Just when you thought more dumb ideas couldn’t come to the foray in our education system, enter from stage left, Alfie Kohn. Claiming his views are “supported by research”, he is pushing the concept of “No Competition” in Canadian schools. Roy Green spoke with him Saturday.
Update: On his Sunday Show, Roy Green interviewed Chris Wejr, principal of Kent Elementary School in Agassiz, BC. You can listen to it here (beginning at 11:00). Wejr is a big supporter of Alfie Kohn’s “No Competition” philosophy.
Here’s a pertinent and related article. And here’s the e-mail I sent to Green about Mr. Wejr:
I’m in absolute disbelief at what the “educator” has just said. He clearly has no grasp of the modern reality that Canada is in a fierce competitive battle with nations like China & India. In those nations hundreds of millions of children are pushed to strive to be better & work harder. Here we appear to strive to not push too much. If we translated this to a hockey match, our team would lose every game 20 to nothing.
If your guest’s words were played for parents in Asia they’d be convinced that it was satire such as we’d see in The Onion. Frankly, so do I!
On a personal note, may I share with you that a few years ago I dated a lovely woman from mainland China who had relocated to Vancouver. I’ll never forget a conversation we had early on in which she said that in many ways Canada is more socialist than China. Of course, the patriotic hairs on the back of my neck immediately jumped up! But then she explained about private health care being widely available if you want it, much more of a competitive spirit in education, and a whole lot of other examples. The views of Mr. Kohn and Mr. Wejr vividly reminded me of her prescient observations.
Incidentally, in contrast to Kumbaya Central (aka Kent Elementary), here’s a recent editorial from a Chinese-American mother who is almost certainly representative of the mindset in households in Asia. She has already received Death Threats. Likely from those “hateful conservatives” who would adamantly disagree with her, eh?! You know, the same folks who despise competition, hard work, and accountability. đ
‘lookout’, you’re a teacher and not a Lefty? Isn’t that against the law in Canada?!?
Nothing new about the no competition idea.
Ontario was into that as far back as the early 90’s. No Competition was the mantra.
It was pushed hard by OISE and hard left
“experts”, mostly die hard dippers ….or worse. Their statements were chock full of quotes beginning with “research shows that….”.
The “research” was a load of crap naturally but it was the basis for the Transition Years fiasco and they were strongly pushing for “Equality of Outcome”.
Basically they wanted individual instruction and individual progress for every student where success was,in effect, guaranteed.
Neat trick given that schools were set up for mass instruction. A mark of 70% for Johnny did not mean the same as 70% for Suzy. The result was to be classes where there could be 30+ students , progressing at different rates and all at different “places” in their development and the teacher could be teaching (or monitoring) 30+ separate lessons in a period since students could be “anywhere” in terms of having mastered the whole spectrum of material from multiple grades. Grade 9 math could really be grade 5 math up to,potentially, grade 11 math it seemed. Good luck with that.
To further “fix things”…the students were to teach each other in small groups. No lie!
It was a horror show.
Just my opinion though.
‘lookout’, you’re a teacher and not a Lefty? Isn’t that against the law in Canada?!?
Posted by: Robert W. (Vancouver) at January 16, 2011 9:27 PM
Almost certainly an exception to the rule. They’re out there, though. A few years ago, I volunteered for an organization call Junior Achievement. It’s an organization that, at the request of a teacher, will send a volunteer into an elementary classroom to teach a prepackaged course of basic business tenets in a fun, age-appropriate manner. I only taught to one class (a grade 4/5 split IIRC), but it was a thoroughly rewarding experience.
“Self-esteem is earned.”
But, of course.!!!
As for the concerns about competition……competition is healthy. Period.
The concern should not be about the competition per se, but about unhealthy competition.
Which is propagated by political systems similar to the one which exists in the country mentioned in the recent articles in Le Figaro
“Espionnage chez Renault : deux comptes Ă l’Ă©tranger”
OR in the Guardian:
“French suspect Chinese link in industrial spying at Renault”
Bill Stewart, I’m not sure what kind of socialism for the rich you’re talking about unless it is the type of crony capitalism that is associated with the BC Lieberal party.
