Big excitement: another religious state school is opening in Leicester, a Hindu one modeled on another in Harrow (London). Hooray hooray, even though there are people who think Not hooray hooray.

It, like other faith school proposals for “free” schools, has its opponents, those that think the plethora of religious schools being opened under the Gove initiative will destroy community cohesion and increase segregation on racial and religious grounds among pupils.

And that that’s not something the state should be fostering and funding. What’s the other view, exactly? I can never quite figure it out. That it will do those things but those are good things to do? Or that it won’t do those things? Either one seems…feeble.

The programme is intended to overcome the situation whereby there are a million Hindus in the UK but only 30 Hindu primary school places a year for them.

But there you are, you see, that’s just it: what does that mean, “for them”? Nothing, basically. You might think (if you were a naïve observer) it meant the children of Hindus are barred from all UK schools apart from a selected 30. But of course that’s not the case: the children of Hindu parents like the children of any other parents can attend state schools. The “for them” implies that children of Hindu parents perhaps “need” to attend specifically Hindu schools, even though parts of the article put that very idea into question. It’s a goofy, retrograde, sloppy idea that’s been coming into vogue in recent years, and people should toughen up and get rid of it. Children don’t “need” to go to any kind of denominational school, and assuming they do does indeed push them into religious and sometimes ethnic segregation. Get over it.

I wanted to say a bit more about that passage from Obama’s Audacity of Hope that Rieux quoted yesterday.

And yet for all her professed secularism, my mother was in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I’ve ever known. She had an unswerving instinct for kindness, charity, and love, and spent much of her life acting on that instinct, sometimes to her detriment. Without the help of religious texts or outside authorities, she worked mightily to instill in me the values that many Americans learn in Sunday school: honesty, empathy, discipline, delayed gratification, and hard work. She raged at poverty and injustice.

I wish he had managed to say that without presenting it as somehow at odds with secularism, and for that matter without calling it “professed” secularism as if his mother had been either fake or wrong. I wish he had in fact said emphatically that his mother’s attributes were and are entirely compatible with secularism. He could even have said that religion is often at odds with for instance kindness or honesty, not in a random way but as part of its nature. Religion can be punitive, and it can be deceptive or evasive.

Most of all, she possessed an abiding sense of wonder, a reverence for life and its precious, transitory nature that could properly be described as devotional. Sometimes, as I was growing up, she would wake me up in the middle of the night to have me gaze at a particularly spectacular moon, or she would have me close my eyes as we walked together at twilight to listen to the rustle of leaves.

Again – entirely unsurprising. I spent a large chunk of pre-dawn time just this morning staring at a particularly spectacular moon – it’s full, so it was low in the west at 5:30 a.m., and the clouds had parted, so it was reflected in Puget Sound. I listen to leaves; I stare at eagles perched in trees over my head; I stop dead when I hear the chatter of a hummingbird, to look for it and then watch it when I’ve found it. That has nothing to do with religion. It is compatible with religion (though not the contemptus mundi kind) but it is in no way dependent on it.

I really, really wish Obama could have discussed the issue without patronizing his mother’s non-theism.

In the mood for some spiritual discipline? Have some Giles Fraser. He’s very kinky.

It’s good to do without stuff. It’s a discipline. Food, sex, hot showers, reality tv, flowers, poetry, music – whatever you like, you should give it up, so as to exercise your giving it up muscle. For those of you who like to ask questions: you should give that up. It’s good for you and it’s a pretty compliment to god.

…one of the things that we learn from earthquakes and tsunamis is precisely that such mastery is an illusion. To use Lacanian language: it is an eruption of the Real against the neat meaningfulness with which we structure our lives. Are religious believers especially bad at wanting to buy any old explanation for tragic events so long as they return their familiar symbolic order to its former integrity? Probably, yes. For too often, religion can regard the admission that one does not understand as some sort of lack of faith. And furthermore, it can regard the refusal of poor explanations as a lack of loyalty to the tribe.

Fraser seems to have given up making sense for Lent. He doesn’t mean “are religious believers especially bad at wanting to buy any old explanation” – he means are they bad about doing that. They’re all too good at it. And that “poor explanations” is just confusing – he means bad explanations.

