Session Notes

Guardian.co.uk  

Last week, on an internet radio channel called The Fifth Column, I debated climate change with Claire Fox of the Institute of Ideas, one of the rightwing libertarian groups that rose from the ashes of the Revolutionary Communist party. Fox is a feared interrogator on the BBC show The Moral Maze. Yet when I asked her a simple question – “do you accept that some people’s freedoms intrude upon other people’s freedoms?” – I saw an ideology shatter like a windscreen. I used the example of a Romanian lead-smelting plant I had visited in 2000, whose freedom to pollute is shortening the lives of its neighbours. Surely the plant should be regulated in order to enhance the negative freedoms – freedom from pollution, freedom from poisoning – of its neighbours? She tried several times to answer it, but nothing coherent emerged which would not send her crashing through the mirror of her philosophy.

He’s right – but he’s missing a key point: The libertarian movement has rightly seized on one of the fundamental tenants of the doctrine of freedom taught by Paul: For freedom to be freedom, freedom must be absolute.

But, they miss the foundational logic behind such. The entirety of Scripture is pretty clear on one key point: people with un-transformed hearts need the law. They need to be controlled and they need a system of punishment to back such or other people would be harmed.

The intention of other people not being harmed has never changed.

All that has changed is the mechanism of the delivery of such. It’s based on the foundational assumption that people’s hearts can be changed and that every other part of them can be made new – such that they want new things. It’s based on the belief that it is possible to have such a profound encounter with love in the form of the person of Christ that the human heart can come to feel the pain of others and care as deeply for the pain of another as if it were their own pain. It’s based on the assumption that a person can come to hear the voice of God and, indeed, can come to long to do so.

A person who is that deeply transformed can be set absolutely free for they no longer need the control of law to cease hurting and commence loving others.

Libertarian ideology ignores once simple reality: Not all hearts have been transformed.

They could be – but some don’t want to be, some are too damaged to understand how to be, some are too afraid to be and some are so deluded that they actually think the evil that defines their lives IS transformation.

Those people need the law that the adherents of this level of extremism want to and have largely succeeded in abolishing.

Ironic thing is, it’s predominantly Christians who are promoting the ideological delusion that setting people free with un-transformed hearts is consistent with the Gospel…

The best schools

The students could not go from their vague discomfort to a rational ethical conclusion because they have never learned traditional philosophy of ethics. Therefore, their objections have no force and, for all that they sense injustice, they will likely do very little good in the world. And the “accept everyone, accept everything” assemblies they attend unwittingly feed the problem: They learn to accept gay rights in North America and stoning gays in Afghanistan.

For centuries, the Church (Protestant and Catholic) was the center of moral thought. She defined goodness, ethics, morality and truth and, as dubious as some of the definitions may have been, they were societally accepted – though they were founded on very little in the way of rational thought and mostly based on the writings of ancient teachers.

And, the years passed and the faith slowly changed. More and more the basic concepts of grace and freedom became a tired footnote to a reconstituted law we used to control people. The strident hostility she formerly displayed towards the Gnostic ideas that regarded the body as bad and the spirit as good were replaced by a bland acceptance of such. The ancient and even enlightenment ideals of God calling humanity to heal and change the world for good slowly became replaced with a cosmic vending machine of the Divine which is purchased by an ever changing subset of moral requirements.

And, society responded. The more educated did what the Church had long since ceased to do – read the Bible – and rejected us because the strange Judaism, Gnosticism and New Age Movement based beliefs we were now following in no way resembled the teachings of Scripture. The less educated simply looked at us in the hard cold light of reality and judged us to be idiotic. And, they were both right.

And, with us went our morality.

But, the Church had no fear. Our laws safely projected our moral system and a societal acceptance of virtue – thus, the acceptance of our morality was not really that necessary. So, we continued with our passivity, pulled back into our stained glass hidey-holes, repeated the writings of long dead thinkers and acted like everything was fine while we continued to do nothing to alter our refusal to actually think about what we believe.

But, little by little, something was changing. While our laws still promoted most virtues, the society quietly forgot truth could even exist – and the law started to seem silly. And, a Church promoting anyone’s law – especially long dead people’s laws – began to seem absurdist, and MOST WORTHY of strident censure themselves.

So, then we finally get here: We arrive at a place where a class full of high school students no longer can look at a culture where women are property, can be executed at will, have their noses hacked off and may be abused by their husbands or families as a matter of course and conclude that this is not a good thing to be happening.

Why? Because way back when, we decided it was a good idea to stop thinking. We decided we would base our teachings on dead guy’s thinkings instead of founding them on anthropology (The study of what it means to be human) and we decided our stained glass hideouts would attract people in all by themselves.

And, ultimately, we decided to quit engaging culture and thought.

