Faith me no faiths!

Facts and statistics too often get in the way of a forceful opinion. The indiscriminate use of the word ‘prejudice’ in discussion has unfairly truncated what could have turned out to be a productive exchange of views. ‘Mankind,’ as T S Eliot so perceptively said, ‘cannot stand too much reality,’ how unfair then to expect truth (the handmaiden of reality) to be paraded like some vulgar ringmaster when putting forward a genuinely naïf point of view.

Modern civilization has not developed by people having a solid base of evidence for their actions: faith, whim, desire, belief, instinct and muscular spasm are far more persuasive in the understanding of the history of mankind than anything else.

So don’t expect dry evidence to be used in the following observations; a partially overheard news story is basis enough for me to pontificate.

The government, yet again, appears to be adopting its usual supine posture when confronted by an eager coalition of opposition groups without power. Stalin is once reputed to have asked an aide, ‘How many divisions does the Pope have?’ when confronted by religious opposition, and the self evident answer allowed Uncle Joe to pursue his murderous path dismissing any whingeing voices from the Vatican. The Religious Right in the USA may seem to give some reason to doubt the unthinking continuation of this cavalier rejection by any person in power, but although seemingly united on issues such as abortion, capital punishment and homosexuality their instinctive innate conservatism usually ends up supporting the status quo and not really threatening the true power bases in their respective countries. And they don’t have divisions either.

Great Britain is a notoriously secular country with church going decreasing like the level of enjoyment in each new series of Big Brother, yet our government capitulates to opposition which wanted the non-religious quota in state supported so-called ‘faith schools’ to be made mandatory.

I can see no justification for the continuation of state funding for sectarian schools. If faiths want to have their own schools then good luck to them. But they should be funded entirely by the faiths themselves: buildings, maintenance, teachers’ salaries, books, toilet paper, everything.

The cost of building a school is nothing compared to the year on year costs of salaries and the day to day running of the institution. If faith schools had to bear the real cost of these schools then most of them would close tomorrow. We the taxpayers are actually funding the division of our society and funding it in countless millions of pounds every month.

OK I know that our society is riddled with absurd contradictions: we are a democracy with a hereditary monarchy; a secular society with a head of state who is also the head of the ‘established’ church of the country; bishops who sit in the second chamber of our legislature; an heir apparent who mouths vapid platitudes about ‘faiths’ which show his grasp of reality is tenuous, to say the least; and, of course, our wonderful system of law. We need a fundamental restructuring of our society; from the top (if that is how you regard the present Defender of the Faith) to the . . . what? Bottom? The 93% of the population who own 16% of its wealth? Get real!

One of the more sickening justifications for the continuation of the essential basis on which our country has been governed for . . . ever is that any change would unset the odd, idiosyncratic, essentially English way that we muddle through and somehow manage to survive. After all, they say, the one country in Europe that did not have a revolution in 1848 was Great Britain.

All that means is that our ruling classes were fractionally less criminally and self destructively stupid than the inbred cretins who had power elsewhere. The meritocratic basis of English society, so the story goes, can even be seen in Tudor times when the butcher’s son from Ipswich rose to be the most powerful subject in the realm; but I seem to remember that one word from the bloated dictator Henry VIII and Wolsey was nothing. So much for merit.

Any attempt to tinker with the Heath Robinson system that we have will result, like an overdrawn Mr Micawber, in ‘misery.’ As if, in percentage terms, we weren’t living in financial, political, educational and moral misery now. Heath Robinson’s fantastic drawings were surrealistically complicated showing, in one case, machines for drilling holes in Swiss cheeses of fiendish complication which would have had William Occam weeping with frustration and reaching for his razor to start excising all the unnecessary elements.

We need William now, today, to come back to life and start looking at the way in which we govern and educate ourselves. It is just depressing to think that his philosophy has been around for over 600 years and, if you want to look further, you could say the principles that he advances can be seen in the writings of Aristotle who has been dead for over 2,300 years.

We don’t learn do we? Especially not in faith schools.