Secular Intolerance

[Nick_A]

From the link on incoctrination and education offered by Belinda

Part of the problem is that RE is a statutory subject and has to be taught, but it is not part of the National Curriculum and so RE can be taught in any way. It means that while some schools follow a multi-faith syllabus, others limit their pupils to one faith.
This has been exacerbated by the freedoms given to Academy and Free Schools, which can be used creatively but are also open to abuse by those wishing to blinker their pupils into a single world-view.
It would be much healthier to have a National Curriculum for RE, with all schools having to teach all belief-systems (including humanism), providing a balanced inclusive education.
This would be partly a matter of general knowledge, and partly as preparation for citizenship, so that children are equipped to emerge into a diverse society.

This is just the modern attempt to teach secularized religion. The essence of religion will be scorned. A secularized interpretation of religion will be indoctrination and this indoctrination will be supported by intolerance. So once again the ones who will suffer will be the young whose minds and hearts are beginning to open in an environment that seeks to close them. Simone Weil wrote:

That is why St. John of the Cross calls faith a night. With those who have received a Christian education, the lower parts of the soul become attached to these mysteries when they have no right at all to do so. That is why such people need a purification of which St. John of the Cross describes the stages. Atheism and incredulity constitute an equivalent of such a purification.
- Simone Weil, Faiths of Meditation; Contemplation of the divine
the Simone Weil Reader, edited by George A. Panichas (David McKay Co. NY 1977) p 418

The last sentence she wrote in the notebook found after her death was: "The most important part of education--to teach the meaning of to know (in the scientific sense)."
The whole of Simone Weil is contained in these few words.
- Biographical Note, Simone Weil, Waiting for God (GP Putnam's Sons 1951, Harper 1975) p xi

Simone Weil has observed: "There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God."
- William Robert Miller (ed.), The New Christianity (New York: Delacorte Press 1967) p 267; in Paul Schilling,

Secular intolerance is the result of the rejection of the reality of objective meaning.

Greta wrote: Why can't forms be dispassionately studied and considered, with the ancient metaphysical baggage removed?

Traditionally, the word Metaphysics comes to us from Ancient Greece, where it was a combination of two words – Meta, meaning over and beyond – and physics. Thus, the combination means over and beyond physics.

Simone asks what it means to know in science. Secularism doesn’t even admit the question. Yet to know means not only knowing facts but their meaning and objective value in terms of a conscious human perspective. Studying the facts with the scientific method is one thing Contemplating the relationship between forms as ideas and their manifestation into things and the objective meaning of the process requires more than a computer mind. No matter how much the Borg learn they will never experience the calling of conscious human perspective since it isn’t a part of their dominant mechanical origin. What defies the Borg must be absorbed just as the calling of eros must be absorbed by secularism.

We simply do not appreciate the human purpose and value of education so have settled for the belief in secular indoctrination for public schools. Abortion has become a secular good so why not spirit killing as well? After all, it is considered progress by experts.

[Belinda]

Nick_A wrote:

Part of the problem is that RE is a statutory subject and has to be taught, but it is not part of the National Curriculum and so RE can be taught in any way. It means that while some schools follow a multi-faith syllabus, others limit their pupils to one faith.
This has been exacerbated by the freedoms given to Academy and Free Schools, which can be used creatively but are also open to abuse by those wishing to blinker their pupils into a single world-view.
It would be much healthier to have a National Curriculum for RE, with all schools having to teach all belief-systems (including humanism), providing a balanced inclusive education.
This would be partly a matter of general knowledge, and partly as preparation for citizenship, so that children are equipped to emerge into a diverse society.(The foregoing is a link to a comment which I posted)
Nick replied:This is just the modern attempt to teach secularized religion. The essence of religion will be scorned. A secularized interpretation of religion will be indoctrination and this indoctrination will be supported by intolerance. So once again the ones who will suffer will be the young whose minds and hearts are beginning to open in an environment that seeks to close them.

Nonsense, Nick! I quote: " with all schools having to teach all belief-systems (including humanism), providing a balanced inclusive education. " All belief systems" Nick. If your teaching is biased towards only one belief system you will indoctrinate not educate.

Nick-A wrote:

Abortion has become a secular good so why not spirit killing as well? After all, it is considered progress by experts.

Abortion is not a secular good. To nobody is abortion a good. Have you not heard of least bad? People's spirits are to be free not manacled in childhood to the tenets of some belief system .

