Religion and anti-religion : matter and anti-matter?

Do the religious, the non-religious and the anti-religious annihilate each other, like matter and anti-matter? Or can they work fruitfully together to common ends?

My experience says they can work together.

Yesterday morning - sunny but cool - I took the Piccadilly Line from King’s Cross to Holborn, bought a latte in the Costa at the corner of High Holborn and Southampton Row, dodged the London traffic and made my way to the offices of the Board of Deputies of British Jews in Bloomsbury Square for a meeting of the Religion and Belief Consultative Group on Equality, Diversity and Human Rights (RBCG).

The RBCG first came together in October 2004 as a reference group for a Muslim and a Humanist who were members of a government committee that was preparing the way for the establishment of the new Commission for Equality and Human Rights (CEHR). Somehow I found myself in the chair of a group that included representatives of the major churches and faiths, of the Inter Faith Network for the UK, of the British Humanist Association and of the National Secular Society.

Three meetings, I said, and then someone else can do the job. Well more than 20 meetings later I’m still chairing and the group still meets. Actually, the group has gelled, has a sense of solidarity, does real, solid, work. And we laugh together. A lot.

Yesterday we met to produce an agreed set of answers to a number of questions about the priorities for the work of the CEHR when it opens its doors in October. We had collected responses from individual members of the RBCG to the questions, but we had decided that our answers would have greater impact on the CEHR if they were agreed and submitted by the RBCG as a whole.

One member of the RBCG had kindly produced a two-and-a-half page draft. Reviewing and reworking the first page took us over an hour. The discussion was intense, searching, frank, focused - and seemed never-ending. At one point I commented that I thought I might be losing the will to live. Each time I thought we had arrived at consensus about a paragraph, someone would raise another question or issues - and sometimes those questions and issues led to a great deal more discussion, much of it most illuminating.

Challenging to chair such a discussion? Yes, but absolutely fascinating to observe the process flowing through and around the group, to note people’s body language and facial expressions, to call on someone whose face said they wanted to speak but who hadn’t raised a hand.

Throughout this intense discussion there were no personal attacks and no attacks on others’ beliefs. People listened carefully to what others had to say, spoke frankly, but without rancour, about their different views. There was genuine respect, even at the most tense and difficult moments.

I felt privileged to be chairing, to be the one who (I hope) facilitated and enabled the discussion to flow and to come to a good conclusion. We completed the document in six minutes over the 150 minutes that we had scheduled. I came away elated, feeling that we had achieved something of moment, that a group of people with, in some cases, mutually opposed views about the legitimacy of religion’s having a place on the public square had been able to agree a significant document to submit to the Commission for Equality and Human Rights, and that this had been accomplished in a good spirit and with a real sense of solidarity.

Back in October 1985, the Universal House of Justice (the elected world governing council of the Baha’i community) addressed The Promise of World Peace to the peoples of the world. In that ground-breaking call for a concerted effort by the world’s peoples and leaders to bring about peace, the Universal House of Justice made this plea to religious leaders:

The challenge facing the religious leaders of mankind is to contemplate, with hearts filled with the spirit of compassion and a desire for truth, the plight of humanity, and to ask themselves whether they cannot, in humility before their Almighty Creator, submerge their theological differences in a great spirit of mutual forbearance that will enable them to work together for the advancement of human understanding and peace.

The RBCG is not a group of religious leaders, but it does comprise accepted representatives of the major faiths as well as of the British Humanist Association and the National Secular Society. We did not achieve everything that the paragraph from The Promise of World Peace calls for. But we did take a further step along that path.

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