Explains it all really.

There’s really very little to be worried about.

In all schools to all students, it appears. No doubt any and all connection between islam and violence will be portrayed as merely ‘circumstantial’ and simply a question of ‘misperception’.

Now if Brett and company are so concerned about sacro-sanct secularism instead, as I suspect, of just this brain-fart driven trashing of Christianity, he’d have a posting on this.

Your public ’secular’ school systeme is being turned into a vehicle for Islamist proslytisation and yet only Bishop Ali Nazir, the least offensive cleric by far, is the only religious figure being raked over the coals.

As a result of this soft anti-Christian bigotry, and the harmful distractions it creates, Britian is going to get hardcore religion right up its butt.

Giving far-right islamist radicals unfettered access to maleable 12 year-old minds is NOT the way to go, but the dimwit athesist school commisioners don’t see that.

Ed Balls, by the way, is the same guy who promotes London as a centre of sharia banking.

How do you get on the Saudi payroll, anyhow?

Those ’sparks and flames are yours, not god or allah or class consciencness, yours and yours to treasure. Enjoy them fella!

Enjoy yours too

Statements like that show how little the writer knows about Islam. If Brett can find me any senior Muslim cleric who thinks Islam is purely a matter of private belief I’ll be very interested to hear about them. Islam is clearly a totalitarian ideology that expects the belief system to regulate every aspect of life – including sex, education, scientific belief, music, the arts, sport, clothing. There is nothing that Islam doesn’t have an opinion on. There is no equivalent of “render unto Caesar” in Islam.

I respect the Bishop as someone who understands what Islam is and what it wants in this world. Beyond that I don’t think the Anglican Church is going to save us from Islam.

However, I think it is true that Christian culture sustains our democracy and our freedoms through its stress on the individual, its “render unto Caesar” approach, its concern for the poor and the underdog, its rejection of violence and its theological subtlety (again a basis for philosophical and scientific inquiry). Equally important are our
classical, pagan heritage; our wonderful science; and our secular arts.

The classical heritage, with its wonderful resonant myths is still highly relevant to our culture. We don’t have to literally believe in Zeus or Prometheus to appreciate its value. So with Christianity. We don’t have to have faith in Jesus to recognise the incredible and benevolent power of the Christian narrative.

That’s your own decision, John, but it does make it slightly hypocritical to attack Islam for supposedly nullifying scientific study.

Have a wonderful weekend.

Yes, “sparks and flames” is good way of putting it. My “faith” is really just a hunch, but it’s a hunch that is constantly teased and tweaked by situations, things and people that I encounter on a daily basis….but never to the point were my faith becomes a proven, empirical certainty.

I never see the object of my faith and I’m never supplied with proof of its existence, but at times I think I can perceive the ripples from its wake, its presence.

That’s all.

Have a good weekend!

Faith was brought up on this thread in the dogmatic sense as in faith in a deity or a supra-individual narrative. I would say that subconscious ‘hunch’ you label as faith is of the sort described by Koestler as ‘the spark and the flame’. It is imagination, a jump of perception, yes. Faith by its very nature is more existential, it is not fruitful whimsy or the unpredicted thought. Indeed Dogma might co-opt this as the gift from Sky Pixie tm, yet is origins lay within the individual. Faith in such circumstances is merely faith in one’s self.

My point is that the most fruitful ’sparks and flames’ occur when we venture outside of our conventional epitomological contructs, when we see previously uncharted connections between two seemly incompatable ‘matrix’. Thus we go beyond learnt doctrine and expectation and reason begins there.

But I grant you this might be a difference in vernaculars rather than a great fissure.

‘It might surprise you to know that I spent years inhabiting the moral/philosophical *space* expressed in that statement before deciding to move on.’

I’m not sure which space you mean, my secular sarcasm or the ‘faith of the free spirit’, but either way, JP, very little would surprise me about you, you are systemically surprising :)

Ven –

I was not suggesting that Soho or any place in that spawning ugly necro-polis of London is utopic, merely that those streets represent what faces us now, not Turks at the Gates or Puants in the provinces or Fascists in Kiev or Infidels in the attic. If a multiplicity of religious faiths, a inevitable part of human nature, are to exist side by side rather than seek violent hegemon or insular control of their particular ghettos, I think there needs to be a change. Religious faith is individual, it can inspire creation, but the agents for that change remain mere human beings, not gods or the dialectic.