Posts by Paul Litterick
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Jeremy, I agree with you. The worst kind of secular education system would be one that ignored religions entirely, as if they did not exist. We have to accept (some Atheist "representatives" especially) that religions have played a crucil role in history and continue to do so. We also have to recognise that religion is hugely significant to people's cultures: the two cannot be separated easily. Nor should they be: so-called humanists who stomp about trying to convert believers and calling them names for believing are just as bad as the evangelicals. They do not realise that humanity and its religions have a long and intimate association.
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Jeremy: the pressure comes from the media in the way it represents or ignores political arguments and issues; but that is another story.
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I was thinking less about compartive politics and more about teaching students about voting and how our political system works. I would group it with media education because citizens need to understand how the political system works and the pressures upon it and them.
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My comment in the Fundy Post about religious groups falling out concerned the panel that drew up the diversity statement, not any incident at the forum.
I agree with Anjum about Bible in Schools. Mark Easterbrook's assumption is in part right: many of the teachers of the Bible in Schools programme are members of 'evangelical' churches. The Elim church in particular seems eager to use the programme to find new adherents.
Bible in Schools is indefensible. The orginal Education Act of 1877 ensured that education would be secular but churchmen later invented the fiction of closing the school for religious instruction; it is called the Nelson System and it was a deliberate subversion of the Act.
It has to go but need it be replaced by education about all religions as Anjum Rahman proposes? Religion is a private matter and there are far more important matters that could be taught, such as participating in democracy and understanding the media.
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Maybe it is just us liberal malcontents who like the Daily Show. Eveyone else is wathcing Fox on Prime.
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The question that must be answered is "who wrote this crap?" It doesn't even make sense: how can a pseudonym be inarticulate? What is a belief of self-freedom? I wouldn't read a blogger who wrote so badly.
Meanwhile, DPF links to the latest in the Herald's series of interviews with the new intake of National MPs. This time it's Chester Borrows. Any pretence of impartiality by the Herald seems to have been abandoned.
Ho hum.
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But what so many NZers express when they think they're in private or not in front of their 'others' is really no different to what Aussies do in public
How would you know that? You said the onlookers were as peeved as your mate. In Australia or Britain their sympathies would most likely be with the yobos. I have lived in some racist countries and this is not one of them.
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Skrewdriver were a bit more than an Oi band. They were the house band of the National Front in Britain and very much part of the White Power movement. The use of one of their songs in the video shows that this is the work of commited fascists, not just your average thugs.
Of course, Howard doesn't help matters when he praises Catch The Fire Ministries, which is involved in a religious hatred case going though the courts. He has shown which side of the divide he stands on.
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I think if Osama does rail against the 'liberals' it's in a wider sense. The 'Western Liberal Values' that Osama has the most objection to are the biggies. Rule of law, freedoms of speech and religion, full citizenship rights for females, democracy.
I think you are probably right (although everything Osama says is so gnomic that it is difficult to ascertain what he believes).
Western conservatives also object to these values, as well their consequences, such as greater sexual freedom. We should not let them remove our freedoms on the spurious grounds that they threaten our security.
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bin Laden wants a fundamentalist pan-Islamic state - he's said over and over that "Western" liberals values are the enemy
Neil, if you can provide the quotes, I will concede that point. My understanding is that Bin Laden wants American troops to leave Saudi Arabia, regime change there and in other Middle Eastern monarchies and an end to Western involvement in the Middle East (especially in Israel, of course). It is western imperialism (for want of a better word) that bothers him.
The Taliban are irrelevant: they confined their activities to Afghanistan.