PRINCESS DIANA - A PERSONAL HUMANIST PERSPECTIVE.

Princess Diana’s death and her funeral makes this a difficult time for Humanists, and republicans like myself. Many commentators have talked of late about the multi-faith reaction to the tragedy, but no one has had the guts to look at the truly secular view of the hard line atheists and agnostics. More than ever, I have been confronted by the dilemma of standing, or not standing up to a performance of God Save The Queen. At my local pub on that fatal Sunday when the awful news woke us all up sober-minded, the pub D.J. paid tribute to Diana by playing a recording of our National Anthem. Similar rituals will have been witnessed in many public places. Greatly to his credit, the D.J. told us all we needn’t stand if we wished not to. We all did, including myself, though I was tempted not to, as I have refused before, and will again. Somehow, it felt necessary. A nice, good woman who touched us all had died. I was saddened by her passing. That was an inescapable fact that left me restless and disturbed. I stood torn between different thoughts and feelings. I felt hypocritical. God save the Queen? Diana isn’t even an official royal now. And as for God? To me he doesn’t even exist. Why If he is there, didn’t he ‘save’ Diana? Why do we criticise the Tabloid gutter press and leave God unblamed? Now, we’ve put her public funeral in the hands of the very family who rejected her and left her to seek romance with Dodi. Whether there would have been a new wedding and real happiness for her and her sons will never be known now. If they had married would Diana have converted to Islam? Would Dodi have become a Protestant?

That funeral was conducted by priests, and Bishops ho for all their integrity, compassion and sincerity, still serve the very God who, if he had the powers to create our Universe, could have stopped that car crashing at all. Diana’s was a strong human story, with a tragic ending dangerously similar to that of Romeo and Juliet. Her death was a human tragedy. Which humans humanity will blame for her death is yet to become clear. Our tears are human and humane. Diana was human. Lets keep all gods out of this. It’s none of their business.

I still disapprove deeply of Charles’s intent to become a defender of the faiths, as such a worthless office has no value for those like me who live without religious faith or gods of any kind. Rightly long since stripped of the autocratic Divine Right of Kings, the royals are little more than capital sponsored fashion idols and Celebrities. for us to stare at as they maintain a rapidly crumbling illusion of being the ideal British Family. We ogle them as we would study the animals at Chester Zoo. In trying to capture a pointless 2-D image of Diana and Dodi sitting in a car, steered by a drunken Chauffeur, to sell to us through some glossy trashy magazine the press contributed to the tragedy they now report to us. If the allegations that the vultures continued to take pictures of those trapped in the wreckage, and even sold some of those pictures are true, then our fascination with Diana has moved from voyeurism to outright necrophelia. We are utterly ashamed of ourselves, I hope.

My long standing disapproval of the very concept of a monarchy needn’t ever actually stop me from respecting individual royal personalities like Diana, though some people seem to assume that I must openly disapprove of her life too. She had her faults, such as her desire to avenge herself on anyone she believed to have hurt her. Like many people I can applaud and even celebrate her taboo breaking charity work, her support for AIDS and leprosy patients and her awareness campaign on the sheer inhumanity of land mines. Humanists applaud all involved in such work, most of whom lack Diana’s celebrity status. I can readily admire her brave and principled stance against the cold heartless neglect she suffered and endured at the House Of Windsor in her increasingly loveless marriage. Her battle against eating disorders and a desire to commit suicide and acts of self mutilation touched many hearts. I can admire Diana more because she exposed the sham that she had lived with for so many years as the stage managed fairy tale marriage inevitably turned sour. That there was no happy ever after for Diana demonstrates the very human nature of her life and her death. There was nothing remotely romantic or divine about any of these events. On top of that there was her pleading struggle against media intrusiveness of the kind that ultimately helped destroy her. Her Greta Garbo, and life Of Brian like call to be left alone just made the callous Paparazzi even more eager to capture her anguish and pain on film.

During the filming of mourners placing their bouquets at the gates of Buckingham Palace, the feeding frenzy photographers focused in on the many angry people who called them murderers, rather than taking the hint and going away to a more tactful distance. No one has learned anything from this tragedy. It shakes my essential faith in humanity to the core, let alone anyone’s faith in God. There’s a disturbing question for Humanists if ever there was one. - How do we cope with loss of faith in Humanity?

