I don’t have a lot of time for organised religion and even less for established religion. Generally, they are misogynistic and oppressive and hark back to a time when men lusted after women, blamed them for being temptresses and labelled them unclean. We, i.e. men, allowed women to worship, but usually on the back row, or just outside the ‘holy’ place – palpably unjust and discriminatory; you might even say unchristian, to take our established ‘faith’, except that to be Christian is to be a member of a very broad church indeed, broad enough, for example, for the Papacy to sign a concordat with the national Socialist Party in the years leading up to war – something which hardly aided the Jewish peoples of Europe.
This isn’t an anti-catholic piece; scandals like child abuse, Mussolini bribing the church to legitimise his regime or the imposition of Catch 22 on the poor – choose between the sin of birth control or squalor and starvation – can be matched, I guess, in most organised religions. In Saudi, for example, the ‘guardians’ of Islam are systematically destroying the archaeology of their faith and replacing it with hotels and ‘Starbucks’.
So it’s not an anti-Catholic or anti-religious rant; in fact it’s not a piece about religion at all really It’s more about whether and how we make our way towards our individual truths and the part education should play in that journey.
I have been struck though, by how far Christianity and other ‘faiths’ have drifted from their radical starting points. The power of many faiths came from their radical nature, their attack on venality and their response to corruption and oppression. There is something to be had from all religions but, if they survive, many[1] seem to make the same journey from radical and reforming to established and oppressive, despite the best efforts of many of their followers. Here are a couple of quotes from a Christian, writing sixteen hundred years ago about inequality and injustice: – the writer is known only as the Sicillian Britain
Listen to your rich man calling your poor man ‘wretch’, ‘beggar’, ‘rabble’, because he dares to open his mouth in ‘our’ presence, because in his rags he reproaches ‘our’ morality and conduct, …. as if the rich alone had a right to speak, as if the understanding of truth were a function of wealth, not of thought.
Abolish the rich and you will have no more poor…for it is the few rich who are the cause of the many poor.
The Sicillian Briton, early 5th century (in The Age of Arthur, John Morris, Weidenfield and Nicolson, London, 1984)
Much early Christian writing was in a similar vein and, to be fair, some church leaders still have a powerful social conscience, much to the irritation of politicians.
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I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s
I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create.
William Blake
I’m with Blake. I know that many people choose not to build their own moral or ethical belief system, they opt instead to use the guidance of their religion as a lodestone and live as closely as they can to its tenets. Others go farther and treat the written records of their faith as the word of God. This, I find perplexing for a couple of reasons. The first is that, certainly in the bible, and I assume (out of ignorance) also in the Koran and probably in most ‘holy’ texts, it’s possible to find a quotation contradicting almost any prohibition or exhortation – maybe not ‘Thou shalt not kill’ though ‘an eye for an eye’ rings a bell. My second difficulty is more profound in any case. Religious texts and guidance all need to be interpreted by someone, usually a man, and the range of views here is hardly nuanced – there are some crazy people telling us what to think and what to do.
When the Romans took the sacred isle we know as Angelsey, and butchered pretty well everyone on the place, they were up against the Druids and took their own priests along to even the balance. When the Normans went to the fens to dislodge Hereward they faced holy women or witches depending on your point of view, and again took their own priests along to counter their power. Hereward was betrayed in the end by a monk; I’m not sure what that says about whose power was the greater. In any war men of religion have lined up behind their priests to hear that ‘God’ was on their side.
Dylan’s ‘With God on Our Side’ mentions the slaughter of Native Americans in the nineteenth century, the Spanish–American War, the American Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Holocaust, the Cold War, the betrayal of Jesus Christ by Judas Iscariot and, in 1980s versions, the Vietnam War – all supposedly just not to say civilising wars.
All wars are just of course, if God is on our side. In 2011 the US Air Force, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, revised a training course taught to nuclear missile launch officers which included quotations from Werner Von Braun and also cited Christian ‘Just War Theory’, among other materials.
The Just War Theory is a, largely Christian, philosophy that attempts to reconcile three things:
- taking human life is wrong;
- states have a duty to defend their citizens, and defend justice;
- protecting innocent human life and defending important moral values sometimes requires willingness to use force and violence.
The theory specifies conditions for judging if it is just to go to war, and conditions for how the war should be fought. Although it was extensively developed by Christian theologians (it originated with classical Greek and Roman philosophers like Plato and Cicero and was added to by Christian theologians like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas) it can be used by people of every faith and none.
The principles of a Just War. http://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/war/just/introduction.shtml
Do you remember the arguments for invading Iraq? Wasn’t it a just war to stop missiles raining down on London (“capable of being launched within 45 minutes”) and to topple a tyrant who ignored the will of the people….or was it Tony Blair who ignored the will of the people? I forget now.
Do you remember the Fort Hood shootings? There have been an awful lot of shootings so why should you? A Muslim US Army Major, Nidal Malik Hasan, opened fire on his colleagues on November 5, 2009. In the course of the shooting 13 people were killed and 29 wounded.
