To give a quick summary, as I’m aware that these things do vanish sooner or later:

“Atheists could set up their own schools in England under the government’s education reforms, Education Secretary Michael Gove has said.”

The article goes on to explain a little further, with a further quote from Prof Dawkins:

“I would never want to indoctrinate children in atheism, any more than in religion. Instead, children should be taught to ask for evidence, to be sceptical, critical, open-minded.”

I must say that I have watched the argument over faith schools, as they are something I feel strongly about.  I agree with Prof Dawkins, children should be taught to think for themselves, be shown critical thinking and the scientific method.  Children should not be indoctrinated either for, or against, religion.  Put simply, religion has no place in the school system.

I think it’s fair to start with the observation that our religions have, and still can, play a highly controlling part in society.  This is usually informally and hand in hand with secular rulers (think religious politicians), but often with enough power of their own that these rulers would not provoke them thoughtlessly.  After all, priests could have you executed or banished for arguing with them, and whilst kings have their glamour, priests had a hotline to the ineffable. Of course, as we can see in the West, this power has now shifted heavily towards the secular rulers, to the point that the words of the priests are often disregarded and the police will happily raid a church if they feel they need to (as happened recently in Belgium).

This has, in my opinion, caused a significant move towards faith in a society and its agencies and away from faith in a religion and its agencies.  This tends to have a lot of the same characteristics, including an unquestioning belief for many that their society is always right and better, whatever the actual facts might be.  Of course, we have a lot invested in these things mentally and often physically and financially, thus the world view that stems from a persons faith (or indeed their society) can frame everything for them.  Any challenge to this is highly unwelcome, an observation that leads me onwards.

As in the case of religious faith, questioning this ‘societal faith’ invites swift and harsh criticism from some quarters, which is very understandable in light of my previous paragraph.  After all, any challenge to that faith is more than intellectual, it strikes emotionally as well.  Our answers to life’s questions and problems are found in the framework of our society or faith.  To question that can feel like a very personal attack, it attacks the persons life choices and possibly their sense of who they are.

In religious terms, you’d be a “Heretic”, an “Infidel”, or a “Heathen” and in secular terms you’re a “Commie”, a “Traitor” or a “Subversive”.  Interestingly, all of these are ‘ad hominem’ in that they condemn the person without addressing their ideas.  I think it’s fair to say that these sort of terms are used to put down the ideas of both secular and religious heretics without thought or consideration.  Of course, this is very likely because the faith (whichever that is) can’t afford to have those ideas examined closely.  In each respective system you can be ‘excommunicated’ or ‘ostracised’ and capital punishment has been an option in both systems and still is in many places.

In both secular and religious systems we have competing groups and also sub factions within those groups.  We can call the groups, ‘faiths’ or ‘nations’, it might then also be fair to call the factions ‘sects’ or ‘political parties’.  These groups most often form around a charismatic leader, be it a “Koresh” or a “Stalin”, then power hierarchies form and a dogma is drawn up.  There are always disagreements between groups, which can result in conflicts (armed or verbal) for ideology or practical power or the calving of sub groups.

To wrap up this first part, let me say that I take the view that there are definite parallels between a religion and a society.  I hope I’ve demonstrated this, or at least planted the seeds of further thought, as is my usual aim.  I’m hoping to get more into the ‘Tenets of the Religion’ in Part 2.

Creative Commons Acknowledgement.

The crowd image is by victoriapeckham and is licensed under Attribution 2.0 Generic.

Actually, I suspect that a comedian somewhere is getting some great material out of the Catholic Church’s recent announcement.  It seems that they’ve made the attempted ordination of women a serious crime, right up there with child abuse and heresy.  No, I’m not making this up, the Richard Dawkins Foundation has the story here.

I’ve spoken up in support of women priests before, and also here (also in support of gay clergy) but I would like to say a bit more as I find my patience is wearing very thin.

Now, quite aside from the fact that they’re dismissing half the human race out of hand and showing a breathtaking level of arrogance into the bargain.  Just who the hell do they think they’re impressing?

Maybe the Catholic church missed the part where we moved into the 20th century, and then from there into the 21st.  If anything is guaranteed to show how out of touch they are with modern society this is it.  The zeitgeist has moved on, things are changing and rapidly.  The church is going to have to adapt with the times or be swept away, do they not grasp this?

You want my advice?  You speak of your faith as a ‘rock’, well the tides of change are wearing at it.  Old handholds you thought you had are vanishing, in order to get a good grip again you will need to change position or be carried off by the tide.

It’s not just an opposition to those of us who hold the view that a big change is coming, a desire to make us shut up and stop spoiling the party with inconvenient reality.  It’s not just denial, the stuffing of an envelope full of bad news down the back of the sofa to be ignored;  I’ve seen others do it, I’ve done it myself, and I admit this is what our society’s response seems to amount to in some areas.  I also know from bitter experience that it’s not a clever game plan in the long term, not clever at all.