People vary in ability and what the capitalist system does is to give them equality of opportunity. This equality of opportunity has been perverted into the idea that everyone is equal in everything, physiologically preposterous.
In certain settings, when one has a uniform population one can dispense with certain aspects of competition like the medical school I went to where there were a ridiculous number of highly intelligent and competitive people. Our exams were marked on a pass/fail system with 66% being a pass mark. People competed for scare residency positions and found other ways in which to distinguish themselves to enhance their chances of getting into their residency of choice.
Competition for females by males was brought up by ET which I didn’t think of because it’s been so long since I’ve had to compete in that area. Given the size of the commitment made by women to have and raise a child, they select the best male to be the biologic father of the child and the best male to help her raise the child. These may not be the same man as the traits that make a man sexually attractive may not be what a woman wants in raising his child. In Canada, the casualty toll of male competition for females is a tiny fraction of what it is in primitive societies made up of “noble savages”.
The notion that people who are competing against one another can’t cooperate is absurd. The only time that conflicts are sure to arise is when the result of a competition is decided by means other than what the competing parties had agreed upon; ie someone cheats. In athletics, when I went to school, the idea was to try as hard as possible to beat other runners or other soccer teams but at the end of the game everyone was friends again. That’s known as good sportsmanship and it was part of school teaching for decades.
The data on human competition is supported by vast amounts of evidence based on other primates. Perhaps some idealists want us to be closer to bonobo’s than chimpanzees, but we are descendants of generations of humans who were were the survivors of often very bloody competition for scarce resources. Given the upper body muscular hypertrophy of the average male, it was clear that physical combat with other males was the norm. There are thousands of years of evidence of less aggressive cultures being taken over by more aggressive ones and, if the non-competitive idiocy is allowed to continue, it won’t be long before the primary language of Canada is Chinese.
âYou’re a teacher and not a Leftyâ: Robert, yes, itâs true. (Shhh.) As I’ve said before, I keep my opinions pretty much to myself, and certainly out of the public square. âSome freedom of expression, eh?
Before it was against the lawâas in board âequityâ policies and our Human Rights (sic) Commissions and their kangaroo courts: theyâre actually cudgels used to beat up dissentersâI could express my opinions freely without fear. Now? I know of teachers hauled in for âre-educationâ for, even innocently, expressing ideas not in conformity with the boardâs iron-clad, politically correct fiats. Certain groups are protected: other groups are automatically considered unclean and given no statusâother than badâat all. And the lefties thought that the caste system was both bad (me too!) and gone. Theyâre the ones whoâve both built and now perpetrate a caste system right here in Canada. No one who isnât politically correct or whoâs unwilling to go along with, and promote leftist dogmas, will go very far up the educational establishment ladder. Of course, this explains why things are such an astonishing mess.
So, while this deluded principal decries competition, heâs one of the enablers and perpetrators of a rigid caste system of politically correct thought, along with harsh, arbitrary judgment and punishment. As I posted earlier this evening, âThe arrogance and hypocrisy of [such] people . . . takes oneâs breath away.â
I’ve had far more failures than successes in my (business) life and I’m thankful for that.
That’s because I’ve been driven by two things: a passion for success and a desire for ‘riches’. Without both, I would never have attempted the many entrepreneurial gambits I undertook.
I eventually earned the highest accolade available in my field and was honoured as a ‘Lifetime Member’ of my professional association – but both of these were built on a foundation of failures interspersed with occasional but meaningful successes.
Each of those ‘failures’ was a building blocknand a learning experience for a future ‘success’ – both are part of the whole edifice of life.
I’m not unique by any stretch. But if we follow this Principal’s philosophy, we’re certain to create a nation of drones and and an inferior and infantile society.
“We just want all our students to be successful” – it’s pablum.
No Guff: “But if we follow this Principal’s philosophy, we’re certain to create a nation of drones and an inferior and infantile society.”
Look around: that’s just what we’re doing!
sasquatch @ 5:22, a few of those 100,000,000 competitors had the same last name as I do and they could not compete with the black raven and the NKVD occupants that stopped at their house at 4:00 AM.
I get nervous when someone like Bill pontificates about how superior that system is.
