Faith, beliefs and values

My mother’s parents were the only Jewish family in the small town of Orroroo, about 250 km north from the nearest synagogue in Adelaide. They were closer to secular humanists than observant Jews. Their oldest 4 or 5 children had bar or bat mitzvahs, but my mother, the second youngest of 10, and the 4 or 5 siblings nearest her age didn’t.  Only one selected a Jewish marital partner and none of their descendants are practising or conforming Jews.  My maternal grandfather ran the general store and was a notable figure in Orroroo, where he had what is still the grandest house. When they were children, my mother and several siblings attended Sunday School at the Methodist church in Orroroo.  In her middle age she was baptized and confirmed into the Church of England, formally adopting the religion of the Anglican boys’ college that my brother Peter and I attended, both of us on scholarships. For the rest of her life, she participated in Anglican church services and regularly took communion. 

When my father was a child, he and his parents attended a Baptist church but he abandoned Christianity in early adult life and was agnostic or atheist in all the years I knew him. He was opinionated and intolerant but I never heard him speak ill of anyone solely on the basis of their religious beliefs.  He was able to accept the fact that other people held firm spiritual faiths and beliefs that mattered to them.

As a child I was baptized and in early adolescence confirmed as a member of the Church of England, but even at the time of my confirmation when I was in my early teens I had begun to question the creed I was obliged to recite in chapel at school and at church on Sundays. By my late teens my skepticism about the basic tenets of Christian belief – the trinity, virgin birth of Jesus, life everlasting, heaven and hell, resurrection, the bread and wine that we consumed symbolizing the body and blood of Christ – had evolved into outright disbelief.  I went through the motions, attended church occasionally. By the time our 3 children were born I had stopped attending church.  Mere attendance, I decided, was hypocrisy, and therefore unacceptable. Instead I abided by Polonius’s advice to Laertes:

      “This above all, to thine own self be true, and it must follow as the night the day thou canst not then be false to any man.”   

In contrast to me, my brother Peter is a devout Christian. I find it curious and interesting that we two brothers, three years apart in age and with identical upbringing, should have evolved such different spiritual beliefs. We differ in scientific beliefs too: I, having carefully studied the scientific evidence on human action as the main cause of climate change, believe it. Peter, relying on what he reads in newspapers, does not.

Throughout the 60 years since I rejected Christianity I have upheld values common to most religious beliefs, at least in theory: honesty, integrity, empathy, compassion, tolerance. Under Wendy’s gentle influence and my own conscience, my adherence to these values has strengthened throughout my life. I’ve observed, sometimes with disgust, that devout believers, whether Jewish, Christian, or Moslem, do not necessarily possess these values or practise what their religion preaches. 

The tolerance that most religions preach is the opposite of the behaviour that some members of particular faiths exhibit towards those who hold different religious beliefs.  Violent, often murderous intolerance has occurred throughout history, punctuated by genocides, pogroms, the inquisition, the Thirty Years War, Hindu and Moslem bloodbaths in India at the time of Partition in 1947, catholic-protestant ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, Serbian-Croatian-Bosnian warfare in the former Yugoslavia, Sunni-Shia conflicts in Iraq, and innumerable other bloody conflicts fought in the name of clashing religious beliefs.

Wendy remained Christian (Anglican) for most of her life, attended church, took communion, and did some of her altruistic volunteer work under the auspices of St Mathias church in the suburb where we lived when we arrived in Ottawa in late 1969. In the last 10-15 years of her life, she became disillusioned by the hypocrisy of some members of the church to which she belonged throughout our time in Ottawa. She stopped attending church in the early 1990s, but remained in the Family Life group for social reasons, increased her commitment of time and energy to volunteer activities, and was recognized for her exemplary work when she received the Governor General’s Caring Canadian Award. By the time she fell ill with the motor neuron disease (ALS) that took her life, she had lost her faith, wanted no words of comfort or funeral service from the Anglican church of Canada.  Over the course of our 55 years together we drew closer together, ultimately became almost identical in values and beliefs. She transmitted her empathy, altruism and kindness to strangers to me, I transmitted my skepticism and disbelief to her.

