Dialogue Between a "Free Thinker" and the Founder of the CICNS

Dialogue between a “Free Thinker” and the Founder of the CICNS, January 2007

Dialogue between Michel Thys mithys@skynet.be, former president of the Libre pensée of Schaerbeek-Brussels, member of a lodge of the Grand Orient of Belgium, text in light blue on the original page, and André Tarassi, of the Centre d’Information et de Conseil des Nouvelles Spiritualités (CICNS), text in dark blue on the original page.

Mr Thys, who authorised the publication of this exchange, wished to add the following clarification:

“I am obviously speaking only in my personal name, and not in that of the members of the Grand Orient of Belgium. While they share the principles and values that animate me, they each have their own perception of the cultic phenomenon, with all the nuances that implies.”

To believe or not to believe:

That’s the question!

Does one really choose?

20 QUESTIONS to debate, ad libitum (even at the cost of oversimplifying…):

André Tarassi answers the proposal of a debate by taking up certain points:

1. If one considers that “truth” is only ever personal, partial and provisional, is it not legitimate to be able to choose effectively, that is to say as freely as possible, one’s philosophical or religious conceptions?

2. But does a free choice not imply having all the alternatives at one’s disposal?

3. Beyond the traditional (philosophical, indeed theological) approach to the religious phenomenon, why not also take into account, before choosing, the recent psycho-neuro-physio-genetico-educational discoveries about faith? (DAMASIO, P. JEAN-BAPTISTE, M. BEAUREGARD, RAMACHANDRAN, …)

A free choice made with all the alternatives at one’s disposal (I pass over the pretension of holding them all) is an honest proposal.

4. Although it is impossible to demonstrate the existence or non-existence of God, would there currently be convincing arguments in favour of his imaginary and illusory existence (this said without seeking to convince anyone)?

Is the postulate of “convincing arguments” the demonstration of a sincere desire to propose and let choose, or is it already an intention to convince and convert? We observe that the atheist belief, or the fundamentalist secular cult, can each take over on their own account the deviances they like to denounce everywhere else…

5. Early religious education is certainly a constitutional right, but being necessarily affective, since founded on the trust and example of practising parents and educators, would it not leave ineffaceable traces in the child’s emotional brain (through neuronal and synaptic plasticity), and would it not disturb, to varying degrees, the adult’s critical spirit, be he a scientist or an intellectual, as soon as religion is at issue?

Why should religious conditioning be more disturbing than secular conditioning? The atheist argument is thus founded, like every ideology, on the idea that conditioning is the other person’s certainty. I fear today, and we observe it in the French psychosis against the cults, that secular conditioning has largely disturbed the critical spirit of the general public, which merely repeats mechanically the surahs of the anti-cult republic, and this from the youngest age.

6. To say: “My children will choose later…”, is that not to misjudge or minimise, obviously in good faith, the importance of this affective influence?

The question of choice is doubtless interesting, but when it is inspired by a desire to replace one conditioning with another, it becomes fallacious. Besides, how would children whom one wanted to spare the affective influence of religious education have “all the alternatives”? It seems evident that the wish at the origin of this pamphlet is not to propose the widest choice, but to subject the child’s mind to an atheist belief rather than to that of religion. This little sleight of hand, sincere though it may be - for everyone is always sincerely convinced of the value of their certainties - can only fool those who have not really put their convictions to the test of “reason”, whatever they may say.

7. Are not all the religions and all religious education (above all Koranic education, potentially at the origin of abuses, even if they are in the minority) based on submission (be it, elsewhere, rationalised after the fact), rather than on autonomy and individual responsibility?

The great religions, seated on the precepts of past civilisations, still need to grow. But laïcité does too. Neither the one nor the other today really offers autonomy and individual responsibility. And the secular fundamentalisms - and particularly the anti-cult ones - which we witness today presage nothing very new on the path proposed by those who call themselves “free thinkers”.

8. Faced with the prodigies of nature (for example the genome, the different embryonic stages, the brain, the eye…), and with the gaps in our present knowledge, is it not all the same a little hasty, simplistic and comforting to conclude that there necessarily exists a god, of whom one has the revelation and to whom one submits, or a great architect of the universe, a euphemism for the former…?

Faced with the prodigies, it would be hasty and simplistic (and necessarily false because “comforting” - would truth lie solely in trembling? Is that the new testament of atheism, which demands that one tremble before the god of reason?) to conclude that a god exists?

There is one element always absent from atheism’s discourse: the existence of religious experience, literally “that which binds together”, and on the basis of which beliefs, religions and today the spiritual minorities were founded. Religious experience has nothing to do with an opinion, and might well not depend on “neuronal plasticity”.

9. Might it not be because it is very difficult to become conscious of the influence that animal evolution exercised for millions of years on the neocortex, become capable of imagining, by anthropomorphism and thanks to language, a “protective, enlarged and substitutive Father” (Fr Antoine VERGOTE, professor at the U.C.L.), in answer to the fear of the unknown, including death, and to the needs for love, hope, identity and a meaning to give to existence?

If the image of god, as it has been constructed over time, is sometimes used as a substitute for the protection or love of the father, it is only an image. The fact that part of the population may use this image in an illusory way does not invalidate the religious experience at the origin of the most diverse spiritual movements. Anything, moreover, can be used to secure oneself against fears, to imagine things - even science, or the atheist belief. That ought to inspire more respect in the followers of atheism and their goddess science.

10. Conversely, have unbelieving parents not always observed that in the absence of religious education and/or a religious cultural milieu, faith does not appear?

This supposition is unfounded, even if it is convenient for supporting the rest of the argument. Religious experience does not issue from culture. When it does, it is only an ideology.

11. For a free choice to have the best chances of coming about, would it not first be necessary for believing parents, like unbelievers, not to inspire false metaphysical problems in their children, and to aim rather at developing further their critical spirit in every regard, and a sufficient inner strength?

