely? A complementary therapy, so to speak. So where on Earth did the Neumanns get the idea that it might work for their child?

Dale Neumann describes himself as someone who partied hard and drank until he found Jesus. Was it finding Jesus, then, that lead him to kill his daughter? It seems so.

If I in a moment of crisis and in a moment of time, I went to anyone else but the Lord, it would not have been favorable to God,” Dale Neumann said. “It would have been idolatry and sin because it is disobedience.”

I use the word ‘kill’ deliberately because both the Neumanns have been convicted of second degree reckless homicide and, as it happens, I think this conviction is justified simply because they didn’t plead insanity and, in spite of reportedly once burning library books “because the Holy Spirit told him to” and calling a prayer meeting instead of an ambulance for his daughter, Dale Neumann had not been sectioned (or whatever the US equivalent is). The Neumanns reportedly gave the appearance of being a normal American Christian family and Dale has reportedly said that he wouldn’t do anything differently should another of his kids get sick. Note the word ‘reportedly’ — I’m having trouble believing everything I read about this couple and I am open to correction. But if it is all true and if their delusions are not deemed to be symptomatic of mental illness, then they are guilty as charged.

For pity’s sake — they didn’t grow up in some isolated primitive tribe so if they are not insane then what excuse have they got?

That said, growing up in the most powerful industrialised nation in the world, they will undoubtedly have encountered some pretty primitive and outlandish ideas about a dysfunctional paternalistic creator god who sent his only begotten son (who was really himself, you understand) on a suicide mission to this planet because we earthlings turned out to be no better than he made us in the first place. If you are going to indoctrinate people from birth to believe in bizarre myths and a load of other stuff about an omniscient, omnipotent and altogether improbable god, then it’s perhaps not surprising that someone somewhere takes it seriously.

Gloria Thomas and Kara Neumann both died because their parents disregarded reason and evidence in favour of superstition.

There’s a moral there somewhere.

In spite of all those years of activism, I only became aware of Adam Deen for the first time last week when, in the tradition of religious crusaders throughout history, he struck a blow for the god of his rather limited imagination by spamming a bunch of secular internet boards, posting links to youtube videos of himself and running away.

The boards include Atheist Forums, Raving Atheists and the very civilised Think Humanism, where he was welcomed and an attempt to engage him in discussion was made but to no avail. For this reason, I am dedicating this post to him. I am delighted to give him the publicity. He deserves it.

No doubt, there are people who are perfectly entitled to call themselves Muslim intellectuals but, having now watched a couple of Adam Deen’s videos, I can affirm that he is not one of them. A philosophy undergraduate at Birkbeck, the guy frequently has trouble articulating a coherent sentence and there’s many a twelve-year-old that can refute his muddled arguments. These, for the most part, are the same tired old arguments theists always come up with.

Take the one about morality, for instance. Adam says,

God is the best explanation of objective moral truths. My argument here is that if God does not exist then objective moral truths do not exist.

He goes on to say that objective moral truths are ones that are “valid and binding” regardless of our beliefs and opinions. So far this argument is identical to that presented by some Christians. In fact it could have been lifted straight from the debate between Christian philosopher William Lane Craig and Christopher Hitchens.

Assuming these religionists are correct and objective moral truths do come from God, what Adam fails to tell us is how we can know what these are. This, presumably, is where Muslims and Christians part company. A young Christian I heard speaking at a debate organised by the Central London Humanist group last week said that for the source of morality we have to go back to the Bible. Somehow, I doubt whether Adam Deen would agree with that. But if we substituted the Bible with the Qu’ran, he might get on board. From a Muslim’s perspective, Muslim objective morality beats Christian objective morality hands down, I should imagine. And vice versa, of course.

But, seriously, if God’s word, as recorded in whichever scriptures, is the source of objective moral truth, how does Adam Deen account for the fact that some Muslims fly planes into buildings in the name of the same God that he claims is the source of objective morality, while others — including Adam himself — proclaim such actions to be morally wrong?

The answer is that he doesn’t, he can’t and he will go to shameful lengths to avoid admitting it. At the end of this video of a debate hosted by Bradford University’s Islamic Society, Brian Layfield of West Yorkshire Humanists reminds Adam that humanists don’t fly planes into skyscrapers. Adam’s response has to be heard to be believed:

Well in the atheistic view there’s nothing wrong with that because they haven’t demonstrated that objective moral truths exist in the absence of God.

