Will you eat meat tomorrow

sheesh wrote: »

thats fine you go and believe in your hamster and be happy.

I don't believe in your hamster but fully recognise your right to believe in what ever you want.

Are you serious?

You wouldn't even try to challenge this belief?

If your child's teacher believed in the celestial hamster and mentioned it to you, would you have a) more respect, b) less respect or c) the same amount of respect for that teacher as a professional and an intellectual human being?

Jeremias Tender Cheese wrote: »

No there simply was no drugs, almost no murders and almost no organised crime etc in Ireland 50 years ago. Population as nothing to do with it, these sort of things just didn't happen.

I wonder how many old people were beaten and robbed in their home 50 years ago. None I'd wager. Nowadays its a common occurrence.

A very large percentage of the crime in Ireland is committed by a small section of the community that have gotten out of control, and I can guarantee you, that the vast majority of these people are not atheists.

mrsbyrne wrote: »

Oh I wouldn't agree with you at all. If you speak to anyone working or volunteering with Child line Seniors Helpline Victim Support Samaritans St Vincent due Paul they will soon tell you how utterly obnoxious we are and how there are no boundaries or taboos any more. Our elderly racist and God-bothering as they are used to be cherished but not now. Children sexualy abused by a man their mother invited into the house but most often by a family member. On and on it goes the misery.
And the Magdelen girls of 2014 where are they? Lots get tremendous support from family. some have at least a decent leaving cert and can struggle on into further education in the hope of becoming independent some day. But the girls I meet are stuck in poor accommodation poorly educated from dysfunctional backgrounds struggling to manage financially . No skills to deal with life. Depressed lonely they hook up with the next guy they meet in the hope that he'll be "the One" get pregnant to him in the hope he'll stay few slaps later and he's gone too. "I'm finished with fellas Mrs Byrne" if I had € for every time.
We can never go back to the horrors of the laundry but don't think the singleparent lot is all sweetness and light. For some lucky ones its good but flinging money at them and rewarding them with more filthy lucre and no questions asked when you add to your brood is doing them no favours.
What really angers me is how great it would have been if the nuns hadn't been so bloody greedy and evil and sadistic. A place to be safe a place to think a place to plan your future. That should have been the Convents. Now there's nothing.

All of those things existed in the past but were brushed under the carpet. Now that they're open, we have a chance of dealing with these problems.

People who have freedom will make poor choices. We can try to deal with this in several ways.
1. Remove their freedom and try to force them to act in the way that the powers that be deem to be acceptable
2. Teach them proper life skills. How to reason, how to think critically
2a Support people as they try to find their way in life. We're all young once and need guidance while we find our way forward.

The education system is crucial as it has a massive effect on future outcomes and opportunities for the next generation.

Ireland does somethings very well, and some things very poorly. The free pre-school places for children is a very progressive step, and I think we should have much better early intervention for children to stop them from falling behind if they are unfortunate enough to be born into a family that is incapable of putting their development first.

The focus of our education should be on preparing them for life in the 21st century. It's very sad that so much primary school time is taken up with counter productive religious indoctrination. Teaching children that magic is real istead of teaching them how to think and reason and argue and understand the world around them.

Kids are able to pick these things up. Instead of teaching about the nativity (which even christian scholars acknowledge was completely fabricated) wouldn't it be amazing to teach them about cosmology instead? Instead of teaching them that 3 'wise men' followed a star, teach them about how we all came from elements forged in supernova explosions and that these discoveries were made by men and women who appreciate and understand mathematics and science, not astrology and prophesy.

I can't understand how anyone in the 21st century could possibly disagree with this?

Jeremias Tender Cheese wrote: »

There is plenty of time in the day for teaching religion also. Also you appear to be suggestion that complicated subjects should be taught at primary school level. This would be detrimental as they wont understand and it will probably turn them off studying them in the future.

Time is a very precious commodity in the education system. There is so much more that we could teach the kids if there was time to do so, and unfortunately, this time is reduced even further by spending enormous amounts of time preparing for religious ceremonies during school hours.

I'm not suggesting that the kids are taught the equations or the minutia of particle physics, but they can be taught the wonder of science and broad but non patronising explanations for how we know things and how things really are

I know the author puts a lot of people off, but The Magic of Reality by Dawkins is a book written specifically for primary school aged children that shows how deep the explanation can be without losing the attention of children.

If this book was on the curriculum rather than 'the good news' or catechism, I think the kids would have a much better start to life.

Kids should also be taught elementary computer science and the basics of how computer programs work, again, time spent doing this would be infinitely better spent than time spent learning off catechism so that the teacher isn't embarrased when the parish priest does his inspection. (kids as young as 5 are able to learn these concepts as proven by the excellent Coder Dojo organisation)