Elton John’s sentimental syrupy over-patriotic funeral tribute song gave us an alternative pub tribute to Diane than the irrelevant God Save The Queen, though the song still talks of Heaven and eternity in a way that injects a potent hymnal religiosity into the words. In its original Marylin Monroe version, the song (Candle In The Wind) carried the angry line; "Even when you died, oh, the press still hounded you. They put you on a treadmill. " That line should have stayed in the new version of the song.

It was left to Diana’s brave brother to give a voice to some the words any Humanist would want to hear; that Diana was a human woman with a laugh that bent her up double, and not a saint, ripe for canonisation. His brutally honest broadsides against the Windsors were also highly applicable. They it was who stripped her of her proud HRH title and cast her into exile, in a way that the ordinary people of our country refused to accept. Their efforts to reinstate the title after the funeral were rightly met with the Spencer family’s refusal. Effectively, they were told to shove it up their royal backsides. Her brother was quite right to assert that ‘she (Diana) needed no royal title to continue to generate her particular brand of magic’ but that magic was a secular gift of caring, sharing, sincerity and an open minded honesty about her deepest fears. These are values Humanists will always respect and cultivate. Diana certainly believed in the God I openly renounce and denounce, so it was right and proper that her funeral reflected that belief for her. The senior Windsors trapped in the hard dogma and fundamentalism of Protocol, only emerged before the people to show their grief and lower their flag under duress. Before Diana’s coffin had even reached Althorp House, they were back on route for Balmoral instead of accompanying their grandchildren and Prince Charles to the final resting place in a quiet island in a lake that now takes on the appearance of a new Avalon, rather than a new Graceland. Perhaps they weren't invited. Perhaps they chose not to go. Their absence was noticed either way.

Humanists, more than most people were appalled to see the Windsors rushing the young Princes to family prayer as normal that terrible first day. There was no reference to Diana in that church service. Imagine how her teenage sons must have felt about that. I was particularly aware that the Princess Of Wales had been robbed not only of her HRH title, but had also been crossed off the family prayer list by fellow practising Christians upon her divorce. What kind of God-fearing people set the unforgiving example of praying for each other but excluding prayers for the mother of their own grandchildren, and the future heirs to a broken throne? Were those poor boys also expected never to pray for her when they have been raised in the faith themselves? Such behaviour is disgraceful. That the Windsors played such a prominent public role in her funeral took on a certain hypocritical guilt tarnished edge. Why pray after her death for someone you never prayed for in life after her divorce?

We saw the Union Flag finally lowered to half-mast over the biggest council house in Britain but only under public pressure. We must rise from apathy more often. We should use our power to speak our minds, with such conviction to support the Earl Of Spenser’s wish to see Harry and William get to see the world through real, secular, no nonsense eyes, unblinkered by rigid absolute protocol and dogma or tradition. The boy princes have minds of their own, and must be allowed to think for themselves, and feel for themselves. They must be free to make up their own minds. It won’t be easy for boys who are regularly moved between several royal palaces, surrounded by bodyguards and camera happy tourists, with an Uncle pledging close support even though he lives in South Africa, and their isolated public school education. Thinking for yourself is what humans do in the real world. That is the values that Diana lived by right to the end. That is why this Humanist will miss her deeply. The extent of her veneration as a saint is gross and demeaning. Many priests are holding services in her name. Mystics and seers are coming out of the woodwork to make claims that they foresaw the crash. Merchandise sales of Diana memorabilia are likely to go through the roof. The Paparazzi contributed to the death of the goose that lay their golden eggs. Now others will be selling us souvenirs or contriving conspiracy theories claiming that Diana faked her death to shack up with Elvis. Many people are calling for monuments, airports, and even Lake Windermere to be renamed in her memory, while Diana is likely to take over from Kylie as the name of most girls born in the remains of the decade. Pizza Express food chains are already offering a Pizza Diana special, with 25p on every sale going to one of her charities.

What do other Humanists think of the monarchy now? The best answer will receive a piece of the one true tiara; there are only 20,000 such pieces likely to be distributed soon.

Arthur Chappell.