But no, that didn’t seem to quite fit somehow.  Then I thought of celebrity, media, politics, the whole thing and a thought stood up in my mind and waved – “What if, in an increasingly secular society, our society is our surrogate religion?”

Well, I fired up my trusty mind mapping software and started a map.  A little spare time later this is what I have, let me see if I can run with this thought experiment.

In my experience, Religions are based on a series of faith based assumptions that are not to be questioned.  Now it seems to me that in the West there’s an unquestioning assumption, held by many, that Western society is better than any other.  Well, in many areas that’s true; but in others our record is, to say the least, a little shabby.  Those who question this assumption are often labelled “unpatriotic” or worse.  Why not call them “Heretics”?  After all they hold ideas that are in some areas in disagreement with the status quo and that’s what a Heretic does.  It’s OK to play the home team, but not senselessly, we need to admit when we’re wrong.

Exploring further, the world’s religions have tenets that are to be accepted, again on faith.  In the West we have Capitalism, the idea of ‘the bottom line’, the ‘doctrine of unlimited growth’, various economic doctrines and in the UK the idea that ‘house prices only go up’ (that’ll get me lynched if I’m not careful).  These are clung to with a religious fervour, some due to the consequences of following a failed doctrine, others because there is no room in the heads of the faithful for any internal dissent.  Brainwashing, indoctrination, it has to be like this….. we can keep growing…..

Our holy book has the ‘Gospel according to Keynes’, ‘The book of Capitalism’,'The Corporate Handbook’ (though this one varies from place to place).  To question these tenets and books is again to invite charges of heresy, the ‘doctrine of unlimited growth’ especially, as our whole faith is bound up in it.

But what of the priests?  Our society has a priesthood, politicians and corporate leaders provide guidance and leadership, and they’re only arguably doing any better or worse than the clergy managed overall.  In addition we have celebrities, the ranks of our ‘saints’, those whose word and actions many follow adoringly.  We can elevate mere mortals as saints as well, through the medium of Reality TV shows such as ‘Pop Idol’ or ‘Big Brother’, though are they any more seemingly valid than the religious ones?

In summing up, am I trying to say religion came first and is somehow more valid?  No, but what I’m observing is that as religion vacates the lives of so many, other things are moving in to take it’s place.  They’re not necessarily better or worse, but it is certainly going to be interesting to watch.

Attributions

1. The image of New York City is from Wandering The World.  Used under a Creative Commons License.

With each problem, each speed bump along the way, more people get bumped onto the road towards waking up and people already on the road get moved along.  With that said, I know that many people have a colossal investment in Business As Usual, there are many who will fight the coming changes fanatically; even though their position in that of King Canute, their belief in the status quo is almost religious in it’s intensity.

For their part, the Vested Interests; the powers that be, are deploying every while and weapon in their not inconsiderable arsenals to fight this.  Every person whose consciousness is raised and who starts thinking freely is a loss for them, a body blow, and the more people that awaken to our situation the easier it is for others to do so.

For my part, I think the VIs are fighting a losing battle.  Once a person awakens, it’s impossible to unawaken; a consciousness raised cannot truly be lowered.  You may have denial and suppression but that’s all you have, consider that a religion knows that once the conditioning is broken that person is lost to them, it’s the same here.  This is a secular raising of consciousness that goes far beyond anything we’ve seen in religious terms.

But that’s a thought, and I will swing towards religion as my final thought in this post.  Religions hold views that are in some cases counter to the coming reality, those faiths are in for a shock.  For example consider Catholicism and contraception.  The coming population issues will challenge and break that teaching, the faithful believe the Pope is infallible, they are about to see both their leader and their faith shown to be in error.  Where does that lead?

Once again I’m left with the strong impression that the Catholic Church seems to have been responsible for the suppression of a lot of knowledge and scientific progress.  I think this is one of the things that should worry us all about the rise of so-called “Creation Science” and the resistance to the teaching of Evolution in the classroom.  Do we really want another lost millennium?  Do we really want the scientific investigation of the universe to be modulated and limited by the unverified and adulterated writings of a bunch of near stone age priests?

When Galileo said that the Earth moved around the sun, Martin Luther said:

“An upstart astrologer …. This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of Astronomy.  But Sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the Sun to stand still, and not the Earth” [1][2]

Some years ago, someone tried to tell me that it was the other way around, that the Catholic church had said the Earth orbited the Sun and Galileo that it did not.  To this day, I still shake my head now as I think of that incident.  My response to anyone who thinks that is to read the words of the Pope John Paul II on the issue:

“Thanks to his intuition as a brilliant physicist and by relying on different arguments, Galileo, who practically invented the experimental method, understood why only the sun could function as the centre of the world, as it was then known, that is to say, as a planetary system. The error of the theologians of the time, when they maintained the centrality of the Earth, was to think that our understanding of the physical world’s structure was, in some way, imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scripture….”