[Nick_A]

Belinda

I think we have to look to the historians of ideas to try to explain what Jesus meant. I personally interpret the saying as meaning that the Kingdom of God is akin to the authenticity and courage endorsed by existentialism. The reason I say this is that a man's soul is nurtured by sincerity in thoughts , words, and deeds. The willingness to go it alone if necessary.

What is a historian? It is a person respected as an expert by other historians. What do they understand realistically about the human condition?

Culture is an instrument wielded by teachers to manufacture teachers, who, in their turn, will manufacture still more teachers. Simone Weil

Jesus taught rebirth: leaving the cave. Historians argue about life in Plato's cave.

Secularism wants to psychologically pull the sacred down to the level of the secular. Plato awakens us to psychologically move from the secular and imaginary gods into the direction of the sacred. Pondering the relationship between knowledge and opinion, forms into things is one means of opening the mind and heart in pursuit of the experience of objective meaning.

You will probably appreciate this:

"Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere". I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part... What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?" ~ Richard P. Feynman

"Beauty is the only finality here below. As Kant said very aptly, it is a finality which involves no objective. A beautiful thing involves no good except itself, in its totality, as it appears to us. We are drawn toward it without knowing what to ask of it. It offers its own existence. We do not desire something else, we possess it, and yet we still desire something. We do not know in the least what it is. We want to get behind beauty, but it is only a surface. It is like a mirror that sends us back our own desire for goodness. It is a sphinx, an enigma, a mystery which is painfully tantalizing. We should like to feed upon it, but it is only something to look at; it appears only from a certain distance. The great trouble in human life is that looking and eating are two different operations. Only beyond the sky, in the country inhabited by God, are they one and the same operation. ... It may be that vice, depravity and crime are nearly always ... in their essence, attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at." ~ Simone Weil

Beauty for Richard P. Feynman creates the scientific curiosity to explore its fragmentation. Beauty for Simone Weil invites conscious contemplation of the reality which beauty masks. Spinoza finds the ultimate reality within the beauty of nature.

Are they really in opposition? Could secular education resolve these differences? No. Secularism has created an army of experts who deny a conscious human perspective so become incapable of reconciliation within secular education.

[Nick_A]

Nick_A wrote:

Part of the problem is that RE is a statutory subject and has to be taught, but it is not part of the National Curriculum and so RE can be taught in any way. It means that while some schools follow a multi-faith syllabus, others limit their pupils to one faith.
This has been exacerbated by the freedoms given to Academy and Free Schools, which can be used creatively but are also open to abuse by those wishing to blinker their pupils into a single world-view.
It would be much healthier to have a National Curriculum for RE, with all schools having to teach all belief-systems (including humanism), providing a balanced inclusive education.
This would be partly a matter of general knowledge, and partly as preparation for citizenship, so that children are equipped to emerge into a diverse society.(The foregoing is a link to a comment which I posted)
Nick replied:This is just the modern attempt to teach secularized religion. The essence of religion will be scorned. A secularized interpretation of religion will be indoctrination and this indoctrination will be supported by intolerance. So once again the ones who will suffer will be the young whose minds and hearts are beginning to open in an environment that seeks to close them.

Nonsense, Nick! I quote: " with all schools having to teach all belief-systems (including humanism), providing a balanced inclusive education. " All belief systems" Nick. If your teaching is biased towards only one belief system you will indoctrinate not educate.

Nick-A wrote:

Abortion has become a secular good so why not spirit killing as well? After all, it is considered progress by experts.

Abortion is not a secular good. To nobody is abortion a good. Have you not heard of least bad? People's spirits are to be free not manacled in childhood to the tenets of some belief system .

Belinda, the only way the essence of religion can be taught in public school requires the teachers to appreciate the transcendent origin of religions. Without that the only possibility are secular interpretations. Consider the following diagram:

https://integralscience.wordpress.com/1 ... religions/

Culturally approved secular interpretations will take place at the exoteric level so lose their meaning. What could be more silly than a bunch of government experts arguing the essence of religion? So who will suffer? You guessed it; the kids.

[Belinda]

Nick, history is a modern academic discipline which is not restricted to people who work in universities. You too may learn the criteria that define history as an academic discipline. Cultures of belief or practice vary . I don't understand your criticism of "culture" unless you are referring to the snobbish meaning of the word.

I agree that science is not in any sort of opposition to aesthetic experiences.

Nick, what if anything is "the essence of religion" ?

[Nick_A]

Nick, history is a modern academic discipline which is not restricted to people who work in universities. You too may learn the criteria that define history as an academic discipline. Cultures of belief or practice vary . I don't understand your criticism of "culture" unless you are referring to the snobbish meaning of the word.

