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Dear Squeers,

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It was William Shakespeare’s signature I was expecting at the end of that playwright text you wrote.

I do not see my previous post as a "glowing assessment of (my) individual life" but rather a faithful description of my life as it is today.

Of course it has not always been like that. Like most of us, I suppose, I have had many lives. I cannot count how many.

My mother taught ballet and made me a ballet dancer. Until I raked up enough courage to say no and took up boxing instead.

We were very poor and I started working at the age of ten after school, on the weekends and during school holidays to pay for my school books and uniform. They kept me hidden out the back in the storeroom because they said I was too young to work and it was illegal.

My father died when I was thirteen. I learned that he was alive the day I was told he was dead. I had always thought he was dead.

My formal education ceased just before my fourteenth birthday and after a few years in the Queensland outback working (gratuitously) for a Bush Brotherhood Hostel looking after children from the outback, I migrated to Sydney where I worked in insurance.

From there I landed in Paris (after two years on the road) with virtually no money, knowing nobody and unable to communicate. I again worked in insurance in a back office where I could communicate internationally in English.

Stress and anxiety in the fight for survival against rude competition made those early years in Paris extremely difficult. My marriage took some heavy blows. Sex was my outlet. Not drugs, not alcohol. Just plain hard sex.

My professional days are over now and the battle has been won. The stress and tension are gone. All is calm inside me. My (French) wife and I have succeeded in merging and are now synthesized into a single being. Not just spiritual.

We will probably die together. That will be the end of our story.

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Dear Banjo,
thanks for that interesting insight into your interesting life (I could well compare notes). I hope I didn't give offence. I wasn't so much contesting "your" "exemplary assessment" as men's propensity in general to assess their lives in optimistic (if not fantastic) fashion. Apart from astonishing omissions and revisions, even genuine hardships are easily converted into merit points: making the best of adversity (perceived or real. I'm thinking Mr Bounderby in Dickens's "Hard Times"), indeed turning hurdles into conceits that both put a stop to personal growth and perpetuate social injustices as "good for the soul".
I'm really using these exchanges to explore Marx's notion that we are distorted by the competitive relations we find ourselves in. When those crushing bores go on with "it'll make a man of you!" etc., such cliches are in good measure a means of asserting and validating their own insecure manliness, and perfectly useless as advice, unless to temper the emergent soul to the inevitable hardships to be encountered in an unfair, competitive and exploitative (vicious) system. It does seem to me that the culture maketh the man, and I wonder if we are by nature so desperate to establish superiority (of whatever kind) over others. It seems to me that a fair, equal and just society would just as readily foster benevolence as ours fosters antagonism.
Quite right about the Buddhism, btw, except I don't agree with the dogma of renunciation, I believe in making the only world we have a better place.

Apologies to the ladies for sexist terminology above, but I have less insight into female foibles and am only really dealing with the male syndrome.

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Dear Squeers,

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"Marx's notion that we are distorted by the competitive relations we find ourselves in."

Perhaps "modified" rather than "distorted" by "involuntary" competitive relations.

In Australia when I was young, it was generally considered that competitive sport was a character builder, amateur sport, of course, not professional sport.

The ancient Greeks are credited with being the first organisers of sport on a systematic basis. The Olympic Games which began in 776 AD originated as part of a religious festival dedicated to Zeus.

Powerful Greek city-states required defence against outside attacks and they ensured this by encouraging and rewarding warriors. The development of the polis triggered the growth of the state's control over human expressions of violence.

The state established a legitimate monopoly over violence and reserved it for the possible repulsion of attacks from outside powers.

Contests, challenges, and rivalries were ways in which the impulse could reassert itself, but in socially acceptable forms.

Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who organised the first modern Oltmpics in Athens in 1896, was convinced after visiting England that rugby had played an important role in the rise of British power in the 19th century. He decided it had to be transplanted into France. Coubertin saw physical health as being necessary to win wars. If France was to overcome its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, physical education had to become central to the French education system.

Of course there are negative aspects to sport. It serves nationalism and capitalism. Pushed to the extreme, pleasure and spontaneity disapear in favour of obedience to strict rules, efficiency and record times. Excessive training transforms human beings into efficient machines.

