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RE: Indoctrination - 11/17/2012 4:04:24 PM   
Aswad


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quote:

ORIGINAL: PeonForHer

I looked up the phrase as quoted by Tweakabelle.


Thank you for restoring my faith in humanity.

quote:

'Word' in that phrase has multiple possible meanings.


Quite. First and foremost, though, it probably comes down to the meaning not corresponding exactly. If you look up what Mimra means, it has senses that are quite distantly connected to each other when viewed through the lens of a modern, western paradigm; this is part of what Focault addresses, so I thought tweakabelle would pick up on these issues right away.

quote:

I'd even hypothesise another that wasn't mentioned: that 'Word' has some connection with 'Wyrd', which was form of ancient magic/knowledge (those two ideas not being easily distinguishable in the sense they were once and sometimes used) here in England and other parts of Northern Europe.


It wouldn't surprise me.

quote:

Now, me, I'm of the mind that I have scant patience with any text that claims that it's directed at ordinary people who can therefore learn from its wisdom - like the Bible - but, apparently, can only be understood by 'experts'.


Does the text claim that?

I'm genuinely curious; I haven't memorized the whole thing.

quote:

With a bit more good faith (no, I'm not using that phrase in its religious sense) in this thread Tweakabelle's comment could have just been picked up and given a bit of interested consideration. That's how it struck me that her comment was intended.


I should have been clear that I don't bear her any ill will, and am myself also first and foremost interested in examining ideas.

My frustration has got to do with expecting much, which is a reflection of how I see her.

IWYW,
— Aswad.


_____________________________

"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do.
" -- Rorschack, Watchmen.


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RE: Indoctrination - 11/17/2012 4:05:50 PM   
tweakabelle


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quote:

ORIGINAL: leonine

.

What the UK school system calls "religious education" these days is - except in Church-run schools - a mix of comparative religion and Philosophy & Ethics 101. There's very little in it that even a militant atheist could object to. Like some other good things in modern British schools, this is an unintended consequence of multiculturalism: they have to teach about everyone's religion, but they can't treat any one of them as the Truth, so they have to teach them all as just interesting belief systems. Compulsory religious observance went the same way.



I wasn't aware of this. It is a welcome development. I have long advocated something along these lines, with anthropological, epistemological and critical thinking skills elements too, here.

Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

< Message edited by tweakabelle -- 11/17/2012 4:06:14 PM >


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RE: Indoctrination - 11/17/2012 4:14:56 PM   
Aswad


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quote:

ORIGINAL: tweakabelle

Aswad, I signalled clearly in my last post that I am not interested in playing semantic games.


Yes. I also signalled that I respectfully doubt that we can arrive at anything meaningful today.

quote:

Previously you claimed that ""concrete concepts of a deity and the underlying posited realities that the concepts relate to" exist. You were asked to provide examples of such.


Based on your reaction to the question of Focault's comments on aphasia, I respectfully decline to invest more time in that side of the debate.

Thank you for your input so far.

quote:

Thus far, the only examples advanced are, in order, my mother(!), POTUS and a picture of Marilyn Monroe.


The abstract mother ideal, the office/role abstraction of the president, and a picture of a woman worshipping the Beatles (absolutely not Monroe). A minor correction, but an important one. If you're interested in my POV, it's not beyond you in any way, and you have the pieces you need. Given the previous interaction, however, my return on investment doesn't justify attempting to bridge the gap at this time.

Again, thank you for your input.

IWYW,
— Aswad.


_____________________________

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From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do.
" -- Rorschack, Watchmen.


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RE: Indoctrination - 11/17/2012 4:19:38 PM   
PeonForHer


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quote:

ORIGINAL: leonine
My parents were humanists, but my well-meaning grandparents tried to save me with Bible-tales-for-kiddies books, and between that and school RE (which in them days was real RE) I had an intense Christian phase. My father wisely didn't argue, just gave me an equally basic book on the origins of all the major faiths, and let me come to my own conclusions.