I agree that science is not in any sort of opposition to aesthetic experiences.

Nick, what if anything is "the essence of religion" ?

The majority of what is called recorded history is based on lies. This should be obvious. Since imagination governs a person's life, it is the same with a society. A lot of real history is ignored since it doesn't fit the narrative. So what is left is highly inaccurate. Cultures vary but in America for example the values which create a healthy culture are vanishing in favor of materialism and commercialism. I'm not being critical because there is no choice in this. it is just lawful blind reaction to universal laws. A healthy culture based on human values including the collective awareness of the higher indicates an evolving society. A cheapening culture indicates a devolving society. It isn't a matter of liking or disliking bu rather seeing it for what it is in terms of a great cycle.

The function of or essence all religions initiating with a conscious source is to awaken people to the human condition which keeps humanity as a whole as a slave to imagination and what is lost by living in imagination.

The secularist is content with defending cave life and often intolerant of those who inwardly have opened to the third direction of thought which connects above and below.

Karl Marx wrote that religion is the opiate of the masses. This is an excellent expression of.imagined secular supremacy.

Simone Weil retorted that revolution is the opiate of the masses. The belief in revolution is misguided because since we are as we are, everything is as it is. After the revolutions the same conditions will reappear that led to revolution in the first place. We need the nourishing quality of grace for our higher parts in order to change what we Are.

She is right but it does seem things are too far gone to allow for a collective awakening. The attractions of technology will prevent it. So our species will hit bottom and suffer all the consequences of this descent. Then those who are left will start the cycle again.

[Belinda]

Nick wrote:

Simone Weil retorted that revolution is the opiate of the masses.

Maybe, but in any case present day America evolved since the American Revolution(1765-1783); the revolution is over since 1783 . Now that America has evolved since then what do you believe would change American society for the better?

I am still unclear whether or not you are conflating secularism with consumerist materialism. Whether or not I agree with Plato's hierarchy of Forms as denoting Truth I probably agree with you that something needs to be done to sort out the present troubles.

Since we are talking about America in particular let me say that the most dangerous aspect of present day America, for America and the rest of the world, is that its President is balking at the international climate change agreement. If religious America was vociferous in its support of the initiative to restrain man made climate change perhaps President Trump may listen and comply.

Then those who are left will start the cycle again.

Educating children to think critically and with feeling includes the best of all academic disciplines including history. The inclusion in education of comparative religions and sociology of religion won't prevent the children's acquiring feelings towards the good, the true and the beautiful. This holds whether or not children envisage The Good at the head and core of the hierarchy of Forms or whether they envisage the good as a pillar of smoke and fire.

It's education in both feelings and the best of knowledge as it's available to teachers (and also physical and health education) which prepare them for leading their society into better ways. If you are saying, Nick, that to acquire the best of available knowledge will prevent the children's acquiring feelings of sympathy and aesthetic awe, I'd very much disagree .True, well educated children will avoid superficial religiosity.

[Nick_A]

Belinda

Maybe, but in any case present day America evolved since the American Revolution(1765-1783); the revolution is over since 1783 . Now that America has evolved since then what do you believe would change American society for the better?

https://theparagraph.com/2009/01/the-pu ... ed-states/

The Purpose of the United States

(Analysis.) Why should an American want to be a citizen of the great United States, instead of just a member of one’s own little tribe? What is the purpose of the United States? The preamble to the U.S. Constitution answers that question:
We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
In that statement we find six goals, with each relying on others:
• Union: A society of persons striving together towards the other five goals.
• Justice: Equal application of law and equal access to the commonwealth, regardless of one’s office or monetary wealth.
• Tranquility: Peace, which follows justice and welfare.
• Defense: Standing guard against forces that would harm the Constitution and the pursuit of the other five goals.
• Welfare: The people’s well-being, which is advanced by the commonwealth: the land (national parks, environmental protection, …), infrastructure (highways, railways, water lines, postal service, airwaves, communications satellites, Internet, …), public education, libraries, Medicare, the social safety net (minimum wage, Social Security, …), …
• Liberty: Freedom to do what one will without treading on another’s. That freedom needs the space given by tranquility (freedom from strife) and welfare (freedom from want of basic needs).
Now, as the first five goals all lead to the last, and as the present generation leads to next, we might venture an ultimate answer to our question: The purpose of the United States is to secure the blessings of liberty to its children.

You tell me: has America evolved or devolved in relation to its purpose?

