The post-Trojan horse shenanigans rumble on. The BHA are riding the secular wave – good on ’em. The BBC reports:…
Category Secularism
Sometimes you just want to open the window and shout at the world. Whether it be religious fundamentalism in the…
In debating whether religion is a cause of or an excuse for violence, moral wrongdoing and problems in the world (in a discussion on facebook), it is worth noting that:
The National Governors’ Association calls for the abolition of the 70-year-old rule that requires schools to hold a Christian assembly every day, saying it is “meaningless”
I have often argued about (state-funded) faith schools in the UK, and whether their above-average exam results are used in repeated examples of the correlation fallacy.
Well, it seems they are.
The reality (and having worked in some, I should know) is that the sorts of parents who want their children to do well have high aspirations. Let’s call them HAPs (High Aspiration Parents). HAPs will do things for their children to further their education, both in and pout of school. HAPs will support their children by teaching them to read early, by setting high standards and expectations for their children and so on.
I recently wrote a piece, “I am Rationally Islamaphobic”, which set out why I think Islam is a problem, and is a worldview to worry about. Well, it seems like areas of the world are self destructing under its dogmatic extremes. We could argue about defining Islamic extremism, but there is something going wrong. Well, let’s look at what has happened over the last week
OK, so if you have been following the debacle of the schools in Birmingham, UK, which have involved the schools…
These schools shouldn’t even be allowed to exist, let alone be policed by their own. As the National Secular Society reports:
The National Secular Society has expressed concern that inspectors with extremist views are working for the body responsible for inspecting Muslims and Christian independent schools.
This has been an ongoing saga which is nothing short of depressing. As the Guardian reports:
Amnesty International joins condemnation of death penalty for Sudanese doctor found guilty of ‘apostasy’ for marrying Christian
President Omar al-Bashir, an Islamist who seized power in a 1989 coup in Sudan
President Omar al-Bashir, an Islamist who seized power in a 1989 coup. The imposition of sharia law was one cause of Sudan’s civil war. Photo: Abd Raouf/AP
A Sudanese doctor who married a Christian man and who was convicted earlier this week on charges of apostasy was sentenced to death on Thursday, judicial officials said.
The new book that I have co-edited with Tristan Vick called Beyond an Absence of Faith: Stories About the Loss of Faith and the Discovery of Self has been really favourably reviewed by those who have read it, and hopefully some of those reviews will filter trough the internet.
Plenty of brain-sapping journals clutter the desks of Westminster, offering the patient reader an intellectual transfusion of information, analysis, insight and yes, just occasionally, complete guff.
But until the last few weeks I had never read the Church Times.
This, from the Telegraph: Headmaster sacked from Catholic school over marriage split A top Catholic school retracted its job…
Some of you may have heard news reports like this one from Yahoo News about a church being ‘knocked down by the Communists’. This is how they report it:
Here is a quote that I posted on the Daily Telegraph (eek) in the UK which was reporting the letter it had received denouncing PM Cameron’s claim that we should be proud that we are a Christian nation. I will first post the comment I reacted to:
The government are continuing to look into the Islamification of certain schools in the Birmingham area as I reported (from the BBC) before. Here, the anti-terrorism unit has got involved. This is close to my teaching and secular heart (from the BBC again):
H/T to Gandolf for this one, in response to the article about the girl being taken out of a Christian school because she didn’t look girly enough. God move for the European Union to be tackling such issues.
This is from the Parliamentary Assembly Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights. Read the hole thing here.
Being a Christian, or any non-Muslim, in Pakistan is hard. Blasphemy laws restrict any kind of free speech and freethought. Here, the BBC reports on yet another case of backwards thinking. It makes me so sad.
The Guardian reports, following up from a story which I reposted here:
Experienced headteachers say they recognise ploy outlined in document about alleged Islamic plot to ‘take over’ schools
As a teacher, I cannot tell you how much this worries me. I will be striking later this month in opposition to this government push on ‘free schools’ an academies which is thinly veiled attempt to privatise education and politically liberalise it. I could bore you for hours on the ramifications and implications of such a stupid approach to education, not least adding in the utter stupidity of scrapping a national curriculum and assessment framework whilst neglecting to be organised enough to have something in mind and prepared to replace it. Total idiots. And yes, if I meet Education Secretary Michael Gove in a dark alley…
Media group opts for self-censorship on terrorism after Taliban admits murder of three employees for critical reports on militants
When it was launched four years ago, the Express Tribune set out to become the house newspaper of liberal-minded Pakistanis.