Chaplaincy
practice or by people talking to you about religion, but it’s not the case at all. Yes there are religious people here but mostly they just sit and chat like everyone else and anyway, I tend to avoid the explicitly religious events. “The chaplaincy lets any charitable society use the upstairs space for meetings, which is great, so Bollocks to Poverty meets here once a week to campaign for tax justice. Being here allows us to approach other students and get them involved in our campaigns – it’s great for networking!” One of the laudable aims of chaplaincy is to generate understanding and tolerance between different faith groups, but it inadvertently makes those of no faith feel like outsiders. I spoke to Luke Hecht, who’s just been elected president of the University of Edinburgh Humanist Society. Luke, from Washington DC, is reading Evolutionary Biology, and he didn’t take long to confirm my intuitions. “Having a centre “For all faiths and none” run entirely by people of faith is a little uncomfortable, so we feel a bit out of place,” he told me. “We’re happy to cooperate over doing things like setting up a soup kitchen for example, and we’d do that, but really what
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students and I are fully aware of the ways in which we disagree, but we are able to cooperate, and I’m proud of what we’re doing. “I look at it this way.
Religion is a human invention and like all human invention it gets things wrong, but at its base, a religious community is helpful to people. Non- believers have trouble finding meaningful ways of connecting – we need to offer an alternative.” Changing the faith-based
we enjoy most is the free exchange of ideas in debate. “Just before the Society
Representatives Meeting there’s one called where people from different religious traditions sit around and talk about what they believe, but nobody criticises anyone, and I don’t feel I’ve got anything I can usefully contribute to that. At humanist meetings we’re very critical, and we argue passionately over the things on which we disagree. “As humanists we don’t
believe that all beliefs are equally valid – so debating them really is the only way to work out what we should do as a society, especially on issues like gay marriage for instance, or assisted suicide. But there’s a sense that if you criticise someone’s beliefs at a chaplaincy event, it could be taken as
a personal attack, and that makes it hard for us to get involved.”
Getting believers and non-believers together may be an uphill struggle in Edinburgh, but in Harvard it seems to be rather less of a problem. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans back in 2005, Greg Epstein and his humanist students spent their spring break working alongside people of faith to rebuild the shattered community. “We reached out to a social justice minded evangelical group who’d been doing some good work in New Orleans,” Epstein told me. “I don’t agree with all their motivation or all of their methods, but we learned a lot from them. We went into the project as equals, and it was a wonderful model. The
nature of the Chaplaincy Centre may be the key. As Luke Hecht said: “A humanist chaplain isn’t an oxymoron. I think it would make sense, and if there was a humanist chaplain here in Edinburgh we would feel more comfortable getting more involved. One thing we’d like to do within chaplaincy is set up a kind of workshop to have ethical discussions from a non-religious perspective. That way we could we can cooperate on things that matter, while at the same time agreeing to disagree”. “As society becomes ever
more secular, people think chaplaincy’s kind of uncool”, says Kirsty Haigh. “But when they come here, they think it’s the coolest place ever! There’s a real sense of community because it’s like nowhere else. It’s a hidden gem”. l
www.humanism-scotland.org.uk
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