The Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association (GALHA) has strongly criticised the Prince of Wales’s attack on scientists and Humanists.
Prince Charles used a BBC Reith lecture delivered on 17 May to attack both science and the Humanist outlook on life. He referred in his lecture to “a sacred trust between mankind and our Creator under which we accept a duty of stewardship for the Earth” and he claimed that this had become “smothered by almost impenetrable layers of scientific rationalism.” He singled out for particular criticism the views of two prominent 20th-century Humanists – mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell and biologist Sir Julian Huxley, one of the first directors of UNESCO.
Commenting on the prince’s anti-Humanist stance, GALHA spokesperson George Broadhead said: “For a public figure and possible future head of state to put religion and spirituality on a higher plane than Humanism and rationality, and to imply that only adherents of the former can have concern for the future of the planet, is astonishing naive and divisive. The prince seems to have forgotten that, according to the bible, his creator god deliberately damaged much of the earth’s environment with a great flood. Humanists have just as much concern about global warming, the pollution of the atmosphere, the over-use of insecticides, and other so-called green issues which the prince refers to, as religionists.”