David Richardson

Jag har nyss fått ett e-post från Per Westman vid Nätuniversitet: "Nästa webbmöte har inte annonserats ut, men du är välkommen att delta om du vill. Martin Burman från vår internationella kommitté ska prata om Kommitténs resa till Indien." Alla andra är också välkomna. Jag skriver igen så fort jag vet vilken dag och tid. Mötet äger rum via Karlstad universitets Marratech server (jag eller Per kan beskriva hur man gör för att koppla upp sig)

There's something extra painful about being a beginner in a foreign language, as opposed to being a beginner in, say, Geography. If you think that the capital of Brazil is Rio de Janeiro, and it turns out to be Brasilia, most people just shrug and say to themselves, "who cares?" We're all used to being able to say just what we want in our native language, though, and most of the people who stumble over words are babies and young children. So … when we stumble with the foreign language, we get embarrassed and flustered - and try to avoid being in that situation in the future. You can't avoid getting things wrong when you start learning a foreign language. If the classroom situation is such that this isn't painfully embarrassing, then most people will persevere. If it is, though, then lots of people quickly give up even trying.

Swedish has a similar set of false friends - eventuellt also means 'possibly'. A Swede could well say "You are very ambitious", but she means 'hard-working'. The 'dog' story is quite clear in Swedish - this 'must' would be 'have to' in English.

There's a lot about trading successfully that monolingual English speakers miss out on - like the understanding that when people speak a foreign language (English to British people's customers), they're really expressing their own cultural habits, but in the foreign language. When things go wrong with the communication, it's much more likely to be due to cultural problems than 'pure' language problems. Learning to express yourself in a foreign language gives you all sorts of insights into what's going on when two people from different cultures try to communicate with each other, which the monolinguist usually doesn't have. That's why Swedes are such successful exporters …

"We sell to other people in English, but we buy in our own language" I don't know where that quote comes from … but I think it's true.

Yes … but the problem is that people do. Once again, the dividing line seems to go between people who want to deal with the world as it really is, and people who want to force the world to conform to abstract principles, irrespective of the amount of suffering this causes to real people. As I understand it, HIV in Africa is most often transmitted from a married man to his wife, the man having picked up the virus from a prostitute. The wife's only real protection is a condom - since if you could change men's sexual behaviour with sermons, there wouldn't be a problem at all. Is religious fundamentalism (of all types) the new Communism (on the argument that this sacrificing of real people in the name of abstract principle was the characteristic of Communist regimes too)?

I wonder why no-one on this forum thinks that this question is very interesting! The debate about whether or not Catholics in Europe go to church, take mass and confess their sins seems a little beside the point (since there are plenty of statistics to go on). My own impression of the discussion in newspapers since John Paul II's death is that it's only really Catholics themselves who found John Paul to be an important figure. For the rest of us, we're used to conservative figures trying to turn the clock back on the advances we've made … and we're not buying their message. I wonder who the cardinals will choose for their next leader. One thing seems pretty certain to me: if they choose a figure who will appeal to the bulk of Catholics in the third world, then the Catholic Church's decline in the developed world will just continue. If, on the other hand, they don't, then the Catholic Church is headed for the same schisms as are currently affecting the Anglican Church. However, I'm an atheist, not a religious believer, so there's quite probably something I've missed!

Not in Sweden - so far as I can tell. However, there may be individual Swedish academics looking at Essential Learning, who haven't published anything yet.

The only evidence I've come across is anecdotal. There was an interesting argument in the Guardian last week, for example, from an Irish Catholic, who claimed that the Catholic Church's attitude to contraception was a major factor in the steep decline in Catholics taking confession. It looks to me, though, as if alll the major churches are in decline in the industrialised countries, as you say. I'd say that the reason for that is rationalism … and that the only situations where religion has any chance of regaining its former glory are ones where rationalism hasn't reached yet.