It's education in both feelings and the best of knowledge as it's available to teachers (and also physical and health education) which prepare them for leading their society into better ways. If you are saying, Nick, that to acquire the best of available knowledge will prevent the children's acquiring feelings of sympathy and aesthetic awe, I'd very much disagree .True, well educated children will avoid superficial religiosity.

Secular intolerance which appreciates societal idolatry as the form of the greatest good has one definition of “best available knowledge.” A universalist who appreciates objective human meaning and purpose within a universal perspective has its own definition of “best available knowledge.”

The question of what is the best available knowledge is an intolerable insult to secular intolerance which believes it has the best means to learn and define the “best available knowledge.” It is believed best to kill the question in the cause of the secular good. This begins with secular progressive education and its growing proficiency in the skill of spirit killing..

[Greta]

Greta wrote: Why can't forms be dispassionately studied and considered, with the ancient metaphysical baggage removed?

Traditionally, the word Metaphysics comes to us from Ancient Greece, where it was a combination of two words – Meta, meaning over and beyond – and physics. Thus, the combination means over and beyond physics.

Simone asks what it means to know in science. Secularism doesn’t even admit the question.

Sure, it does. In fact the need for people to try to tease allegations from fact is an important driver of science. There will come a time when no matter cleverly or aggressively that one tries to drive home their opinion, all of the mechanisations designed to convince will simply be ignored, replaced by a clear assessment of the facts. This happens to some extent in law, science and business, but bluster, manipulation or persistence are still effective and famously endemic in politics.

Yet to know means not only knowing facts but their meaning and objective value in terms of a conscious human perspective.

As is currently done in the humanities?

Studying the facts with the scientific method is one thing Contemplating the relationship between forms as ideas and their manifestation into things and the objective meaning of the process requires more than a computer mind.

So does science, which requires the creative vision to extrapolate on what has come before so as to set up new experiments. Scientists in physics need to regularly meditate on what actually constitutes physical reality. Non-physical properties are not part of that field and are addressed by the humanities.

We simply do not appreciate the human purpose and value of education so have settled for the belief in secular indoctrination for public schools. Abortion has become a secular good so why not spirit killing as well? After all, it is considered progress by experts.

Religions and concerned theists should pay for their own schools rather than lobby to be granted even more taxpayer funds than they already (wrongly!) do.

Rationalisation of the syllabus in schools is no different to the rationalisation of any other industry. I personally don't like the de-emphasis on the arts, which I think is good for the total person. However, the state is moving away from shaping the total person and focusing on the basics - the three Rs and whatever extensions of those skills that will be deemed useful for future vocations or studies.

So schools are no longer places where it is reasonable or fair to expect involvement in personal development. Rather, this role has been thrown back on to parents - essentially outsourced, and extension on the "user pays" principle. The state is basically saying, if you want a child of character you will need to do the work needed yourself rather than rely on the contributions of other taxpayers.

Short sighted? Seemingly so. Still, who can forget the general lack of interest in the arts and humanities subjects at school? The same goes for religious topics, which were compulsory in schools back in my day. If the topics didn't count towards grades and university honours, and if parents and teachers don't take them too seriously, then no one wanted to "waste their time" with it.

Is the rationalisation aimed at religions? Only in the eyes of the paranoid religious. Just as you won't want major corporations advertised in class, ditto major religions. They can pay for their own publicity.

[Nick_A]

Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith; and in this sense atheism is a purification. I have to be an atheist with that part of myself which is not made for God. Among those in whom the supernatural part of themselves has not been awakened, the atheists are right and the believers wrong.
- Simone Weil, Faiths of Meditation; Contemplation of the divine
the Simone Weil Reader, edited by George A. Panichas (David McKay Co. NY 1977) p 417

From Simone Weil’s
Draft for a Statement of Human Obligation
Profession of Faith
There is a reality outside the world, that is to say, outside space and time, outside man's mental universe, outside any sphere whatsoever that is accessible to human faculties.
Corresponding to this reality, at the centre of the human heart, is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world.
Another terrestrial manifestation of this reality lies in the absurd and insoluble contradictions which are always the terminus of human thought when it moves exclusively in this world.
Just as the reality of this world is the sole foundation of facts, so that other reality is the sole foundation of good.
That reality is the unique source of all the good that can exist in this world: that is to say, all beauty, all truth, all justice, all legitimacy, all order, and all human behaviour that is mindful of obligations.

