Dialogue with Humanists?

For Evangelical Christians, as for the Roman Catholics in this article, it is a live issue as to why one would want to be involved in interfaith dialogue. Now a word before you read the quote following and think "hang on; that's not about interfaith dialogue; humanists aren't a faith". Well, I'd point out that the issues are the same and that we sholudn't get hung up on labels. However, there is a case to group together humanists with people who follow Christ, Mohammed/Qur'an, Buddha etc. One of those figures was, apparently, agnostic on the God question which would cohere with the humanist position -at least some versions of it. And if a faith is a belief system that provides perspectives and values for living, then humanism certainly fits with that. In addition consider that the European legislation on religious discrimination etc; usually gets worked out in terms of religions and 'life philosophies'. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that humanism should, in a number of public fora, be grouped with religious and spiritual bodies and movements.

This quote starts from the difficulty that often people who engage in dialogical events can't 'bind' their constituencies to anything they may themselves agree or change their minds about. To do so would be tantamount to saying that a conversion of one agent in such and event would be a conversion of all. Clearly that cannot be: individual conscience still is paramount. So ...

‘If you are not representing anybody, you already know what the other side is going to say, and you’re probably not going to change their minds, why bother?’ He then answered that question by appealing to the importance of ‘civility’. Civility ‘is not about agreement, or even negotiation,’ says Sims. ‘It is about how we can disagree in such a way that we retain the respect of those we disagree with, and build the possibility of common cause on issues beyond our disagreements.’

 What I like about that is the recognition that there is a value in 'civility' based on conviviality, if you like. In a society where there are a number of different views on all sorts of things progress can only be made by agreement, common-cause and/or 'co-belligerancy'. We need to be in the business of creating the conditions for alliances to be made and for disagreements to be worked out with respect and charity. These are matters, in Christian terms, it seems to me, of straightforwardly working out loving ones neighbour. In addition, if we believe that God's mission involves justice, peace and peacemaking, then we cannot avoid effort towards creating the conditions for those things and that means dialogue with others who do not see things as we do.

And in actual fact, if we are broadly right about certain important facets of reality as we think we are, then we are only going to help others to wrestle with that claim and those realities if we prepared to dialogue genuinely. This will mean that we will be changed. But I would argue that this is analogous to the 'change' involved in Incarnation and seen in Jesus' response to the Syro-Phoenician woman. Change doesn't mean necessarily 'apostasy' but could mean a fuller entry into the world of another so that our perspective becomes clearer in other terms than those we started with. This, theologically, in term, may be related to some of the debate about God's impassibility ... but perhaps that would be a longer post than I have time to compose right now. Suffice to say for now Thomas Weinandy and Does God Suffer?