The fact of inspiring children towards one thing rather than another is again affirmed here as “a free choice”. Is the author of these words himself the dupe of his own intention?

12. Although religion is a private matter, would it not then be necessary for teachers, believers or not, ideally gathered in a single pluralist network, to accept honestly and without proselytism to have children and adolescents discover, at their own pace, all the options: belief, deism, agnosticism, unbelief, atheism, secular morality, free thought, freemasonry, etc.?

That is a good suggestion, which joins the first, but unfortunately contradicted by the rest of this pamphlet.

13. Would teaching (intellectually) “the religious fact” not be the means of compensating for the one-sided family influence and thus reducing sociocultural inequalities, indeed of calling into question or nuancing the legitimacy of an elitist confessional education, perceived more and more as an anachronistic ghetto, in favour of a better-quality official (Belgian) education?

From the moment religious experience is not denied, the proposal remains acceptable. For most believers of every church, it would be as indecent to deny the foundation of their faith as to demonstrate that a feeling (joy, love) does not exist on the pretext that it involves the functioning of the brain.

14. Instead of letting the cults and other evangelicals harpoon more and more believers disappointed by the traditional religions, and even certain unbelievers, is it not urgent to make abuse of weakness and mental manipulation illegal, and to promote secular morality, even if it is resistant to all proselytism?

If abuse of weakness and mental manipulation become illegal, our entire society will have to undergo a revolution. And that will be all to the good. It is either naive or mendacious to make people believe that the “cults” invented these abuses. This is only the very ancient practice of the scapegoat.

15. Now that moral values can no longer be imposed dogmatically, should one not see to it that they are concretely and freely discovered and accepted by the greatest number?

Many believers, despite the wanderings of faith in recent centuries, think that moral values are better defended - because founded most often on religious experience - in the spiritual currents. The hatred underlying the anti-cult and secular crusade lets nothing good be foreseen (at any rate nothing better than religious hatred).

16. Is it not time also to make all those who are unaware of it understand that - as juvenile delinquency proves by the absurd - moral conscience, respect for the other and his difference, tolerance, the sense of limits, autonomy, the critical spirit, individual responsibility, etc., can only appear at the price of an early “humanising” education, founded on example and on affective experiences, lived or suggested by empathy, sometimes a contrario?

Yes, this paragraph is a fine description of what a pluralist education could be, offering at once the knowledge of religious experience (that which allows one to bind oneself to the other, to nature, to the divine, etc.) and the moral values that flow from it.

17. Finally, is it not urgent to make people discover that one can give existence a non-alienating, less individualist meaning, comprising a secular spirituality with multiple facets, both individual and collective, aiming at once at individual flourishing, solidarity and the search for a consensus of common values, well beyond economic-political conflicts?

Secular spirituality (we are indeed speaking of the one that has voluntarily detached itself from the “great architect of the universe”, are we not?), when it cuts itself off from the etymological meaning of “religion”, is only a theory. Truly spiritual believers found their hope of a more just world on the possibility of being spontaneously animated by love, and not merely of being intellectually convinced of it. A thought, however intelligent, has never made a human being spontaneously good or respectful. Man’s challenge is indeed to live certain realities essential for our societies, and not merely to make them a subject of intellectual debate. Even if the religions have not achieved this for the greatest number (that is to say, the effect of authentic religious experience has not reached society as a whole), the fact remains that they are the hearth of people of great worth, whose wishes for humanity appear better founded than the militant angers of anti-cultism and atheism (I was nevertheless inspired to answer this pamphlet because it seemed to me wiser than what one can read elsewhere on the Internet).

18. Does tolerance - which one must see to it never tolerates the intolerable - not consist in respecting individuals (and all the more so if they have called their conceptions into question, if they are tolerant and respect humanist values such as the dignity of man, woman and child), but not necessarily their ideas, which are always open to criticism?

All ideas are respectable. What you want to denounce, I believe, are the actions that flow from them. An idea can benefit from the presumption of innocence so long as it has no impact on others. The actions of the anti-cult campaigners have not demonstrated that they were really altruistic. Their actions are open to criticism, but they may have whatever ideas they want.

19. Would this not be a way - let us be optimistic in the long term - of inciting humans, in every latitude, to the learning of human relations, to citizenship, to peaceful coexistence between cultures, and of slowing the current Islamisation of modernity in favour of the adaptation of Islam to modernity?

Thought “liberated” from god, and the fight against the spiritualities that results from it, is one option among others, respectable as an idea, but whose action ought to be balanced by thought steeped in religious experience.

20. Even if such a perspective is utopian, does it not deserve to be debated?

A society that knew how to tolerate all these options (and would correct, through a balanced justice, the possible abuses on every side) is a fine utopia that would deserve to be debated.

Michel Thys replies:

Dear Sir,

It is with a few days’ delay that I answer you: I was determined first to acquaint myself with the reports of the French and Belgian parliamentary Commissions, even though they date from 1996 and 1997, with more recent texts, and with those favourable or otherwise to the “cults”, notably yours, those of Anne MORELLI, of Serge MOUREAUX who answers her, of Father TROUSLARD, etc., etc.

It is fortunate that the idea of defining what a cult is has been abandoned: given the number, the diversity, the multiple denominations (cults, new religions, minority religions, new spiritualities, etc.), and the different degrees of dangerousness of the groupings that may attach to the cultic phenomenon, all amalgam had to be avoided.

Better a list of criteria of dangerousness, criteria of judgement situated at the level both of the beliefs and of the behaviours that harm the rights of man, his dignity and his liberty. I shall return to it.

Let us come back to my twenty questions, which you had the kindness to comment on.

It would be vain to seek to convince each other of the soundness of our respective conceptions. Let us only attempt to define better our divergences and our convergences.

I observe, moreover, that statistically, beyond the age of about 25, it becomes difficult and rare to call one’s fundamental options into question. A question of self-esteem no doubt, but also no doubt for fear of destabilising oneself.

