DICK SPICER DISCUSSES HUMANISM
DICK SPICER HAS ALWAYS BEEN A DRIVING FORCE IN CULTURAL CHANGE AND WAS THE FIRST TO SET UP THE HUMANIST ASSOCIATION FOR NON-RELIGIOUS
HUMANISM in a nutshell is being good without God, believing that you can live an ethical life as a human being without having to invoke an outside power or rewards in heaven or punishments in hell,’ said Dick Spicer, speaking from the garden of his home in Bray.
‘In other words, having empathy with other human beings is a natural instinct of humans and we believe that you can live that sort of life.
‘Now of course that instinct can get perverted and diverted and so forth but nonetheless humanism believes that we can try and encourage that within us.’
Dick said that he is often reminded of a saying attributed to all sorts of ethnic groups. ‘ That we all have different wolves within us, and whichever wolf you feed becomes the dominant’.
So in that way, people become what they live. ‘How you behave feeds into and reinforces an ethical decision to approach life in that way.’
He said that there is no rigid dogma in Humanism, but a simple belief that humans have an ethical principle within you.
‘It makes sense. That’s how humans actually thrive and get on. It gets you through. It’s not for nothing that humans have developed a social empathy, look at this crisis today.’
He believes that the Covid-19 emergency is in fact bringing out the best in people.
‘It makes you proud to be Irish doesn’t it?,’ said Dick. ‘When you look at the mess that other societies are making of it. The way our society has pulled together, it does your heart good.’
Dick has always read a huge amount and came across Humanism as a young man. He was around 13 when he lost religious belief.
‘I was watching television and I was just coming up to 13. Something went wrong with the television and I made a quick prayer - please God, fix that. Shortly after that a thing came on about all these starving people. And it just hit me, there was I asking for the television to be fixed. If there was a God, he wouldn’t be interested in my piddling problem. From that moment the whole thing just seemed absurd.’
Later, the first referendum on divorce was coming up in Ireland. ‘We had a young child and we were thinking about problems with schools, and there was the whole agitation for divorce. I got involved with that.’
The first referendum was lost in 1986, but that was only the start of campaigning for Dick.
‘I had felt for a year or two that something was wrong with just focusing on one issue. I felt it actually needed a culture change in the society before you could make major changes.’
He wanted campaigners to tackle a whole range of issues rather than focus on one, and get people to see that it’s not democratic to impose one particular religious view by law on everyone.
‘I suggested that we establish an organisation campaigning to separate church and state. I listed out the various things - divorce, abortion, schooling, censorship, human rights for gay people and so on. There were about six or seven issues.’
He spent about a year trying to encourage people to participate, and eventually got a campaign together. They set up a committee and the first meeting of the campaign to separate church and state was addressed by Mary Robinson. ‘We ended up with quite a clatter of people involved. It became quite influential,’ said Dick.
He wrote an article for an American magazine, explaining that Ireland was the only country in the world that had in law the entire programme of the Moral Majority organisation in the States. ‘No other country in the world had that,’ he said. ‘In other words there was censorship, homosexuality was banned, divorce was banned - you name it.
‘We were absolutely unique,’ said Dick.
Soon after, the nuns who owned Carysfort teacher training college in Carysfort Avenue decided to sell the property.
‘ The state had put £11 million into this over the previous few years. They were going to sell it for £20 million and they weren’t going to give the state anything,’ said Dick.
‘We lived in a very small cottage in Rialto,’ he said. Various people on the committee had said if he lost his house, there would be a whip around. ‘But there were no guarantees.
‘I took a case in the High Court against the state for the endowment of religion, because it’s forbidden in the constitution. I was arguing that because they hadn’t tied up with any contract the money they had invested, that they were illegally endowing religion. The developers got worried and said they were going to pull out of the purchase. So then the nuns had second thoughts and they said they’d give the state back two or three million. So I said fine, I’m calling that a victory! In the end the state got back two and a quarter million.’
He was amused in the aftermath by the number of people who said he should have stuck with the case.