Editor’s welcome

Our founding editor, David Brittain, recently lost his wife Linda after her battle with Alzheimer's. I attended a livestream of her humanist funeral during which David gave a moving eulogy of their life together. Our business advisor Alan Montgomery also recently lost his wife, another Linda, to cancer. We send both of them our heartfelt condolences.

There's a growing sense in some quarters that humanism is punching well below its potential. My own take on this is that humanism is not just the absence of religion but, as espoused by humanists from the start of our movement, it should in some sense be an alternative to religion. Merging humanism into progressivism is not the answer because that leaves out half of humanity who feel left behind and alienated by the pieties of progressives. We need something more inclusive and less polarising. Colin Lewisohn and I have addressed aspects of this problem in our articles this month. Owen Morton, in his inspiring and uplifting story of humanism in Ireland, also points to a grander vision, while Christian Colombo, from Malta Humanists, proposes a marketing strategy drawn from the corporate world.

The ideas of novelist and essayist Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) sit somewhere between humanism and mysticism. In 1959, at the University of California in Santa Barbara, he delivered a series of lectures entitled The Human Situation which explored human problems such as overpopulation. His dystopian novel Brave New World (1932) critiqued the dangers of totalitarian control, while his autobiographical work The Doors of Perception (1954) displayed an openness to psychedelics and altered states of consciousness. In this issue of Humanistically Speaking we delve into human consciousness, the distorting and sometimes terrifying effects of mental illness on cognition, and the therapeutic potential of substances such as ayahuasca and psilocybin. I hasten to add that we are not recommending anything that could potentially break the law. A number of our contributors this month have opted to write under a pseudonym, but I can assure our readers that all of them are real people.

There’s tons to explore in this issue of Humanistically Speaking, including a position paper on Palestine from Canadian humanists. I hope I've whetted your appetite to get stuck in. I also hope you will share our articles on social media. You’re free to republish them in your own humanist newsletters and elsewhere, as long as you credit the author and provide a link to Humanistically Speaking. For more details, refer to our Creative Commons licence by following the links at the bottom of every page.

We’ll be back in June, and in the meantime we wish you a happy spring and early summer. If you’d like to contribute an article or news report, do get in touch.

Thank you for your encouragement, friendship, constructive criticism and support.

David Warden