Layer 519 . . . Secularism versus Religion, Intolerance, Warsi, Liberal Elites, Dumb Politicians and Spiritual Intelligence

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It's a strange business, this secularism versus religion - the godless versus the God-fearing and God-worshipping. Take this article in G2 today:

Is religion really under threat?

People with faith say secularism has become an aggressive and intolerant force in Britain. What has gone wrong? It should bring society together

by Julian Baggini

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/14/is-religion-really-under-threat

http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/julianbaggini

Mr Baggini's 3 pages in the paper today were inspired by the incredible Baroness Warsi and her ludicrous comments about secularism in the past few days:

Baroness Warsi attacks 'liberal elite'

(The Telegraph's headline actually calls it a 'lilberal elite', but we'll gloss over that.)

Baroness Warsi, the Conservative chairman, has launched an attack on the “liberal elite” who are attempting to downgrade the importance of religion in public.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/9083287/Baroness-Warsi-attacks-lilberal-elite.html

In a speech to the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy, which trains Papal diplomats, last night, Baroness Warsi warned of the growing danger of “militant secularists” to British life.

She attacked the “well-intentioned liberal elite” for undermining the role of faith.

She said: [They] conversely, are trying to create equality by marginalising faith in society and think that the route to religious pluralism is by creating a path of faith-neutrality.”

She claimed that this led to them attempting to “downgrade religion to a mere subcategory in public life.”

The peer continued: “But look at their supposed level playing field. Its terrain is all but impassable to anyone of belief.

“One of the arguments of the liberal elite is that faith and reason are incompatible. But they don’t realise, as the Holy Father has argued for many years, that faith and reason go hand in hand.”

“Just as reason should not be excluded from debates about faith...so too spirituality should not be excluded when we look at worldly matters.”

So here we go again - another God-worshipping individual believing that only people who believe in a God possess any "spirituality", and that atheists (and presumably Buddhists) can't consider the spiritual dimension of "worldly affairs". Which, of course, is patent nonsense.

Buddhists don't have "faith" in a supreme being. However, unlike a lot of religious 'believers' they possess enough spiritual intelligence to apply a doctrine of non-violence when it comes to "worldly affairs" - very unlike the God-bothering Blair and Bush, for example.

Readers may have noticed that Oxzen has very high regard for principled religious people of high spiritual intelligence such as the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and the Rev Giles Fraser, late of St Paul's. I doubt very much whether any of these people feel threatened by secularists, atheists or Buddhists.

Interestingly Channel 4 News last night showed interviews with a rabbi and an imam - neither of whom felt threatened by “militant secularists” or felt that such people are a growing danger to 'British life' - unlike the idiotic Warsi. The female cleric who leads the daily prayers in the House of Commons, on the other hand, agreed with Warsi completely.

The rabbi and the imam both said that Britain is a brilliant country for Jews and Muslims and other religious people who wish to practise their faith.

What is it with dumb politicians and rent-a-gob careerists like Warsi? It's obvious that so many of these people would like 'godless liberals' and atheist intellectuals, who also tend to be on the left of the political spectrum, to become marginalised and disregarded in their critiques of society.

The other thing that Warsi has presumably realised is that the Establishment in this country stays powerful by sticking together - the monarchy, the political elite, the religious elite, and the financial elite. All of them consider themselves to be 'at the heart of public life'.

Give me an intelligent and truly spiritual Archbishop anyday, instead of an idiot atheist like Nick Clegg, for example. But please, someone, spare us the likes of Warsi and her diatribes - the only practising Muslim who thinks that Christianity should be at the heart of British public life, in spite of the fact that the vast majority of people in this country never set foot in a church, never pray to a god, and have no strong religious beliefs.
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Layer 508 . . . Happiness, Desert Island Discs, Kirsty Young, Contentment, Intelligences, Philosophy, de Botton and Zen

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It's Desert Island Discs Weekend. Hurrah!

Castaway: 70 Years of Desert Island Discs

Kirsty Young tells the story of the long-running programme as it celebrates its 70th anniversary and investigates what has made it such an enduring part of the radio schedule.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01b8wrw

Why Desert Island Discs is still in the groove

Who are the classic radio show's most colourful castaways of the past 70 years?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/9044972/Why-Desert-Island-Discs-is-still-in-the-groove.html

As part of the 70th birthday celebrations, we are all asked to choose our own favourite eight discs – results will be broadcast on BBC national and local radio tomorrow after the 70th anniversary Desert Island Discs at 11.15am on Radio 4. Will national tastes have altered yet again? Will Ralph Vaughan Williams have been demoted? We will soon find out.

