Primary school college course and atheism

Nutgrover wrote: »

Teaching religion in publicly-funded schools should be deemed illegal under European human rights law (freedom of conscience). Teachers and teachers-to-be should demand banning religious education from curriculum and removing all religious symbols (crosses, figures of saints etc.) together with religious patrons of schools. Until this is not done, absurds like this are bound to continue. As an example, try to hang a cross in a classroom or preach any religion in a public school in France - you'll be immediately fired. That's exactly what should be implemented in Ireland A.D. 2012. Religion has nothing to do with education and knowledge, so it can only be harmully confusing to children. A teacher who should be their role model turns out to be a liar and hypocrite.

I find the initialism "AD" to be offensive since it forces upon me the presumption of there being a god. I would ask that, if years are to be quoted as being either more or less than 2012 years ago, the initialism "CE" (common era) and "BCE" (before the common era) are used instead of the religionist, overtly presumptive terms.:(

Galvasean wrote: »

I think Nugent did very well to keep calm and keep the debate logical and fact based (particularly citing references which could be easily looked up by anyone).
I do not agree with some here that feel Nugent should have adopted a more aggressive approach.

I should probably keep this to myself but, for reasons that will now become clear, I can't. I have spent no short time with Michael Nugent, over the last few months, driving him to debates at colleges and universities around the island and making (rather shabby) attempts to video them (see atheist.ie).

Mick has to put up with the sort of verbal diarrhoea, like that emanating from Vincent Twomey today, from religionists at most of these debates. It is, frankly, beyond my understanding how he manages to contain himself, on occasions.

He is always civil, well-mannered and polite to all those he debates with, not only during the debates but also before and afterwards. He always keeps his cool, whatever the provocation, and I have never seen him become noticeably angry.

He is, in short, an excellent ambassador for Atheist Ireland and, I would like to think, all those wishing to see a separation of church and state and a secular society.

I was talking to Mick, earlier, to congratulate him on the Newstalk feature and I said that I am sure that I would have lost my cool. Mick has this ability to lead the ignorant into clearly showing their ignorance without having to over egg the pudding. It would be hard to believe that anyone missed the fact that Twomey verbalised his bizarre idea of the 'facts', presumably in context and yet repeatedly stated that those same 'facts', as printed in the course notes, were taken out of context. I would have rammed that down his throat, Mick let him hang himself.

Sadly, though, the truth will never get through to some. I heard some of the text messages afterwards, e.g. 'well done to Fr. Twomey, someone needs to stand up for the Catholics, we're the majority'.

What the church stance actually is, and what many of its followers who have been indoctrinated to believe it is, is that human rights somehow belong to the majority. Of course, the exact opposite is the truth.

We heard the latest example of the propaganda today, following on from the concerted efforts of the church repeatedly equating 'atheism' and 'secularism' and spreading the lie that secular schools are atheist schools, whatever an atheist school is. We heard Twomey state that ultra-right wing nazism equals atheist; ultra-left wing Marxist Stalinism equals atheist and ultra-left wing Maoism equals atheist.

For any of you who are not mathematicians, that means that Twomey is stating that nazism, Marxist Stalinism and Maoism are, in every respect, equal given that each one of them equals atheist. His (Im)moral Theology course notes are bad enough, I hope he never taught mathematics (or perhaps he did... to the FFers in the last government).

wonderfulname wrote: »

You think it's right that until the age of 12 a school give no indication of the basis behind the different cultures that are evident in our society? You must seriously underestimate children, they can distinguish between fact and fiction long before 12 and leaving a gaping hole in their world view because it's just someone's beliefs is a little absurd in my opinion.

As for the 20% of the school day and the integrated curriculum stuff, were religion treated impartially and given the weighting it merits that wouldn't be a problem now, would it? Kind of pointless to aim that at me when it is a problem within the primary school curriculum and catholic patronage and not the concept of actually educating a child about the world around them, which is what I was referring to.

I apologise if you think for one moment that I am being personally critical of you in any way at all, it was certainly not my intention. I was only thinking, last night, how well this thread was going.

I see this whole matter matter as a debate, not a 'cast in stone', opninionated set of views and, in that light, I can see, very much, where you are coming from. To be honest, after I wrote that, I started to wonder, myself, how it would be best to handle the current situation where kids from all over the world are coming together, probably for the first time, in Irish primary schools.

I think, though, that culture and religion are not necessarily the same thing. On the other hand, religions quite frequently have an (adverse?) influence on cultures and the mindset of different communities.

Having read your post, I think you are correct that 12/13 is probably too late to be starting but I still maintain that 4 is too young.

Perhaps, though, the best way to approach this would be through, say, geography. Maybe it could be done by teaching the kids about different countries' customs, national dress and food, even, and then saying that in these countries people have different beliefs and how the different beliefs have different gods, and ideas of how the world was created, and say that many people don't believe in gods at all... and now let's move on to science.

What would you suggest? How would you introduce religion and how early do you think it would be sensible to do so?

By the way, you are of course correct in saying that the current curriculum (http://www.ncca.ie/uploadedfiles/Curriculum/Intro_Eng.pdf) is tremendously biased towards religion and that just has to be the influence of the church on government, disgraceful.

I apologise again if you think I was being personal, I certainly did not intend to be.

Michael Nugent wrote: »

The terms denominational, inter-denominational, multi-denominational and non-denominational are used inconsistently and confusingly in Ireland.