@ET:”This act of evaluation is an act of making a judgment within a competition-of-choice. I get to choose whichever action or thing I judge ‘best’.”
Are the various elements of a choice necessarily competing elements? Is the choice always mine? I’d love to pick the “best” oranges at the market, but what if I can’t afford them, or I’m allergic to them…. I can still judge that the bruised ones are not “the best” but I can’t choose them. You make it sound as though choices are made in an open and unrestricted field of elements.
My problem with the word competition is that it often issues from a very narrow understanding of nature and “survival of the fittest”, in which it is often assumed that it is only the most aggressive, fierce, and territorial that survive in competition. Nature shows that there are countless ways to win at the game of natural selection: co-operation, symbiosis, parasitic, dominance (agressive, numeric etc). The vast array of cultures also shows that many ways are “workable”.
@ lookout: I did respond to your previous post, regarding my “self professed” Christianity, but about other similarly ridiculous comments you had made. About your lust for papacy. Personally I think any reasonable person wouldn’t not to be a member of a denomination in which more than half the “members” can’t even become “full” members. And I wouldn’t be caught dead in a church that wouldn’t allow me to be a full member.
About Benedict, I know very little, but if memory serves he was a good little soldier in the Hitler youth and we all know the role the Catholic Church, under Vatican orders, played in bringing Hitler to power and later in complicity with fascism. And JP II, didn’t he condemn millions to death in Africa by holding to his “procreative” sex bs and denying the using of contraception to protect against HIV? I’m willing to attenuate my views a little, but I stopped paying close attention to papists a long time ago.
So I’m not a Roman Catholic, although I was baptized one. If you must know, my theology is more along the lines of Martin Luther, Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer as well as postmodern deployments of neo-orthodoxy.
Now about the whole faith/revelation and reason. I don’t think they are mutually exclusive. Still, I don’t want my politics guided by “revelation” and I don’t want to wait millennia for “the Church” to come around to the idea that the earth is not flat:). Yet, indeed the two may well be complementary. I’m thinking here of Ken Miller’s work, for instance. The only God I can imagine is a non-interventionist one in which creation is imbued with self-sufficiency-a creation which is not only not at odds with Darwin but is in fact resonant with his science. So no, I don’t want to check my brain at the door of my church which is why you won’t typically find me in a Catholic church.
But I still think there should not be any religious observances in our public educational system. And I still think Adler is a wanker and hypocrite in his “speech”. I also agree wholeheartedly with a separation of Church and State.
@loki. I don’t have enough time right now to respond, but I would like to respond because you seem sane and intelligent.
The absence of competition is not a contributing factor to the emotional or social health of child or an adult. The most significant contributing factor to emotional and social health in adults and children is RESILIENCE.
If these educators truly cared about these children, they would focus their efforts on building/fostering resilience in children instead of eliminating competition which is completely unrealistic in my view. Incidentally, a resolute acceptance of relityone of the key contributors to resilience is the ability to
These educators are instilling a sense of entitlement in these children. The message is – you are entitled to everything everyone else has simply by being born. No work or effort is necessary. You’re all special; therefore entitled.
This educational philosophy will result in an entire generation dependent on the state for their entitlements.
That being said, there are some children, due most often to their temperaments, that due not fair well in a highly competitive environment.
Robert please delete my post above. I accidentally hit the post button in error and the post is incomplete. thanks – I will re-post when corrected.
Socialists, never take note of universal truths, or more corrctly LAWS!
Gravity, conservation of energy, and more suited to this thread…survival of the fittest. Lose the fight, lose your life.
Humans are not immune. But leftists are always outside, smoking dope, the day this lesson is taught.
LC Bennett @2:29 and @5:42 – yes. You’re smart, Elsie.
loki @3:04 – as a failed archaeologist, I still have a booklet on the Jivaro, who are even more bloodthirsty than the Yanomano. Ecuadorians. Head hunters (still?). Fascinating people. Apparently they don’t believe that anyone can die of natural causes, and therefore almost any death is attributable to sorcery and is potentially cause for a blood feud. Amazing that any of them ever survived, really. They also give their tiny babies hallucinogens; crazy South American hallucingogens that make LSD look like chardonnay.