Anyway – what he’s doing is going all around the houses in order to say “don’t ask why god did this because I have no clue.” We already knew that, and we think Fraser and other clerics should realize that that means their god is either useless or a sadist or not there. In Lacanian language that would be: dude, get over it.

I accidentally encountered a new (new to me) atheist-hater yesterday. Very unpleasant guy. I was curious so I followed the link to his blog, and found this winsome little essay.

Let me make a loud and clear statement that a James Lee or Jared Loughner type would or should understand. A secular humanist seeks to improve human welfare upon our planet while atheism is amoral and only claims to be a lack of belief. Isn’t it clear that these two men lack respect for human life? So they can rightfully call themselves atheists but should be denied entrance into a humanist organization. Yet the above humanist organizations welcome and recruit atheists who may or may not respect human life.

The Counsel for Secular Humanism and the American Humanists Association should immediately delineate their terms and deny atheists into their ranks. There is a difference between the terms atheist and humanist! Until the above Humanist organizations delineate their terms, they must defend the actions taken by the type of “nut jobs” that they would allow into their ranks! These “Humanist Organizations” have some explaining to do!

He’s saying atheists are likely murderers. And yet they laugh when we say atheists are a despised group! Funny, innit. (I don’t advise commenting there. The guy’s got a nasty mouth, and he’s not what you’d call scrupulous.)

A “faith school” in Birmingham.

Holding the children’s attention is a man in Islamic dress wearing a skullcap and stroking his long dark beard as he talks.’You’re not like the non-Muslims out there,’ the teacher says, gesturing towards the window. ‘All that evil you see in the streets, people not wearing the hijab properly, people smoking… you should hate it, you should hate walking down that street.’

He refers to the ‘non-Muslims’ as the ‘Kafir’, an often derogatory term that means disbeliever or infidel.

A snapshot of the worst kind of schooling imaginable – training in hatred of all people who are outside the favored group.

This school is required by its inspectors to teach tolerance and respect for other faiths. But Dispatches’ Lessons in Hate and Violence filmed secretly inside it – and instead discovered that Muslim children are being taught religious apartheid and social segregation.

We recorded a number of speakers giving deeply disturbing talks about Jews, Christians and atheists. We found children as young as 11 learning that Hindus have ‘no intellect’. We came across pupils being told that the ‘disbelievers’ are ‘the worst creatures’ and that Muslims who adopt supposedly non-Muslim ways, such as shaving, dancing, listening to music, and – in the case of women – removing their headscarves, would be tortured with a forked iron rod in the after-life.

It sounds like an imaginary school dated c. 1950 if the Nazis had won the war. It’s hard to come up with anything more poisonous. Given recent history in the UK, it’s terrifying.

‘Salma’ and ‘Ayesha’ are a mother and daughter whose identities we are protecting. Ayesha is now sitting her A-levels but when she was seven she was beaten at her Koran classes. She says: ‘The teacher would sit there, tell me what to read, pronounce it to me – then if I said it wrong he would hit me on the hands with a ruler.’ Her younger brother, only five at the time, would be hit on his feet with a stick.

They dreaded going to those classes but did not tell their mother. Salma eventually withdrew her children from attending madrassas for a completely different reason: she learned that they were being taught an intolerant version of Islam.

‘They were using terms like ‘Kafir’ just because somebody isn’t of the same religion,’ she says, ‘and I’m teaching my children to integrate and not be racist so I pulled my children out.’

Humans can be so ugly. It gets me down.

…

we have a government that, on the one hand, gives grand speeches about tackling the causes of extremism, as David Cameron did last week, while, one the other, encourages local communities to set up their own schools – including faith schools. It’s time to stop these mixed messages. And Muslims can no longer sweep this under the carpet – they need to face up to what is happening behind closed doors.Many warn that if we don’t all tackle this toxic mix of hatred and violence head on, we will reap the whirlwind in years to come.

Very few years in fact. Children can carry bombs in backpacks.

