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 define this as the idea that we should know everything, that to openly confess ignorance is frowned upon.  Not to know is intimated as failure, and there is a feeling that we should have all the facts to hand.

It has the result that people are frightened to ask questions, for fear of seeming foolish.  I’ve seen this in action throughout my life, in school, college and also at work. I’ve seen people seem frozen with the seeming embarrassment of not knowing, but in reality it’s better to admit this than to carry on under false pretences.  I’ve seen managers who expect their staff to have encyclopaedic knowledge of subjects they rarely deal with, and also expect them to waste their time memorising this stuff when a perfectly good reference exists.

Then we have people who consider a particular pet methodology or system (this is prevalent amongst the geek community), if you haven’t heard of it then woe betide you!  Yet, one could easily level the charge back: “I was doing quite well without this, I have many calls on my time, why should I spend it on this?”

It seems as if it could be an ego trip, to expect that either you should be able to command encyclopaedic knowledge but also a way of putting down others when they don’t know, a way to stoke a sense of superiority perhaps?

Speaking personally, having had exposure to Taoist thought on the matter, I find the whole notion quite ridiculous.

Chuang-Tzu [1] is quite explicit, “On Levelling all things”:

“For the Tao which is manifest is not Tao. Speech which argues falls short of its aim. Kindness which has fixed objects loses its scope. Integrity which is obvious is not believed in. Courage which pushes itself forward never accomplishes anything. These five are, as it were, round (mellow) with a strong bias towards squareness (sharpness). Therefore that knowledge which stops at what it does not know, is the highest knowledge.”

The Tao Te Ching [2] has it’s own say in Chapter 48:

“Pursue knowledge, daily gain

Pursue Tao, daily loss
Loss and more loss
Until one reaches unattached action
With unattached action, there is nothing one cannot do

Take the world by constantly applying non-interference
The one who interferes is not qualified to take the world”

I prefer to honestly acknowledge that I don’t have all the answers, but if it’s needed, then I’m prepared to make the effort to find out.  It’s not the accumulation of knowledge we should value, but the ability to discover and apply knowledge, this knowledge is worthless without the skills that surround it.

Creative Commons Acknowledgement.

The bookshelf image is by Babblingdweeb and is licensed under by-nc-nd.

References.

[1]. http://mindgazer.org/tao/chtzu_level.htm

[2]. Derek Lin Translation at  http://www.truetao.org/ttc/complete.htm

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?

So, we have a possibility for change from a two party sytem to a system of Proportional Representation.  Now, I personally am a fan of P.R., I feel it will enable the political system to better represent the voting public.

The British two party system is a throwback to a previous era of politics in Britain, when there were only two main parties and no credible third.  Of course, that’s no longer the case, so the system as it stands is not fit for purpose.

Proportional Representation will iron out one glaring issue with our current system which is that a party with 26% of the vote (the Liberal Democrats) only got less then 13% of the seats in the Commons, that’s hardly fair play.   It would also make it harder to have one party take the country to war on a conviction, or wreck the economy with nobody in a position to stop them.  Yes Messrs Blair and Brown, I’m looking at you two.

While we have a two party system, we swing between extremes; with P.R. we settle into something nearer the middle way, I think that’s better for everyone.

I’ve noticed in the coverage that, aside from the airlines, there have been other people and companies hit by this.  People are low on medicines they need to control medical conditions, among many other stories.  This could have been avoided.

I am coming to think that our reliance on just in time methods has been shown to be an achilles heel, as has our reliance on imports and air freight.  I’ve talked about balance before, and I believe that what we are seeing here is that our situation is unbalanced, a wheel out of kilter.  I’m an advocate of local goods, and when the business is being poached by artificially lowering currencies, I also consider that the appropriate level of protectionism is a reasonable response.

If I take a lesson from this it is the importance of diversifying, making better use of local sources and building in redundancy.  We need to stimulate local jobs and protect local economies and communities, we also need to develop high speed rail as a matter of some urgency.

I also wonder at the unbalanced media coverage.  The BBC, and a lot of the UK media, seemed to miss the stories of the Finnish F18s and the NATO f16s that suffered damage in this cloud, most of the interest in the news websites seem to come from the commenters, not the journalists!

Cue riot police, protestors, disruption, etc, etc.