I must nevertheless observe that certain cults manage it, by choosing people who are fragilised or in a state of weakness (but always fairly well-off), whose trust they deceive, whose credulity they exploit, or in whom they even provoke, by a whole arsenal of psychological destabilisation, a dependence, a submission, a depersonalisation, etc.

Whatever their number, officially small, the dérives sectaires exist (cf. that mother of Perpignan who let her three-year-old child die of hunger, “on God’s orders”). It is even legitimate to think that they are only the emerged part of the iceberg…

I respect believers, but I condemn those who impose a belief or exploit it.

I do not share the opinion of Madame MORELLI, who is nevertheless a convinced secularist, when she fears a “witch-hunt”, when she claims, in the name of freedom of conscience, expression and religion, that an adult is supposed to be free and responsible, nor when she writes that the religions have caused humanity much more harm than the cults! Certainly, both are founded on submission and obedience. Certainly, to varying degrees, the religions seem to me more harmful than beneficial on the individual plane.

And historically they are even more so: by having influenced both the rulers and the exploited in their youth, by not having them discover, nor therefore respect, humanist values, by smothering their possible moral conscience as much as any critical spirit, and by thus facilitating their indoctrination, the religions played a role in all the warlike and dictatorial atrocities (Nazism, Stalinism, …), often wrongly attributed to their misunderstood atheism. But that does not attenuate the dangerousness of the cults: the past excuses neither the present nor the future.

Defending the cults amounts in effect to privileging freedom of expression at all costs, to tolerating all ideas, even the most intolerable, to disregarding the precautionary principle, and therefore to giving a blank cheque to the cults, whatever they may be, so long as a condemnable offence has not been proven. Yet it is clear that abused followers fear, or are dissuaded from, filing complaints, and that the criminal law, above all in Belgium, is quite helpless before associations that change their denomination, their headquarters and their corporate object, and that dispose of powerful means of defence.

I nevertheless share Madame MORELLI’s opinion when she considers that the religions and the cults proceed from the same irrationality. But they differ in my eyes by their degree of dangerousness and harmfulness. I would have appreciated it if this historian had pushed her logic to the point of wishing that one sought to organise for all children an early apprenticeship of the critical sense, from ALL points of view, including in the religious domain, so that the later choice of their convictions might be made as freely as possible, on the basis of alternatives… But the sacrosanct constitutional principles of individual liberty (which ought nevertheless to stop where that of others begins), of absolute tolerance, of the neutrality and non-commitment of teachers, apparently seem to her more important to take into consideration.

That said, I think one must first agree on the meaning of words. Certainly my text is short and therefore simplifying, but it seems to me neither violent nor satirical.

It is therefore not a pamphlet.

“The atheist belief”: for me, and whatever André Comte-Sponville may think, the atheist does not BELIEVE that god does not exist. He thinks, he considers, he concludes that he does not exist, or only as a product of the imagination, in a favourable family and cultural context. Certainly there are still rabid atheists, but many fewer since the Catholic Church renounced its provocative clericalism and attempts to adapt to modernity by recovering certain secular values.

“Fundamentalist secular cult” seems to me severe as a qualification of the secularists opposed to the cults, as does Anne MORELLI’s “cult of the adversaries of the cults”, at least insofar as they do not put all the cults in the same basket. To include all the cults among the spiritual minorities, such as for example Belgian Protestantism, is that not to give them the benefit of a favourable prejudice of honourability that they do not necessarily deserve?

I understand that you find it contradictory that I advocate a free choice between several alternatives (and not all, of course) while proposing the secular ones. Doubtless we all tend to want to share what we think or love (Music, for example). I fear, moreover, that this may give certain believers the impression that I have understood everything on the basis of a psycho-neuro-physio-genetico-educational theory of faith, and even that I am seeking to convince them, which is not the case. Not only do I not deny religious experience, but I understand it, having been a believer (Protestant) until the age of 21 (only, it is true - I am 67), but I think I have had a certain experience of faith all the same. Having lived through that apostasy rather painfully (it took me 4 years to become an atheist, passing through deism, agnosticism and unbelief), I have been committed ever since, through a few articles, by a sort of “philosophical solidarity”, to helping, perhaps, those who, like me in the past, seek to free themselves from a faith that does them more harm than good.

But believing is a mental state that consists in attributing to a subjective representation an objective reality, which thus becomes a certainty. Despite the doubts inherent in faith, I therefore understand that believers generally take no interest in any destabilising argument or in a theory that would tend to explain the origin and durability of faith, and that they prefer to retain only its beneficial aspects (an answer to metaphysical uncertainties, hope in a hereafter, an answer to the needs to give a meaning to existence, to belong to a community, for identity, appeasement, serenity, …

You write: “Why should religious conditioning be more disturbing than secular conditioning?” I have indeed asked myself the question: believers and unbelievers, do we not all influence our children? Obviously yes, but in my view in very different ways. With believing parents, it is in a more affective and therefore deeper way, since they commit themselves by testifying to their faith and their certainties through their religious behaviour. It is not disturbing, since it answers the child’s need for security. Unbelieving parents, for their part, abstain from affirming the existence of a god, do not arouse and therefore do not amplify false metaphysical problems, but answer their children’s questions as they come, develop their critical spirit from every point of view, and bring out in them an inner strength allowing them to bear doubts and uncertainties serenely through a reasonable confidence in science.

The secularists do not seek to “subject the child’s mind to an atheist belief rather than to that of another religion”: they seek only to defer as far as possible the free choice they will make. But they have all observed that in the absence of a religious education and a religious cultural milieu, faith does not appear spontaneously.

The religious psychologist Antoine VERGOTE, former professor at the UCL, testifies to it a contrario in “Psychologie religieuse”, of 1966: “Religious availability only takes shape on condition of being educated early.” (…) “The gestures and language of the parents (…), the celebration of religious feasts mark indelibly the childhood memories of many adults and determine their feelings of religious belonging.”

