I understand that we live in a mainly secular society and should therefore strive for a secular public school system. My question is how much effort we should put in to discourage students from engaging in prayer. Is that unconstitutional? Let's face it. The reason this is a hot button topic is that it mainly concerns the right of Muslim students to pray in the school. Islam, as a local minority religion, has always been controversial but it is even more so post 9/11, whether that's justified or not. So, what to do?
The school system's mandate is to educate the students, to prepare them for life as productive and informed adult citizens. (Whether we are fully achieving this goal is irrelevant right now.) The school boards would additionally like to not offend anyone along the way. Let's examine the possible solutions.
1) Force non-Christians to become Christians and be part of the majority. If this is your goal, you officially qualify as a nut. Or at the very least a fervid Evangelical. This is never going to happen, so stop pushing for it -- don't even wait or hope for it.
2) Force non-Christians to choose secularism over piety. This is as unlikely to happen as option #1. I might point out that both are unconstitutional.
3) Force non-Christians into private, religion-based schools. This is at least feasible, but I don't think it is desirable. It's a workable solution. John Tory's Progressive Conservatives ran on a platform of funding for private schools which would be more egalitarian than the current model. (Yes, I just agreed with John Tory and the Progressive Conservatives. Mark it on your calendar, it's likely to be that rare.) Nominally, each cultural group will have their own self-regulated school boards funded by public money. They will have control over how much religious/cultural content will be compulsory and what will be ignored. They will have control over which days the schools are open and which days they are closed -- a scheme that will match their own holy days. Everyone should be happy, right? Cultural leaders almost certainly will be.
However, some of the greatest sources of global concern are ignorance, intolerance and tribalism. If we force our children into environments where they never encounter anyone who is remotely different from them then we are promoting all three of those problems when we should be trying to eliminate them. Promoting these three root causes leads to burgeoning hate, something I believe we can all agree is to be avoided. So instead of helping society, we've hurt it. We need a better solution.
4) Let children leave the schools in order to pray during school hours. Unlike Christianity and Judaism, Islam's holy day falls during what we call the work week. That makes Islam stick out like a sore thumb and makes religious comparisons unfair if not impossible. So, everyday Muslim students leave the school in order to worship, but mostly on Fridays when the duration and importance of prayer is enhanced.
What does this really mean? It means that the Muslim students not only lose class time for the time the pray, but also for the time they travel to a house of worship. Depending on the school that can be a very significant amount of time, or even untenable. Are we serving the Muslim students by forcing them out of the classroom even more than they need to be? Are we serving the students that remain in class by maximizing the duration of their friends' absences? Further, in most cases, the students don't bother returning to school on Fridays after prayer. By the Ministry's own rules, this solution fails to serve Muslim students' right to an education as they miss too much time to technically and officially qualify for accreditation. Bureaucracy aside, what do they really learn!? Remember, school is about learning, not collecting marks or even credits. Those are merely our best tools for tracking and measuring learning.
5) What if we do it the other way. What if we allow the Muslim students to worship onsite? Travel time is nearly eliminated, reducing the disruption in their education. It sends a message to the Muslim community -- and for that matter all communities -- that they are valued and that their needs can be accommodated. I don't know how open the Muslim community is to this suggestion, but it wouldn't hurt for the other students to experience Muslim prayer once or twice in their lifetimes. (Gasp!) What better opportunity than when the prayer is happening in their own schools. Besides, who and how does it hurt to allow them to worship on site? Rationally, there is no harm whatsoever. The 'problem' is that it may currently be interpreted as being in violation of some board or Ministry policies. Why have a rule that causes more trouble than it solves? If there is in fact a conflict in rules, and I'm not sure there is, then change them!
Yes, I understand that people want to point to the segregation within the Muslim prayer community, namely separating the boys from the girls from the girls who happen to be menstruating, and call it discriminatory. Conservadox & Orthodox Jewish women worship separated from the men and that hasn't caused the ire of the general public. Why is that? Is it that the women are subdivided? The Bible itself calls women who are menstruating "unholy" -- it is questionable as to whether in ancient times they were permitted in temple at all. Is it the fact that the subdivisions are made from front to back instead of side-to-side? Are we really going to get up in arms over semantics? Seriously!
When people start trying to protect their ideals without really knowing why, you pretty much know they are in the wrong.
I was going to move on to topic two, but there were demonstrations on Saturday addressing this issue.
I'm fairly confident in saying that all in attendance did a good job of emulating nine-year-olds in trying to argue their positions. They were there for many reasons. Some were there due to very real and very current cultural and/or religious hatred. (The status of the Kashmir comes to mind.) Some were there due to fear, humanity's default reaction to things it doesn't understand. Some were there to complain that 'they' got a bigger scoop of ice cream than 'we' did. Some were there because they habitually have knee-jerk reactions that border on complete paranoia. I wonder, how many were there because they thought that children were being harmed in some way by the current policy? almost assuredly not that many since it really isn't happening. Why does the lunatic fringe get so much attention (i.e. press) and the wise and sensible that propose actual workable solutions get ignored and lost in history?