If people are staying away from the Catholic Church because of the policies propagated by John Paul II, then he would be responsible, wouldn't he.

I was thinking more of the same kind of aspect of religion Rowena was talking about. Every time I had to pick my car up from being serviced I had to ask my Saudi boss for permission to leave 15 minutes early. After a while he began to say to me, "David, Hondas must be bad cars - you're always taking yours to the garage". For him, preventive maintenance was almost blasphemous. If God wanted your car to break down, it would. If he didn't, it wouldn't. If you intervened in the process (say, by having it regularly serviced), then you were interfering with God's will. The same reasoning led to very few Saudis taking out car insurance. My boss, on the other hand, relied absolutely on his car (and on the electricity supply, the air-conditioning, etc, etc). His beliefs about how the cosmos worked were in direct contradiction to the way he actually lived his life. It's a position which is tenable so long as you've got the money to buy yourself a new Merc every 6 months (when you've run the last one into the ground). I'm sure that the 'Abrahamist' (a nice adjective I read recently which covers Judaism, Christianity and Islam) view of God was the start of one strand of the development of our technology (let's not forget the ancient Greeks), but I was just wondering how much relevance that view has today.

I've lived a few years in Muslim countries (including Saudi Arabia) and the issue which really troubles a lot of thoughtful Muslims is why there aren't any 'successful' Muslim countries in the world. The Saudis are rich, but they know that their wealth is based on an accident of geology, and, anyway, has been largely squandered. However, even the Saudis know that their very existence is dependent on technicians imported from non-Muslim countries, whose technology only functions because of atheistic scientific materialism. They also know that their school systems are unlikely to produce the ground-breaking thinkers that the early years of Islam produced, when Islamic countries were scientifically, culturally, militarily and economically streets ahead of the the non-Islamic countries (with the exception of China). This is because their schools are run by the same kind of religious fanatics who're beginning to bring down the teaching of science in the USA. I remember showing film of the moon landings to a group of Kuwaiti pilots, who flew Mirages over the desert at night. They started tutting and saying 'haram' (blasphemy) because somewhere in the Koran it says something like "a man may no more do X, than he may walk on the Moon" - so the moon-landings can never have happened (please post your comments about the factual nature of the moon-landings on the Apollo 11 forum!). Could you take this question further and ask: are there actually any countries which are successful because of their religion? I'd say no - since the USA was established as a society which explicitly broke the connection between Church and State which was the contemporary norm. It certainly looks to me as if you have to set your religious beliefs aside if you want a technologically-advanced society to actually function.

I'm a lone Mac user in an almost entirely PC environment (I should feel lucky that the powers-that-be haven't taken my Mac away). I have the same experience as Mike vis-a-vis my colleagues. We've come to a modus vivendi where I don't make comments about their computer breakdowns and they don't begrudge me the ability to carry on working whilst they're waiting for their computers to be fixed …

Tim, I understand your concern for Terri's parents and brothers (remember that her family includes Michael Schiavo too). However, I think that you're being far too hard on her husband. Why is it so 'obvious' that her husband doesn't love her? I would say that someone who's fought so hard to protect Terri's dignity and integrity in the face of such unjustifiable vilification is certainly showing all the symptoms of love. Wasn't he offered a million to "hand Terri over" (like an unwanted parcel) to her parents? If he was only in it for the money, he had a great opportunity to demonstrate it then. There's one loser at least if Terri's kept in her current vegetative state - Terri Schiavo. So far as it's possible to tell, she didn't want to end up as an experimental animal in a laboratory. And sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind … Encouraging Terri's parents to keep believing that she can be revived has been the real cruelty here for me. It's time for them to move on, but the religious right are just making it more and more difficult for them to do that. Soon Terri will have been cremated, and the show will be over (one of the real horrors of this situation is that the religious right have turned people's suffering into a show - some respect for human life!). I wonder how many of the Republican senators and the other religious fanatics involved will be giving even a thought to Terri Schiavo this time next year. If my analysis of their motives is right, the only thought they'll be giving her is how they can use the case again to further their political careers.