Kathryn @6:50 – “Schools are starting to pass kids into the next grade whether they’ve learned anything or not.” – Kathryn, this is the norm in the U.K. (a “public”, as they don’t call it, education system destroyed by Labour post-WWII). I have lived in the U.K. Don’t go there.
Personally, I was a smart kid in elementary school, and I would have loathed this Kohn, whose palpable passive-aggressivity would have repelled me then, as it repels me now.
Bill Stewart @4:35, why are you going on about fascist-style crony-capitalism? It’s got nothing to do with the discussion and nobody here advocates it that I know of. And we have a “resident Socialist”. She calls herself Davenport. I prefer her to the trolls. But if you feel you have something to add, then who’s stopping you? In fact, please stick around. I like to see the enemy defend himself before being diced-and-sliced, especially when he boasts about the letters after his name.
No more Teacher of the Year Awards, wouldn’t want the other teachers to feel like losers.
The absence of competition is not a contributing factor to the emotional or social health of child or an adult. The most significant contributing factor to emotional and social health in adults and children is RESILIENCE.
If these educators truly cared about these children, they would focus their efforts on building/fostering resilience in children instead of eliminating competition which is completely unrealistic in my view. Incidentally, a resolute acceptance of reality is one of the key indicators of a highly resilient individual.
These educators are instilling a sense of entitlement in these children. The message is – you are entitled to everything everyone else with no work or effort being necessary.
This educational philosophy will result in an entire generation dependent on the state for their entitlements.
That being said, there are some children, due most often to their temperaments, that do not fair well in a highly competitive environment.
Unfortunately, the psychology of resilience is being hijacked, corrupted, and used as a model for making changes in our social and systems (including economic systems) to sustain our eco system by the environmentalist and climate change fanatics to prepare society for the âdrastic changesâ that are inevitable in their view (audio link provided 55 min long called a âWorld of Possibilitiesââ which sheds light on the strategy that is being used to prepare humans for the great change to protect our ecology)
http://www.resilienceproject.org/ (scroll down for a multidimensional model of resilience)
http://www.ccfbest.org/worklife/theimportanceofresilience.htm
Audio page link: http://www.resilienceproject.org/
Bill Stewart – just read your latest comment. I’m an agnostic, although even I know that women are “full members” of the Catholic Church. The Pope was never a “good little soldier in the Hitler Youth”; he was signed up as a minor, without his consent, in what basically amounted to the Nazi Boy Scouts… as was everyone of his generation, and he never so much as flicked a rubber band for Der Fuehrer. Read up on some real Nazis before you slander the Pope. I hate anti-semites like poison, and if Benedict had something to apologize for I’d be the first to say so. He doesn’t.
BTW, Martin Luther was a raging anti-semite. Check it out!:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Jews_and_Their_Lies
I miss Davenport.
Well, I have actually talked to Alfie Kohn myself…a very interesting man who defied left or right categorization, IMHO.
What I understood from him, is that children learn best when they aren’t tested in frequent quizzes, given little stars or have big red marks on their paper, that a teacher may set up to have little rivalries in her classroom.
He does believe in evaluating students and pushing them to excel though. Just not testing them in the manner we do now. He puts a lot of emphasis on the teacher actually teaching.
I am probably a little biased because I put my kids in a Montessori classroom which does very little testing of their students yet my children left in grade 6 doing grade 8 level work…..resilient and competitive when needed.
So I believe his theories do work BUT they only work in a certain, prepared environment with highly trained teachers.
No testing or competition in our present public school environment????….No, I think that spells disaster….
Competition is part of human nature, and students have to be evaluated; there’s no getting around it. What leftists ultimately want is to be able to evaluate as “successful” those students who bootlick socialist teachers and as “unsuccessful” those who would prefer to think for themselves. That’s why they don’t want objective standards, claim that “teachers are the best evaluators” and are strenuously opposed to standardized tests.
It’s true though that methods of evaluation leave something to be desired. Passing a test today doesn’t mean you will recall all the information tomorrow. And I often remembered information that I had missed on a test (corrected in class) better than information that I had known.