You do know about the EagleCam, right?

EagleCam

It’s a camera high in a tree at Norfolk Botanical Garden in Virginia, trained on an eagle’s nest 8o to 90 feet up a loblolly pine tree. There were three eggs; one chick hatched Saturday, another hatched Monday, the third is due to hatch any moment.

It’s enthralling. You can see whichever adult is on the nest get up, a fuzzy bobblehead appear, then the other fuzzy bobblehead join it, then the adult rip bits off a fish (fly-covered, at this point) or a squirrel (caught yesterday) and offer them to one or the other fuzzy bobblehead, who will eat it. You can also see the older bobblehead attack the younger one. You can lose hours watching for this…

It’s warmer today, and the eagle on the nest (the female at the moment) is gaping to cool off. An hour ago she was gaping a little; now her beak is open farther; clearly it’s warming up in Virginia.

Do check it out if you haven’t, and rejoice at modern technology.

Anthony Grayling said more about this possibility of evidence for god question.

I don’t think that every effort has been made to look for evidence and none has turned up…You and Richard think it’s an empirical matter whether there are deities (or fairies? goblins? consider why you think the latter are zoological non-starters) and I think it’s a matter of coherence of the concept…

And, I find, so do I. The more I think about it the more I think that.

The point is that ‘god’ is not like ‘ether’ – it is not amenable to empirical investigation, and does not occupy a slot in some systematic framework of thinking about the world that might be improved on in the light of better theory or observation. It does no work because it purportedly does all work; like a contradiction it entails anything whatever; it is consistent with all evidence and none.

Exactly! By which I mean, that’s what I would have said if only I’d thought of it. It does no work because it purportedly does all work; that’s beautiful, and exact.

But ‘god’ is not like ‘yeti’ (which might – so to say: yet? – be found romping about the Himalayas), it is like ‘square circle’. Trying to explain to someone who thinks that ‘god’ is like ‘yeti’ (namely, you) let alone to someone who thinks ‘god’ is like ‘Barack Obama’ (names an actual being, as Christians and Muslims do) that it is actually not like ‘yeti’ but  like ‘square circle’ and that nothing can count as evidence for square circles, is harder work for ‘god’ than ‘square circle’ only because religious folk have been squaring the circle for so long!

Furthermore, “god” is like square circles and round triangles and octagonal hexagons and flat cubes and married bachelors. There are different versions of god, to say the least, and there is no univerally agreed set of minimal items that belong on the god-list, so there is no core “god” concept that we can try to match to possible evidence.

It’s dead easy to imagine evidence of a yeti. That wouldn’t even surprise me much, because the Himalayas are difficult terrain, and some animals are very good at hiding, and there is more than one species of great ape.

It’s also easy to imagine evidence of a species that would be superior to humans. That’s child’s play. But “god” is a whole different territory, with built-in hand-wavy stuff that make it as Anthony says consistent with all evidence and none. It’s Intelligently Designed that way.

Why would something new and astonishing and apparently a violation of what we know about nature be evidence of “God” or a god or the supernatural rather than…something new and astonishing and apparently a violation of what we know about nature?

I can easily imagine evidence of something new and astonishing and apparently a violation of what we know about nature. I have a harder time thinking of something that would convince me it was evidence of “God” or a god or the supernatural.

I’m not being stubborn or dogmatic in saying that. I’m saying I just don’t see why something new and the rest of it couldn’t point to A Big Unknown as opposed to the familiar though speculative category “God.”

Maybe a very big very powerful Person? But that could be a part of nature we hadn’t known about before. It could tell us “Hey I’m the one in the Bible” [but in which language?] but that could be what this part of nature does.

Maybe all kinds of spectacular magical events? But that could be astonishing and inexplicable without necessarily being non-natural. It could just mean that we’d never known what we hadn’t known – which is bound to be true anyway.

On the other hand, I can see saying “this is at least evidence of something like what people have been calling ‘God’ all this time.” I can see agreeing that this changes everything I thought I knew, and everything I thought other people knew, too.

But just plain “evidence of God”? Well which one, for a start?

Inspired by.