Certainly, this “collier’s faith”, which consists “in feeling God as simply as the warmth of the sun” (Dr Alexis CARREL), has since been rationalised: one now speaks of an “authentic, purified faith, the Operative Presence of the Wholly-Other”. That does not eliminate the doubts, but permits, it seems, the acceptance of the revelation of the existence of the “Lord” and the establishment of a religious experience of an acceptable level.

There is a question that apparently nobody asks. It is whether faith, membership of a traditional Church, facilitates, favours adhesion to a cult. The Raëlians seem to have understood it, since they develop a remarkable argument against the monotheisms and dogmatism, and therefore in favour of atheism. But it is in fine in order to recover the believers and the unbelievers by inciting them to believe in our creation by extraterrestrials, and in their return, thus making science a new anthropomorphic religion!

Alas, out of concern for tolerance and because it refuses all proselytism, laïcité has not so far been in a position to propose a secular and humanist alternative that could answer the decline in religiosity, notably through the promotion of secular morality, by having people discover that one can give one’s life a non-alienating, less individualist meaning, comprising a secular spirituality aiming at once at individual flourishing, solidarity and the search for common humanist values, such as respect for the dignity of man, woman and child, the learning of human relations, coexistence between cultures, etc. The cults obviously profit from this secular deficiency! It must also be said that, in order to survive, the religions, except Islam, prefer to give the impression of secularising themselves, but their will to influence consciences will never disappear…

We could obviously pursue this dialogue for a long time.

It will at least have had the merit of having taken place and, I am certain, of prompting reflection.

I sincerely hope I have not offended you.

André Tarassi takes up certain points to reply:

Hello, and thank you for your reply which, being devoid of all aggressiveness, could not offend me as you feared. I answer you in turn below:

Yes, and this lucidity that shows through your writings is, moreover, at the origin of my impulse to answer you. But lucidity is not only a matter of rationality. I am, like you no doubt, intimately (and therefore finally: “spiritually”) “convinced” of something.

The meaning I give to the expression “religious experience” is the foundation of my argument. An argument that operates only from the convolutions of thought is only an opinion. An “experience”, in the sense in which I understand it, even if one may tend today to look for purely neurological causes for it, is not debatable. It seems to me important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. If “religious experience” is a reality (the “collier’s faith” you rightly mention, without however realising the incongruity of that aside with respect to your certainty that faith can only be the product of a conditioning), the fact that abuses exist should not lead to such an anti-religious campaign as exists in France in particular and more and more in Belgium.

Whatever their number, officially small, the dérives sectaires exist

Abuses exist. The fact of attaching the term “sectaire” to them is in my view the principal abuse we are witnessing today. The said “cults” did not invent abuses and seem, in reality, to be largely immunised against them, contrary to what people want us to believe. The CICNS is working on a citizens’ commission of enquiry which investigates the real abuses (and not merely the defamations, amalgams, exaggerations and media repetitions) within all the spiritual minorities, in liaison with several law firms and the movements named in the 1996 parliamentary list in France. We can already affirm that the facts plead in favour of these “cults”, in comparison with any other human organisation, including the “political class”, the very one that leads the public-health action against the cults and that remains an inexhaustible hearth of misdeeds and deviances of every kind.

The sacrosanct constitutional principles of individual liberty (which ought nevertheless to stop where that of others begins), of absolute tolerance, of the neutrality and non-commitment of teachers, apparently seem to her more important to take into consideration.

When lucid minds realise that this stigmatisation of the “cult” is a conditioning they are undergoing, we will then be able to take up the question of abuses seriously. Most of the people who choose a “spiritual family” feel shut up in the cult of the Republic in France, which dictates to them their behaviour, their belief, and slips into their inner universe through the most manipulative advertising. If one wants to deal with manipulation, one must do so without looking for a scapegoat. We are all subjects and objects of such behaviour. And I believe, precisely, that religious experience is the only reality that guarantees not yielding to that kind of instinct. I am therefore not speaking, of course, of imposing a “mental belief” on children as you say, but of respecting the experience (and the way of life that flows from it) of millions of people in our countries who are currently being pointed at very unjustly (I refer you again to our citizens’ commission of enquiry, whose results we will send you if you wish).

On the subject of the “dérives sectaires” whose existence you affirm, I would like to share the following information with you:

Suicide?

In our country, after the prisons, the media long declared that national education and the police were the professions that led the most people to suicide (in the Anglo-Saxon countries, it is said that psychiatrists or dentists are the most affected!). Do you know of any campaign against the harm done by the police or by national education to their personnel, driving them to such extremities? No. Everyone would judge that amalgam indecent or taboo, and in fact most researchers today think that associating membership of a profession with the causes of a death is senseless. But this unhealthy little game is played with the members of spiritual minorities, for whom membership is automatically considered the cause of a suicide (The research demonstrates in fact, in every country, that the members of structured religions are less inclined to suicide, and the members of recent spiritual minorities commit practically none). Can a “free thinker” look seriously at these objective facts?

The ill-treatment of children?

The hearings of the French parliamentary commission of 2006 on childhood and the cults demonstrated (even if this was not put forward in the final report) that a tiny number of cases of ill-treatment could be associated with a “cult”. One of the hearings, that of Mr Depuis, reveals that “the academy inspectors or the rectors made 19,000 reports to the public prosecutors concerning children considered to be in danger for various reasons, physical, moral. And when we asked the academy inspectors which, among these children in danger, were in danger because of cult movements, they answered us that there were 8”. But who spoke of it? The site “Allo enfance maltraitée” produced its latest statistics in 2004: 27 cases out of the 12,916 calls received can be associated with a cultic phenomenon, that is 0.2% of cases (and these are in fact 27 “accusations” on the part of the people calling). These are official figures, not additions we might have made up! Can a “free thinker” look seriously at this objective fact?

Must the display of facts continue for you to realise that you, a “free thinker”, are repeating the manipulations and exaggerations of the media?

Mental manipulation?

