NorthOfNorth wrote on Apr 15^th, 2010 at 10:41am:


Yeah - I guess the quality of the art is a gauge of the level of emotional disturbance. In other words, the best artists are often the most disturbed.

I agree on your comment about adult age converts. They seem to have a major chip on their shoulders. Converts from the Mormon or Evangelical Christian to Atheist are probably the most petulant in my experience, but Muslim converts are not far behind.

I wonder which of the adult age converts would be the worst?

In your opinion, which would win the Olympic Gold Medal for the dummy spit?

It is a bit sad when a society that chooses to exclude religious teaching from children's formal education would be likened to the khmer  rouge.

Your analogy with literature totally escapes me, and the only way I could see a parallel would be if they started teaching that a particular group, or author, was divinely inspired, and everything he says is infallible  and you must adopt all the moral precepts that they mentioned, and also worship them.

The first question you should ask about anything taught to our children is, "can it be harmful to their educational, and/or psychological development?", followed by, "what positives does it bring?"

Kids are naturally honest, tell them most religious stories in an environment where they are confident to freely express themselves and the obvious contradictions and follies of religious teachings are self evident to them, but they are told they must accept what they know makes no sense, or else they will be tortured for an eternity in hell.
However if they accept it as true, then you will live forever in perfect happiness, greater than you could imagine.

If any sane person cannot identify the negative aspects of imposing that sort of disgusting rot onto children as young as 4 years old in our schools, then I say shame on you.

So we know there are many negative aspects to teaching religion to children, like the stick and carrot stories of heaven and hell, and then we have all the included teachings about what is right and wrong, which is very hit and miss, with lots of good morals, but also reprehensibly abhorrent ones as well.

So we can see the negatives, but what positives may come from it, could the positives outweigh the negatives?

You hear many claim that religion gives us our moral principles, but I am categorically certain that we could devise a far better book of moral lessons for children, which did not include the threat of eternal torture to provide them with value, than any of the religious books that people seek to teach to children, like the bible, or the koran.

So there is no reason why kids "NEED" to be taught religion, it is merely the current victims of religious indoctrination, enacting the behaviours they were programmed to.

So we can see that these methods of religious indoctrination have their built in plan for self perpetuation through compulsorily application to subsequent generations.

Should we allow our education system to be complicit in abetting this generational process of indoctrination?

Not in any way shape or form should we.

Schools, and the education system as a whole should be a safe bastion free from religious prejudice, and ideological dogma, and just a place where honest inquiry can be pursued, without caveats imposed by doctrines written by primitive goat herders.

Get religion out of our schools, it does not belong there.
It is time we all tried to make ou

Education is coercive to begin with. You can't start education with requiring that pupils bring doubt and scepticism to it from the start.

Religion is part of culture, morality, literature, art, not to mention everyday life. To proscribe teaching it is stupid.
Remember, they are not forcing you to believe, they are just giving you a lesson about what your forebears took their bearings from for millenia, while they were building the culture that you wewre born into.
To be cultured, to a very large extent, means being able to engage in the conversation with the past and the future. To be obsessing about the removal of religion from that converstaion is to be almost obcenely narrow minded. It is a call to militant philistinism.

NorthOfNorth wrote on Apr 15^th, 2010 at 3:44pm:


Hare Krishna's are just plain weird, but mostly harmless.  

There are very few Hindu converts, and they are not always readily accepted by the Hindu community. There is still some bad feeling about the hippy movement's incursions into Hinduism. I have met two Hindu converts, and these two are an exception.  They are totally embraced by the local Hindu community because of their contributions.

There is differing opinion on conversion - some Hindus believe that you must be born into Hinduism. Hinduism is much more of a culture than a religion as I understand it. Most educated Hindus have a bit of a snigger at Ganeesh and Krishna in conversation.

Hindus don't actually prosletyse like the monotheists do, but it's a wonderful all inclusive, non selfish set of philosophies, a bit like the polytheist religions that gave rise to Judaism and Christianity. There are some pretty nasty local customs of course.

Judaism was once a form of Henotheism.  They believed in many gods, but just worshipped one.  

The new guys on the block (the monotheists) are the main problem. Like most new guys on the block they have a kind of arrogance (religious arrogance) that can be irritating at best, and dangerous at its worst.

OK, when you are a kid and you first hear the bible stories, it does call for the acceptance of magical forces that control everything.

Here is a flas card they could use to give the kiddies an overview of what they will be taught.

It is the non-scary version which does not mention the fact this magic dude is watching you every single second, and if you break any of his rules, he will torture you in hell forever, just being burned alive for all time.
We will save that lesson until after we con them into believing this crap first though, otherwise it will be less effective instilling fear into their young minds.

Soren wrote on Apr 18^th, 2010 at 10:31pm:

Time to cork the sherry bottle, Soren... You're getting a bit maudlin.

Soren wrote on Apr 19^th, 2010 at 10:55am:

Not always, but apparent indignation over a triviality conjures up an image of a maudlin old man on the sauce, is all.

Soren wrote on Apr 19^th, 2010 at 3:51pm:

Danke sehr.