The ironic reality is that when we quit engaging and thinking, even secular thinkers are waking up and realizing that thinking basically seems to have ceased – right along with the ability to stand up for much other then not standing up for much of anything other then seals and trees – especially that which may suggest that some things simply do not fit well with our Anthropology.

And, starkly and significantly absent from an article that so clearly grasps the problem, is even the remotest grasp of anything but a plan to go back to teaching a set of rules that these students should then accept and make moral judgments on the basis of.

And, we’re still waiting for the Church to stand up…

Danoah

Before I go on, I feel I must say something one time. Today’s post is not about homosexuality. It’s not about Christians. It’s not about religion. It’s not about politics. It’s about something else altogether. Something greater. Something simpler.



It’s about love.



It’s about kindness.



It’s about friendship

Honestly, I usually find this guy a bit insipid and annoying – but this is so worth reposting. Because it’s real. Because it’s so constant.

Huffington Post

Barna blames pastors for those oddly contradictory findings. Everyone hears, “Jesus is the answer. Embrace him. Say this little Sinner’s Prayer and keep coming back. It doesn’t work. People end up bored, burned out and empty,” he said. “They look at church and wonder, ‘Jesus died for this?”‘



The consequence, Barna said, is that, for every subgroup of religion, race, gender, age and region of the country, the important markers of religious connection are fracturing.

It’s so about time Barna returned to this subject!

What he’s really saying is that the whole,”Get saved. Get holy. Get busy.” story we’ve been fed for years isn’t selling anymore then the, “New calling God has for you to work in nursery – what was your name anyway?” routine worked. That people are tired of becoming an institutional support crew as a substitute for real community and have completely had it with formulaic religion and doctrine.

That’s the amazing and oh-so-welcome piece of this.

Unfortunately, there’s also a darker underbelly… The sad reality is that more and more are just giving up the search for it (or the longing to create it) and are settling for what the author is calling, “Designer,” but what is actually a complete freak-show of much greater levels of control and use/abuse.

The daily beast

That too is my view: that the GOP, deep down, is behaving as a religious movement, not as a political party, and a radical religious movement at that. Lofgren sees the “Prosperity Gospel” as a divine blessing for personal enrichment and minimal taxation (yes, that kind of Gospel is compatible with Rand, just not compatible with the actual Gospels); for military power (with a major emphasis on the punitive, interventionist God of the Old Testament); and for radical change and contempt for existing institutions (as a product of End-Times thinking, intensified after 9/11).

That’s how I explain the current GOP. It can only think in doctrines, because the alternative is living in a complicated, global, modern world they both do not understand and also despise. Taxes are therefore always bad. Government is never good. Foreign enemies must be pre-emptively attacked. Islam is not a religion. Climate change is an elite conspiracy to impoverish America. Terror suspects are terrorists. When Americans torture, it is not torture. When Christians murder, they are not Christians. And if you change your mind on any of these issues, you are a liberal, an apostate, and will be attacked.

Religion has replaced all of this, reordered it, and imbued the entire political-economic-religious package with zeal. And the zealous never compromise. They don’t even listen. Think of Michele Bachmann’s wide-eyed, Stepford stare as she waits for a questioner to finish before providing another pre-cooked doctrinal nugget. My fear – and it has building for a decade and a half, because I’ve seen this movement up-close from within and also on the front lines of the marriage wars – is that once one party becomes a church with unchangeable doctrines, and once it has supplanted respect for institutions and civility with the radical pursuit of timeless doctrines and hatred of governing institutions, then our democracy is in grave danger.

Ok, just for a min, ignore that Richard Dawkins is all over this like ugly on an ape. Ignore Sullivan himself and his attitudes as well. Just think about the message…

He’s right.

I spent my early childhood years mostly on the dark continent watching every imaginable form of political chaos and genocide take place. And I learned something: Democracy will not work everywhere. Democracy will only work where a population places greater allegiance in concepts like the rule of law, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, humanist care for the common good, reason, logic and all of the above are elevated over concepts like family and religion or ideology.

When a political party cheers for the death of a sick or foolish person who is ill because it fits their ideology, we’re already there.

Smithsonian Magazine.

“Whatever it takes” is an attitude that drives not just Kirkkojarvi’s 30 teachers, but most of Finland’s 62,000 educators in 3,500 schools from Lapland to Turku—professionals selected from the top 10 percent of the nation’s graduates to earn a required master’s degree in education. Many schools are small enough so that teachers know every student. If one method fails, teachers consult with colleagues to try something else. They seem to relish the challenges. Nearly 30 percent of Finland’s children receive some kind of special help during their first nine years of school. The school where Louhivuori teaches served 240 first through ninth graders last year; and in contrast with Finland’s reputation for ethnic homogeneity, more than half of its 150 elementary-level students are immigrants—from Somalia, Iraq, Russia, Bangladesh, Estonia and Ethiopia, among other nations. “Children from wealthy families with lots of education can be taught by stupid teachers,” Louhivuori said, smiling. “We try to catch the weak students. It’s deep in our thinking.”