Is Kirsty Young the most intelligent and attractive woman in the UK? If not, then who is? And we're not just talking intellect here. Sense of humour and sense of the ridiculous are also key.

I don't want my children to be happy just to be content and have self worth, says Kirsty Young

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/9033222/I-dont-want-my-children-to-be-happy-just-to-be-content-and-have-self-worth-says-Kirsty-Young.html

The presenter of Desert Island Discs said that "life is complicated" and that her children will be "bloody lucky" if they even glimpse true happiness.

The 43-year-old, who has two daughters and two stepchildren, was speaking as the BBC radio programme, the world's longest running, celebrated its 70th year.

So what does Kirsty Young mean by 'being content'?

The presenter of Desert Island Discs has caused a stir by saying she doesn’t want her children to be happy.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/family/9035926/So-what-does-Kirsty-Young-mean-by-being-content.html

Young knows the value of not having it too easy. Her Scottish childhood was tough; her parents divorced, there wasn’t a great deal of money, and she has in the past paid tribute to her mother for instilling in her the ambition to do better for herself.

Anthony Seldon, master of Wellington College, political biographer and co-founder of the campaigning group Action on Happiness, was horrified by her comments. “She is totally and profoundly wrong,” he says. “I feel sorry for her children. Every parent should want their child to be happy more than anything else in life, to achieve that sense of deep fulfilment, that they are experiencing life to the full.”

Why is Seldon so obtuse? He's talking here about being fulfilled, and experiencing life to the full. Is that all there is to happiness? Is it possible to feel fulfilled and to 'experience life to the full' ALL of the time? Is there no place in life for sadness and melancholy? Can you experience happiness whilst NOT 'experiencing life to the full'.

Seldon is in the vanguard of those credited with promoting a “happiness agenda” in government circles. His school was the first in the country to offer pupils lessons in happiness. “It is all about psychological health,” he explains, “about connectedness and engagement, about relationships, doing good, appreciating nature and art. Happiness underpins them all. At a time when we are experiencing so much mental illness, teaching youngsters about happiness enables them to see what they can be and to strive for it.” In other words, his take on happiness may mean exactly the same as what Kirsty Young labels contentment.

Doh! Lessons in happiness indeed! He's talking about enabling young people to develop all of their intelligences - personal, social, emotional, spiritual, etc. Happiness is then a by-product of all-round development and reaching one's full potential as a human being. Happiness cannot UNDERPIN this process. How the hell do you acquire happiness in the first place - especially if you're living in dire circumstances? Like in certain public schools.

Happiness doesn't cause you or enable you to develop good relationships, do good to others, appreciate nature and art, etc. Happiness is a by-product of these things.

Seldon's already been told these things - so why doesn't he listen? Especially when he agreed with those of us who were telling him that you can't actually teach young people to be happy!

This article goes on to say,

The emphasis on happiness also worries writer and mother of four Sarah Johnson. “It all sounds so easy,” says the author of The Christian Parents’ Toolkit and Parents on Parenting. “Happiness is very much a state I associated with childhood, all that living in the moment, immediacy and enjoyment. But I cannot say that, as they have grown up towards adulthood, what I have wanted most for my children is for them to be happy, over and above everything else, because that carries with it for me the implication that their lives should be about gratifying their immediate desires. As a goal in life that way only unhappiness lies.”

Seldon is keen, though, to draw a distinction between happiness and pleasure. “Pleasure is when you only think about yourself. It is always about having material satisfaction – good food, another body next to you, a smart car, and it is time-specific. It doesn’t last. But in the 10 routes to happiness that Action for Happiness has identified, serving others and volunteering is among the highest. Happiness has a spiritual value,” he stresses, “with a small s.”

The same message is promoted by Alain de Botton in his new book, Religion for Atheists. The great faiths, he suggests, have always managed to make their followers happy, so why shouldn’t atheists do the same by establishing their own “temples of tenderness”?

But de Botton is misrepresenting religion, says Mark Vernon, the author of Wellbeing and a former Anglican priest. “Religions aren’t keen on the word happiness. It is there in what Christianity means when it uses terms like 'blessed’, but it also understands how complicated it can be. In modern terms, happiness tends to describe only if you are up or down, and my instinct would be to forget it as thin and shallow if you want to talk about spirituality.”

Which brings us back to the attraction of contentment felt by Kirsty Young and others.

