Good afternoon everyone. My name is Alan Montgomery. I’m a director of a computer software company. I’m also a humanist. I’ve not done this before, so please excuse the notes.

Humanism is not a religion. But like many religions it is a way of thinking about life, about people and about the universe. It’s also a life stance that helps us decide moral questions like ethics and justice. We think about these issues using human reason, so Humanists are rationalists. (Mostly, humanists can fall in love too.)

• superstition, supernaturalism, pseudoscience, dogmatic/fundamentalist religions.

Humanists tend to be atheists or agnostics. Do you know what these are? Atheist means without a belief in God and agnostic means uncertain about whether there is a god -- a don’t know position. There are no laws in humanism about what people believe. Some religious people do not believe in God, Quakers or Buddhists perhaps.

Terry Pratchett, Philip Pullman, Richard Dawkins, Polly Toynbee, .....

Let me tell you my story. I was born in N Ireland. Everyone there believed in religion, even the same religion - Christianity. Unfortunately there were two different Christian sects, Roman Catholics and Protestants. Do you think they got on well together?

(well the argument is over more than just religion).

I grew up being told about god and Jesus. I went to Sunday school and won prizes for bible study. We sang hymns at church and school, and I do remember wondering what sort of a person this god was if he wanted to listen to all that stuff; our own church choir was bad enough (my Dad sang the tenor part - so he said, to us it was just the wrong tune - very loudly, much to the family’s embarrassment). I felt sorry for poor old god having to listen to thousands of churches alls singing and praying, and sometimes all at once? I did think it a bit odd. I also wondered whether I actually like the kind of person who wanted all this worship.

My parents had also told us about Father Christmas. Does anyone here believe in Father Christmas? How did you discover he was not real? I remember my horror when my older brother and sister showed me the Christmas presents hidden under the bed – my parents had told a lie! And I remember thinking then that if Father Christmas didn’t exist, maybe Jesus and god didn’t either.

But it was hard to be an unbeliever in N Ireland, everyone there claims some sort of religion. I went to confirmation classes, partly because I fancied a girl there, and took communion. Do you all know what confirmation and communion mean? What?

I can remember at my first communion I felt really emotional. Hairs were standing up on the back of my neck. Surely this religious experience meant it must be real!

Soon after that I went away to university. At first I continued to go to church, but despite the prettier girls at the Methodist church, I gradually stopped going. I worried a lot about why a just all-powerful god allowed evil to happen. (John F Kennedy was shot during my first term in Oxford. (Since you ask, I was walking down Cornmarket and saw it on a newspaper billboard.) At Oxford no one cared what religion you were, and I soon found out that many other intelligent, thinking people didn’t believe in any god.

One day I just decided I didn’t believe it. I waited to be struck down by lightening or something, but nothing happened. Then I felt enormous relief: this life is what matters, and it is up to me to make the best of it. Without me being aware of it religion had been an enormous burden, constantly telling me I wasn’t perfect, and threatening eternal damnation.

I discovered that there were many people at Oxford did not believe in or care about religion, but the cared deeply about moral and social issues. So I joined the Oxford University Humanists.

I remember going to court because I was a witness in some motoring accident case. I said I didn’t want to take the oath on the bible, but wanted to affirm. No problem!

But I did become a martyr for Humanism. What is a martyr? OK, well I didn’t have to die for Humanism, obviously.

Anyone here a scout or guide? Well I’d been a cub, a Scout, a Rover Scout, and I became a Queen’s Scout. I feel really grateful to Scouting because it provided so may fists – Cam provided my first stay away from my parents; it also provide my first trip outside Ireland. I still rely on knots I learned when climbing onto the roof of my house to repair it, and I can fell dead trees in my garden using skills learned for my Foresters Badge. So I felt I should put something back and help others to experience scouting, by training to be a Scout leader.

Who remembers their Scout or Guide Promise? Together with a group of friends from the Oxford University Scout and Guide Group I went through all the training to be a Scout Leader at Boars Hill Scout Camp. We were just ready to be given our certificates by the Oxford County Commissioner for Scouts, and each was asked to renew his or her promise. I still remember standing before the Commissioner and being asked to renew my promise including to "do my duty to God". I remembered the court case, and said, "Can I affirm?" The man exploded.

He ranted on that as an atheist I was not fit to be near young people. He would make sure I never worked with scouts again. I tried to reason that my Humanist position was probably more compatible with Christianity than Hindus (with elephant head gods and holy cows) or Buddhists (whose promise refers to their Karma which is not a god) but he was not interested.

I don’t remember whether I was actually stripped of my scarf and beret, but I was certainly made to feel humiliated in front of my peers, and turfed out of the Scout Camp. I like to think it was Scouting’s loss. I started training to be a youth leader in Oxford City, and ran two youth clubs in Headington.

The reasons for being an atheist are many. Can you think of any?.

1) If God is supposed to be the origin of everything– where did God come from?

2) If God is all good, totally benevolent, then why are human beings, who are supposed to be in its image, often so far from good and benevolent? Look at the way human beings often behave and why do they behave like this if they are created by an all-good creature? Some would say there is a force of evil as well as good in the universe. But where did that come from?

3) If God created the earth and all that is in it, why does it seem to be so badly constructed, with earthquakes, floods, fires etc.

4) Many religious people claim that their belief in God or an offshoot of god, Jesus, comes from personal experience. They must be experiencing something, and I have experienced that too. I know that I get a "spiritual" experience when I first see a beautiful scene, or hear Beethoven’s ninth symphony. Some people seem to interpret this as evidence of God. I would like to seek other explanations first.

