Thanks for the welcome. I’ll try to make the visits worthwhile. I read your comments, Jack, and I found echoes of your views in a previous blog. You are implying that those with a ‘naturalist’ world outlook are intolerant of those who don’t share the view. I’m not sure that’s true. (By the way, Daniel Dennett who founded the Brights uses the word ‘naturalist’ which is OK but reminds me too much of nudists; I prefer to use the word ‘materialist’, although I think we use the words in an identical sense).

There’s nothing wrong with being forceful in pushing your ideas and arguments. ‘Tolerance’ per se is not a good method in a polemical or debating environment. You have your point of view, your arguments, your facts and figures and you go for it. You want to convince the other person. Having said that, I work and associate (as we all do) with Moslems, Christians and people of other faiths and I am not intolerant of them in my day to day work. In most cases I respect them professionally and I get on with them personally. If I was to debate with them, however, I would not be inclined to water-down or adapt my opinions so ‘meet them half way’ as it were. I don’t think that makes me intolerant. It just means I’m fairly convinced of my ideas.

Looking around the world today I see the greatest intolerance coming from religious people – those who think women ought to wear a headscarf (and are beaten in the streets of Tehran if they don’t), those who think it should not be permitted for gay people to form legally binding partnerships or adopt children, those who think it oughtn’t to be allowed to drive cars on the Sabbath (so they throw stones at them), etc, etc. Think of these and many, many other cases and then think about, say, a campaign to make schools secular…a campaign to outlaw the teaching of religion in schools. Are these two ‘intolerances’ equivalent to each other? I don’t think so. I have no objection to anyone practising their religion in the privacy of their own home or temple (although certain religious practices could be banned, like female circumcision, animal sacrifice, child abuse) but I do not think that in civil society that religion should have any influence – by civil society I mean the legal system, local, regional and national government, the health system and in education. Religion has no part in these public functions.

I don’t think that is being ‘intolerant’ any more than it is intolerant to deny fascists the ‘right’ to intimidate and harass black people. Let’s have a civil society built on the principles of secularism, non-religious ‘neutrality’ as it were. Let religious people follows their practices at home and in their temples. What’s wrong with that?

So. My first blog. Thanks, Jack, for setting it up for me. I’ll try to use it regularly.

 I thought I might base my first blog on one of the themes I will come to from time to time. I would like to promote a materialist view of existance among as many people as I can. I would strongly recomment the ‘Brights’ website. Daniel Dennett, an American philosopher, came up with the idea of giving materialists a title or a handle that would distinguish them from religious and spiritual people.

Homosexual people adopted the word ‘gay’ successfully so that it has become the word people use to describe their life-style. It’s a good word, happy and positive and it has fulfilled an important purpose in its new role. Daniel Dennett wanted to find a similar word that was equally positive that could be used by atheistic materialists, people who didn’t believe in ghosts, goblins or gods. ‘Brights’ seems a suitable word. The brights have a ‘network’ that now included tens of thousands of people all over the world. It doesn’t involve ‘joining’ anything, but it’s nice to think that this is a growing group. During the last national census it was reported that many people write ‘Jedi’ under the ‘religion’ heading. I would like to think that in the next census ‘Bright’ is an answer written in by large numbers of people.