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Zen

Alain de Botton is annoying. He talked this morning on Radio 4 about Zen Buddhism and about religion as though they're one and the same thing. They're NOT. There is no God and no worship in Zen Buddhism, which is a philosophy and a method of developing higher levels of spiritual intelligence. De Botton is a clever man and a philosopher, and he ought to know better.

Saturday Live - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qgj4

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Layer 65 Long Strange Trips and Seeking Enlightenment.

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It’s animal madness here today. I’ve just had a squirrel leaping around all over my conservatory roof making an amazing racket, before shooting off along the fence top and into the trees.

Meanwhile White Cat has been on holiday for the past fortnight, camping in the garden in the little Ikea tent I originally put up for my granddaughter. She seems to like it a lot. I’m now thinking it needs to be her permanent quarters. It has a built in ground sheet and seems to be rainproof. It even resembles one of the tents you see refugees living in on news programmes. Being the senile idiot cat she now is, however, she’s just come in for food, and whilst I wasn’t looking did a dump in the corner of the conservatory. She spends more than 23 hours of every day outside, but of course has to shit inside. Up with this I can no longer put.

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Watching the repeat of Long Way Round last night was interesting - 3 guys on motorbikes plus two support 4x4 trucks (one of which crashed) making their way slowly across some incredibly difficult terrain through the wilds of Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Russia, reminded me of the insane times we had journeying back to England across practically the whole of Africa in 1973 in a two wheel drive VW, on a shoestring budget and with no support team whatsoever.

We were most definitely on our own, with just a couple of large-scale Michelin maps to guide us. It’s made me feel determined to do something with the reels of Super 8 movie film I have, and all the slides and photos I took. I really must get them all transferred to digital format and create a proper DVD with a music soundtrack, plus voice-over.

Looking back, the whole thing was pretty epic. Watching the guys on TV cracking up with the sheer effort and frustration of dealing with virtually impassable roads day after day brought back a lot of memories of exhaustion, but also exhilaration and wonderment at some of the landscape, and the kindness of people along the way.

Having done all that I should be ready to do something similar with photos and videos of a career in working in London schools. Lots of highlights and lowlights there too, and another epic trip to put on DVD.

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I suppose Oxzen should have something to say about the Jim Rose article in Education Guardian this week, and about his Primary Curriculum Review.

Peter Wilby, in his article on Jim Rose, concludes that people like Sir Jim “keep the system working”. Was this meant to be ironic? Or is it a supposed to be a genuine compliment that ‘conscientious, hard-working, undogmatic,’ etc, men and women like Jim Rose help to legitimise and prop up a system that’s driven by others who are indeed full of ‘airs and graces, flashiness and egotism’ (which Sir Jim seemingly isn‘t.)

The kind of people, in fact, who enjoy bullying others and creating an education system that’s based on ludicrous notions of academic attainment being pretty much the be all and end all, on league tables, on a culture of targets and testing, and ruthless dismissal of the efforts of conscientious teachers and heads of schools to provide a broad and balanced education that genuinely meets all the needs of children and helps develop the crucial skills and attitudes required for emotional, social and spiritual intelligence.

No doubt Sir Jim can cope as well with this faint praise as he can with the comments of those who maintain he’s basically a fence-sitting career bureaucrat who hides behind bland statements like “I don’t make policy” in order to divert attention from the fact that he’s been so willing to do the bidding of his political masters and not make any waves or offer any opinions that might contradict or challenge the prevailing New Labour orthodoxies. You see, Sir Jim, it’s like this. Very few of us actually make policy, but we can, even if we’re working within the education system, offer opinions to the policy makers that might actually give them pause for thought and cause them to make better policies.

I despise what he had to say about the teaching of reading. He’s clearly no expert on the subject, so what was he doing writing a report that supported an approach to the teaching of reading that skewed the emphasis so heavily towards ‘synthetic phonics’, whether or not learners have such a need?

All he needed to say was that it’s essential for learners to develop grapho-phonic skills, as well as onset and rime skills, and skills in identifying syllables, graphemes and phonemes, but that it’s equally essential for learners to have in their repertoire skills in using picture cues, syntactic cues and semantic cues, and to use such predictive cuing systems from the outset.

Plodding and pounding your way through text using ‘synthetic phonics’ on its own is not the best, the most efficient, the most effective or the most intelligent way of tackling text. It’s just part of everyone’s tool kit for word identification when other strategies aren’t helpful. Otherwise it just slows down and interferes with the whole process, which is a complex and sophisticated one from the very beginning, especially with English, where there are so many high frequency words that are phonically irregular.

