Author: Ophelia Benson

A “faith school” in Birmingham.

Holding the children’s attention is a man in Islamic dress wearing a skullcap and stroking his long dark beard as he talks.’You’re not like the non-Muslims out there,’ the teacher says, gesturing towards the window. ‘All that evil you see in the streets, people not wearing the hijab properly, people smoking… you should hate it, you should hate walking down that street.’

He refers to the ‘non-Muslims’ as the ‘Kafir’, an often derogatory term that means disbeliever or infidel.

A snapshot of the worst kind of schooling imaginable – training in hatred of all people who are outside the favored group.

This school is required by its inspectors to teach tolerance and respect for other faiths. But Dispatches’ Lessons in Hate and Violence filmed secretly inside it – and instead discovered that Muslim children are being taught religious apartheid and social segregation.

We recorded a number of speakers giving deeply disturbing talks about Jews, Christians and atheists. We found children as young as 11 learning that Hindus have ‘no intellect’. We came across pupils being told that the ‘disbelievers’ are ‘the worst creatures’ and that Muslims who adopt supposedly non-Muslim ways, such as shaving, dancing, listening to music, and – in the case of women – removing their headscarves, would be tortured with a forked iron rod in the after-life.

It sounds like an imaginary school dated c. 1950 if the Nazis had won the war. It’s hard to come up with anything more poisonous. Given recent history in the UK, it’s terrifying.

‘Salma’ and ‘Ayesha’ are a mother and daughter whose identities we are protecting. Ayesha is now sitting her A-levels but when she was seven she was beaten at her Koran classes. She says: ‘The teacher would sit there, tell me what to read, pronounce it to me – then if I said it wrong he would hit me on the hands with a ruler.’ Her younger brother, only five at the time, would be hit on his feet with a stick.

They dreaded going to those classes but did not tell their mother. Salma eventually withdrew her children from attending madrassas for a completely different reason: she learned that they were being taught an intolerant version of Islam.

‘They were using terms like ‘Kafir’ just because somebody isn’t of the same religion,’ she says, ‘and I’m teaching my children to integrate and not be racist so I pulled my children out.’

Humans can be so ugly. It gets me down.

…

we have a government that, on the one hand, gives grand speeches about tackling the causes of extremism, as David Cameron did last week, while, one the other, encourages local communities to set up their own schools – including faith schools. It’s time to stop these mixed messages. And Muslims can no longer sweep this under the carpet – they need to face up to what is happening behind closed doors.Many warn that if we don’t all tackle this toxic mix of hatred and violence head on, we will reap the whirlwind in years to come.

Very few years in fact. Children can carry bombs in backpacks.

You do know about the EagleCam, right?

EagleCam

It’s a camera high in a tree at Norfolk Botanical Garden in Virginia, trained on an eagle’s nest 8o to 90 feet up a loblolly pine tree. There were three eggs; one chick hatched Saturday, another hatched Monday, the third is due to hatch any moment.

It’s enthralling. You can see whichever adult is on the nest get up, a fuzzy bobblehead appear, then the other fuzzy bobblehead join it, then the adult rip bits off a fish (fly-covered, at this point) or a squirrel (caught yesterday) and offer them to one or the other fuzzy bobblehead, who will eat it. You can also see the older bobblehead attack the younger one. You can lose hours watching for this…

It’s warmer today, and the eagle on the nest (the female at the moment) is gaping to cool off. An hour ago she was gaping a little; now her beak is open farther; clearly it’s warming up in Virginia.

Do check it out if you haven’t, and rejoice at modern technology.

Anthony Grayling said more about this possibility of evidence for god question.

I don’t think that every effort has been made to look for evidence and none has turned up…You and Richard think it’s an empirical matter whether there are deities (or fairies? goblins? consider why you think the latter are zoological non-starters) and I think it’s a matter of coherence of the concept…

And, I find, so do I. The more I think about it the more I think that.

The point is that ‘god’ is not like ‘ether’ – it is not amenable to empirical investigation, and does not occupy a slot in some systematic framework of thinking about the world that might be improved on in the light of better theory or observation. It does no work because it purportedly does all work; like a contradiction it entails anything whatever; it is consistent with all evidence and none.

Exactly! By which I mean, that’s what I would have said if only I’d thought of it. It does no work because it purportedly does all work; that’s beautiful, and exact.

But ‘god’ is not like ‘yeti’ (which might – so to say: yet? – be found romping about the Himalayas), it is like ‘square circle’. Trying to explain to someone who thinks that ‘god’ is like ‘yeti’ (namely, you) let alone to someone who thinks ‘god’ is like ‘Barack Obama’ (names an actual being, as Christians and Muslims do) that it is actually not like ‘yeti’ but  like ‘square circle’ and that nothing can count as evidence for square circles, is harder work for ‘god’ than ‘square circle’ only because religious folk have been squaring the circle for so long!

Furthermore, “god” is like square circles and round triangles and octagonal hexagons and flat cubes and married bachelors. There are different versions of god, to say the least, and there is no univerally agreed set of minimal items that belong on the god-list, so there is no core “god” concept that we can try to match to possible evidence.

It’s dead easy to imagine evidence of a yeti. That wouldn’t even surprise me much, because the Himalayas are difficult terrain, and some animals are very good at hiding, and there is more than one species of great ape.

It’s also easy to imagine evidence of a species that would be superior to humans. That’s child’s play. But “god” is a whole different territory, with built-in hand-wavy stuff that make it as Anthony says consistent with all evidence and none. It’s Intelligently Designed that way.