Of our three children, only David has some spiritual sensibility. As far as I can tell Rebecca and Jonathan have no religious beliefs. David’s first wife was Roman Catholic and David converted to Catholicism at her request. Two of their three children were confirmed into the Catholic church; but the family started attending the Anglican Church when Christina and Peter were old enough to ask unanswerable questions about the sex abuse scandals affecting the Catholic church.  David’s second wife is Jewish, and he has been exploring Judaism since he entered that marriage; but I think his interest is more intellectual than spiritual, as it is also for his youngest son, my grandson and namesake John Last Junior: he is now in his third year of a combined religious studies and early modern history honours degree at Kings College, Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia; he is spending his third year at Bogazici University in Istanbul, learning Arabic and Turkish, aiming ultimately to become an expert on the Middle East; his religious studies are part of his interest in the Middle East, rather than an indication of religious beliefs. He is as interested in the gods and goddesses of Classical Greece and Rome and the Hindu gods as he is in modern mainstream monotheist religions. In an email (Nov 7, 2013) John wrote:

Though my interest in religion is still primarily intellectual, that is something I do want to change, as I am interested in the spiritual aspect of Christianity as found in the practice of the liturgy and the philosophy of Christian life, not to mention Christian mysticism which was regrettably excised from the faith by the prudes of the Protestant reformation (fortunately Anglicans, without developing or encouraging this strand of belief in any way, have left the door propped open with their latent Catholicism). I am still interested in studying all religions to find their common validity in the genuine expression of human faith, but if I were to specialize these days (as I'm coming to the end of a degree it's something I should keep in mind), I think I would focus on Christology, neo-Platonism and Christian philosophy, or the Church of the East, though further study in Hinduism is pretty tempting (just because of the vastness of the field and the satisfyingly orientalist undertones of studying eastern religion). 

This is a fascinating statement and I regret that I don’t have enough remaining years of life to observe for long how John’s spiritual journey will evolve.

  

David’s other two children, Christina (now Charles) and Peter, are agnostic or atheist I think; my grandson Peter seems to be, like me, a committed atheist.   I don’t know whether Peter’s partner Sylvie, or John’s partner Emily, adhere to any religious faith.  My limited acquaintance with them suggests that if they hold spiritual or religious beliefs, these are a minor feature of their lives.

Most humans appear to have a need for belief in some sort of power greater than their own free will, whether individually or collectively. People in all societies throughout history have expressed a need for someone or something to worship, to set rules and standards of behavior. Even those of us like myself who are committed atheists must have codes of conduct, rules of behavior to which we adhere, if we are to function harmoniously in human society. These codes and rules may be constructed by ourselves, or like mine, derived in part or entirely from precepts of someone else who acts as a moral compass. Although I rejected the absurdities of Christian faith I believe I have a strong and effective moral compass, partly derived from values that are integral to our culture and traditions, partly from empathy I owe largely to Wendy’s gentle influence, perhaps partly hard wired into my brain. (I've commented before on the mutability of values in our culture, and will have more to say in a future post). There is no place in my belief system for hypocrisy that I have observed in others who claim to be devout Christians. It’s a good combination that has served me well and enabled me to do some good for others too. I am content with this.

When the CIOMS Working Group was meeting in Geneva to revise guidelines for ethical conduct of human experiments and developing guidelines for ethical conduct of epidemiological studies I met and got to know representatives of all the world's major faith groups. I took part in some fascinating conversations with Hindu, Buddhist, Moslem, Jewish and Christian scholars. Specific proscriptions and customs like avoidance of pork and circumcision (or not) of boys didn't arise in the context of our work on ethical conduct. I think the only failure to reach consensus was the question of when a foetus becomes a person: at fertilization among Jesuits, at 'ensoulment' (when foetal movements are detected) among Moslems, and this is rarely an issue in medical research. Otherwise ethics and human values are virtually identical in all the major faiths, and among atheists too.

It doesn't matter whether you're Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Wiccan, Agnostic, Atheist, or all or none of the above. What matters is to have Aristotle's virtues and Shakespeare's values. It's hard to go far wrong with these.