I think that just about sums the matter up, except to say, “Once xxxx x txxx there was x . . . .” Get it, Sir Jim? This isn’t about real books versus no books. This is about approaching the teaching of reading as though we, and children, are intelligent, thoughtful, insightful, sophisticated and analytical beings, which happily most of us are. End of.

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Having said all that, it must be said that Sir Jim’s final report on the primary curriculum could well be something we’ve needed for a long time if indeed it delivers what it’s supposed to -

* greater emphasis on personal, social, emotional, physical and spiritual development
* greater emphasis on play-based and active experiential learning throughout at least the foundation stage
* greater emphasis on developing creativity and imagination
* a requirement for Primary schools to introduce foreign languages in ways that make learning them meaningful and enjoyable

But talk about the Long Way Round! This is all stuff that was meant to be happening in our schools from 1966 onwards, and frequently was, prior to the introduction of the National Curriculum, the Primary Strategies, SATs testing and league tables!

We used to be the world leaders in a form of Primary education that genuinely put children and their various developmental needs at the heart of the learning process, before we turned the clocks back, became curriculum obsessed and driven by tests and targets. We used to believe that children should first and foremost learn to love learning for its own sake and should look forward to coming to school in order to enjoy a rich variety of creative learning experiences each and every day. Ha!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/aug/05/ofsted.primaryschools

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I’ve invented a new word for teachers who are responsible for their school’s personal, social, emotional and spiritual development. Zenco.
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And speaking of Zen, there was an excellent article in G2 this week by Miranda Hodgson, “I Became A Zen Buddhist Nun”.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/aug/04/healthandwellbeing.familyandrelationships
In it she explains how she used to have “an aggressively atheistic” view of life, but “gradually became aware that there were other, non-theistic approaches to experiencing the spiritual side of life”. She started doing yoga, and was then introduced to Zen meditation by a friend.

She then goes on to say,

“Having previously lived such a goal- and achievement-oriented life, sitting in meditation and simply observing my state of being was a new experience. As I examined my ideals, particularly the validation I sought through unrelenting hard work, I found that they were empty. One by one, they dropped away. I realised there were more important things than climbing the career ladder at any cost. Although it was a liberating experience, it was incredibly frightening at times. I had to reassess my approach to life.”

“I met a Zen master (a practitioner who has received permission to teach), and under him, I made a formal commitment to follow the Zen path. Unlike in Japan, where Zen monks and nuns are supported by the state, Europeans who make this commitment continue to live and work in society as they did before. For me, the decision to ask for nun ordination came easily. It simply felt like the right thing to do; it made sense. Life was beginning to unfold naturally.”

“Because I am now a teacher, I don't shave my head and, as I wear the kolomo and kesa only for meditation, I look no different from anyone else you would see in the street.”

“When most people hear the word nun, they think of Catholic nuns. Often, their first question is why would I want to give up having sex for ever. Stated in this way, it puts sex on a par with things such as smoking or drinking: self-gratifying acts of pleasurable consumption. If one understands sex according to such a selfish, loveless definition, then I suppose that yes, I have "given it up". One of the vows I made when I was ordained pertains to sex, and it states that you should not use your sexuality in a way that harms. It is not what you do, therefore, but how you do it: using someone as a commodity for one's own satisfaction is definitely harmful if considered in that light. Shortly after my ordination, I met a man with whom I now share a relationship based on mutual trust and respect.”

“Some of my students assume I live like a puritan, and are surprised when I tell them that I do drink alcohol and I will eat meat.”

“While my status as a nun usually fosters a dialogue between me and my students, I sometimes feel it separates us. Nowadays, students think that, to be successful in life, they must strive for high scores, regardless of whether academic learning is right for them. I feel sad at how stressed my students get and, during exams, I remember words from a Zen teacher that to "be adequate" is enough in life.”

It seems to me that articles and case studies like this one ought to be central to the curriculum of all our pupils in Secondary schools - not in order to persuade them to become Zen nuns, but in order to point out some issues around atheism, belief in a God as a supreme being, the development of spiritual intelligence, the use of meditation, the purpose of life, the pursuit of academic qualifications and material success, the importance of diet, the use of alcohol, and the importance of a serious and respectful approach to sexuality that is enjoyable and affirmative at the same time as being non-exploitative and another route to satori and spiritual joy.
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