[FRIAM] Joe Rogan interviewing Bernie Sanders.
Pieter Steenekamp
pieters at randcontrols.co.za
Fri Jun 27 05:46:11 EDT 2025
I totally agree — it would be great if all students learned about the major
world religions. I don’t have the inside scoop, but I’d be a bit surprised
if Texas public schools don’t already include that.
That said, teaching about religion is one thing. Starting the day with “Let
us pray”? That’s a different ballgame — and, in my view, a firm no-go for
any public school.
On Fri, 27 Jun 2025 at 08:21, Russell Standish <lists at hpcoders.com.au>
wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 27, 2025 at 07:31:53AM +0200, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
> >
> > Now, here’s where it gets interesting. If we’re all chipping in tax
> money for
> > public education, then yes — I’m 100% on board with keeping religion out
> of
> > public schools. That’s not only a fair deal, I would be horrified if any
> > religion were included.
> >
>
> I have a dissenting opinion on this. I believe all students should
> learn about all the major religions, including having a passing
> knowledge of the contents of the Bible, the Koran, and a notion of the
> special traditions etc of each one - eg the importance of confession
> to Catholics, the importance of Shabat to Jews and Muslims, etc. In
> todays world, you come across all these sorts of people, and having an
> understanding of where they come from helps a lot.
>
> After all, the Bible is probably the most important work of fiction in
> the English language, followed closely by the complete works of
> Shakespeare.
>
> When my son went to school here in Australia, there was a smorgasbord
> of about 3-4 varieties of Christianity and Judaism (no Islam, from
> what I recall), and Non-religion, where you just got to read books in
> the library. We sent him to the latter of course, but if there'd been
> a proper comparitive religion course, that would have been my choice.
>
> > But if my neighbour is still paying her taxes like the rest of us, and
> on top
> > of that has to fork out again to send her kids to a private Christian
> school —
> > that's also just not right. A voucher system, to me, seems like a fair
> > compromise. It respects both freedom of choice and fairness of
> contribution.
> > Maybe it’s not a perfect solution, but it does stop us from
> double-charging
> > parents for believing something different.
> >
> > For me, diversity of opinions and freedom to choose your religion is a
> very
> > good and positive thing.
> >
> > On Fri, 27 Jun 2025 at 02:33, Santafe <desmith at santafe.edu> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > On Jun 27, 2025, at 7:31, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > Dave writes:
> >
> > < My 'mysticism', like my hallucinogenic experience, is nothing
> more
> > than a source of what I consider to be "real" data and a supply
> of
> > fascinating questions—never answers. >
> >
> > Not clear why something that supposedly cannot be captured by
> mere
> > language keeps getting pitched as a real and intersubjective
> thing via
> > language.
> >
> >
> > I am much less bothered by this _in principle_, since I generally
> hold the
> > two premises:
> >
> > 1. Language is a collection of signals _within_ a system, that are
> part of
> > coordinating states among people; it doesn’t follow that language
> should
> > “contain” or “capture” anything that works as a model “of” the
> system, in
> > the way I would want formalism to have a mappability to phenomena in
> > anything I consider science. Often language-in-general will have
> some
> > mutual information with something closer to a model, but that is
> partly
> > luck and not uniform. Languages that do have those mappable
> qualities tend
> > to be more bespoke, because they were under heavy pressure to do
> that job,
> > which is somewhat different from the background social/material
> criteria
> > for the great majority of language (though scientific language and
> sense
> > can both, I would argue, be seen to grow out of their counterparts
> that
> > have some presence in the broader bulk of language and commonsense);
> and
> >
> > 2. The term “reality” is a problem in general. It is still too
> close to
> > its origins in the hand-me-down umbrella term from common usage,
> which gets
> > it accepted and used with a fluency that belies its evasive and
> indefinite
> > character. I would put it, in most instances of usage, in the
> category I
> > call “placeholder terms”. They enable the rest of discourse to
> proceed,
> > because something is needed in those slots, but that doesn’t mean
> they
> > necessarily carry very good meanings on their own. To the extent
> that
> > “reality” has a central tendency of meaning, it seems (to me) to be
> around
> > the notion of “since we are always trying to economize on attention,
> which
> > things are safest to turn your back on, in the expectation that they
> will
> > still be there and not bite you in the meantime?”
> >
> > So for a language-term to be suggesting that it is trying to
> coordinate a
> > state, with some somewhat reflexive situation-statement acknowleding
> that
> > it does not have a model of the state, together with the state
> itself’s
> > being so loosely handled that it is not clear when the people really
> are
> > coordinated or how they would decide on that, I can certainly see
> this kind
> > of pattern as an ordinary occurrence. Even if some
> intersubjectivity would
> > be reasonable to expect, in view of our vast overlapping constitution
> > shared by all being people, primates, mammals, and so on.
> >
> > I do like the idea that this is just a version of the normal
> confusion, for
> > things not understood very well (like, quite badly), and that one
> could
> > find ways to do better.
> >
> > Eric
> >
> >
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> --
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
> Principal, High Performance Coders hpcoder at hpcoders.com.au
> http://www.hpcoders.com.au
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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