Greta wrote:

Sure, it does. In fact the need for people to try to tease allegations from fact is an important driver of science. There will come a time when no matter cleverly or aggressively that one tries to drive home their opinion, all of the mechanisations designed to convince will simply be ignored, replaced by a clear assessment of the facts. This happens to some extent in law, science and business, but bluster, manipulation or persistence are still effective and famously endemic in politics.

Secular intolerants cannot appreciate or respect what it means to open the supernatural part some are called to even though both the essence of philosophy and religion suggest we are closed to something basically human. Secular intolerants will mock it and do what they can to destroy the impulse both in education and in the arts. On the other hand opening to a greater reality doesn’t malign the study of facts. As Simone described, opening to the vertical direction of thought opens a person to objective “meaning” while science studies facts which those like Greta believe are the end all for human intelligence.

Secular intolerance expressed by secular intolerants dedicated to the destruction of this third direction of thought beyond our normal reliance on duality strengthens the Great Beast and the idolatry which supports it. Secular intolerants cannot measure objective quality so deny it. At the same time their dominance in media, education and in the arts assures IMO the inevitable victory for secular intolerance. The balance between facts and and the psychological recognition of objective quality Simone refers to will only become possible for a minority who have begun to spiritually awaken. As much as they are scorned, the future of humanity may well depend on the influence of their “being” in a slumbering secular environment.

[Necromancer]

Wear this end, while I explain, as many times as necessary, over weeks, months or years, why my morals are superior to your morals, and why I am going to force you to live your private life according to my moral code.

Ehh... I think religious people think of their ethics code as universal. The point is that you have one to show for your love of the World, limited or not.

Also, Atheists/others easily babble about a multitude of ethical codes, but there are not so many, in fact, maybe only one set! For plausibility, for credibility!

[Skip]

Wear this end, while I explain, as many times as necessary, over weeks, months or years, why my morals are superior to your morals, and why I am going to force you to live your private life according to my moral code.

Ehh... I think religious people think of their ethics code as universal.

No, they can't. If they did think that, they wouldn't need to go around trying to convince other people, by whatever method, or forcing it on other peoples through military conquest. If they really believed their 'code' was universal, they would assume it's already, everywhere, in effect. If they really did think their god was universal, they would assume he had already made himself known everywhere to all people.
Some people object to having other people's beliefs forced on them.
Hence: secular intolerance of tedious/overbearing/self-righteous/ludicrous proselytizing.

The point is that you have one to show for your love of the World, limited or not.

Who "you"? has "one" what, to show what kind of "love" of which "World" to whom? And what's limited or not?

Also, Atheists/others easily babble about a multitude of ethical codes, but there are not so many, in fact, maybe only one set! For plausibility, for credibility!

That doesn't parse any better than the previous "point."

[Greta]

Religious intolerance and political correctness in one - evolution is not to be taught in Turkish schools any more because it contradicts creationist scriptures: http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2017/06/evolut ... h-schools/

Are secularists to be tolerant of this or should they simply submit to the dumbing down of the next generations?

[Belinda]

Nick_A wrote:

You tell me: has America evolved or devolved in relation to its purpose?

My impression for what it's worth is that America has evolved away from what I know about its Constitution . Everything evolves. America has declined in standards of democratic equality. I hope that American politicians will be good men, some time soon as soon as possible , who will act with intelligence and wisdom to protect the interests of all people everywhere, and the natural environment upon which all people depend.

There is no such movement as secular intolerance. Intolerant people whether they are 'secular' or religious are right to be intolerant of bad wherever it occurs. There are evils which we all agree are bad.

Nick:

This begins with secular progressive education and its growing proficiency in the skill of spirit killing..

Have you ever taught? I have.
No teacher I have ever known even from long ago when I was a child has been proficient in spirit killing. All have done their best in the true spirit of education. True, some teachers have done wrong , one hopes that teachers who have abused their trust have been brought to justice . But to accuse all teachers of being abusive is absurd.

[Nick_A]

Belinda

Have you ever taught? I have.
No teacher I have ever known even from long ago when I was a child has been proficient in spirit killing. All have done their best in the true spirit of education. True, some teachers have done wrong , one hopes that teachers who have abused their trust have been brought to justice . But to accuse all teachers of being abusive is absurd.

You are writing of things as a secularist you don't understand. What is the process of spirit killing? What is the true spirit of education? Of course there are good teachers. But intentional and unintentional efforts at spirit killing are alive and well in school systems. How many of these teachers appreciate the true spirit of education? How can these ideas be discussed if they are not understood?

To make matters worse, many of those who do not understand begin to feel superior. This creates secular intolerance. So who suffers? The young who are not yet able to see it for what it is.