A Modern Secular Religion

blatham

sumac had posted a new thread about this earlier today:
Atheism, Agnosticism, Politics and Religion

That's a lovely piece, Blatham. Most reassuring.

Having been brought up right next door to Blue Hill (where that op-ed piece originates), I'm not surprised at all at the good sense of it!

george and tartarin,

Interesting thoughts about the public school system and competition. I haven't the time now, but I'll get back here soon to continue. But when I do, I'd like to continue to address george's question about secular humanism and social indoctrination in public schools and programs like head start. Back later.........sad I don't have the time now. Very interesting discussion this is.

Humanism doesn't have much place in modern religion. There are some who would feign to emulate St. Francis but they are fakes. They reach their church driving a Mercedes and preaching that people should be happy with what they've got. Yeah, right.

I'll post this piece from the Guardian UK as it points to the influence AND the depth of organization the American evangelical contingent has even in the Church of England
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,997233,00.html

george

You describe Setanta's response as 'defensive', but you read him incorrectly. It is impatience you perceive.

You suggest his singling out of the protestant evangelicals as 'straw-man', but go on to acknowledge they are guilty of excesses, but you feel they aren't a proximate threat to liberty. I'm not certain you actually accept the possibility they could be, and even less convinced you would allow that possibility for your own church. I am also coming to think that you perhaps hold with Bork that 'liberty' is fine for getting folks roused up, but if you give them too much of it, they'll just cause everybody else trouble on their fast train to perdition.

to lola you said That is only half true. Education was a community effort, though what else could it have been then? And the intention of everyone you might care to mention was that education be a highest level NATIONAL endeavor...Jefferson "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."....Lincoln in 1832 said education was "the ost important subject which we as a people can be engaged in."....Washinton i his Farewell Address urged the people to promote "institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge...it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened."

And education was not 'mainly a relgious affair'. Nor was it even mainly an intellectual affair. It was utilitarian and designed, as one historian of education put it, to produce "a useful citizen untouched by the effeminate and perhaps even dangerous influence of the arts or scholarship." Early school teachers, for communities that even thought they ought to have one, were poorly paid and more poorly esteemed (there's a reason so many women were teachers of children - you didn't have to pay a woman bugger all). Sometimes, the local minister would function as teacher, but that was to save money or to minimize the possibility you'd hire the sort of 'teacher' who was a bad guy (when almost no one is educated, and when teaching is held in such low esteem, you don't have a lot to choose from).

That religious faith was more evident in schools then is true, but irrelevant, as it was in all walks of life. And this is the change you protest.

Your protest against the size and complexity of the system, and against the involved agents who "feed off" it, are just simplistic. Your population is huge, and that entails size and complexity regardless of who does the job. Add in the realities of the modern technical world, and education can no longer do with simple textbooks. Throw the job to the states, throw it to the county, throw it to the community, throw it to Coca Cola and Boeing to "feed off"...the same job has to get done.

The push for a break up of the school system comes from three quarters only...the religious quarter, which finds itself in retreat and threatened not mainly by information which does not correspond with dogma but moreso by the Socratic process where all ideas and assumptions are held to account and given no forgiveness merely because they are sacred....from the business quarter who understand just how much money they might pocket and how much earlier they might retire to some tropical tax haven through getting in on this 'monopoly'...and from folks on the right who have been persuaded that government's only proper role is ensuring that wealth continues to determine control (clearly, the wealthy are the most capable, thus deserving).

ps

I normally do not even engage in discussions on education unless the person I'm talking to has gone into a public school and done a month's worth of volunteer work. So I won't be talking ed any more here.

I am sometimes a little slow. I just realized, george, what you are up to here. Though perhaps I've even beat you to it.

You told lola that..." A wall between government and Religion is one thing. However putting wheels under the wall and rolling it into the territory once occupied by religion, and then excluding religion on the grounds of preserving the wall, is quite a different matter."

You don't much like government, and you'd rather it wasn't there. Certainly, you don't want it powerful and influencial in citizens' day to day life. Even if it is the best government ever in the universe, what with the Constitution and the genius of the framers and Betsy Ross and all that.

But you do like the church. You do want it there, and want it increasingly powerful and influencial in citizens' day to day life.

Now, there's a real problem when you have to fit that weird 'separation of church and state' element into the soup. So, if you make the role of government in education illegitimate, then there is no separation problem after all!

Lovely, and not too far off Scrat's idiocy after all. Scrat, we'll remember, claimed..."My point is that when the government attempts to shut out all religions, they are doing that which the non-establishment clause seeks to have them not do."

