mudhook

I haven’t posted about religion for a while.

Here is a story of Christians scuffling in Bethlehem. Religion, eh.

And here is an article by Jeremy Clarkson in today’s Sunday Times which I enjoyed.

Here are two articles, by Libby Purves and Andrew O’Hagan, which ooze civilised sense about the nature of religious and philosophic tolerance and the importance of live-and-let-live and not imposing your beliefs upon others. I wholly agree with their sentiments.

The news from Christians has been dispiriting of late. The Anglican church has, as far as I can see, gone along with those who think homosexual acts are evil and damned in their Bible and that homosexual committed partnerships cannot be recognised in their churches and homosexuals cannot be Anglican mahoffs. Francisco Chimoio, Catholic archbishop in Mozambique, has said condoms from two unnamed countries of Europe are deliberately infected with HIV, unbelievable views which leave me speechless. And here’s an item from Nicaragua on the effects of a Catholic prohibition on abortion.

Mehr Licht, said the dying Goethe. I think liberals should also take to heart his other words, Ohne hast aber ohne Rast.

Last week the Labour government and several religions in Britain put out a document, Faith in the system. This supports more tax-funded faith schools. See the document here and the launch here.

Some children are sent to different schools at age five because of their parents’ genuine or claimed religious beliefs. We are told that this segregation fosters community cohesion. This view is drivelling nonsense.

Religiously segregating people doesn’t promote social cohesion. It is divisive. You do not increase mutual understanding through segregation; you do not unite people by separating them; you do not get cohesion and integration in society by religious apartheid. Indeed, is not segregation more likely to lead to failures of understanding and to social disunity?

Cohesion and a sense of common belonging are better fostered in education by having children learn and play alongside one another every day and experience their differences and, more importantly, the many things that they share in common. That mutatis mutandis applies to the adult world too.

This week the Commission for Racial Equality, about to be subsumed in a new all-embracing commission, published a final report, A lot done, a lot to do. In that they say that “our society is fracturing” and “segregation - residentially, socially, and in the workplace - is growing.” They do not examine whether religiously segregated education places a part in that fracturing. The new commission should.

Incidentally, a recent report by Rebecca Allen and Anne West shows that faith schools in London select a disproportion of pupils from better-off homes.