I particularly enjoyed one sign: "Today Muslims want prayer in our schools: what will they ask for tomorrow?" Good show! I like the choice of "our" to describe Ontario schools, like somehow they aren't "their" schools too. With an attitude like that you must really want 'them' ejected from 'your' country, isn't that right? There is nothing so rational as to punish people for what they haven't done, or in this case, deny people for what they might do at some point in the future. What might they ask for tomorrow? Peace? Harmony? A thriving multicultural community? How dare they!? Oh, I forgot. "Multicultural" is an increasingly dirty word as the world rebels against 'the Global Village'. There was a time when we looked to Europe and thought "how backwards, how intolerant", but now we want to emulate them and stir up a backlash against minorities. Is it the minorities that are 'ruining' Canada (or America) or is it established Canadians (Americans) that are inventing the problem? It's pretty clear to any objective viewer that it is the latter.
What did I mean by the 'ice cream' reference above? I mean that Jews and Christians are trying to make accommodating Muslim prayer on Friday somehow an issue of 'inequality'. Why can't our children pray in schools, too? Well, the last time there was prayer in schools it was in the classroom, and catered to Christendom only. That was an inequality issue. Fortunately, that's not what's happening now. Last time I checked, schools in Ontario were closed on Saturday and Sunday, the holy days of the Jewish and Christian weeks. Schools aren't accommodating these religions because there is no need for it! Jewish and Christian children are free to worship all day long without fear of missing any school.
Do we really want to make it an equality issue? Let's throw schools open seven days a week! Then everyone can be excused to pray to their definition of God on the day of their choosing, right there in the school auditoria. I'm sure that teachers will be only too willing to work seven days a week -- for no increase in pay, of course, since we simply have no money for that and can't increase taxes for fear of public lynching, completely forgetting that the Government is just doing what they demanded! Better yet, let's completely undermine the entire teaching profession! Make all teachers part time! Full-time jobs are disappearing everywhere, why not in education, too? Each teacher works 3.5 days a week and students will just have to learn from two people instead of one. Sure, communication between the two 'partners' will be difficult, particularly since they are never in the office at the same time, but they'll work it out and our kids won't suffer at all. For an added benefit, teachers will lose all their benefits, as is the norm for part-time workers. They won't receive a pay increase to offset the fact that they'll now be on their own covering those lost benefits so it's a net savings for the province (hey! they can reduce taxes!), and all it cost us was the integrity of the system and the quality of education for our kids!
Teachers aren't going to work continuously, nor part-time. Taxes aren't going to get raised, or lowered for that matter. Schools aren't going to be open on Saturday and Sunday, and Jews and Christians should stop whining and realize that there is no equality issue here. There's plenty of real inequality for them to concentrate on without inventing new problems.
What about tolerance of gay students? Students in the Separate School System want to be able to form clubs that are supportive and inclusive of gay people. This panics and angers far too many parents. The Bible says! The Bible says! We know what the Bible says, thank you very much. However, 2000 years have passed since these words of 'wisdom' were written. Attitudes have changed. Our understanding of the world around us has grown enormously. Tolerance of intolerance has greatly declined. More and more, people are being awarded full and equal rights regardless of any perceived differences they may have compared to the majority.
For those who believe that every word of the Bible, or the Qur'an, or any other holy texts for that matter, is/was the direct word of God, here's what I think. (I fully expect you to differ.) Language and culture was much, much more limited, primitive even, when the Word was received. God could only tell us what we could be made to understand. Then there is also the possibility that a prophet heard the Word of God and misinterpreted it with his fallible, less than godlike brain. But we take everything as gospel without considering any of these possibilities. Even if you dismiss the possibilities because you conclude that God wouldn't allow these things to happen, that conclusion came from you and your fallible human brain, and not from God -- your judgement is neither perfect nor above criticism. You could easily be wrong which brings us back to the possibility that God's Word did not come to us complete, intact and without error.
If God had dropped a bomb like "everyone, without exception, is equal" the limited, tribal, competitive, even vicious, human minds that received this Word would have rebelled, downright refusing the Word. They might have struck down the offensive prophet rather than accept his message. The prophets themselves might have even come to believe that it was not God that spoke to them, but some malign spirit, maybe even that one, you know his name. It is also possible that they may have henceforth doubted their own sanity. In any of these situations, God's intent is undermined -- the Word fails to be disseminated among the people which was the entire purpose of revealing it to a prophet in the first place.