If we took Scrat's 'understanding' of what the framers were up to here, we have...what? Well, the government can't shut out religion, so it can't make a wall after all. That's actually what the wall is all about...prevention of a wall. Clear so far? Perhaps he might protest and say that he doesn't want the cross portrayed on the flag. Well why the hell not? The non-establishment clause clearly seeks to have them not attempt to shut out religion.

Blatham -- I qualify under the volunteer-for-a-month criterion, but never actually attended a public school. I do beg for attention to the multitude and variety of private schools which range from sensible secular to eye-popping evangelicals and a lot in between. Many of them should be considered the good competition the public school system needs, but since they are often considered snob paradises (which of course they're not), it's hard to offer that alternative here.

Until we get over the social division myth, public schools will be supported ardently by those who are not so much supporting good, "free," education for all (that would be good), as venting a middle-class gripe against perceived elitism. At the lowest end of the economic scale, parents would love to get their kids into the best damn school and could care less whether the state or a foundation or alumni fund pays for it. That's why so many alumni of private schools and colleges contribute so heavily to their schools' endowments -- to enable admissions offices to look for students everywhere and particularly in areas where public education has fallen apart. So that's my line in the sand: I'll stand up against those who invent federal bugaboos to destroy the idea of the secular public school, and I'll stand up against anti-snob-snobs who assume all private schools are social clubs for the rich. Oh, and I'll use my BB gun on those who complain religion is being eliminated from our lives. I wish! Religion is alive and richly sick and has an absolute right to continue to be so for those who want it in their lives, BUT THEY MUST NOT BE ALLOWED TO IMPOSE IT ON PUBLIC LIFE. Public schools are part of that life and must continue to be so.

george

I confess you are trying my patience somewhat too. Will you be home today about 3PM? I'd like to send my ex mother-in-law over to visit. Her truck reads "Hairy Knuckles Home Care". You won't have to watch for her, she'll find you.

I frankly don't find Dennett any more smug than your post above. So given the smug equivalence, he wins on other grounds more interesting.

You begin with a fixed idea (a creator exists) and all else falls out from this. Thus a mathematician's calculations which lead to the possibility of an infinite series of universes MUST BE a 'tortured attempt to escape consideration' of god's bighood...thus the leap to a creator/designer is no leap at all, but other ideas are more tortured escapist denials. I understand you are convinced of all this, and I'm happy to let you be, but the fixed idea makes you less fun to talk with because only one conclusion can ever bear fruit for you. You'll certainly tell me that my idea is fixed too, because the structure you have built up demands equivalence, or it fails. I have no fear of a creator...if one is there and rational and just, he and I will have a good discussion one day. But you don't have that fall back george. You are clearly happier with Augustine than with Kierkegaard.

My reference to the Church of England affair (and there is a sub-plot occuring here in a Vancouver disocese as we speak) spoke to evangelical memberships, present in various protestant groups and within Anglicanism too. It is not exclusively, but mainly, an American phenomenon. It's highly prescriptive, highly censorious, and equally as smug and self-certain as the anti-liberty crowd you have in the white house presently.

On education...sorry, tired of it. But a lifetime spent around or in the institution and a degree in the discipline (with an invitation to move directly from undergrad to doctoral) might suggest I'm not talking through my baseball cap.

Your last paragraph is intellectually undisciplined. This is where our impatience is generated. Separation means no middle ground. Your metaphor is powerful, but not in the manner you hope. Your final few words "those who would see religion eliminated from our lives" is, frankly, the stupidist thing I've heard you say. It is a matter of keeping YOUR religion out of MY life.

Now, finally, I'll just tie this all up and tell you that I'm fond of you but you've joined scrat in liberty stupidhood here, and that makes you a species of philosophical enemy.

My ex mother-in-law will continue the discussion for me. I've instructed her to show some small mercy simply on the basis of your paragraph on Setanta - he of the thermobaric impatience.

I'll include you all in my evening prayers, especially blatham's ex mother-in-law for having a succesful discussion .

Seriously, I'm glad that I've been only lurking - my ex mother-in-law would want me to pay for the flight. :wink:

I attended public schools and my children have all attended private schools. The last two have attended "the" private school in town. The first went to public school for lower school and my grandson the same. My youngest daughter and grand son (one year apart) are both going back to public school next year. In the location where I live, I'm as annoyed by the religious influence or pressure, I should say, in the public as I am in the private. Government can't regulate religion out of anything. Especially when the religion in question is populated with ravenous evangelicals out to do "God's work." (which you can translate as a justification for coercion.)

