Who am I? Societal attitude and the question of identity

How do we create our identity?
The UK has been my home for 27 years. I have always loved living here, have been part of my community and have felt totally at home and accepted. That changed a year ago when the EU referendum fuelled anti-immigration sentiment and for the very first time I felt unwelcome, anxious and insecure.

I want to explain what happens when people are marginalised and scapegoated, because even a year on I feel the effects very strongly. Of course I can only speak for myself, but I have spoken to enough EU immigrants and have observed friends from other minority groups to be fairly sure that this is a shared experience.
I expect that the simultaneous impact of the EU referendum result on 3 million people is probably a fairly unique event, but the sense of no longer (or indeed not ever) belonging into society happens to many groups of people for many reasons.

In my personal experience, when you no longer feel accepted by society as a whole, you lose your sense of belonging and security.
You may try to fight it, but how do you change society's perception of you, especially when it's fuelled by the media and political powers?
You begin to feel wary of other people, and you wonder what people really think about you - even people you have known and felt safe with for a long time.
You become more sensitive and more defensive about what people are saying and how they are saying it.
There is a temptation to withdraw and isolate yourself, because that's easier and more comfortable than managing your own feelings around other people.
So eventually you shed your old identity, and you take on a new one. Which new one? The one that you have been labelled with. First you carry that badge tentatively, then you carry it with pride.
Then you start to seek others who carry the same badge, and before you know it *they* are the people you feel safe and comfortable with.
And although you have perhaps never before felt disconnected from "everybody else", you have been pushed that way and you suddenly become it. You know longer belong, at least not in the same way you used to.

I say this because I felt so secure and assured in my life that I would never ever have imagined that anything could change how I feel. And yet it has.
If it can happen to me, it can happen to anybody.

This post is not about me. I am just using my own experience to demonstrate how we affect others.
How society perceives us matters. How we allow politicians and the media to speak about whole groups of people matters. If we allow people to be set aside and scapegoated we risk driving them away into the margins of society where they may become lost and drift away.

We seem to be increasingly wary of people who are different to us, whether it's based on ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, (dis)ability, or social standing etc. We don't like the very rich and the very poor. We accuse people who sound, look or behave differently to us of undermining our culture and way of life. We suspect whole groups of people of exploiting our system, to "just take" and not contribute to society. There is much talk about wanting people to "integrate", to be more like us and to take on the "British way of life".

I put up a different argument. I suggest that if as a society we accept and welcome people as they are, they will be much more likely to contribute to and be part of our society naturally. It's what most people are wired to do.
If we learn to draw people into the fold of our communities, rather than hold them suspiciously at arms length on the edges, we may just become a better nation.

Humanism, being a Christian and the parable of the Eaton Mess

When @Naradee12 first asked me to write a piece for her secularscarlet.wordpress.com blog I thought “I can do that”.
… Then I checked out the blog and found myself thinking “I’m not sure I can do that”. There seemed to be a strong anti-religious sentiment and terminology such as “eradication of religion” simply makes me feel a bit uneasy.

I am a Christian. I grew up in a Roman Catholic family but left the church when I moved away from home at the age of 18. For many years I had little to do with religion – although I was drawn into a church service once in a blue moon, for a while dabbled in Paganism (there is still much I like and respect about it) and at some stage developed an interest in Hinduism.

Then, quite unexpectedly, in my mid-30s I returned to the Christian faith and have been an actively and openly practising Christian ever since. My faith acts as a daily reminder to be more caring, more forgiving and more loving, to be less selfish and self-absorbed and to strive for greater things than personal gain, power and reward.
Of course I am not saying that you have to be a Christian to do these things – but simply that for me the framework of the Christian faith acts as a daily and constant encouragement.

Quite often atheists have said to me: “I respect you, but not your beliefs” to. I think that’s meant to be a compliment, but I find it quite difficult to get my head around that statement.
For me the two are firmly connected. My beliefs shape who I am. Where I see myself in relation to God and other people is who I am. To those atheists I would respond by saying “If you respect me you also respect my beliefs, because my beliefs are what makes me!”

I would also say “judge me by what you know about me, not by what you assume to know about me based on your assumptions”.
I am talking about my personal beliefs. Find out about those, rather than judge me by what the Pope said in 1997 or what some Televangelist preached last week or what you were taught in Bible school when you were 7 or by some obscure Bible verse which really gets your goat.
Or simply judge me by my words and deeds … because they mirror my beliefs.

I believe in God
I also believe in humanity.
I believe in equality and in Human Rights.
And I believe in our ability to live together in peace and harmony … and I am passionately convinced that the only way we can create societies like that is to listen to, learn from and respect each other!
I guess that makes me a humanist.

Jesus summed up all religious teachings into two laws: “Love God and love your neighbour as yourself”.
He modelled this by concerning himself with the most needy, excluded and vulnerable members of the society of his time; those you were considered unclean, sinful or undesirable – menstruating women (yes, I know!), adulteresses, tax collectors, lepers, non-Jews, the mentally ill and the physically disabled, to name a few.
He considered religious rules to be there to benefit people, and criticised them sternly when they were used to burden or control people. Religious teachings are there to benefit people, not the other way round.
Jesus was a humanist too!

My hope is that we all be HUMANISTS before we are theists/deists/atheists and that rather than try to eradicate each other we fight for and work towards the humanist values which will build more loving and caring communities.

The other evening we had Eaton Mess for dessert.
For those of you who don’t know what Eaton Mess is, it consists of broken up meringue, whipped cream and fruit (typically strawberries or raspberries) mixed together. Imagine a mashed up Pavlova!
Now, I’m not too keen on cream and my husband doesn’t really like meringues … but we both agreed that in an Eaton Mess all the ingredients really complement each other.
Take the cream out of the Eaton Mess and you no longer have Eaton Mess. And cream on its own is just, well, cream.

I wonder whether there is a lesson for building society.
Perhaps to create diverse, tolerant and understanding communities, we need to get in together, mix with each other and get messy!

Find me on Twitter under @solsikke66