Your father sounds like a wise man indeed. Me, I think a fair few of those 'Bible-tales-for-kiddies' stories are useful: they help to illustrate moral points that stand up to proper moral reasoning without shoveling in the primitive, evil, hideous shit with which the Bible is liberally laced as well.


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RE: Indoctrination - 11/17/2012 4:42:31 PM   
PeonForHer


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quote:

ORIGINAL: Aswad


My frustration has got to do with expecting much, which is a reflection of how I see her.




OK. But you know she might well say the same of you, don't you?

I shall let you into a secret, Aswad. I'm one of the most highly educated people using these forums - possibly *the* most highly educated. But I try to avoid going around 'expecting things of people'. Like most highly educated people, I've learned that I can be a bloody idiot, and that frequently.

< Message edited by PeonForHer -- 11/17/2012 4:43:04 PM >


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RE: Indoctrination - 11/17/2012 4:46:12 PM   
Aswad


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quote:

ORIGINAL: PeonForHer

OK. But you know she might well say the same of you, don't you?


I certainly hope she does.

I've never said I'm infallible.

I've said my discussion with her is at a juncture where I don't foresee a return on further investment, certainly not today.

ETA:

To clarify, it would be cool if she were both (a) right, and (b) able to convey that to me. Quite simply because I would be a more reflected, better informed and less wrong person as a result. As you say, we can all be idiots at times. If that turns out to be me, I suspect I'll be more able to see that tomorrow, coming at it from a fresh start. If not, I can't justify the effort I estimate it will take at this point. Maybe she can, in which case I'll certainly read it. I like being wrong, if and only if it's a transient condition. Other people being right helps keep it transient.

IWYW,
— Aswad.


< Message edited by Aswad -- 11/17/2012 4:53:43 PM >


_____________________________

"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do.
" -- Rorschack, Watchmen.


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RE: Indoctrination - 11/17/2012 6:13:33 PM   
freedomdwarf1


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quote:

ORIGINAL: leonine


quote:

ORIGINAL: freedomdwarf1

As for our kids being indoctrinated at schools, it's not always the fault of the parents.
In most state schools (ie, those paid for by government funds) don't give parents any choice in the matter when it comes to RE (religious education) and it is frequently not optional and the kids cannot opt out regardless of their faith.
In a predominantly catholic country, the RE being taught would be the catholic faith.
Over here, it is the CofE (Church of England) faith, ie Protestant; although sometimes you can choose a different faith school if you live close enough and are within the 'catchment area' of the school (and assuming they have room for your child to attend). Most of the alternative faith schools here are catholic.
Typical schools around here have a 20-30 minute 'assembly' every morning before lessons where prayers and other faith-related speeches are said. The timetable has at least 1 hour of RE a week, sometimes more. In many cases, they will only study the faith of the school and barely touch on other faiths in any favourable light or equal discussion.



Interesting, whereabouts is that? Here in Yorkshire, all the schools I know of are way too determinedly multi-cultural to risk any kind of explicitly religious event in case it was the wrong religion, and RE works so hard at not favouring any faith that it ends up presenting them all as interesting oddities.

I'm in Kent - north Kent to be more precise.

We have about 5 or 6 'secondary' level schools within a spit of us.
Two of those are what I would loosely call 'faith' schools; ie, funded and run by a church foundation and teach predominantly the faith of the foundation running it - which we didn't approve of as we are Pagans and don't subscribe to the fundamental idea of 'god' or teaching of any bible (or other 'holy' book).