I'm not, btw concerned about their influence on the way my children think about religion. I think it's up to my children to make up their own minds. All of them went through stages in which they wanted to go to church and asked me to take them. (Religion is as rampart in the exclusive private [supposedly secular] school as it is in the public school.) When they asked me, I joined a church and established them in a Sunday School. I couldn't stand to attend the church service itself, so I spent my time while they were in SS in the church library reading my assigned Freud readings. I thought the kids needed to see what they were yearning for up close. A vaccination of sorts. And it didn't take long before they said they didn't want to go back. Maybe 6 to 8 weeks in total. They've never wanted to go back again. What I am concerned about is the peer pressure in the schools to be like the rest of them and the worry they struggled with when they were being fed the fat little donuts of simplistic religion. All of my daughters have gone through stages early in their school years worrying about their parents and whether they would spend eternity in Hell. When they got old enough, they could see this for the fantasy it is, but at the time, they were tramatized. And even now, my middle daughter says we should never have raised them in the city in which we live, she doesn't live here anymore and would not consider ever returning. And now, I can see that she's right. Oh well, hind sight.......

You'll have to excuse me if I'm a little impatient with this evangelical desire so prevalent in fundamentalist religions. (Oh, by the way, george, I do know an Episcopalian church which is fundamentalist and evangelical. May the universe preserve us.) But I'm more than impatient, I'm also worried because this element has edged itself so firmly into our government now (GW and company) that we can forget about secularizing our children, we can start worrying about the influence this evangelical disease will have on us all and on the entire world.

I can't tell, george if you've never had any experience with fundamentalists or if you are one and don't see the harm in it. But come see me and I'll introduce you to some folks that would make most reasonable people's skin crawl.

It seems that the concern here is for those kids whose parents are involved enough with them to wish for a good education for their children. But what then will happen to those kids whose parents are too overburdened or themselves struggling? It seems we're worried least about the very students who need education the most. And all because many are worried about their children being snatched by the devil. It's been my experience that most kids are influenced in these matters by their parents regardless of what they encounter in the world outside their homes. Of course, there are those exceptions like me.

So what am I trying to say? That our energy should be focused on building excellent public schools, less homogenized and richer in ethnic/cultural diversity, as Tartarin says. But this will take money and when tax money and investment is drained off for those who want their children to attend a religious school or for whatever reason, I wonder if this dream will ever be a possibility.

And I don't fault the concerned parents one bit because we all want what's best for our children first and the larger society second. But it seems if all parents worked in the public schools with as much energy as they invest in the private school, the public schools would improve and everyone would be more willing to pay the taxes necessary to make it a fine school system. Maybe that's polly anna....but I can wish..........

Tartarin

Yes, I mentioned to George earlier that I'm a fan of Jesuit educational standards. And I have no beef at all with alternate schools and diversity in educational theory and practice. I also now think, sadly, that our hopes for what a universal education might achieve to be somewhat romantic, which is not to say that the lack of one wouldn't produce a much uglier world.

But we ought to be honest about things and face up to the reality that equality in educational access and performance is not really desired by many of those who presently are advantaged by inequality. Also, that the push from the religious community isn't at all about 'quality' of education, it is about indoctrination in dogma. And that the push from the business community is about profit (and with any luck, these assholes will continue to fail to make much).

No kidding! You mean they don't really WANT equality? You mean it's about POWER? Is this America or what!

Tartarin

Sorry, it is a bit obvious, isn't it.

Tartarin,

Apparently our ideas are fairly close with respect to public & private education. The tragedy of current public education in the United States is that it is failing mostly the very people its adherents claim they are most interested in helping. The system should be reformed, not destroyed, and competition is essential to its reform.

I believe you exaggerate the danger of the imposition of religion in public life.. In fact religion, and what is often called traditional morality, are in full retreat from public life. They have no control and rapidly diminishing influence. They are being displaced by secular values through the actions of private social organizations and the government, which is increasingly their tool.

No, George -- we disagree. It may seem odd, but I don't think morality is in full retreat. I think it's morality which is trying to sideline corrupt, power-driven religion. If, by traditional morality, you mean stuff like segregation, interference in people's sex lives, and stuff like that, then I'd agree, happily, because the sooner we see the back of that stuff, the better. What's wrong with secular values in schools? Well, first of all, what are they (in your view) and what's wrong with them?

(note george's revealing use of 'imposition' in the first sentence of his second paragraph above)