Rich @ 9:46 p.m.:
“Nothing new about the no competition idea.
Ontario was into that as far back as the early 90’s. No Competition was the mantra.
It was pushed hard by OISE and hard left”
Recall that it was OISE who granted Jenny Peto a degree on her controversial thesis about Holocaust remembrance organizations, which was in the news before Christmas.
Like Empire of Jeff (second post in the thread), I read Alfie Kohn’s defense of political correctness.
It starts like this:
“If there is a verbal equivalent of a drive-by shooting, it must be the use of that nasty epithet ‘politically correct.’ At best, this is a label that allows the intellectually lazy to denigrate anything they don’t like without having to offer a reasoned objection.”
And ends like this:
“But the label serves no legitimate purpose regardless of whom — or what — it is used to disparage. Those who merely find it a convenient, perhaps ironic, shorthand ought to consider the political ramifications of its use. And even people who approve of those ramifications ought to be offering logic and evidence to support their views rather than depending on an unpleasant label to bully into silence those with whom they disagree.”
If you substitute “racism” for “political correctness” in the above, you get the leftist modus operandi. And everything about the left is founded on the extreme know-nothing irrationality of Kant and Hegel; logic and evidence are noticeably absent.
One last thing – and I’m far from obsessed with this kind of stuff, it’s a big world etc. – why do both Kohn and Weir sound so effeminate? Because they do; I don’t know either’s orientation, obviously, and indeed many gay men are very masculine, but these two men are anything but. I’m not interested in their sex lives, I’m interested in their personae.
(p.s. – can you hear how angry Kohn is? It’s in his voice, his speech rhythms, his emphasis. Listen to him.)
nv53: “What leftists ultimately want is to be able to evaluate as “successful” those students who bootlick socialist teachers and as “unsuccessful” those who would prefer to think for themselves.”
Exactly – you hit the nail on the head.
just wondering, Did Kohn ever win a Teacher of the Year Award or any other kind of an award for his efforts in non-competition in education?
I would add that is an attempt to criminalize success to the point of causing one to feel guilty if they happen to be especially gifted or skilled in an area.
Robert: I re-posted my comment – it met with the spam filter and was not posted which is fine by me.
If these educators truly cared about these children, they would focus their efforts on building/fostering resilience in children instead of eliminating competition which is completely unrealistic in my view. Incidentally, a resolute acceptance of reality is one of the key indicators of a highly resilient individual.
Have just read more of Kohn’s articles and find myself disagreeing with him even more. Standardized testing was what saved my ass in high school as I spent much of the time in boring courses like English and French writing programs and the Alberta provincial exams let me pass those courses with my classroom work (when I was rarely there) counting for nothing.
In his article What does it mean to be well educated he brings up the innumeracy of his physician wife. To me mathematics is one of the fundamental skills that every educated person should have. Similarly, everyone should have the facility to write in English and a knowledge of how many parts of society work.
I’ve known innumerate doctors, usually female, and they have no independent means of checking the math in medical publications and I’ve found glaring math errors in medical journals which would never occur in physical science journals. Numeracy is of equal importance to literacy in people and, if I had to chose just one of these as most important, it would be numeracy. A worrisome number of people just can’t understand the financial mess we’re in since they don’t have a feel for large numbers.
If I can learn how to interpret a poem (most of which still seem like meaningless verbiage to me) to the extent necessary to pass an English exam then other people should be able to learn their multiplication tables (I was in programming mode when I had to do my English exam before med school and viewed the metaphors as a linguistic form of various levels of indirect addressing).
Exams are a terrible way of testing students level of knowledge but they’re a lot better than almost all of the other options that have been suggested. Regardless of the field one ends up in, a lot of memorization is required. Would one want a surgeon who had all of the possible anatomic variants of the area he was operating in memorized or a surgeon who had only a vague idea of the anatomy and knew where to look it up if stumped? Knowing the basics of a given field is essential regardless of how creative and intelligent someone is and, when one knows the basics, most exams are trivial.
We’ve seen the result of people not knowing basics about numerical methods in the artifactually high temperatures from NASA’s GISS program which contained an error which would result in a fail for someone making this mistake in first year computing science course (Cheifio’s web site linked to from WUWT). Other glaring errors in the area of climate “science” are as a result of people who just don’t know the fundamentals of a field.