We (or I should say, more 'I') spent several months going through the ethos of all of them and spoke to the head intake person prior to sending my kids to the ones we chose. Those faith schools I mentioned very much single-mindedly used RE to teach their faith virtually exclusively.
Of the remaining ones, one was exclusively a girls school (we had 2 teen boys and a teen girl) which we didn't favour too much as it didn't show favourably in the local league tables. Another was pretty much at the bottom of the tables for results, so we ruled that one out too (we wanted our kids to do well at school).
We whittled it down to basically two schools - one in the opposite direction to the other as far as location goes (friggin typical). Both seemed to have a general outlook as far as RE was concerned and they appeared to not really concentrate on any particular faith. We sent two to one school and the third to the other (he wasn't none too bright and the other school was, quite frankly, way out of his learning ability).
Shortly after we got them all started, they announced they were merging into an 'academy' - which we thought was a good idea to begin with and for the first year before they actually 'joined', the kids did quite well in their studies.
Oh woe is me... It turned out that the academy was going to be run by a very pro-protestant foundation and the board of governers had one ex-head teacher and the rest were protestant bible-bashers in the extreme (several bishops and priests and curates). The academy's 'foundation' and ethos wasn't based on science or maths or any of the major 'good-to-have' type subjects either. Instead, their main ethos was religion (protestant, obviously), drama, and art. They spout on their website that they had a 'wide-ranging' religious embrace and that students were free to follow and discover their own beliefs. Sounds great doesn't it??
We had no end of telephone and face-to-face full-blown arguments with the teachers and the govenors about their complete intollerance to anything outside of their preachings of one particular protestant bible. If any student even dared to ask questions about anything else they got detention and extra RE classes and additional RE homework (usually to re-write passages from their bible). It was inconceivable that a state-supported school that was supposed to follow the national curriculum was soooo mega-biased on their version of RE that it was a joke. My son was expelled from classes many times because he dared to question what he was being taught or asked about any other religions. I even told one teacher to go shove his bible where the sun don't shine!!

So out of all the schools that we qualified as being within the designated catchment area, one was just crap, another was all-girls and fairly crap, two were pretty much exclusively faith-driven, one didn't have any spaces, and the remaining two that were half decent ended up merging into something quite horrendously not-fit-for-purpose academy only fit for those studying to enter the priesthood or become a nun.
We don't mind a mixed RE base - in fact we welcome it because it does no harm for kids to learn about other faiths and be tolerant of others in general, regardless of what faith you happen to believe in.

A friend of ours who lives about 5 miles away had similar experiences with the schools in her area too.
Before we moved down here from Peterborough, we also had no end of arguments about RE to the schools up in that area. We could choose schools that were catholic, protestant or islamic-based. When my kids were up there they were a minority of 6 white pupils in a school of just under 1,000 mixed Pakistani and Indian kids. They learned about Eide & Ramadan and could count to ten in punjab and hindi before they were allowed to learn it in English. The other kids were allowed to wear nose rings, ankle bracelets, headscarves, earrings and bangles in classes; but when we bought some genuine bangles from the local Indian shop for our daughter, she was sent home to take them off because it "wasn't her religion" to wear them. Sheeesh!

So maybe you are lucky to have schools that are very liberal in their approach to RE teachings where you are but that's not been my experience in the Peterborough area and not around where I live now.

Despite what tweakabelle says, schools are able to do what they like regarding RE even when the national sylabus says you should teach otherwise.


< Message edited by freedomdwarf1 -- 11/17/2012 6:18:27 PM >

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RE: Indoctrination - 11/17/2012 6:21:30 PM   
Kirata


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quote:

ORIGINAL: Aswad

quote:

'Word' in that phrase has multiple possible meanings.


Quite.

Well, no. Actually, it has a very specific meaning. But since this has become a subject of discussion, I'll elaborate.

First some physics:

We have confirmed, only recently in the 21st century, that mass is frequency: that the proximate cause of our universe existing, and that which maintains it, is the vibrating pure energy of void space. No to put too fine a point on it:

The masses of particles are -- not are like, or similar to, or metaphorically suggested by -- they are the tones, the frequencies, of these vibration patterns... These are very hard, rigorously tested, battle worn consequences... so, I mean, as scientific facts, as hard as they get... there really is that rigorous sense in which mass is frequency.

