When “education” consists of nothing but studying one book, then not much is learned.

For thousands of years the way that ultra-orthodox Jewish children are taught has changed little and is based almost entirely on study of the Torah – the Jewish Bible.

But now a group of leading secular Israelis wants to force the ultra-orthodox, or Haredi, education system to modernise and adopt standard subjects like maths, science and English.

The reason, they say, is that thousands of Haredi students are unable or unwilling to participate in wider Israeli society and are becoming an increasing economic burden.

“Participate in wider Israeli society” looks a lot like “get a paying job.” The BBC is apparently reluctant to spell that … Read the rest

Well how nice for Toronto – unlike poor sad deprived Britain, it gets to have Zakir Naik telling it what’s what.

Zakir Naik, founder of online Peace TV in Mumbai, India, tops the bill at the Journey of Faith Conference, July 2-4, at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. It is being described as the largest Islamic conference ever in North America. In videos on YouTube, Naik advocates death to homosexuals and to Muslims who leave the faith…“This guy has absolute hatred for the West,” Tarek Fatah of the Muslim Canadian Congress said Friday.

And homosexuals and apostates, apparently. I bet he’s not much of a feminist, either.

“What we want him to preach here is peace. We want him

Remember Kees? I mean “Kees”? The troll who appeared in February-March 2009 pretending to be a naive observer who had just discovered moral relativism by watching a tv documentary about a South Pacific island where the men (prepare for a shock) ran everything?

Who then revealed himself (by emailing a lot of commenters here to urge them to escape my dictatorship, and using a revealing email address) to be the same as one “Bernie Ranson” who had staged a similar extended charade at Talking Philosophy more than a year earlier, in January 2008?

Remember him? (He claimed to be male, and I think that particular claim is true.)

I’ve been reading some of his comments from those two encounters. They’re … Read the rest