The people who have taken the trouble to go beyond the most primary evaluation of this phenomenon (read for example the “little treatise on manipulation for honest people” by Robert-Vincent Joule and Jean-Léon Beauvois, or “the manipulated word” by Philippe Breton) have been able to demonstrate that the population most liable to be a victim of manipulation is the most “conformist” one, the one the authors of the book cited speak of on page 262: “It is disconcerting to observe that the individual who is respectable in every regard, the one who adheres to most of the norms of judgement while believing moreover that he departs from them, the one who feels free, the one who wants to be consistent, the one who finds in himself the reasons for what he does and for what happens to him… to observe, then, that that individual is incontestably the most manipulable.”

Would free thinkers be more manipulable than those said to be enslaved by faith? I will not go that far, that would be to play the game I denounce. I know well that there exists a tendency consisting in asserting that there are “invisible offences” or “hidden victims”, but few people find that argument rational.

But then, can we have a more fraternal vision of things?

Michel Thys replies:

Thank you for this information. I always avoid, for my part, going from one extreme to the other: everything is not black or white…

I think that the higher number of suicides in certain professions with high physical and psychological risks is due to a personality unsuited to those functions and to a lack of training, as much as of assistance (debriefing) after the fact.

It is correct that practising believers are less inclined to suicide. First because it is forbidden, notably by Catholicism: it would be to withdraw oneself from God’s will. They even often live longer: appeasement and serenity are effects of prayer. Note that, outside all transcendence, the relaxation that yoga procures, through the control of breathing and muscles, has the same effects. But unlike the believers of the traditional religions (Muslims excepted), who are permitted to renounce their faith or to nuance it, the followers of the cults are practically prevented, or “dissuaded”, from leaving it, for multiple reasons (guilt, the impossibility of social reintegration, the disappearance of their resources, broken family ties, emotional destabilisation, impossible communication, etc.). Being moreover fragilised (or having become so), I can understand that their only way out is sometimes suicide… The number of cases is not the criterion of dangerousness: the mere possibility of suicide in a cult suffices, and it must be denounced, in application of the precautionary principle.

The ill-treatment of children by the cults. The argument of “invisible offences” and “hidden victims” seems rational to me.

The exaggeration and amplification of the number of cases by the media are certainly regrettable, but I see two attenuating circumstances: even if the number of these ill-treatments is tiny, it exists, and that is not acceptable. On the other hand, it is legitimate to think that these ill-treatments, apart from the fatal cases that are difficult to camouflage, represent only the emerged face of the iceberg…

Mental manipulation (“Petit traité de manipulation à l’usage des honnêtes gens”): of course it is not the exclusive property of the cults. Although theoretically better protected by “free enquiry”, a good number of free thinkers, for example, doubtless “let themselves be had” during the test of the critical spirit of French-speaking television viewers carried out by the RTBF on 13 December, concerning the pseudo-secession of Belgium: 85% of people believed it! Just as most people, by “freely consented submission”, let themselves be fooled by mendacious advertising, etc. Buying an object one does not need, or joining a religion or a cult to find comfort there, even if these apparently have nothing to do with each other, nevertheless have in common not calling into question one’s options and reactions, having had one’s credulity abused and having been relieved of one’s money…

But that a free thinker should be more manipulable than a believer seems to me improbable: free enquiry, the critical spirit, incite him in principle to vigilance. But it is true that many of them, doubtless still most, discovered only late this way of approaching all aspects of reality and are still, more or less, influenced by reflexes of submission going back to their generally religious education. This tends to prove, in my view, that the apprenticeship of the critical sense must be done progressively from the youngest age, and from every point of view. At home, I never let my grandchildren of 7 and 10 watch television alone: I comment on everything, even the cartoons, I incite them to doubt, to reflect, to criticise, to ask questions, and notably, if they speak to me of it, about the religion of their classmates, since no one speaks to them of it in their ethics course. In fact, we should speak of this again in a generation’s time (but I shall doubtless no longer be here), when, I ardently hope, even believers will be convinced of the necessity of an early apprenticeship of the critical spirit, from every point of view, and even if that must hasten the undoing of the traditional religions. But to the benefit either of a secular humanism and spirituality, or of a religious spirituality. But, as it is a matter of “choosing” one or the other, I realise that I have not sufficiently answered your comments on this subject. I will therefore permit myself, if you allow me, to return to it soon.

In the meantime, I want to tell you how much I appreciate the fact that you agree to publish points of view you do not share, or only in part. That was already the case in the sixties, when the predecessor of Father Charles DELHEZ (the journal DIMANCHE) published one of my articles on the objectives of free thought! It testifies to a “more fraternal vision” of things.

André Tarassi takes up certain points to reply:

(…) It is correct that practising believers are less inclined to suicide. First because it is forbidden, notably by Catholicism: it would be to withdraw oneself from God’s will. They even often live longer: appeasement and serenity are effects of prayer. Note that, outside all transcendence, the relaxation that yoga procures, through the control of breathing and muscles, has the same effects.

The positive “secondary” effects you are willing to grant to minority religious or spiritual practice might perhaps alert you to one point, on which you have perhaps already reflected:

The Republic seeks to preserve public order (I do not know to what extent its objectives resemble those of the Belgian federal government). That is, moreover, one of the strong arguments of anti-cultism in France: “in agreement with freedom of conscience, so long as it does not disturb public order”.

If the organised religions (for the reasons you mention, certainly, and others which, as a sincere apostate, you can no longer draw from within yourself) or the “cults”, which we call “spiritual minorities”, have this effect on their followers, why then neglect this positive effect in a society that fears nothing more than death?

Would there not be revealed there a tendentious orientation, a primary anti-religious feeling that would in the end spare itself a true confrontation with reality?

Otherwise, why not denounce the great Republican cult (or religion) by underlining its incapacity to inspire (from the point of view of authentic religious experience) or to “frame” (from your perception) its citizens, to the point that France has become the country with the highest suicide rate in Europe?

There are indeed double standards, for which you are certainly not responsible, but which the atheists tend to defend dishonestly to support their cause.

