Multifaith Schools

I see that a source close to the Education Secretary has said that schools will be asked to ensure that they teach about different faiths in class and that faith schools will be expected to take pupils who are not of their faith or are secular.

Further to this, teachers will be encouraged to break down barriers between faiths and schools should try to help improve interfaith relations in the community.

According to the Times, this move was quickly opposed by Catholic, Jewish and Muslim groups and the government backed down. Now, that really is pandering to special interests, after all, regular schools take faith pupils, why not the other way round? Unless, you're frightened of something? Letting the wolf into the door, maybe.....

The Times newspaper suggested that these groups saw this as the beginning of secularisation, well, the horse is long gone from that stable. Britian has a large secular segment to it's population, and the long term trend is for it to increase. In my view, the best course of action by far, is for everyone across creeds and faiths to engage openly and equally. I can't see how we'll solve our current cultural challenges by building walls when we should be building bridges..

Update: Looks like it's turning into a bit of a row, BBC News Coverage here.

Sprituality and Secular Society

I've trying to put something into words for a little while about the place of spirituality in a Secular society. I have felt for a while that we need to develop spiritually more than religiously, and that simple spirituality can offer us better guidance than formal straight jacketed religions. I remembered this quote from the Dalai Lama, which to be honest, pretty much says everything I wanted to say:

"…I believe there is an important distinction to be made between religion and spirituality. Religion I take to be concerned with faith in the claims to salvation of one faith tradition or another, an aspect of which is acceptance of some form of metaphysical or supernatural reality, including perhaps an idea of heaven or nirvana. Connected with this are religious teachings or dogma, rituals, prayer and so on. Spirituality I take to be concerned with those qualities of the human spirit - such as love and compassion, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, contentment, a sense of responsibility, a sense of harmony - which bring happiness to both self and others. While ritual and prayer, along with the questions of nirvana and salvation, are directly connected with religious faith, these inner qualities need not be, however. There is thus no reason why the individual should not develop them, even to a high degree, without recourse to any religious or metaphysical belief system. This is why I sometimes say that religion is something we can perhaps do without. What we cannot do without are these basic spiritual qualities."

Can slower be faster?

During my day I handle a lot of problems, the pressure is to get things done as quickly as possible. When things aren't done quite right by the analysts, the calls are passed back to the service desks and we have to revisit our old work.

Taking a slightly slower approach usually means having to redo less work and more time to think means providing higher quality information, which helps things flow better and means individual problems actually get handled faster. Outside of work, I find it a slower approach gives better quality of life as I can take time to appreciate the world a bit better. Of course, some folk thrive on going at breakneck speed, fair play to them. But for a long time my feeling has been that we're turning into a society of rushers, with no time to stop any appreciate what we've got.

The sign on my Fiancee's wall says "Of course I don't look busy, I did it right the first time!", I have to say I prefer "The more haste, the less speed".

Ecological footprint

I found an interesting site that allows you to measure your ecological footprint against the average one for your country, it also give suggestions on what you can do about it.

Check out ecofoot.org.

Humanity and the Environment

I was reading about our impact on the environment in todays times, it seems that humanity is exceeding the Earth's ability to support us by 25%!

Each of us in the UK uses 2.2 hectares of resources to live, but the Earth can only renew 1.8 hectares. The article said there's a strong possiblity of a large scale collapse of the eco system by the middle of this century.

Once again the point was made that the UK is quite a bad offender, though there are worse out there. This just makes the point about humanity's need to get into tune with our environment. Benjamin Hoff said in the Te of Piglet that the environment would eventually turn on us, I'm reminded of the Taoist principle that when something reaches an extreme it become it's opposite. Unfortunately, unles we get proactive very quickly, it'll take an extreme event to make us change.

I can't help feeling the the emphasis is on the average Joe/Jane to make the running on this one, in this case, the big corporations and government need to be driven by public demand. What's needed is for the public to lead the way, it really is in our hands.

More on BBC News Online here.

Religions & Freedom of Speech

Well, there was a program on Channel 4 tonight about Islam and freedom of speech. The question posed is "Do muslims threaten freedom of speech?". The Channel 4 Dispatches forum made interesting reading afterwards.

Now that's a bit of an inaccurate question, as there are most cetainly Muslims who hold moderate views and are not opposed to freedom of speech. With that said, there are no doubt members of every group, be it religious or political who wish that their critics would just shut up.

As I 've said before, I think that religion is too important a matter to go uncriticised. I feel that conventional book based religions are, unfortunately, much too rigid to do much to fix the points raised.

For better, or worse, we live in interesting times.

Saving Energy

I was looking at both the Times and the BBC today, it seems that the UK is the worst country for energy waste in Europe.