Remember this was followed by a formal apology in 2000 for a lot of things in the Catholic Church’s history, including what happened to Galileo.
—
[1] Cosmos, Carl Sagan, page 69. ISBN 0-349-10703-3
[2] Refer to New International Version Bible.  Joshua 10: 12:13.

The author of the article pointed out that, through “Codes of Conduct” and other methods, various organisations can work to exclude people whose views and lifestyles are not the strict majority norm.  A couple of examples he gives are a teacher who got into considerable difficulty for being a pagan and another teacher who posed topless a few years before being a teacher getting into trouble for that.

It’s a question I’ve pondered before with regard to the rows about Anglican clergy, for example, why should a priest’s gender matter?  What matters more is their ability to do the job, though fundamentalists would without a doubt disagree with me, as is their right. So when looking at teaching (which did seem to get singled out a little more in the article), surely what matters is that we have a good teacher, someone who can get the lessons across?  Who gives a damn if they’re pagan?  If you can do the job, the standard of the work’s good and you keep your professional life reasonably seperate from your personal life where’s the problem?  That question, forces us to confront our prejudices and frankly it’s needed.

All of this raises questions about how far employers should be allowed to go in these dictates, at what point do we turn and say “That’s none of your business”? Human Rights legislation is improving in this area in Europe, but it does seem to me as though in some instances employers are (without realising, I hope) working to undermine the human rights of their employees. This is a trend we need to fight and I notice Britain is very slow on the uptake (we have opt outs) with human rights and employment laws.  It is to be hoped we come to our senses.

I like to define Spirituality as a sense of that which is common between us, regardless of Religion; that we are not islands in the world and that we are not separate from, but intertwined with the world around us.  It provides a sense of the sacred in the world, that some things go beyond our materialism, and that we should look beyond the daily grind and the “rat race”.

Some of what I just said can be said of what it though of as Religion.  I think that Religion is a set of rites, rituals and customs that sit on top of Spirituality, that provide more of a framework and structure.  To a degree this is needed, I don’t argue that point, but it is not a good thing it it should grow to stifle things.

The comment that spurred me to write this was that if you have Spirituality without Religion you just have a vague feeling of goodwill, in my view, that isn’t accurate and is quite derisive.  I’ve come to realise more and more over time that there’s a lot more to a simple Spirituality then a vague feeling of good will, it seems to be a much more intuitive thing and it also seems more feminine to my sense of it.  As any Taoist or Zen Buddhist will tell you there is a thing that can be dimly sensed that is beyond being articulated in words, that can only be glimpsed intuitively and can’t be grasped by reason as is the case with the scriptures of a by the book religion.  Further to this, you must do the glimpsing yourself, a priest cannot do the work for you, you must work to your own salvation!

To try to bind it in scriptures is (as Alan Watts so brilliantly said) to walk into the restaurant and eat the menu instead of the meal.  My own conclusion that has been spurred by the comment I read, is that Spirituality without religion is quite valid if difficult to grasp and also not so easy to fit into neat categories with names.  It can live without overt Religiousness quite happily.   Religion without Spirituality on the other hand is doomed from the outset.  It would seem to me to be a set of scriptures and rules and rituals that have had the original point somehow lost along the way, if this is the case, then is religion without spirituality a hollow soulless shell?

I have to admit to being something of an agnostic on all of this, I take the view that there is much we don’t know and will possibly never know.  As much as many would like to cling to a holy book and proclaim that this is certainty, it isn’t and I’ll refer the reader to my essays for more on that.  In many ways I can make a similar observation of the scientific orthodoxy, science seems to get a revolution every so often and is quite defined by the unknown.  I’m also not the first to observe that science seems to be gaining it’s share of fundamentalists, and I feel that a fundamentalist attitude does science no justice at all.

I’ll also step aside from the row surrounding the much misunderstood and misrepresented theory of Evolution, other than to observe that it seems to be producing the goods in a very practical sense across a number of fields and that its opponents have produced no science of their own that I’ve seen and seem to do nothing but throw mud.

So I’ll move towards the whole question of a creator prior to the beginning of the universe.  Now this, of course, assumes that there was a discrete beginning and that the whole thing doesn’t move in some kind of cyclical way that would make for a very interesting line of investigation.

Now, for what I can see of it everything we have regarding events prior to the big bang is pure conjecture, nobody really knows. It seems to me that every debate I’ve seen boils down to a “yes it was / no it wasn’t” with nobody willing to budge an inch. Now, this sort of thing is one of the questions that the Buddha described as being a net, I can see why, all it does it cause upset and you can never really settle the argument no matter which side you’re on.

But it makes me realise, that many people are shouting certainty from a position of not really knowing.  My sense of things is that true liberation and real courage is to openly admit that you don’t know and possibly never will.  Then get on with something more relevant.