The Christian American Family Association (don’t look at their web-site unless you’re feeling really well; sample article:
“Barack Obama is not the antichrist but he is an antichrist”
issued the statement “No More Muslims in the US Military”, which explicitly asked that Muslim enlistees be barred from military service in the US armed forces on the grounds that:
“…just as Christians are taught to imitate the life of Christ, so Muslims are taught to imitate the Prophet in all things. Yesterday, Nidal Malik Hasan was simply being a good Muslim.”
So I’d rather make my own mind up than be told what to believe and I’m surprised that isn’t true of everyone. Of course religious education starts early in most cultures for a pretty good reason. Catch them young works as the 16th century Jesuits knew.
Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man.
St. Ignatius of Loyola, or St. Francis Xavier, (alleged)
From Jesus Camps to Madrassas, teaching focuses on obedience to the ‘word’; there’s just some disagreement about whose word.
I’ve seen first-hand the affect that indoctrination into street-gang culture can have on adolescents -and they start getting this indoctrination in some large cities at a very early age. Kids in this predicament are generally from low-income, single-mother households and are usually desperate for authority figures that they can put their trust and loyalty in.
I wonder how the uncertainty and economic strain of chaotic nations in the Middle East affect adolescents there? Could it be any different? Could being raised in a war-torn nation, a theocratic nation, or one in which the only existence you’ve ever known is that of occupation by an oppressing and repressive authority affect your psychological well-being?
Then again, are the young participants of indoctrination camps like the Jesus Camp or the well-to-do students of Mullahs at any less risk of being indoctrinated into a cult of hatred?
Jonathan Evans, the director general of the British MI5, November 2007
We’re all desperate for someone we can put our trust and loyalty in at some level aren’t we? That’s why generally most of us follow orders. We’re pack animals; give us a good alpha male (or female, AKA Maggie) and we’ll do as we’re told most of the time. Psychologists have demonstrated this in the lab. time after time. Here are a couple of well-known examples:
The Asch Conformity Experiments in the 1950s
Groups of students participated in a “vision test.” All but one of the participants were confederates of the experimenter, and the study was really about how the remaining student would react to the confederates’ behavior.
The participants — the real subject and the confederates — were all seated in a classroom and asked a variety of question about lines (which line was longer than the other, which lines were the same length, etc.). The group was told to announce their answers to each question out loud and the confederates always provided their answers before the study participant. The confederates always gave the same answer as each other. They answered a few questions correctly but eventually began providing incorrect responses.
In a control group, with no pressure to conform to an erroneous view, only 1 subject out of 35 ever gave an incorrect answer except when surrounded by individuals all giving an incorrect answer. Then they provided incorrect responses on a high proportion of the questions (36.8%). 75% of the participants gave an incorrect answer to at least one question. ‘ 1984’ had it right – 2 and 2 can make 5!
The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.
Stanley Milgram, 1974
I think we might need to reflect on how we can educate men and women to sustain their truth whatever the situation.
The Milgram Experiment
Milgram started his experiments in 1961, shortly after the trial of Adolph Eichmann had begun. The defence of ‘only obeying orders’ wasn’t accepted in war-crime trials but the Milgram experiments demonstrated that most of us will inflict pain (in this case electric shocks at dangerous levels) to helpless innocents if an authority figure tells us to.
Milgram thought that no more than 3 out of 100 Yale University students would deliver the maximum shock. In the event 65% of the participants delivered what they believed to be maximum shocks.
Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. ……….when they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.
Stanley Milgram, 1974
Of course, as a general principle, conformity is no bad thing; in social terms it encourages cohesion and collaboration and we surely need those. If the species is to survive we had better agree most things and get along. But we also need, as a species, to be able to disagree and speak and act to stop what we know to be wrong. If the general balance of a population reflects Milgram’s findings, approaching two thirds of us will not oppose publically what we know to be wrong if the circumstances don’t encourage it – unless, of course someone else speaks out first. Later experiments conducted by Milgram indicated that the presence of rebellious peers dramatically reduced obedience levels. When other people refused to go along with the orders, 36 out of 40 participants refused to deliver the maximum shocks. So, should not all education systems have, as a key aim, to encourage and develop free thinkers who have the language skills and the confidence to question the ‘instruction’ and received opinions that form part of their ‘education’?
How about these four key aims?:
- For the curriculum: the study of a base curriculum that takes account of what young people need to know, understand and be able to do to survive and thrive;
- For the young person: opportunities to develop social and interpersonal skills and explore individual interests, talents and skills;
- For society: personal and social education which enables young people to develop a strong personal underpinning ethical system and a knowledge base which prevents them suffering or inflicting harm;
- For educators: training and support to develop a range of learning and teaching strategies which are fit for purpose and a grounding in the philosophy of education.
And the “Hokey Kokey?”
In out, in out and shake it all about” – it’s just the credo of politicians of all parties, with perhaps the honourable exception of the Greens who, for some odd reason, seem to base their policies on research-based evidence and a value-base – how novel is that?
