Day: August 28, 2008

George Pitcher In Defense of Compulsory Religious Education

In general, I tend to think of Great Britain and Europe as significantly more secular than the United States, which is why I always get a bit weirded out reading op-eds like George Pitcher’s defense of compulsory religious education in the United Kingdom.

The thing is that compulsory education is already the norm — although from what I can tell just from news accounts, many public schools give only a perfunctory nod to their legal obligation to provide religious instruction to their pupils.

A joint committee of Parliament recommended giving some children the right to abstain from religious “education.”

We recommend that the Government reconsiders its objection to permitting a child of sufficient maturity, intelligence and understanding to withdraw from religous education. As for religious worship, we recommend that children who are not in the sixth form but who have sufficient maturity, intelligence and understanding to be permitted to withdraw.

Pitcher finds even this recommendation as part of a secular attack on religious faith in the UK,

The NSS’s [National Secular Society] agenda is simple: it wants to force the next generation to stop thinking about the spiritual, the transcendental and the mysterious, in favour of a negative utilitarianism. That can be the only reason for picking on this particular bit of the syllabus.

Which is odd because, in general, the widely accepted explanation for the much greater religious fervor in the United States is precisely the strict separation of church and state. And, of course, nothing even close to the existing regime of religious instruction in school nor this rather mild modification of the same would have a chance in hell of passing muster in U.S. courts — they’d be rejected out of hand as impingements on fundamental freedoms.

So from a strictly utilitarian perspective, perhaps atheists and secularists in the United States are engaged in self-defeating behavior when they run around trying to extinguish mention of religion from the public sphere. Receiving religion from the state — at least a liberal democratic state — seems to have the same effect on religion that perhaps a teenager receiving a pornographic magazine from his parents might have on the libido. It takes all the fun and interest out of it.

It’s Not Easy Being Green . . . and Crucified

The Catholic Church is apparently a bit unhappy over this sculpture currently being displayed in an Italian museum that depicts a green frog being crucified while it holds a beer mug in one hand and an egg in the other.

The sculpture, Zuerst die Fuess is by the late German sculptor Martin Kippenberger. The Vatican wrote a letter in Pope Benedict’s name supporting efforts by Italian politician Franz Pahl to have the sculpture removed from the state-supported museum where it is being displayed. In portions of the letter released by Pahl, the Vatican complains that the sculpture “wounds the religious sentiments of so many people who see in the cross the symbol of God’s love.”

According to the Associated Press, Kippenberger apparently considered the sculpture “a self-portrait illustrating human angst.” Um, yeah, why else would the frog be holding an egg in one hand?

On the one hand, it is always a bit strange to see people who allegedly have the Supreme Creator of all things brought low by something as ridiculous as a frog on a stick (or whatever the allegedly blasephemous item of the day is).

On the other hand, in Western societies generally the Vatican’s letter writing is about the limit of its power to actually remove the offending item. This was not always the case, and, of course, in many parts of the world a similar item — say portraying Mohammed as a green frog — would likely end up with museum officials in prison or worse.

Using Photoshop to Reimagine One’s Past

The New York Times ran an article a couple weeks ago about people who use Photoshop — or more likely pay others to manipulate their photos in Photoshop — to remove unpleasant aspects of the photos, such as ex-husbands,

Removing her ex-husband from more than a decade of memories may take a lifetime for Laura Horn, a police emergency dispatcher in Rochester. But removing him from a dozen years of vacation photographs took only hours, with some deft mouse work from a willing friend who was proficient in Photoshop, the popular digital-image editing program.

. . .

As image-editing software grows in sophistication and ubiquity, alterations go far beyond removing red-eye and whitening teeth. They include substituting head shots to achieve the best combination of smiles, deleting problematic personalities or adding family members who were unable to attend important events, performing virtual liposuction or hair restoration, even reanimating the dead. Revisionist history, it seems, can be practiced by just about anyone.

As people fiddle with the photos in their scrapbooks, the tug of emotion and vanity can win out over the objective truth. And in some cases, it can even alter memories — Cousin Andy was at the wedding, right?

In an age of digital manipulation, many people believe that snapshots and family photos need no longer stand as a definitive record of what was, but instead, of what they wish it was.

I can’t imagine doing that. Obviously, there are people who enjoy pretending that some things simply didn’t happen, but once you start preferring what you wish had been to reality, where does it stop? I’ve had personal experience with people who choose to concoct elaborate fantasies around past events to the point where they no longer realize they’ve come to believe the comforting lies they tell themselves, and it comes off as more pathetic than anything else.

The NYT concludes its story with a quote from clinical psychologist Alan Entin which nicely summarizes the desire to alter our past in this way,

“They’re [photographs] a record,” he said. “They have existed over time and space. They are important documents.”

To alter them is to invite self-deception, he said. “The value to accepting a photograph of yourself as you are is that you’re accepting the reality of who you are, and how you look, and accepting yourself that way, warts and all. I think the pictures you hate say as much about you as pictures you love.”