When Ros and I were looking at schools to place our daughters in, we did a lot of research and found that there is literally only one school in Calgary (Charging about $14k/child/yr) that would publicly state: “We are responsible for your child’s education. If your child is not learning it is our problem. We ask you sit your child down to do homework, but please do not assist. If your child can not complete the homework assigned, we want to know.” Apparently, in Finland, it’s national education policy standard.

There are no mandated standardized tests in Finland, apart from one exam at the end of students’ senior year in high school. There are no rankings, no comparisons or competition between students, schools or regions. Finland’s schools are publicly funded. The people in the government agencies running them, from national officials to local authorities, are educators, not business people, military leaders or career politicians. Every school has the same national goals and draws from the same pool of university-trained educators. The result is that a Finnish child has a good shot at getting the same quality education no matter whether he or she lives in a rural village or a university town. The differences between weakest and strongest students are the smallest in the world, according to the most recent survey by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). “Equality is the most important word in Finnish education. All political parties on the right and left agree on this,” said Olli Luukkainen, president of Finland’s powerful teachers union.

But, here we pressure and torture our children by grading them against each other and shaming them when they show up at the bottom of the pile:

In the United States, which has muddled along in the middle for the past decade, government officials have attempted to introduce marketplace competition into public schools. In recent years, a group of Wall Street financiers and philanthropists such as Bill Gates have put money behind private-sector ideas, such as vouchers, data-driven curriculum and charter schools, which have doubled in number in the past decade. President Obama, too, has apparently bet on compe­tition. His Race to the Top initiative invites states to compete for federal dollars using tests and other methods to measure teachers, a philosophy that would not fly in Finland. “I think, in fact, teachers would tear off their shirts,” said Timo Heikkinen, a Helsinki principal with 24 years of teaching experience. “If you only measure the statistics, you miss the human aspect.”

And, our failure rates speak for themselves:

Ninety-three percent of Finns graduate from academic or vocational high schools, 17.5 percentage points higher than the United States, and 66 percent go on to higher education, the highest rate in the European Union. Yet Finland spends about 30 percent less per student than the United States.

Not only do they spend less money, the children spend even less time cooped up in school pretending to learn:

Teachers in Finland spend fewer hours at school each day and spend less time in classrooms than American teachers. Teachers use the extra time to build curriculums and assess their students. Children spend far more time playing outside, even in the depths of winter. Homework is minimal. Compulsory schooling does not begin until age 7. “We have no hurry,” said Louhivuori. “Children learn better when they are ready. Why stress them out?”

And, the teachers are highly respected as well — to say nothing of very highly trained at Government expense:

Practically speaking—and Finns are nothing if not practical—the decision meant that goal would not be allowed to dissipate into rhetoric. Lawmakers landed on a deceptively simple plan that formed the foundation for everything to come. Public schools would be organized into one system of comprehensive schools, or peruskoulu, for ages 7 through 16. Teachers from all over the nation contributed to a national curriculum that provided guidelines, not prescriptions. Besides Finnish and Swedish (the country’s second official language), children would learn a third language (English is a favorite) usually beginning at age 9. Resources were distributed equally. As the comprehensive schools improved, so did the upper secondary schools (grades 10 through 12). The second critical decision came in 1979, when reformers required that every teacher earn a fifth-year master’s degree in theory and practice at one of eight state universities—at state expense. From then on, teachers were effectively granted equal status with doctors and lawyers.

Essentially, you stop treating teachers like they are idiots, they develop pride in their work and make it their mission to help children learn — instead of just putting on a tolerable performance so they keep their jobs:

Applicants began flooding teaching programs, not because the salaries were so high but because autonomy and respect made the job attractive. In 2010, some 6,600 applicants vied for 660 primary school training slots, according to Sahlberg. By the mid-1980s, a final set of initiatives shook the classrooms free from the last vestiges of top-down regulation. Control over policies shifted to town councils. The national curriculum was distilled into broad guidelines. National math goals for grades one through nine, for example, were reduced to a neat ten pages. Sifting and sorting children into so-called ability groupings was eliminated. All children—clever or less so—were to be taught in the same classrooms, with lots of special teacher help available to make sure no child really would be left behind. The inspectorate closed its doors in the early ’90s, turning accountability and inspection over to teachers and principals. “We have our own motivation to succeed because we love the work,” said Louhivuori. “Our incentives come from inside.”

So much so that they no longer even need government supervision — they want to excel from the depths of the pride in who they are and the honor they receive from society.

