Location

West Wickham, Kent/SE London border

Birthday:

June 22

Gender

Male

What do you want to tell us about from your past activity or experiences?

I am over sixty now, and the world has changed far more over the last twenty years than it did in the previous years of my life. 

After the end of the Cold War, Progress seemed to be inevitable. Internationalism was triumphing over Nationalism; Tolerance and Inclusivity were overcoming bigotry and tribalism. But then there were the Balkan Wars, and 9/11, and now Brexit and Trumpism. Many countries have gone backwards in terms of democracy - China, India, Russia, the United States. The UK is not exempt. The Covid pandemic hasn't helped, and if we don't sort out Climate Change nothing else will matter. 

I am still proud to be a Liberal (in the broad sense, not necessarily in voting for that party). and a Free-thinker. I am probably what the Daily Mail calls a Metropolitan Liberal. I prefer the term Classical Liberal, though that has become conflated with neo-liberalism which isn't really liberalism at all. 

I was a Christian until the age of 53 in 2012. Exclusive Brethren until the age of 11; regular Brethren until the age of 19, Charismatic Evangeilical until about 28, then slightly saner and increasingly more liberal evangelical. The loss of a Christian friend in a car crash in 2005 caused huge doubts to open up and the whole thing became more untenable the more I thought about it. Looking back, I had had niggling doubts for at least ten years before that. It took another seven years after the event to acknowledge that my attempts at constructing a looser framework of faith were failing. 

I am not going to substitute one dogma for another; Evangelicalism for atheism. There are certainties but we cannot always be sure what they are. The Argument from Design is not one that can easily be dismissed; maybe we just don't know enough science, but it seems that the more we know about how evolution might have occurred, the more complex life appears to be. But if there is a God, he, she or it exists in a very different paradigm to evangelicalism. 

I'm not keen on labels, but to roughly encapsulate my thinking: 

Worldview and ethical framework: Liberal Humanist

Epistemology: Scientific Rationalism

Spirituality: Somewhere between Agnostic Humanism and Unitarian Universalism.