Babies, bathwater and a continuing humanist and Christian discussion

Photo by Rona Vorontsova on Unsplash

This is a continuation of the previous post, part of a series of posts discussing humanism and Christianity. Dean Brett writes on Substack.

Dean Brett:

Thank you for your kind response to my post. As usual my reply will be brief, even more so this time due to the highly personal nature of my comments (and my effort to spare the feelings of some of my surviving relatives.)

First, I appreciate your sympathetic response to what you describe as “the tragic atmosphere in which you were raised” in “a family that was broken and hurting in so many ways.”

That is not how I see it. Looking back, I don’t see growing up in the Brett side of my family as “tragic” — particularly in contrast to the other side of the family which indeed was “tragic” — but that is another story. Alcohol was just the liquid in which I learned to swim. It was tragic to them, particularly to my uncles, as they reacted to the depression with bad choices. But they just served as bad examples. (Some people navigate towards the North Star, some away from the Southern Cross).

My dad was born in 1920, so would have been 9 when they lost everything. Everything. He persevered through hard work and honesty, with alcohol as a crutch. He was an amazingly good father who…