Don't buy that? What if God had provided specific medical detail regarding the technical and absolute point that life begins? He couldn't, all-powerful though he is, because man had no words for these concepts, nor the ability to measure or determine when this time might occur for any one life. What about the ethics of utilizing nuclear bombs, or nuclear power plants, or computers, or airplanes, or armoured tanks? Should we have ever begun burning coal and petroleum? Should we even be trying to explore space? That information would be extremely helpful to us today. We've had to guess because it was not included in the Word.
But that couldn't happen. We weren't ready. We weren't even remotely equipped. We didn't even know the world was round, let alone have knowledge of all seven continents. What's gravity? What's an atom? I know the periodic table! I know all FIVE elements! They are Fire, Air, Earth, Water and Quintessence. What does this mean? It means that we have to consider the fact the Word makes some approximations and compromises that we may finally be able to address after 1500-2000 (or more) years of linguistic and technological development. How? Through reinterpretation. (For some, this is surely blasphemy!) In this specific case, perhaps the complete disdain for homosexuality was an approximation which needs to be addressed today now that we are more enlightened. Here's a theory. In classical times it was common for important people to have protégés and it was also common for the two to engage in homosexual sex. Perhaps the ban on homosexual sex was primarily, maybe even exclusively, to prevent what amounted to same-sex statutory rape / pedophilia. Perhaps the crime being proscribed was child abuse rather than consensual sex between adults, regardless of gender. This is the kind of 'approximation' I'm talking about. Why didn't God say "no more statutory rape"? There was no such concept. Enforcement would be tricky in any case. When does one's childhood end? Most people at the time didn't track time so had only a rough idea of their age. Would it be based on puberty? How do you know when puberty starts or ends? Better to just ban homosexual sex and with a broad stroke end what was really bothersome. It's just a theory.
Or, we can look at it like this. For a people that is passionate about "Judge not lest ye be judged," we do an awful lot of judging and worse, condemning!
When God said "I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore," (Genesis 22:17) did he really mean that we should reproduce at the maximum biological rate until our burgeoning masses utterly crushed the biosphere? That's where we're headed with the world's major religions' positions on birth control. Might it be time to reinterpret that? Do we have to drive the train off the edge of the cliff just because that's where the tracks lead? Because of a steadfast refusal to think? Can't we reexamine, reinterpret, turn around or stop?
When we were few, and being eaten by lions and wolves was a constant threat -- not to mention the prevalence of disease, parasites, stillbirth and famine -- having as many children as possible made sense. What a great way to glorify God, by giving him more worshipers! Today, lion and wolf attacks are almost unheard of, medicine is winning the battle against disease and parasites, birth defects are no longer the death sentence they once were and, most people have enough to eat. We're seriously straining the planet's ability to feed and shelter us, but for now we have enough. Explosive population growth no longer glorifies God because it conflicts with man's stewardship of Earth in God's name. In fact, there are more starving people today than there were people then! But the world's religions unilaterally refuse to change their views on birth control. The only rational reason for this is that religious leaders are choosing to use population as the primary weapon in the next war, a war of religious ideology where every birth represents a new soldier, a war that will completely change the planet if not render it as sterile as the Moon. To some degree, it's already happening. Is this really where we want to go? Is it so important to cling to the perceived and accepted Word of God that we are willing to leave God with no worshipers whatsoever?
I doubt anyone that reads this will be swayed from their position in the slightest. Today, rational thought is considered fairly toxic. The five things (why five? for fingers of course) that man fights most viciously to protect are: family, property, country/tribe, ideals, and ignorance. True wisdom lies in knowing whether you are fighting for ideals or for ignorance. If any society has figured that out, and moved to cast off ignorance, I haven't seen it. But, we have the capacity to change, to better ourselves, to improve our lot in life without it being at the expense of the quality of life of others. I dream of such a time and place. That might be the closest I ever get to it. I hope not.
So, how does that relate to the school problem? People need to get over themselves. Let the kids choose tolerance over ignorance. You don't have to agree with something/someone in order to tolerate it/them. Homosexuality isn't an infectious disease; so your kids aren't going to 'turn gay' because they refused to discriminate against gays. In fact, their lives may be richer for their openness. Any time you can replace hate in your heart with acceptance, you have both improved yourself and the world you live in. If parents must impose their ignorance upon their children, then by all means, remove your children from school and start your own school. Ruin their lives or at the very least their life chances. Take a giant step backwards. Your kids will hate you, but that's your prerogative. Take care that you don't back yourselves off the aforementioned cliff, taking your children with you.
Tangent: I believe that when the next prophet comes (or the return of Jesus, whichever comes first) 'he' will arrive in the form of a physically handicapped or deformed, gay, black woman. God loves to do things like this, meaning to challenge our beliefs, to test our faith and judgement! It will be interesting to see whether she winds up in an institution, incarcerated, killed or merely relegated to obscurity by a disinterested and unbelieving media, or whether she is accepted for what she is. It will be interesting...
What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet,
to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—
nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.
infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet,
to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—
nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 2, scene 2
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