Now I looked through a few of the things they mention, and noted with dismay that our household is guilty of doing one or two of them, mostly leaving chargers plugged in and leaving lights on and devices in standby. I can see I'm going to have to make some effort in this area, it makes me wonder how often do we use energy wasting devices when there could be a manual alternative?

For example, rather than use the PC to keep my notes and personal diary, I use paper and pen. I also find this much more satisfying, which is strange given my technophile status. Where possible, I walk instead of firing up the car, again, it feels better and gets me some exercise.

I think we could do with applying a little Wu Wei to our use of resources, try to do as much with less. When you consider the enviromental impact of a PDA vs a notebook & paper diary, you start to wonder. It's an interesting question, how many of our mod cons & gadgets could we honestly do without before it really affected us?

Personal Development

I was thinking about personal development today, and it seems to me that there is a tendency to categorise personal development.

We tend to think along the lines of our roles in life, rather than looking at what underlies those roles. You have an appraisal, for example, and things are raised in the context of your job. But, surely the way you do your job is an expression of the person you are?

It seems to me that it would be better to take the approach of trying to develop (note that I don't say improve) the person you are as a whole, in the realisation that the improvements will show through in all aspects of your life, rather than just button hole your personal development into just one area of your life.

Karma and Control

I've been thinking about control recently. I've been looking at my finances and when you take the time to do that and then sit and think you realise that we actually hand over a great deal of control over ourselves and our futures to other people.

Consider a gym membership, typically a contract. You sign up to a 1 year contract for say, £35 per month, for example. This takes a degree of your freedom and cash for the next year, but what if your circumstances change? You now don't have as much control of your resources as you once did and may even wind up paying for something you don't use (which happened to me).

But what if, as I do, you consider Karma to simply be the long term consequences of your actions, not some mystic balance? Tying yourself into something that has long term consequences like that, is to be avoided. I know that in Taoism, we are encouraged to heed the principle of the Uncarved Block, this advises us to keep our options open and avoid lacking ourselves in a given role or worldview.

Thinking about it now, it seems that the uncarved block is a good way of not only keeping our minds open, but helping to minimise karmic consequences by avoiding us tying our own hands and reducing our options in the future.

Arnold, wisdom from bodybuilding

I've been reading "Fantastic - The Life of Arnold Schwarzenegger" by Laurence Leamer. I have to say, it is a very good book! Like a lot of worthwhile things in my possession, I picked it up on a whim, and I've been pleasantly surprised by it.

The book makes the point that Arnold's wisdom was learned from bodybuilding, he has said himself "Everything I learned I learned in the weight room." I thought for a minute and then realised that that isn't as odd a statement as you might think at first glance. I'm not a bodybuilder, but I've done enough sessions in weight rooms and talked to enough bodybuilders to have an idea where he's coming from.

With bodybuilding, you have to have a clear idea of where you're going, what you want to achieve. You work very methodically and in small steps, you build big muscles but you do so one rep at a time, paying attention to small details. A lot of it is mental attitude. Arnold's success owes a lot to determination and a positive attitude, I think that's admirable. I look forward to seeing what he acheives in the future.

Exercising in the real world

I was thinking about gyms the other day. I used to do 6 and a half hours exercise a week, Body Combat, Thai Boxing and weights. Then one day my gym buddy and myself decided to walk to the local pub. It was uphill all the way and it damn near killed us!

It made me question, why? We worked out, did cardio, but we were out of breath, and we weren't particularly rushing. Recently, I started walking for both pleasure and fitness, after a long sedentary period. I feel a lot better than I did, but it bought that incident back to me. It's been quite surprising how a 30-45 minute walk each day makes a difference. It also makes me think about my parents generation, who never really suffered with fitness related health problems, and gyms were unheard of. Is the real root of the problem our growing alienation from the world around us? If we walked more, took more outdoor exerise, would we really need the gym?

I've been very hesitant to go back to the gym as I now feel that the best way to exercise is walking, cycling, etc, things that engage us with the real world, rather than lock us away in an airconditioned gym. Plus, I've learned more about the layout and byways of my local area by walking than I ever would have had I not started going for walks.

Impossible perfection

A lot of people spend time wishing they were better, perfect in fact. You only need to look at a magazine stand in your local newsagent, have the perfect wedding/relationship/sex life/muscles, whatever.

Perfection is impossible, as the world always changes, if a perfect being existed, then that being would need to spend an enormous amount of time changing to keep up with the world. How long could anyone be expected to keep that rate of change up for without cracking up? Would you ever really be happy, never being allowed to be yourself, always at the mercy of those who are telling you what perfect is?

Should we even worry about "perfection"? In my view no. What's more important is being happy with who you are, personal development should stem from that, in the directions that you feel are important. If you keep trying to do what everyone else dictates is perfect, you start to lose control of your own future, and will always be running to keep up.