(Speech to The Stromness Debating Scociety - October 1992)
The widest of the definitions on offer is: Ecumenism a movement, or doctrine, promoting worldwide unity among religions through greater co-operation and improved understanding.
I choose the wide definition because I regret that the word 'ecumenism' has been diminished to mean something to do with Christian unity - which is something I do not wish to discuss because it is only one minority concern, albeit an important one, in the global context.
Why do I, an atheist, care about this and why, in particular do I hope most fervently that the cause is not lost?
There are in the world several Belief Systems, and associated cultural norms, that can be seen as mutually incompatible in ways that cut very deeply into the feelings that their several advocates actually experience. I, and perhaps more than a few others, may take all elaborated Belief Systems with a grain of sceptical salt but there are quite enough people who do no such thing and who can together constitute a 'critical mass' - to use a term familiar in nuclear bomb technology - to make for a major disaster for all of them and for the rest of us too.
In the modern world, people with different Beliefs (and I spell the word with a capital B, quite deliberately) cannot simply keep apart. Necessarily, they live together or they die together and the task of ecumenically minded people is to identify realistically what changes in perceptions are necessary if the 'ideology bombs' are not to go off all over the place in our lifetimes.
One tack that is not worth trying any more is to suppress religion; the Soviet Authorities, and their followers, tried it and look at the results in the Balkans, the Caucasus and elsewhere. Suppressing religions, even supposing such a policy to be ethically acceptable, has much the same effect as had suppressing alcohol in the USA of the twenties; you don't get rid of it; you simply criminalise its users. The other thing that won't work is to try to make a bland homogenised religion calculated to offend nobody.
Let us be quite concrete about this; let us consider beliefs about the status of Jesus, for example.
The Jews hope for a Messiah but they think that Jesus was not the genuine article but merely a heretic in whose persistent wake the Emperor Constantine found it expedient to ride the politics of his declining empire. The Christians, by definition, regard Jesus as God Incarnate - and you can't say more than that about Him. The Muslims regard Jesus as a worthy recipient of silver in the Prophets Olympics but they take a very poor view of what the late Mr Khomeini termed "cross worship".
Now these perceptions of Jesus are not merely different; they are mutually blasphemous and you can't insulate them by apartheid or tame them by fudge. How then can you make them safe neighbours in a global village in which anti-global weapons are there for the using?
If serious general ecumenism is to succeed then it has not to tinker with beliefs but to re-assess Belief itself.
The necessary modification of attitudes, without loss of integrity and without disowning roots, means seeing, in a new way, the relation between certainty and uncertainty.
The Archbishop of York said once that "the lust for certainty may be a sin" and all thoughtful people may be inclined to agree with him. Nonetheless we often need to act as though we are certain when, logically, we cannot be. I do not know for certain that my neighbour is a reasonable man rather than a homicidal maniac waiting for the chance to kill me. Nonetheless, I go about my daily affairs without taking any precautions considering a darker side of his character that I cannot, certainly, say is absent. I cannot know certainty in this but I can act as though I do.
Life is full of instances of this sort of thing - not being logically certain but acting as though we are. Uncertainty in mind accompanied by operational certainty in action is normal.
My question is - "can we turn this the other way about without loss of integrity? Is it feasible to be certain in belief but hesitant in action without being a hypocrite?"
I think it is - on two conditions: one is that we recognise that however deeply we may believe something to be true we must always remember that we can mislead ourselves. Believing something does not make that thing true. We can be certain that our beliefs are as near to the truth as we can get - while recognising that "as near to the truth as we can get" is not necessarily very near. If we allow ourselves only that much certainty - leave ourselves an area of honest doubt - then we can meet the second condition fairly easily. The second condition is that acting on our sincerely held beliefs should stop short before it begins demonstrably to hurt other people who have other, different, beliefs.
It is one thing for Christians to assert that the Jews are horribly wrong to think that Jesus was a false Messiah; it is quite another to persecute and slaughter generation after generation of Jews in the arrogant certainty that they are the murderers of God Incarnate.
It is one thing for Muslims to be hurt by some passages in a book in which The Prophet is depicted in a very derogatory manner; it is quite another to assassinate its translators and to try to organise a murderous vendetta against the author and to terrorise the assistants in bookshops.
It is one thing for Jews to believe very deeply that they are The Chosen people inheriting The Promised Land; it is quite another for the state of Israel to deny the decencies of civil liberty and even-handed justice to Arabs living within its unilaterally proclaimed borders.
We sceptical secular humanists see Belief (again with a capital B) as addictive. It can only be a safe thing to indulge in if the two curbs I have suggested are applied to it.
The very survival of our species is in doubt if we cannot bring ourselves to temper our beliefs with humility and our belief-based actions with consideration for those who, after all, are our fellow humans. Is humanity shared not to take precedence over beliefs not shared ? Do we really think that abusing, in any major way, those with whom we differ, actually helps us or helps to resolve the difference?
If the plural house is to be decently habitable we all have to be house-trained. Sceptical secular humanists can see this clearly because they are not mesmerised by Belief in the way that religionists can often be. (And this is not to say that there are no secularist illusions; scepticism, like charity, begins at home but, like charity, it should not end there.)
Ecumenism is indeed a lost cause if religious people cannot go even that far with us liberal sceptics. I hope they can; I fear they cannot. I fear that ecumenism is lost cause and that our species will have difficulty in surviving that loss in a satisfactory manner.