I am not an "ex-theist". Rather, I was raised in a society which assumed eveyone was religious with no evidence and legally mandated religious education in schools (UK, 1950s &60s) I never really embraced it, though, and had doubts from the very beginning. By my mid-teens, about 1967, I was calling myself an atheist, largely openly.

One of the first realisations to follow from that was that the dead were exactly that; dead. What they "would have wanted" (a phrase I heard a lot) was, while perhaps comforting to those "left behind", meaningless in any useful sense. Yet many of the ethical imperatives I had been handed depended on the authority of the long dead for their effect.

I came to view the prevailing attitudes to time (and the significance of people's place in it) as being somehow "backwards".

Except in the area of abortion and contraception, it seemed that the religious, while revering past generations, had little regard for future ones. They would (and still do) fight bloody wars over wrongs perceived to have been perpetrated by one group of ancestors on another (The "troubles" in Northern Ireland probably planted this seed), wrecking their own country in the process and, in so doing, severely degrading the lives and prospects of their, and everyone else's, offspring whether born yet or not. Then they would "justify" it with reference to "avenging" their ancestors.

I, on the other hand, didn't care what my, or anybody else's forebears had done. Sure, there were lessons to be learned from them but they held no authority. My father's family had been Baptist missionaries in Africa long ago and I considered their attempts to make good little Christians out the local children unforgivable - but I carried no guilt for it. "I" hadn't done it, and never would. I cared more about what those children of the 1930s had grown into; what kind of life THEIR children would get. I cared, and still do, that the religious are still allowed to do this today; passing their own minority opinions onto children (theirs and others) as if they were fact.

It became clear that future people, even though we cannot know them yet and will NEVER know the vast majority of them, are MUCH more important than dead people, even if we DID know and love them.

Conclusion: I do not have to forget my parents or other deceased family and friends but I AM ethically obliged to put living and, as yet, unborn strangers ahead of them when taking positions on issues, selecting charities,or just living my life.

Does this make me a "secular pro-lifer"? No. The unborn I refer to are people who WILL be born, whoever they are, not those who might have been.

- Dave Anderson