Reference: Frank Wilczek, Nobel Laureate Lecture Series, March 2005, MIT

But this is only new news to us. The Spanda Karika said the same thing more than a thousand years earlier, namely, that the universe arises from the action of spanda sakti (spanda: vibration, sakti: energy), the vibrating energy of the Void. The Void, incidentally, is a metaphor for pure consciousness, Siva, which is beyond all limitation of time and space. Sakti, the Goddess, is the active aspect of Siva, of consciousness; hence it is said to be Siva's will that causes her to give rise to the universe.

There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together... We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter. ~Max Planck

Everything we know about Nature is in accord with the idea that the fundamental process of Nature lies outside space-time... but generates events that can be located in space-time. ~Henry Stapp

In Brahmanism, the universe is said to arise when Saraswati plucks the strings of her vina (a musical instrument), the metaphor of sound representing the vibration of the energies. In a similar vein, and for the same reason, the letters of the Sanskit alphabet are called the matrikas, the Mothers. We find the metaphor again in Genesis, where God "speaks" the worlds into being, and in Psalm 33 ("By the word of the Lord were the heavens made").

Sakti follows her Lord's will, and those familiar with some of the more esoteric martial arts will recognize the relationship immediately: energy follows consciousness, the Mind leads Ki (the Mind here being not the ratiocinating processing mind, but rather the "no-mind" of Zen, i.e., consciousness itself). It is evident, too, in what we call the "placebo effect."

Had the partriarchal chauvinism of our Western monotheisms not eradicated the feminine wherever it found it, John 1:1 might have been written as:

In the beginning was the Goddess, and the Goddess was with God, and God and the Goddess were one.

Or in less religious terms:

In the beginning was energy, and the energy was with consciousness, and the energy was consciousness.

Unfortunately, the meaning of many metaphors has been largely forgotten, and the texts containing them adapted to the prevailing religious (and other) purposes of the later cultures that inherited them.

K.


< Message edited by Kirata -- 11/17/2012 7:06:14 PM >

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RE: Indoctrination - 11/17/2012 6:42:39 PM   
vincentML


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quote:

There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together... We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter. ~Max Planck

Planck makes a huge leap from the quantum structure of the atom to his assumption of the nature of the forces of attraction.

But good stuff on Wilczek and Stapp . . . worth a hard look.

Thanks.

< Message edited by vincentML -- 11/17/2012 6:43:28 PM >

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RE: Indoctrination - 11/17/2012 7:06:31 PM   
GotSteel


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quote:

ORIGINAL: thishereboi
A lot of people do. They just get ignored because it's easier to make fun of a group of people if you only point out the extreme examples.


I think everybody gets that not all Christians are the same. The thing I wish that the non and less extreme Christians would stop burying their heads in the sand about is that there are so many extreme examples because their are so many extreme Christians.

They're a large enough demographic that they noticeably get pandered to by the Republican party to the detriment of us all (especially you).

We consistently end up talking about the big problem instead of oh say the Unitarian Universalists because one is a problem and the other is well meh...

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RE: Indoctrination - 11/17/2012 7:09:48 PM   
GotSteel


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quote:

ORIGINAL: freedomdwarf1
You can communicate quite well with a tribesman that has no formal lanuage and achieve the same results.

Are there tribesmen who have no formal language?

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RE: Indoctrination - 11/17/2012 7:19:10 PM   
tazzygirl


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quote:

The thing I wish that the non and less extreme Christians would stop burying their heads in the sand about is that there are so many extreme examples because their are so many extreme Christians.


They are a vocal group depending on the issue. But not all who take a different stance than you on an issue are religious.

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RE: Indoctrination - 11/17/2012 8:08:07 PM   
tweakabelle


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quote:

Despite what tweakabelle says, schools are able to do what they like regarding RE even when the national sylabus says you should teach otherwise.