Some of the more vocal conservative reformers in America have grown weary of the “We-Love-Finland crowd” or so-called Finnish Envy. They argue that the United States has little to learn from a country of only 5.4 million people—4 percent of them foreign born. Yet the Finns seem to be onto something. Neighboring Norway, a country of similar size, embraces education policies similar to those in the United States. It employs standardized exams and teachers without master’s degrees. And like America, Norway’s PISA scores have been stalled in the middle ranges for the better part of a decade.

Oh, and it’s not just some European thing where that people group somehow does better either. Though, it just may have something to do with a national policy of treating everyone fairly decently:

It’s almost unheard of for a child to show up hungry or homeless. Finland provides three years of maternity leave and subsidized day care to parents, and preschool for all 5-year-olds, where the emphasis is on play and socializing. In addition, the state subsidizes parents, paying them around 150 euros per month for every child until he or she turns 17. Ninety-seven percent of 6-year-olds attend public preschool, where children begin some academics. Schools provide food, medical care, counseling and taxi service if needed. Stu­dent health care is free.

And the moral of the story is: Take care of people, treat them with respect and give them the tools to do their jobs and they will take pride in their work and give you one of the best education systems in the world. Don’t be a dick to children, make sure they get to spend lots of time being mothered, feed them, make sure they are healthy and unstressed and they will learn better then most of the world.

Whodathunkit???

Well, certainly not our brilliant and fearless leader — who is busy exporting both our worst educational failures and the associated testing systems to the rest of the world…

Swedish Pirate Party

Laws are not made because they are righteous. Laws are made because they advance somebody’s political career.

(It should be noted that these are words that don’t come from a rock-throwing masked guy, but from a professional politician in suit and tie.)

And this one:

I sometimes hear people claim that laws exist to be followed. These people are the most dangerous people who exist in a society. Tyranny is never upheld through law; it is upheld through thousands of bureaucrats that follow the letter of the law just because they believe in rules and law.

And then this one as well:

A society where people regard rules as general guidelines is a lot healthier for its neighbors and citizens alike than a society where laws and rules are enforced blindly and swiftly.

A little embarrassing that the Pirate Party seems to have a greater grasp of the – yes, pre-cross no less – teachings of Jesus then the church and the two North American nations that purportedly follow such…

via msn.com.

in states where texting while driving is illegal, there appears to be a “slight increase in the frequency of insurance claims filed under collision coverage for damage to vehicles in crashes.”The finding is based on the institute’s comparisons of claims in four states — California, Washington, Minnesota and Louisiana — before and after texting bans took effect, compared with patterns of claims in nearby states. It could be that drivers who continue to text while driving are doing it more surreptitiously, hiding their phones from view of other drivers and law enforcement, increasing the risk of an accident even more, the institute says.

Apparently, the proponents of yet another law fail to realize that laws were meant to be broken — and that people who need to be controlled by said laws are NEVER made any smarter by the presence of such. (Meanwhile, the rest suffer anyway…)

Steve McVey: How To Forgive Somebody:

“‘(Insert the name of the person who wronged you), I want to resolve a matter of unforgiveness toward you. You have wronged me, but I don’t want to be handicapped by this hurt for the rest of my life. What you did to me was (describe the exact incident). When you did that, it made me feel (describe how you felt, not what you thought at the time). You were wrong and I was hurt by your actions. But, (insert the offender’s name), right now I forgive you. I release you from any obligation you have toward me because of what you have done. Just as Christ has forgiven me, I now forgive you.’ Now, pray and thank the Lord for the grace He gives you to forgive others. Ask Him to bring healing to your emotions and to fill you with a greater sense of His love for you. Complete this time by affirming that you have forgiven others at this very moment. Will your feelings instantly change? Maybe not. But that’s okay. As you remind yourself of the truth that you have forgiven those who wronged you, your feelings will gradually change. You may still find that feelings of anger or resentment arise within you at times. That’s normal. When they do, remind yourself of the truth that you have forgiven. It doesn’t mean you didn’t forgive just because you may still have negative feelings at times. Simply acknowledge your feelings and then walk in the truth. Forgiveness is a choice and you made that choice. Don’t allow the enemy to bring you back into the slavery of unforgiveness again. Through forgiveness you have been set free. So enjoy your freedom! ‘If the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed’ John 8:36″

THIS IS A GREAT BASIC ARICLE ON FORGIVING THOSE WHO CHOSE NOT TO ACCEPT THAT GOD TOOK AWAY OUR PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE SINS AND HURT US. I PRAY OUR FAMILY, FRIENDS, CLIENTS, SCHOOLS, AND WORLD ARE OPEN TO J.C’S GRACE.

Steve McVey:

” If the spirit of Picasso rested within you, a great desire to paint would continually motivate you toward the canvass. The knowledge of who was within you would be all the motivation you needed. The good news of grace is that Jesus Christ is in you.”

This is a powerful visionary article on the way the J.C’s Spirit of grace/truth transforms us. May it be so for me, my family, friends, clients, and world.