Medicine is all about fundamentals and knowing them saves doctors from really messing up. There are some hyperspecialists who have massive knowledge about some tiny sliver of medicine but they’re only allowed to deal with patients who fall into that sub-sub-specialty as often they’re completely incompetent in the rest of medicine. If they know their limitations they are useful.
What teachers should be aiming for is to produce what Heinlein considered to be a competent man:
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
Bill Stewart says
“There are likely few here that have more education than I (not to suggest that that in itself should be considered self-evidence that I’m right), but I will say that although I started my Phd confident that I knew some things, I learned by the end that I really don’t “know” that much. In fact, often times the questions posed are actually much more important than the answers because the question prefigures and circumscribes the answer.”
well……
I went to university and specialized. I learned more and more about less and less until I knew absolutely everything about nothing!
of course the opposite is learning less and less about more and more until you know absolutely nothing about everything.
Well, Bill, youâre not a troll, but youâre pushing the envelope. Although you say you’ve earned a PhD and you’re a Christian, you could fool me on both counts. In fact, you seem to need a course in Christianity 101. (And you might consider toning down the competitive streak in your post. E.g., Are you aware of the very loud subtext of most of your posts, âMy wayâs better than yours, nya, nya, nya . . .â? In case you didnât know, self-awareness is an integral part of the mature Christian life.)
Youâve certainly made up your mind about what I believe and youâre wrong on almost every count: attributing to me a âlust for papacyâ is one. (And are you aware that âpapistâ is a term of derision for a Roman Catholic?) BTW, baptism or a reception ceremony, if one is already baptised, makes one a full member of the Catholic Church. (Psst, most Protestants arenât ordained ministers and theyâre full members of their churches.)
You say, âAbout Benedict, I know very little . . .â Letâs just say, you prove your point very well. Find out about him. Re AIDS in Africa: Uganda, the one country thatâs taken fidelity and abstinence seriously, not just condom use, has been a model in the fight against HIV and AIDS.
Deny it if you willâit hardly adds to your credibilityâbut you DID say that you could discern no connection between âChristian authorityâ and âreasonâ. And here you say, âThe only God I can imagine is a non-interventionist one . . . â. If so, youâre certainly not a Christian who worships the God of the Bible: thatâs why I’m curious about what âChristianâ church you belong to. Iâm not a fundamentalistâwhich is a dishonest slur on your partâand I never check my brain at the door of my church.
Iâll say it again, with a few additions: The dishonesty, ignorance, arrogance, competitiveness, and hypocrisy of lefties take oneâs breath away.
Exactly the same deadening spirit pervades the British state education system. In the Nineties the Conservative government introduced City Technology Colleges outside the control of LEAs (Local Education Authorities) to try to bypass this anti-achievement ethos.
Against huge opposition from the teachers’ unions and the Labour party, one was established in our county town. The headmaster had come from a comprehensive school in another LEA. From being a failing school, he had improved its performance until it was oversubscribed.
He said that the LEA had originally been supportive of his improvements but, when he started to outclass other schools, the officials wanted him to “slow down to let others catch up”.
He said that he would be pleased to demonstrate his methods to any other schools but nobody was interested in that. They just did not want a school which showed the others in a bad light.
It is orthodoxy in the teaching unions and official education establishment that “resources” (basically more teachers on bigger salaries) are the only limiting factor and that all teachers are more or less equal – except for people like the author of this article who is obviously more equal than others.
Loki
Agree completely….but that’s why we have oral exams medicine and why residencies/internships work in general, for many fields. However, yes, most of the physician females are terrible at math and many males as well. Ask me how I know, LOL. And that makes them less likely to pick on on failures of logic and more susceptible to pharmaceutical detailing, IMHO.
I did find the Montessori method was especially good for math…all my kids are at the top of their class at math and love it, including my 2 girls. There is LOTS of repetition and drills, but no formal exams.
Alfie Kohn did say to me that his methods and theories work best for elementary kids, but for high school and college, testing and exams are important.