The CICNS, which we created in the form of an association, was born - it sprang up, I should say! - from the direct observation of this injustice and of the intentions that animate it. Nobody, apart from you perhaps?, really has the intention of formulating a “free thought” to help humanity grow, but rather of imposing a “single thought” to make a few clans triumph (including certain lodges of the freemasonry unballasted of the great architect of the universe).

The spiritual minorities, for their part, are for the greater part much less ambitious: they ask to be left to live in peace, and are now attempting, by force of circumstance more than by taste, to argue their harmlessness.

The followers of the cults are practically prevented, or “dissuaded”, from leaving, for multiple reasons (guilt, the impossibility of social reintegration, the disappearance of their resources, broken family ties, emotional destabilisation, impossible communication, etc.). Being moreover fragilised (or having become so), I can understand that their only way out is sometimes suicide…

There is a “stereotyped list” that I find disappointing after the lucidity you had shown until then (the 25-year-old campaign we have all undergone thanks to the French socialist government since 1981 is at the origin of a collective, “freely consented submission” to amalgams, defamations and other fabrications). One of the crudest commonplaces that the anti-cult activists in France have painfully agreed to shed, so thoroughly did the facts demonstrate the contrary, is that of “being prevented from leaving the cult”, a myth from another age. The reversal was in fact so radical that some seized on the change to say that “the cults practised ostracism leading to suicide”; it is easy, for an “intellectual”: one need only take an argument and its contrary to arrive at the same ends.

The phenomenon you describe therefore quite simply does not exist (all the sociological studies demonstrate that what is called “turnover” is very high in the spiritual minorities - see the sociologists’ research on our site). And most informed people no longer mention it, for that matter.

the mere possibility of suicide in a cult suffices, and it must be denounced, in application of the precautionary principle.

We have heard this apparently laudable argument from the very mouth of the president of the Miviludes in France. But it is unfortunately still one-sided. If suicide is the real concern (and not “the cult” or “the belief”), why not examine this tragic question without creating a scapegoat, and see what sharing of the assets of laïcité and of religious experience could be made to really heal society? The same reflection is called for concerning the ill-treatments about which you use the same argument, unfortunately founded on media conditioning: “they exist”.

it is legitimate to think that these ill-treatments, apart from the fatal cases that are difficult to camouflage, represent only the emerged face of the iceberg…

In an entirely rational manner, could you explain in what way this is “legitimate”?

If that is legitimate, it can be legitimate to think that the whole world is camouflaging something horrible, and to distrust everything and everyone in order to construct a world of suspicion (even more so, if that is possible), since everything would be only the tip of the iceberg? Would that not rather be the effect of a “freely consented submission” to psychoses easily installed in the general public? We know so many people who can assert things they know nothing about, but of which they are so sure. It is important to evaluate one’s starting postulates properly, above all when they belong to the order of thought rather than of experience.

believers will be convinced of the necessity of an early apprenticeship of the critical spirit, from every point of view, and even if that must hasten the undoing of the traditional religions. But to the benefit either of a secular humanism and spirituality, or of a religious spirituality.

Yes, your proposal, the very first to which I replied, is not only “reasonable” (which seems to constitute the summit of human consciousness in your mind) but it also manifests a heartening tolerance of the heart (you are conscious that everything cannot come only from mental cogitation, and that certain less mentalised and more spontaneous human impulses have just as much value in the construction of a human fraternity).

I will therefore permit myself, if you allow me, to return to it soon.

Though a little “intellectual” for my taste - but the medium used doubtless has something to do with it - I appreciate this conversation, and we shall each end it when we have the feeling it has reached its term.

The CICNS team welcomes contradiction and argument when it is founded on a sincere desire to see our societies grow, which I believe I have found in your words.

Michel Thys replies:

I think nobody contests the favourable psychological effects of the organised religions and the “spiritual minorities” (which does not prevent there being less beneficial or even harmful ones). So much the better for their followers: notably for believing parents who have just lost a child and who nevertheless find a consolation in their faith.

Unbelievers can count only on themselves, and on those close to them.

I wonder whether the fear of death is still as present as in the past: logically, it should diminish in parallel with the decline of religiosity, if one thinks there is “nothing more afterwards”. Unless it is occulted by the frenzied individualism of our consumer society, or one hopes only not to die prematurely and in suffering.

What the secularists ask is only that immanent paths, and no longer only transcendent ones, may be discovered by each person, generating comparable beneficial effects.

Contrary to what you seem to think, secularists in general, and “liberal” freemasons in particular, are fiercely opposed to every form of “single thought”: that of the religions, according to their degree of dogmatism, as much as that of certain cults (Raël or Scientology, for example - I do not put them all in the same basket -), and that of “traditional”, “regular” freemasonry, since it imposes belief in God, or in a “great architect of the universe”, and/or in the immortality of the soul, and since, the height of intolerance, it does not consider as masons those who leave the choice of referring to it or not. Fortunately, these Anglo-American “regular” obediences are in free fall, but not yet to the point of drawing inspiration from the adogmatic European freemasonry, French and Belgian notably, where all philosophical and esoteric options are possible, in a spirit of mutual tolerance. This happy evolution of minds seems to me irreversible. We would be in complete disagreement if you considered as a will to “single thought” the fact of working for the advent of a freer, more solidary, more human, more tolerant society…, and of contributing to the ineluctable evolution of mentalities towards more autonomy and individual responsibility.

But if dogmas are definitively condemned, there is no question of throwing the baby out with the bathwater: it is important to preserve, to safeguard man’s aspiration to what surpasses him, without thereby renouncing his self-mastery, by means of a spiritual reflection, be it religious or secular. This ideal of freemasonry, insufficiently known, may seem utopian, but, at the scale of the centuries, and along the modest contributions of the masons, it is less so.

I have indeed read that it has become easier than in the past to leave a cult, if only to avoid complications in certain cases. But that does not imply, in my eyes, that it is easy to get out: that would be in contradiction with the objectives of CERTAIN cults, which is manifestly to alienate their followers and make them dependent on a guru, notably for financial ends.