No doubt in the socialist ideal it is preferable to be co-operative rather than competitive. Partnership is preferable to competition.

I subscribe to that but only as regards the home team. What better motor for progress than to strive to surpass previous limits and whatever it is that others are capable of achieving?

Competion is what Darwin called natural selection which I understand is necessary for the survival of all biological species, including mankind.

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Dear George,

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"Do you really need to be given examples of "religious insights into reality" ..."

Yes please. You indicated certain "insights into reality" ("Timeo hominem unius libri", for example) but none specifically "religious".

"If I understand you properly, you answered with "yes" my question "do you really believe that the present Pope is comparable to those who sent millions to the Gulag?"."

Your question was more specifically: "do you really believe that the present Pope is a TYRANT comparable to ..."

The Popes and the Church were and are in a position of authority in respect of minors, past and present, entrusted to their care and protection and to their education.

The non-respect of the fundamental rights of those minors (incabable of discernment) in their custody, to freedom of thought and opinion, is nothing less than a form of child buse.

Child abuse commited by those in a position of authority is a form of tyranny. The Popes and the Church have and continue to commit child abuse by dispensing religious beliefs to minors incapable of discernment. It is an act of tyranny.

The despotic abuse of authority of "those who sent millions to the Gulag" is also an act of tyranny. They have that in commun with the Popes and the Church.

What differentiates between the two is the degree of horror and abomination of the Gulag on the one hand and the fact that the tyranny of the Popes and the Church is exercised with the tacit consent of a large secteur of society, including the families of the victimes, on the other.

It is highly unlikely there will be any change of attitude as long as the Popes and the Church continue to dictate the codes of morality. They will continue to exercise their tyranny on the immature minds of undiscerning minors, in perfect quietude.

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Dear Banjo,

>>"Do you really need to be given examples of "religious insights into reality" ..." Yes please.<<
As I wrote, there are thousands of sources devoted to philosophies compatible with, or even based on, religion. I don't believe you do not know any, but if so, just google "philosophy, religion" or something like that. Therein you will find also the quote I gave, allegedly attributed to Aquinas, which, indeed is not "specifically religious" (only its author is), and should be an indispensable part of any open minded education, religious or not.

You really cannot expect me to summarize all possible approaches to these (philosophical) insights into reality - and their different "watered-down" popularizations adjusted to children and young people of different ages - in 350 words or so, on this OLO! Nevertheless, I tried to state my personal approach to this a number of times on this OLO, see e.g. http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=9389&page=0#150883 and the sequel.

You confirmed in many shocking words my suspicion that you find what Stalin did to millions of those he disliked with what Benedict XVI did, or could do, to you if you do not accept him "dictating" to you his "codes of morality".

I already tried to answer your description of religious education as "child abuse", that you keep on repeating, so there is obviously no point for me to continue. If you reread what you wrote you will perhaps also see that these are not statements about religious education or Benedict XVI, but about your (emotional) state of mind regarding religion (or just the Catholic Church). I know that e.g. Dawkins keeps on expressing similar sentiments -seeing Catholic education worse than sexual abuse of minors, a claim so absurd that not even Stalinist propagandists would have dared to make explicitly.

I have to respect your sentiments since I don't know what caused them. So please, let us leave it at that.

George,

When you say “religious education”, what you’re actually referring to is - in every sense of the word - “indoctrination”. To call indoctrination mere “education” is misleading to say the very least.

The term “religious education” would only be accurate if we were talking about comparative religious studies, or at least not teaching it as though it were the truth.

There are many distinct differences between education and indoctrination. The article at http://www.differencebetween.net/miscellaneous/difference-between-education-and-indoctrination
outlines them well.

<<Dawkins keeps on expressing similar sentiments -seeing Catholic education worse than sexual abuse of minors, a claim so absurd that not even Stalinist propagandists would have dared to make explicitly.>>

Would you be able to link me to some information in regards to Dawkins saying this? It’s not that I don’t believe you, I just can’t find any specific reference to it.

If Dawkins did say this, then (from what I know of Dawkins) he would have specifically had the threats of eternal damnation in mind, in which case, while I’m not sure I’d say that childhood indoctrination is “worse” than the sexual abuse of minors, I think it’s right up there... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_UI-EBGnqk