We have been trying to get the Government to define in legislation what these terms mean in the context of the Irish education system.
[*]An inter-denominational or multi-denominational school would teach religion through an ethos that reflects some permutation of the ethos of different religious denominations.

[*]A non-denominational school would teach about different religious beliefs through a religiously neutral ethos.
[/LIST]

Educate Together describes itself as multi-denominational, and the Educate Together Charter describes this status as follows:

Multi-denominational i.e. all children having equal rights of access to the school, and children of all social, cultural and religious backgrounds being equally respected.

To me, that seems closer to a non-denominational school describing itself as a multi-denominational school

There was some discussion about this earlier in this (long!) thread, but basically there is deliberate confusion inherent in the terminology being used.

The term "multi-denominational" lacks specific meaning. The VEC are setting up primary schools in which the kids are segregated only during the mandatory "religious education" class. They would be divided into different groups and each group indoctrinated with a different brand of mumbo jumbo. The term multi-denominational fails to distinguish this from the more objective teaching about religion of the Educate Together model, where any religious indoctrination would have to occur outside school hours.

So, even the terminology invented and perpetuated by the religious is misleading and inaccurate. That's without even getting started on the indoctrination itself, including the prayers and imagery pupils are exposed to throughout the day in a denominational school.

It was pointed out that there is at least one school describing itself as non-denominational. But it is a privately funded montessori school;

iguana wrote: »

There are, they are just completely private and receive no state funding. Drumnigh Montessori Primary, for example, is non-denom.

http://drumnighmontessori.ie/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5&Itemid=9

It seems that when Educate Together were starting up, they were informed by Dept. of Education that a non-denom school would not get any state funding. As a result, they changed their "labelled status" to "multi-denominational", but anyone who cares to look can see that they are in fact "non-denominational" according to this (silly) terminology. I would imagine they are now getting to the stage where they are big and bold enough to challenge this nonsense without fear of losing all the teacher funding. But that might require changes to the Irish Constitution.
Good luck if you decide to tackle this one....

Thank you, wonderfulname. I think you were tempted to say something about me that I may not have already revealed but that you probably guessed. Yes! I am English and I didn't move here until I was 33, 25 years ago – with my Irish wife and our newly-born (now confused) son. (I have taken out Irish citizenship, by the way.)

So, I did not have to go through the religious indoctrination that it seems my Irish contemporaries (including my wife) were forced to endure. England, Scotland and Wales have state education, in state schools, available to all (Northern Ireland is just, well, 'not the same'). Yes, the schools were sort of Church of England-ish but there was certainly no requirement whatsoever to take any examinations in the subject of religion, unless you wanted to and my memories of 'Religious Education' was, basically, story telling.

I have known Ireland since the early 1970s and I have to admit that I did find it peculiar?, quirky?, weird? that I had to 'smuggle' condoms into the country – including for family members! I think I was also asked to 'import' certain publications that, whilst on open sale in England, were banned in Ireland. It will come as no surprise, then, that not only I, but many others, found this to be a bit 'backward'. And I don't only mean English people, there were plenty of young Irish people I met (I was young then, as well) who held the same opinion.

So, moving on to 1991 and my son has to go to school. I was assured that the indoctrination was not as bad as it used to be and so he went to the local (RC) National School. I live in rural Meath and the nearest alternative was a CofI school in Drogheda, about 9 miles away, so no escape from religious indoctrination anyway. (I don't recall having any knowledge of Educate Together and I'm sure there was nothing reasonably close, mainly because there still isn't.)

I decided that the best way to 'fit in' to my new home area was not to make waves, so I didn't. Let's face it, it's bad enough being a Brit!

My son went through all of that mumbo-jumbo stuff but, at home, I made it clear that what he was being taught at school was only one, limited, view of the world and that many people believed that there are no gods, and I was one of them.

OK, it helped that I was an atheist and my wife had spent 16 years in England, mostly with me, and, although, at the beginning, she went to mass, that gradually tailed off. When we came over here, she really didn't mind me telling our son that there wasn't a god and she told him she thought there was.

Happily, he has turned out to be an extremely caring, generous, honest, respectful and sensitive young man and, yes, he's an atheist, currently having a second go at doing a science degree.

I'm not sure when I first started to get worked up about the injustice of effectively having a State church in Ireland, and the adverse effect that has on the country and its people. I think it was probably a year or so after I had a breakdown, caused by severe depression, from which I still suffer and, as a consequence, am unable to return to work.

In an attempt to rehabilitate myself, and on the advice of one of the psychiatrists I saw, I started to do a law degree in 2007. The first year included the study of the Irish Constitution and I was shocked from the first line of the preamble. A few months after I started my degree (14th December 2007, to be precise) I found atheist.ie and realised that I was not alone!

The most interesting subject I studied was Human Rights. The second most interesting (but for me, ultimately, extremely difficult when it came to the examinations) was Jurisprudence. Both of these subjects really brought home to me the desperate need to see my adopted country become a secular state in which the constitution could be amended and so see Ireland able to fully adopt international human rights best practice.

It is disgusting that the Roman Catholic church is able to, effectively, dictate to the State how children are educated and what their heads are filled with. It is outrageous that taxpayer's money (I do have a [much reduced] income from my employer so I still pay taxes!) can be used to give to a church. It is an obscenity that the influence of the Roman Catholic church prevents Ireland from adopting the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in full.

I shall work, with Atheist Ireland, for as long as it takes, or for as long as I can, to make Ireland a secular state that is, like the Atheist Ireland goal says, rational, ethical and free from superstition and supernaturalism.