The profits of the cults, at least those that “emerge”, testify to it amply, it seems to me. I want to believe that you do not deny the existence of gurus, past and present, nor the harmfulness of some, and that you do not unconditionally defend ALL the cults. The fact that you prefer to speak of “spiritual minorities” seems to me significant, and it goes without saying that I do not call your sincerity into doubt.

Concerning suicide, which obviously has many other causes than those linked to the cults, its prevention, at least while there is still time, can be done, beyond human contact, as much by evoking, for some, their religious experience as, for others, secular solidarity. That implies that suicide-prevention centres must be pluralist: no use speaking of God to someone who does not believe in him, or else, even if in good faith, it would be a recuperation of his despair, the height of proselytism (which I condemn in any case because it is one-sided).

As for the ill-treatment of children, doubtless the media overestimate the number, on the lookout as they are for sensationalism.

But without them, would one know of it? In this domain, unlike suicides, there is never a “cry for help”.

Prevention is therefore limited to making people conscious, in particular the followers of the cults, of the respect due to the child, whether by invoking religious principles and values or those of secular morality.

I consider it legitimate to think that the ill-treatments are only the emerged part of the iceberg, because those who are guilty of them, while de-culpabilising themselves (it was “on God’s orders”), know very well that they are condemnable.

It is therefore foreseeable that they attempt to hide the facts, when possible.

Mutatis mutandis, it is not because there is exceptionally a criminal case of euthanasia, for self-interested ends, that everyone must be put in the same sack, as the Catholic Church does.

We are entirely in agreement about the necessity of favouring the critical spirit early in every regard, without eluding the emergence of qualities of heart generative of a humanism and a spirituality, be it secular or religious.

It will remain for me shortly, as announced, to develop further the question of the “choice” between the two, after which we will, I think, have gone round our common points and our stumbling blocks.

André Tarassi replies:

I will therefore leave you the last word, with the question of choice.

For my part, this reasonable dialogue will indeed have made it possible to illuminate the stumbling blocks that prevent two perceptions like ours from joining:

The first concerns what I have improperly called “spiritual experience”, for want of knowing a better expression in the French language. I am not speaking of an intellectual decision that could lead by turns to affirming the existence of, or one’s own belief in, god… then to rejecting it, but of an intimate experience, of the order of feeling, even if it obviously involves neurophysiology, whose beneficiary does not lose himself in conjectures about its nature, because it is its own evidence and its own proof. It is an experience which, beyond that old anthropomorphism of the Divine and the affective relationship that comes with it, naturally offers peace, joy and communion. Humanism or human fraternity can only be born of such an experience; the education you propose seems to me no more effective than a formula of politeness that would mask an inner anger. Humanist values, to be authentic, truly lived, cannot be only “concepts” or “principles”, but living realities in the hearts of men.

This experience, truly “religious” and “binding”, is the foundation of every spiritual community, ancient or new. It deserves, in my view, more attention than is granted it today, and this sad fashion which consists in using certain abuses to smother this essential feeling and consolidate the materialist world is damaging for everyone.

The second concerns the “guru” of whom you speak, a venerable term in the Indian tradition, which now serves in the West as a shortcut for the debasement of the new forms of spirituality. For one genuine swindler, there are a hundred people of great worth who are soiled by amalgam. I do not give this figure at random, it is an approximate but serious evaluation of the situation in France. And this amalgam is not the fruit of chance either, or of an unfortunate “collateral damage”; it is the fruit of a fierce will to destroy the diversity of spiritual expressions. The genuine swindlers could be condemned without any need to put everyone in the same sack, and without any need to create laws of exception like the About-Picard law in France, which betrays that targeted destructive will.

To contribute to the first not disappearing into the oblivion of a materialist world, and so that the second no longer live this injustice, I have attempted to share my view with you. I thank you for this illumination and for the benevolence you have granted this point of view.

Very cordially,

André

Michel Thys replies:

The ABOUT-PICARD law.

Is there “a fierce will to destroy the diversity of spiritual experiences”?

Before answering your email of 17 January, and its addition, I wanted to reread the text of the ABOUT-PICARD law, as well as the numerous, generally unfavourable, comments that followed. It seems to me that, if there had been such a will, this law would have spontaneously seen the light of day, even before “dérives sectaires” had taken place. This law is in my view a healthy reaction of societal self-defence, faced with offences doubtless rare but real, and morally unacceptable, whether they are qualified as “mental manipulations” or as “fraudulent abuse of a state of ignorance or weakness”. An attempt had to be made to prevent their repetition.

But the criminal law rightly requires that, to be prosecuted and possibly sanctioned, the offence must have been committed. Which certain “cults” manifestly profit from… The proof is often difficult to supply.

So long as the harm is only potential, even if it is foreseeable or indeed probable, the precautionary principle is not currently applicable, since non-assistance to a person in potential danger does not yet exist. Moreover, can one legitimately protect someone against himself? It is already done for tobacco and other drugs, but it is more complicated and delicate when it is a matter of knowing whether someone “in a state of weakness or fragility”, even an induced one, and even if he is “consenting”, no longer disposes of all his free will, and must therefore be protected.

The only preventive solution to prevent certain “cults” from abusing the credulity of such people would consist, in my view, not of course in imposing, but in having people discover the necessity of an early apprenticeship of the critical spirit, from every point of view, and therefore in this instance. But we are still far from it, for the established religions would obviously suffer the negative backlash of such a pedagogical perspective. The clerical reactions testify to it abundantly!

The “gurus”.