This  labyrinthine piece of reasoning was greeted with enthusiastic cheers and applause from the audience.

His argument — for want of a better word — might be a bit more persuasive if it had in fact been atheists who flew those planes into the twin towers. But I know, Adam Deen knows and even the cheering fuckwits of the Bradford University Islamic Society know that atheists weren’t responsible for 9/11. Muslims were. Muslims who get their morality from the same source as them.

Because if the 9/11 bombers, the 7/7 bombers and anyone else who has screamed Allah Akbar before blowing countless innocent bodies plus their own to bits, don’t get their morals from the Qu’ran, where do they get them from? At the CLH meeting I mentioned earlier, the Muslim on the panel answered this question before it was even asked. With reassuring predictability he dismissed the various “misinterpretations” of God’s word as if they don’t matter. But they do matter because, for one thing, these “misinterpretations” provide horrible men like Geert Wilders with an excuse to make nasty films like Fitna, which depicts Muslims “misinterpreting” the Qu’ran and becoming murdering savages.

For another thing, if supposedly objective moral truths are open to different interpretations even by those who agree on their source (whether that be the Qu’ran, the Bible or anywhere else) then those objective moral truths aren’t a lot of use, frankly.

Alas, Adam, in your attempt to demonstrate that God is the source of objective moral truths, you have succeeded only in highlighting that the Qu’ran is just as useless as the Bible or any other religious book when it comes to determining what is best for humankind. (For that, surely, is the function of an objective system of morality.) If the God you worship is omnipotent, he has no excuses. He should have spelled his moral truths out so they were obvious to everyone with no room for misinterpretation.

Anyway, are these moral truths moral because they are commanded by God or are they commanded by God because they are moral? Adam doesn’t tell us.

Come to think of it, not only has Adam not demonstrated that God is the source of objective morality, he has also failed to prove that objective moral truths even exist. The case he makes for them goes like this:

Deep down we know they exist. We know these things are objectively morally wrong.

*sigh* Feelings about right and wrong demonstrate only that human beings have evolved a sense of right and wrong. Perhaps we are the only members of the animal kingdom to have done so, though this is arguable. (One of Adam Deen’s silliest arguments concerns the “lack of a moral paradigm” in the animal kingdom but whatever point he’s making gets lost in a muddle of contradictions.) But “knowing deep down” things are right or wrong doesn’t tell us anything about objective moral truths and to suggest otherwise is extremely dangerous because it leads to discrimination and oppression, misogyny and homophobia. There’s a clue in there as to how so much hateful, violent stuff got enshrined in the scriptures in the first place.

If God is really the source of morality then God help us! To quote Richard Dawkins:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

Judging from the behaviour of some Muslims — those who fly planes into skyscrapers in the name of Allah, for example — I’d wager the God of the Qu’ran is no better.

One more quote from Adam,

It is hard to see how, in the absence of God, morals can be anything more than subjective expressions of personal taste.

No, Adam, it may be hard for you to see that but for those of us whose ability to reason hasn’t been diminished by years of indoctrination into one religion or another, it isn’t at all hard. For those of us who see the function of morality not as a passport to Paradise but as a means to determine how to live and behave for the good for humanity, for the planet and for the rest of the animal kingdom in this, the only life we can possibly know that we have, it is very easy indeed to see morals as something more than a matter of  “personal taste”.

The best explanation for any of the sacred texts is that they are a product, not of any supernatural transcendent being, but of the “deep down” feelings and prejudices of men of a bygone era (and, given the cruelty and violence contained in the holy books, a bygone era is where those prejudices should have stayed). If religionists want to claim these are the word of God, the burden of proof is on them and they should address the Euthyphro dilemma while they’re about it.

Gods worshipped by Muslims or Christians are no better candidates for the source of moral truths than the gods of the Greeks or the Romans or the Vikings and the existence of objective moral truths neither prove nor disprove the existence of any of these or of the thousands of other gods that humans have worshipped since time began.

My own conclusion — apart from that Adam needs to do a lot of work on his critical thinking skills — is that there are two possibilities:

Either there are no objective moral truths, therefore human beings have to decide what is right or wrong. Or there there are moral truths but human beings can’t agree on what they are, so we have to decide what is right or wrong.

Either way, the result is the same. Human beings have to decide.

Some recommended websites:

Council of ex-Muslims
IslamWatch
Apostates of Islam