Indoctrination is fierce. Faith should find its place in education with other myths, while the basic visions of life and growth should be exclusively scientific and wholistic with a humanistic component of improvement and hope, and of understanding natural processes. It could become a complicated game, and kids love games... and so we, old foggies, should, still, improve without deceit.

So what are our convictions? Aren’t our convictions bathing in deceit?

It follows that our thinking about faith and schooling will miss the mark if it focuses only on the times and places for explicit talk about faith. The place of faith in schooling is also bound up with the basic visions of life and growth that shape the way we write curriculum, the way we organize classrooms, the way we design tasks, the way we teach and learn.

It would be a good step towards a more adequate conversation about faith and schooling if all schools - Christian or otherwise - were to be more explicit about the convictions that drive and are communicated through their teaching and learning.

http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2017/08/07/4714463.htm

 

This is ridiculously shallow for a "modern" view point. It is limited and narrow-minded.

 

In the 18th century, Erasmus Darwin, Grandfather of Charles, expressed the notion that all species stemmed from a single source. This was one of the first step in understanding evolution. While Erasmus had expressed the idea, Charles went on the “Beagle” and scientifically showed the processes of evolution and adaptation to environmental circumstances. Faith lacks this understanding. Faith is deficient. Faith is deceitful.

In our modern societies, we have deranged all sorts of miscomprehension and illusionary worths, leading to unsettling uncertainty. Faith simplistically controlled the masses while the hereditary kingdom rulers got away with the loot. Nothing has changed much despite the advent of democracy. Why? Because our basic instincts are easily manipulated by our limited education, our simplistic medias and our learnt willingness to be swindled, including being lied to by religious fervour, through faith. We are like a gullible crowd at a spectacle of Penn and Teller...

 

Erasmus Darwin’s poetry was mixing antiquity’s myths with nature to express the idea of slow change. 

In his poem The Economy of Vegetation, he tells us in Canto I:

 

STAY YOUR RUDE STEPS! whose throbbing breasts infold

The legion-fiends of Glory, or of Gold!

Stay! whose false lips seductive simpers part,

While Cunning nestles in the harlot-heart!-

For you no Dryads dress the roseate bower,

For you no Nymphs their sparkling vases pour;

Unmark’d by you, light Graces swim the green,

And hovering Cupids aim their shafts, unseen.

‘But THOU! whose mind the well-attemper’d ray

Of Taste and Virtue lights with purer day;

Whose finer sense each soft vibration owns

With sweet responsive sympathy of tones;

So the fair flower expands it’s lucid form

To meet the sun, and shuts it to the storm;-

For thee my borders nurse the fragrant wreath,

My fountains murmur, and my zephyrs breathe;

etc...

 

Behind these verses lay an erudite knowledge of antecedents and many words that dip into the human past in order to understand the way things are and could be:

 

Lifts proud ANTEUS from his mother-plains,

And with strong grasp the struggling Giant strains;

Back falls his fainting head, and clammy hair,

Writhe his weak limbs, and flits his life in air...

 

Here Erasmus Darwin tells us of Hercules crushing embrace of Anteus in his search for Atlas who knew where the Hesperian apples were. Hercules has to replace Atlas as the holder of the heavens, while Atlas goes to find the apples. The Apples had been given to Juno as a wedding present, but had been stolen by the Hesperides who took them to their own garden in Africa, a garden that was fiercely guarded by a dragon named Ladon.

Don’t we find here a resonance with the Garden of Eden and its “Apple Tree” that is under the spell of the demon-snake? Of course Atlas becomes remorseful for having taken the apples while thinking of swindling Hercules. Atlas felt oppressed by his thankless eternal task of holding the sky, thus he wants to trick Hercules in staying forever in his place, but Hercules tricks Atlas back by asking him to hold the heavens while he could find a cushion for his sore shoulders... Hercules leaves Atlas holding the heavens forever and takes the apples to return them to Eurystheus, who had thrown him the challenge of finding them... 

Trickery is not new. Our politicians do it all the time. We do it all the time. Religions do it all the time. Deceit is part of nature but it should not enter our philosophical search for betterment. We can aspire for improvements without deceit.

 

‘I think that we can perhaps meditate a little on those Americans ten thousand years from now...Let us hope that at least they will give us the benefit of the doubt, that they will believe we have honestly striven every day and generation to preserve for our descendants a decent land to live in and a decent form of government to operate under.’—Franklin Delano Roosevelt at Mt. Rushmore August 30, 1936.

https://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=52787

 

We are far from this ideal anywhere on this planet. Too much deceit and delusions still permeate the human mind, disguised as a “spirit”. The American “Russophobia” is one of these delusions designed to distract from the sad reality of our general stupidity. 

 

We have still not understood why we need to be in pain and eventually die. The Darwins did. There is nothing to “understand”, but to comprehend. These are natural processes evolved accidentally on a small planet that we are presently destroying by willingly misunderstanding our origins. By being a comprehending atheist we can accept this condition without having to imagine being bestowed upon us through an idiotic “original sin” that involved an apple — symbolic of what distress we want it to represent. God does not exist — and this notion should give us the amazing impetus to evolve better, as a species and as individuals, without destroying the joint, nor robbing our next door neighbour. 

We can do it, but time is running out as the idiots and the “believers” are desperately preventing us to become our next. They are truly afraid of evolution. Human evolution.

 

Gus Leonisky

Your local apple carter...