Clearly humanists do not believe in the power of prayer or in the afterlife. Some people claim to have a memory of a previous life – but their accounts, perhaps at the court of an Egyptian king, are not very convincing. To me when I die, I am like a pile of compost and I decompose and my molecules become a part of the universe. I am not afraid of death, since once I am dead there will be nothing left of me to feel pain or anguish. It follows that I do not believe in heaven or hell.

Humanists are sceptical about the possibility of a supernatural or superstitious element. This includes astrology, telepathy, spiritualism, supernatural bending of spoons. It is clear from what magicians can do that many of these phenomena can be fabricated. However humanists would look at the evidence and if the evidence became convincing they might be prepared to change their minds..

For humanists there is no one book – the bible or the Koran – which is taken as the reliable teaching; nor is there any teacher or guru with all the answers. This does not mean that the religious texts are not worth reading, they have much literary and historical value and some valuable ethical teaching. (Some pretty bad teaching in the old Testament in my view.) But I think that some of the ethical teaching – the teaching about right and wrong – of Jesus are worth paying attention to.

Stalin was an atheist and he was not a humanist. Humanists believe in the importance of human values -- of a need for morality.

Humanists do not set out a list of dos and don’ts. They prefer to look at general principles which have to be worked out in particular situations. One of the general principles is known as the Golden Rule and goes back to the ancient Greeks.

Who know what is the golden rule? It is Do unto others as you would they would do unto you. Or put the other way round Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you.

We need general principles and the ability to work them out in our own lives. Two aspects of morality are very important – think of the consequences of what you do. In deciding what to do the outcome is so important. If you are in such a rage that cannot think of the consequences of your actions then you may regret what you do. Important also in this process is the ability to have sympathy and empathy with other people.

We need morality because we live in society. If we lived alone on a desert island there would be no need to follow moral principles. Except some people might say we have responsibility towards the natural and animal life on the island. A simple rule which we all follow is to stop when traffic lights are red. It is convenient for all of us. But is it therefore not wrong to cross at night when no one else is around?

In one situation an action may be wrong while in another the same action may be right. It may be wrong to kill someone in the street, but right to kill someone in a war. You could argue about this.

At Oxford I studied Science, mainly physics. Humanists place some importance on science as a means of understanding the world. I would prefer a clinically tested vaccination against flu to any number of prayers. I prefer to rely on engineering and aerodynamics, rather than "a wing and a prayer" when I am in an aeroplane. It is the method of scientific enquiry that is important: the results will change in time, but not the method. Science is a process of looking at evidence, of experimenting, of seeking patterns and making predictions based on these, then testing the results and of having your results looked at by other scientists.

Humanism is not new. You can find humanist ideas in the writings of the ancient Indian scripture, the Upanisads, where the concept of atheism is found. In the thoughts of the ancients Greek philosophers there are many humanist ideas. In particular I like the question and answer process of Socrates as a way of arriving at the truth of ideas. Further development of humanism took place in the renaissance and the age of enlightenment, where I could mention the writers Voltaire and Diderot. Then humanism becomes part of mainstream thinking in the nineteenth and twentieth century.

There are humanist organisations which undertake campaigning and mutual support for humanists in particular the British Humanist Society and the National Secular Society. There are also local humanist groups – for instance in Guildford, Farnham and Southampton. There is also a federation of student humanist groups. I should emphasis that it is not necessary to belong to a group. Some people like to campaign and to meet like-minded people – but millions of people go about their lives in a humanist way without being attached to a humanist group at all.

Recently there was a very successful series of ads displayed on buses. It read: There is probably no God so get on and enjoy life. This was very successful with its aim of getting people to think about life. But remember humanism is not an evangelical movement – I have no wish to go around trying to convert people to humanism merely to offer ideas which people can think and debate about.

One more political campaign is against faith schools. As you know there are faith schools, mainly Anglican and Catholic, but a few Muslim and Hindu. The reason for criticising this is that we think it is better for children to grow seeing a variety of religions and non-religious attitudes around them. We also dislike the tendency to indoctrinate. A few Christian Academies teach creationism rather than evolution. I am also not happy about the law which says that there should be regular Christian worship in state schools.

We would like to see something about humanism taught in schools. It seem right that there should be this option in schools – especially as maybe half the pupils will hold views of a broadly humanist kind.

We would like chaplains in hospitals and prisons to be paid for by the religion and not by the tax payer. We would also like the possible of a humanist chaplain for the sick and the imprisoned.

There is quite a demand for non-religious humanists and weddings - so we conduct these where requested.

Humanists have been involved in particular campaigns during the last 50 years particularly relating to sexual freedom and personal responsibility. These include gay and lesbian rights, the right to choose an abortion and the responsibility of using condoms.

What do humanists think about the environment and climate change? We believe that the whole issue should be looked at scientifically. Many humanists are active in organisations such as Friends of the Earth and Green Peace. Personally I think the human race will suffer for doing too little too late in this field.

I don’t believe humanists are always happy jolly campaigners. In fact life can be hard and we can encounter pain and suffering and depression. We have each other’s support, but no divine comfort.

It is up to us to create the meaning we have in life – because ultimately we live in a random universe. Like all humans can take inspiration from nature and music, drama and so on.

Alan Montgomery,

Based on material Jim Herrick and Jenny Johnson.