All the “gurus” doubtless do not have the same profile. The essential criterion that distinguishes the “non-dangerous” from the others is to see whether they respect and promote the autonomy of the followers, rather than making them submissive and dependent. I contest, moreover, the legitimacy of every “directive” authority such as, to varying degrees, that of the priests, rabbis, imams, popes (except John XXIII…!)… Never would a president of a secular association, nor a “venerable master” of a masonic lodge, any more than a “grand master” of an obedience (federation of lodges), permit himself, whatever his “radiance”, to influence his listeners: all limit themselves to “directing the work”, granting the floor successively, each person then forging his personal, partial and provisional truth, from and in the respect of the opinions of the others.

The spiritualities:

Whatever you may think, we are of the same opinion: “Humanist values, to be authentic and truly lived, cannot be only concepts, or intellectual principles, but living realities in the hearts of men.” “The intimate experience, of the order of feeling”, exists as much in the case of religious spirituality as of secular spirituality. Humanism and fraternity too, simply because, before being believers or unbelievers, we have in common being humans.

Having passed in the past from the one to the other, I think that if leaving belief for unbelief proceeds largely from an “intellectual decision”, it also implies, however paradoxical it may seem to you, a sort of prior affective consent, of the order of feeling, a sort of conviction in short, which testifies to a spirituality that is this time secular, no longer transcendental but immanent, simply human.

The rationalisations intervene afterwards, and reinforce that conviction.

In your “addition”, you write that “humanism or fraternity can only be born of an intimate experience, of the order of feeling”. But that is true whether it is a religious or a secular experience. Humanism, spirituality, fraternity are obviously not the exclusive property of the religions, ancient or recent. Secularists, and in particular freemasons, live them just as intensely, but differently.

Faced with the growing disappearance of certainties, and with economic uncertainties, we are all in search of meaning. As soon as we are in the presence of a circumstance that surpasses us, or in a happy or painful episode of existence, we become sensitive to one form or another of spirituality, with or without a religious connotation. Thus, Éric-Emmanuel SCHMITT, in a state of weakness beneath the starry and glacial vault of the Sahara, felt an affective upheaval and recovered faith. But the spiritual dimension is discovered just as well through Zen meditation, Buddhism, the music of Mozart, a simultaneous orgasm, a smell of incense, etc…

By contrast, without becoming a believer again for all that, André COMTE-SPONVILLE, walking at night in silence in the forest, felt “a great peace, the suspension or abolition of time, and of discourse, a marvellous and full simplicity, as if the whole universe were there, present, without mystery or question, (…), a beatitude, a first instant of plenitude, …”.

But there is also an active secular spirituality, the one that consists in feeling oneself on the same wavelength as the men and women animated by a common ideal of individual and collective perfecting, by the respect of the same principles and the same values, etc… What is “sacred”, in the sense of inviolable, for a secularist, is first of all the respect of the dignity of man, woman and child, and the respect of their rights and liberties, which implies the condemnation without appeal of practices such as excision, to cite only that example.

There exists, finally, for certain secularists, “upright and free”, co-opted for their qualities of heart and mind, but also, at equal human qualities, for certain believers who have sincerely called their certainties into question, a masonic spirituality. But the initiatory path they follow, the method of symbolic work and the (voluntary, motivated and not endured) rituals they practise, only have meaning if they are lived. They are incommunicable otherwise than through “Initiation” and assiduity in the lodge. The symbols of freemasonry are not static like profane and religious symbols: they are freely interpretable by each person. Masonic spirituality is not vertical but horizontal: drawing inspiration from maieutics, it proceeds from a quest for meaning of oneself, in contact with others. Adogmatic freemasonry is a school of liberty, of dignity and of wisdom. It invests itself in the understanding of everything human, independently of any absolute (but the “great architect of the universe, alias God”, can be perceived as a symbol, not in the determinist sense of “forces” that would orient evolution in the direction of a “progress”, but in that of the expression of the bio-physico-chemical laws which, more plausibly, by successive complexifications, slowly adapt the living to the milieu, by successive and random trials and errors). But let us return to what we were “speaking” of: masonic spirituality is finally the harmonisation of the individual by himself, the journey that consists in building at once, through dialogue, tolerance and mutual respect, his inner temple and his outer temple. From it results the exalting feeling of being part of a chain of fraternal union that links all the masons of the universe.

It remains to answer the question: does one choose to believe or not to believe, does one choose between religious spirituality and secular spirituality? My answer is: doubtless rarely. Indeed, if the parents are practising believers, certain children will remain influenced by their parents’ faith and their cultural milieu. But in the contrary case, given the inaptitude of the established religions to adapt to modernity, and the growing disappearance of traditional faith, it will doubtless be the “new spiritualities” that will be attractive.

But at the same time, one witnesses a growing diffusion of secular points of view (for example Michel ONFRAY, André COMTE-SPONVILLE, Henri PENA-RUIZ, etc…). I therefore hope that, without proselytising but by supplying alternatives, laïcité will manage to make everyone conscious of the necessity of an early school apprenticeship of the critical spirit from every point of view (cf. my questions 11 and following), whatever the choice of convictions that results from it.

I am now going to plunge into the reading of the latest work of André COMTE-SPONVILLE: “L’esprit de l’athéisme. Introduction à une spiritualité sans Dieu” (Oct. 2006). The publisher’s very objective presentation is as follows (it should interest you, if not please you, as it does me):

“Can one do without religion? Does God exist? Are atheists condemned to live without spirituality? So many decisive questions in the midst of the ‘clash of civilisations’ and the ‘return of the religious’. André COMTE-SPONVILLE answers them with the clarity and gladness of a great philosopher, but also of an ‘honest man’, far from the resentments and hatreds crystallised by some. For him, spirituality is too fundamental to be abandoned to the fundamentalists of every side. Likewise, laïcité is too precious to be confiscated by the most frenetic anti-religious. It is therefore urgent to recover a spirituality without God, without dogmas, without Churches, which shields us from fanaticism and nihilism.

André COMTE-SPONVILLE thinks that ‘the 21st century will be spiritual and secular, or will not be’. He explains to us how. Fascinating.”

Cordially, Michel Thys.

Dialogue between a “Free Thinker” and the Founder of the CICNS, January 2007

Sources