Could you please let me in on the secret of what I am supposed to have said? Because I didn't say anything about UK RE classes other than I was unaware of the classes leonine mentioned, and that I felt these classes were a welcome development.

Lest this task is too onerous for you, here's my post in full:
quote:

"I wasn't aware of this. It is a welcome development. I have long advocated something along these lines, with anthropological, epistemological and critical thinking skills elements too, here.
Thanks for bringing it to my attention. "


Please note that "here" in my case means Australia, not the UK.





< Message edited by tweakabelle -- 11/17/2012 8:11:13 PM >


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RE: Indoctrination - 11/17/2012 8:08:16 PM   
ToyOfRhamnusia


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quote:

ORIGINAL: Kirata


quote:

ORIGINAL: ToyOfRhamnusia

It would help if you would address THE ISSUE instead of constantly attacking the person who brings up something you don't like.

The issue, in this case, is interpreting the text literally, a practice employed only by fundamentalist wackos and a certain brand of atheist. In my opinion, I addressed it not only directly but also with all the respect that it merits (which is none).

K.




You opinion is arrogant beyond reason. And your statement is incorrect. You explained NOTHING, except for possibly unveiling your unpleasant personality.

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RE: Indoctrination - 11/17/2012 8:33:31 PM   
Kirata


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quote:

ORIGINAL: ToyOfRhamnusia

arrogant beyond reason... unpleasant personality...

You're not doing bad yourself.

K.

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RE: Indoctrination - 11/17/2012 9:23:01 PM   
GotSteel


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quote:

ORIGINAL: ToyOfRhamnusia
You opinion is arrogant beyond reason.


He doesn't talk about his position too often because he thinks he is god.

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RE: Indoctrination - 11/17/2012 10:05:41 PM   
ToyOfRhamnusia


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quote:

ORIGINAL: Kirata


quote:

ORIGINAL: ToyOfRhamnusia

the notion that this is written as a fundamental part of what is claimed to be a great religion, carries some water to the reasoning that the use of language is indeed fundamental for the concept of "God".

Actually, quite the opposite; it reflects the impossibility language faces when attempting to encompass the concept of deity.

K.


I referred to the fact that even RELIGIOUS writers of the Bible saw language as a prerequisite for everything made by their God. That's not the opposite of what you claim - it is a completely different aspect.

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RE: Indoctrination - 11/17/2012 10:10:00 PM   
ToyOfRhamnusia


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quote:

ORIGINAL: Aswad

quote:

ORIGINAL: ToyOfRhamnusia

I see this as just one more of the religious self-inconsistencies


It has been said by better men than me that the more abstract the topic becomes, the more we see ourselves reflected in it, that what we see in something abstract may speak more to what is in ourselves than to what is in others, and that in speaking of same, we show more of ourselves than of that about which we are attempting to speak. I invite you to consider what of yourself might here be reflected in your words.

IWYW,
— Aswad.


I don't understand what you mean, other than referring to the fact that I see a bunch of logical inconsistencies in the Bible when it is taken as word-perfect guide, as so many bible-thumbers like to do, and that I then distance myself from that because I value logic too much.

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RE: Indoctrination - 11/17/2012 10:10:35 PM   
Kirata


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quote:

ORIGINAL: GotSteel

He doesn't talk about his position too often because he thinks he is god.

You are projecting yourself onto me. I think everybody is God.

K.






< Message edited by Kirata -- 11/17/2012 10:31:53 PM >

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RE: Indoctrination - 11/17/2012 10:17:08 PM   
Kirata


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quote:

ORIGINAL: ToyOfRhamnusia
quote:

ORIGINAL: ToyOfRhamnusia

the use of language is indeed fundamental for the concept of "God".

writers of the Bible saw language as a prerequisite for everything made by their God.

My bolding for emphasis. When you figure out whatever it is that you want to say, let me know. In the meantime, I'll reply to what you actually post. I hope that's alright with you. I wouldn't want to ruffle your padded nappies again. You get kinda ugly when you're piqued.

K.

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