This brings me to my greatest fear over the debate on racism, immigration, far right elements and the politics of all of this; not only that a reasoned debate will be completely absent but that it will be of such low quality that it might as well be absent.

Let me be very clear.  It’s no good trying to brush the fears of the right wing under the carpet or drown their voices out, any method that does not address and successfully resolve the reasons for those fears will be doomed to fail.  Also, attacks on the main players will not do, this method of “tackling the man not the ball” (formally known as an “ad hominem” attack) simply leaves the ball in play and at great risk of going to the feet of someone else.  When these answers come, everyone must be willing to listen, not to simply sloganise and brush them aside.  I get a distinct feeling of a sense of disenfranchisement in this, this must be addressed urgently, how can someone who feels shut out of things be expected to have any faith in political solutions?

Furthermore, we are an island nation with limited space,  resources and limited capacity of public services.  There are serious structural, logisitic and operational issues here that society needs to address with complete seriousness, not in the form of populist soundbite politics.   We try to approach things with a willingness to listen to the other person’s viewpoint, even if we won’t like what we hear, because the other person may well have a serious point to make, we must try not to make things about taking sides.

I fear very greatly for the future of this debate.

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.

We all are very much for freedom of speech and my previous post goes deeper into my thinking on that subject. But it seems that there is a tendency to have our say come hell or high water, and then shrug when the hurt is done, and simply point to freedom of speech. I’ve known people both professionally and personally who are very forthright and simply have their say, get things off their chest and be damned, I personally know of instances of this sort of thing causing harm.

This brings me nearer to my point here, right speech. The Buddha give us this precept to refrain from unskilled (or false) speech, and while is sounds on the surface like “thou shalt not lie”, it goes much deeper than that. One aspect of right speech is that we should be gentle, tactful. By all means be forceful or sharp if the situation warrants it, but we need to consider the wider impact of our words. The act of simply saying what you think and be damned can often cause hurt and pain to others, and to simply throw this out heedlessly of the consequences is not skilful. If we are delivering such views, is not better to measure and moderate our speech to still say what must be said but be mindful and avoid causing unneeded harm?

This draws us into the realm of Karma, that as we all know, speech can cause very real harm. That harm need not be immediate, sharp phrases and barbed comments can ring in our ears for a long time after the words have faded. The effects of these words can be felt for days, or even weeks, or can cause problems for even longer.

So, to bring things home. Well I think we should have our say, our free speech to bottle things up has it’s own Karma, I mentioned this in my previous post. But we must recognise that this freedom to sow the wind comes with the freedom to reap the whirlwind, we should exercise mindfulness and go gently with our words wherever we can.

There were demonstrations outside BBC Television Centre and other BBC offices, and the view of the demonstrators that he wasn’t welcome on British TV was very thoroughly made.  The demonstrations were well meaning no doubt, and while I agree that racism and bigotry isn’t welcome, I’ll stick my neck out here and suggest that this risks taking the liberal movement into the territory of being an oppressive force.

The point I wish to make, is that the concept is “Freedom of Speech” not “Freedom of Speech We Like”. Our democracy gives everyone the chance at speech, and all points of view are necessarily represented.  The desire to suppress these views, to stop people expressing the views that are painful for us to hear, is only natural but it is wrong, no matter what our reasons are.  Once we start blocking speech on the grounds of the simple fact somebody somewhere doesn’t like it, it’s the thin end of the wedge, how long before that same power to block expression is turned on others?  How long before it’s turned on you?

We must hear the speech we dislike and challenge it, not cover our ears, to this will leave the field open to those who would spread hatred.  To silence or simply drown out the opposing points of view, undermines our own credibility, and simply shows that we cannot respond adequately.  It also deprives us of the chance to hone our arguments.

Suppressing speech also risks pushing issues under the carpet and they will never be addressed, left to fester.  Later they might resurface as political or social land mines, much larger problems than they needed to be.  Just because you don’t like what’s being said, or who’s saying it doesn’t mean that the speaker doesn’t have a valid point.

I know from my own experiences that listening to speech that you don’t like is painful and distasteful, but it is necessary.  I feel that this is where our mindfulness practise comes in, our sense of detachment is needed.

In short, while I disagree with the BNP on issues of race and discrimination (but will admit they seem to have been quite accurate in their assessment of post peak oil nuclear power and also nuclear emissions), I do defend their right to have their say.  Because to do otherwise, will ultimately harm us all.