A visit to the Humanist Meetup

This evening I attended the Humanist Meetup for the first time, where the editor of New Humanist magazine spoke about the work he has been doing encouraging a humanist school in Uganda. He spoke well, and it is good work, but one wonders why charity isn’t starting a little closer to home and he isn’t concerning himself first and foremost with getting faith schools banned in the UK.

On the whole this was a nice evening off for me. It was marred only by the shocking number of leftie liberals I met yet again.

The meeting was chaired very well, but I was shocked when the speaker suddenly declared towards the end that he was greatly in favour of multi-culturalism or at least the “ideal” of it (?!) and even began to speak in support of political correctness. I thought everybody knew now that multi-culturalism was a failed experiment in the UK. And political correctness is simply the shameless repression of the truth in order to be “fashionable” and “not hurt people’s feelings”. These views were nothing, though, compared with what I was to encounter later.

I had a feminist talking to me (an organiser of this group) with her man joining in (proudly announcing he was a feminist too), and I found myself – at a Humanist meeting, mind you – arguing against them about the threat of Islam.

“What’s the problem with multi-culturalism?” she asked. I hardly knew where to start. It concerned me that I was having to explain this at all to a humanist. I tried to distill it: “Cultures are essentially value systems. Conflicting value systems among groups causes a problem for society”. When you appease the more backward of the two (as we do) and this is also the growing one (as Islam is), with imperialist designs (as Islam has), that’s going to cause more of a problem.

More than once I questioned whether I was at the right meeting – but I guess I should know better by now. I cited countless facts, such as:

• the rapidly rising birth rate among European Muslims
• the decreasing birth rate among non-Muslims
• the penalty of death for apostacy under Islam
• the recent appeasement by the government
• the mandate for hatred found in the Qur’an

None of this was going to cut it though. They didn’t even seem to know what the word “demographics” meant. They were big on the idea that Christians are a problem. Well, they are, but you don’t see them issuing death sentences in response to cartoons, and if some did – and this is the key difference – the many of the others would more than likely demand a halt to the insanity. I made the point that the Christians might actually turn out to be our best friends, given the state of denial and apathy of many non-believers and our constant capitulation to Islam.

Anyway, these two seemed to have a supreme confidence and complacency that Muslims would be softened by free society and everything would be okay. Fine, let’s hope that happens, I said, but it won’t the way we’re going.

They seemed to want to argue just for the sake of it, and while I sought common ground, they seemed to like argument, and the girl increasingly began raising her voice, losing control of herself.

Speaking to them it seemed highly likely they had not read any of the books I have on this subject or indeed seen the things I’ve seen: they were not aware of any facts or figures, and its difficult to debate people who are not aware of facts and figures. I was thoroughly shocked by their naivety – and by the smugness that accompanied it. But this is commonplace and is encountered by all who try to speak reason to young people who are pampered by their society and fully infected by political correctness.

After it became obvious I was not going to be able to cover any ground with these two limousine liberals, I let the girl reel off a largely incoherent sentence and did not respond. But I was concerned. I thought: if these are the friends we have on our side against religion, who needs enemies? Have they read Bawer, Hitchens, Harris, Hirsi Ali or Steyn? They can’t have, or they would be up to speed on these matters. It’s one thing to be positive, and that’s great, but it is quite another to be ignorant of relevant facts and figures, naïve, complacent, and out for an argument just for the sake of having one. That’s just plainly irresponsible.

I continued to chat with one, more friendly, guy who berated the Iraq War (as is to be expected) and wouldn’t endorse Geert Wilders despite not being able to cite anything he has said that was wrong (again, par for the course), but he at least seemed to concede there might be a problem with Islam. Luckily there were also a couple of other people (much the senior of the liberals, interestingly) who were more connected and had done some of the apposite reading (one had read Hirsi Ali’s Infidel so was under no illusions about Islam) – so the evening was not a dead loss.

But at many points I felt like I was at a meeting of the Muslim Council of Britain rather than a Humanist group, and it occurred to me again that the movement is in dire need of more straight talkers in the mode of Pat Condell and fewer of these airy liberals.