Comments on: Marching already

By: Michael

Michael — Fri, 15 Jul 2005 02:23:00 +0000

In my brave new world schools would be forced to do at least an hour a week of cultural and religious 'education' in the proper sense. This would involve presenting all views and encouraging young people to actually think about what they mean by way of critique and group discussion.

Curiously enough, that broadly describes the secondary school religious education that I had. I'm sure there was a stronger Christian element than I'm making out, but there was definitely lots of comparative religion, after which we largely abandoned any pretence at discussing spiritual matters and spent the last couple of years exclusively discussing moral issues like sex, drugs and crime.

At the time, I had no idea that this was especially unusual, and I'm very sorry that this seems to have been the case.

Oh, and I second Chris's recommendation for the Kaletsky article - in fact, rather to my surprise, I've found The Times has offered much the best coverage of 7/7 of any of the broadsheets (both in terms of depth and intelligent contextualisation).

By: Chris b

Chris b — Thu, 14 Jul 2005 13:24:00 +0000

I wonder if the bomber chap who worked at a primary school was also a Paedo?

;-)

By: dsquared

dsquared — Thu, 14 Jul 2005 12:53:00 +0000

btw, I think sick jokes are reasonably ontopic for this site, so I will pass on the fact that the Newsnight report last night described the Muslims who formed the local community in Dewsbury as "not like the Islamic community in London at all really … they’re really uneducated, backward-looking and insular".

So in other words, they’d made quite an effort to integrate with the Yorkshiremen then.

By: Chris b

Chris b — Thu, 14 Jul 2005 12:49:00 +0000

It’s not actually compulsory for religious education up to the age of 15, you can opt out on religious grounds, which I found totally insane.
At my school it was the Muslims and the really weird Plymouth Brethren who didn’t go and in my opnion needed to learn the most about other faiths and tolerance in general…
At my scholl anyway the "daily act of worship, broadly Christian in nature" usually consisted of the local policeman turning up to cart off some little shit and show him Retribution the old fashioned way…

By: Chris b

Chris b — Thu, 14 Jul 2005 12:41:00 +0000

Interesting stats:
The Muslim population of the UK is about 3%, if they all become mad bombers and based on the hit rate of the london Bombings (c.52:4) they could theoretically reduce the population by c.21m in the UK.
Predicted DM headline "40% of UK population at risk from British born Muslim Bombers"

I’m now wearing my extra thick asbestos gimp suit…..

Mr Kaletsky is always a good read and fairly spot on with this
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1061-1693163,00.html

I especially like "Morally, today’s Muslim extremists must be put exactly on a par with neo-Nazis. Their violence and hatred may be motivated by deep philosophical convictions and a genuine sense of grievance, but the same was true of Hitler" and "reducing the concept of martyrdom to what it really amounts to: a sad, lonely and utterly futile suicide."

By: dsquared

dsquared — Thu, 14 Jul 2005 12:40:00 +0000

In my brave new world schools would be forced to do at least an hour a week of cultural and religious 'education' in the proper sense.

As far as I'm aware this is actually compulsory in British schools up to the age of 15, however both this and the "daily act of worship, broadly Christian in nature" which is also compulsory tend to go by the by as the schools try to shovel as much league-table fodder into the little dears as possible.

By: Chris b

Chris b — Thu, 14 Jul 2005 12:17:00 +0000

As group works of fiction I think most religious books such as the bible are quite inteteresting as most books these days are from single, or at most dual authors.

It's kind of a collective group story telling around the fire (of burning Jews/homos/commies other.....)

By: The Militant Pine Marten

The Militant Pine Marten — Thu, 14 Jul 2005 12:16:00 +0000

Last word on religion and education. I'm going to quote the great Jean-Claude van Damme:
"It's thanks to love and sex that you can make children, so you need to be physical. But when they're there, you have to be a bit more mental, and then spiritual to make sure they have a good education". Like everything else he says, it's stangely memorable despite being a load of garbled twaddle.

By: The Militant Pine Marten

The Militant Pine Marten — Thu, 14 Jul 2005 11:34:00 +0000

As an engineer, I very much approve of the water into wine nonsense. Besides, nobody said it was a science textbook (except the Creationists, but sod them). That isn’t what it’s for. It isn’t a fair criticism.

By: Larry

Larry — Thu, 14 Jul 2005 11:06:00 +0000

there isn't much in the Gospels that's very objectionable

Not morally objectionable, maybe. But as a scientist I rather object to all that water into wine, walking on water, coming back from the dead nonsense.