Colin – Lethbridge a couple posts up puts it best — competition is survival. You compete, win, eat and live. You lose, starve and die.
Collectively, the same applies to nations and that is what is wrong in the USA right now.
I posted a clear, carefully worded response here this morningâtwice: no no-noâs as far as I could tell. Both times it was caught in the filter and still isn’t up. Robert, could you please check this out? Thanks.
@lookout: You and I will be relieved that this is the last I’ll say on the matter. I typically try to intervene with questions more than assertions (I’d be glad one day to debate socialism versus capitalism, and yes I would strangely enough take as a point of departure that my view is more correct than yours, unless convinced otherwise. Wouldn’t you?).
What bothers me profoundly is the confusion, the conflation, and in your words lack of self awareness around here, as some caricatured straw man version of socialism is repeatedly constructed and then “knocked” down. Not that I own the rights to the definitive version of socialism, but I at least take it seriously. Conflating Liberalism with Socialism, calling Obama a Socialist (most socialists I know see Obama as the single greatest threat to socialism since Tony Blair), repeating old canards and red baiting is disingenuous and ignorant. If you feel good beating up on a straw man, go for it.
But, it is tantamount to my constructing the conservative position as one for troglodyte overweight religious fundamentalist hicks who have no cultivation, no intelligence, who beat their wives, swarm gay people, drool over anything phallic, drink only cheap beer, worship Don Cherry, and believe Stephen Harper is a real economist. As tempting as that might be, I have a lot of Conservative friends whom I not only like, but whose ideological positions I respect while fundamentally disagreeing.
re: your attempt to teach me what Christianity is. “BTW, baptism or a reception ceremony, if one is already baptised, makes one a full member of the Catholic Church. (Psst, most Protestants arenât ordained ministers and theyâre full members of their churches.)”
As long as you refrain from using the qualifier Roman, then yes, one becomes part of the universal Church through baptism. If you’re insinuating that once a Roman Catholic always a Roman Catholic, there is one possibility that might not have occurred to you- excommunication.
I’m not saying that full inclusion requires that all members of a congregation become ordained, but not having the possibility of being ordained and preside over sacraments is a reprehensible form of exclusion. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure women and homosexuals are very important to the Roman Catholic Church -someone’s got to cook, and clean, to press the liturgical garments and make the place look good.
Personally I really don’t care what Christian church you belong to, and if I made slurs, they were intended not at you personally, but at elements of Christianity I find objectionable. If you recall, Christianity only entered the discussion because I made the rather commonplace and perhaps banal point that modern democracy (along with concomitant intellectual movements such as the Enlightenment, secular humanism) represent a certain turning away from the Church as ultimate arbiter and turn to science and evidence as the basis authority.
“âThe only God I can imagine is a non-interventionist one . . . â”. Perhaps I should have been clearer. Kenneth Miller writes well on this. This is not to say I don’t believe in the incarnation, grace and redemption, but what a non-interventionist Creator means is that nature is self-sufficient, operating through the laws of natural selection. God does not intervene in evolution, nor does God smite the wicked with Tsunamis, nor does God lie idly by as a faithful servant gets killed by a drunk driver. This self-sufficiency and non interventionism is integral to human free will.
Peace..Out
Well, Bill, peace to you too, but good grief: stop the disingenuous stuff, please!
You say, âAs long as you refrain from using the qualifier Roman, then yes, one becomes part of the universal Church through baptism.â You said I had âa lust for papacyâ, so you know exactly what kind of Catholicism weâre talking about. You then say, âIf you’re insinuating that once a Roman Catholic always a Roman Catholic . . .â I made no such insinuation.
Re the improvement re âa certain turning away from the Church as ultimate arbiter and turn[ing] to science and evidence as the basis [of] authorityâ: where has that got us? (Think Climategate and the kind of control the associated scientists and bureaucrats would have had over the rest of us.) I donât see Christianity and science as opposites at all: theyâre both part of Godâs creationâand each has its own place. Science tells us how, and, on another plane altogether, that of faith, Christianity talks about why. I can also accommodate both free will and miracles: I donât think theyâre mutually exclusive. (Nor does the Bible!)
Have a good day.