This would be the Sen Frist, MD (as I believe he wants to be called) who made a complete fool of himself by making a diagnosis in a field he has little knowledge of on the basis of watching a short sequence of videotape. My spontaneous reaction, once more, Tim, is that you should place a little more credence in the judicial branch. There have been seven years of hearings and 15 years of trying to find treatments, so far. The fact that the Supreme Court, with the current make-up it has, refused to touch this case with a bargepole ought to be a pointer to the fact that, for once, there is nothing wrong with the judicial review that has been carried out. It's a sad case - and no-one would want to be in the shoes of any of the protagonists. I feel tremendously sorry for Terri, who was cut down in the prime of life 15 years ago … and equally sorry for he poor husband, who's had to undergo calculated character assassination for purely political purposes. Let's just hope that there's a rebound and someone asks the religious right the question that was once asked of Senator Joe McCarthy: have you no sense of decency?

I think it's worth adding that Florida has already passed a Terri Schiavo bill to enable Governor Jeb Bush to intervene and resume the process of keeping Terri in a state of 'not-life, not-death'. This intervention was subsequently rejected by the court system in Florida. The reports I've read in US newspapers today indicate that Governor Jeb Bush is now coming under pressure from the religious right to 'act' (although it's not clear how).

I think that you need to have more faith in the basic workings of the US judicial branch, Tim. The reason most commonly cited for why even this Supreme Court won't take up the Schiavo case now is that all the medical, legal, and ethical questions have been exhaustively examined at every possible and conceivable level in the system. It's time to stop experimenting on this poor woman and let her die in peace.

Another problem I experience as a teacher of EFL is that you need your most proficient teachers to teach the beginners. By the time the pupils get to secondary school, well, almost anyone could teach them! (OK, with some modifications). However, if you want pupils to start learning right, rather than having incorrect patterns and practices reinforced, then you need very capable teachers at the lowest levels. If there are plenty of primary teachers who *can* teach MFL, then it shouldn't be a problem …

The difference between the scientists' 'faith' and religious faith is the 'reliability' of the first one. I'm using 'reliability' in the specialist sense of producing the same result in the same circumstances no matter who it is who conducts the experiment and where they are. If religious experiences could be tested in the same way that the experiences of scientists when they are experimenting can be tested, then there'd be no disagreement between scientists and religious believers. Unfortunately, religious faith can't be tested in the same way as scientific faith, so it can't have the same status. Note that I don't say 'inferior' or 'superior', just not the same. ------- As regards the Schiavo case, I'm an opponent of experiments on live animals, so I think it's disgraceful that it's taken this long to allow the poor woman to die peacefully. In this respect, the amorality of the scientists who've kept her on life-support machines all these years needs looking at closely. Just because science has its rigour doesn't mean that scientists shouldn't be examining their own ethics.

I'm clearly still not explaining myself correctly! Whereas I can definitely accept religion as a social construct. There's a lovely article by George Monbiot in today's Guardian which touches on how different types of soil in the Mediterranean area are associated with different types of religious worship at http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,...443100,00.html, the 'uncertainty' relating to scientific facts is of a different order. A statement like "pure water boils at 100 degrees centigrade" is really a summary of a set of parameters and conditions. As Marco Polo discovered, if you go up a mountain, the boiling point of water drops … because the parameters change. One difference these parameters and the parameters relating to people's accounts of their religious experience has to do with their scientific nature. The scientific parameters must be capable of being replicated, measured and tested. Another difference lies in their predictive power. The exact degree of uncertainty in a particular scientific fact is really an expression of how exhaustingly these parameters have been tested. The predictive power is extremely important. The reason that statements about the make-up of distant stars can be said to be scientifically factual, despite the fact that none of us has ever been there and reproduced the experiments which measure the temperatures of various gases on the spot is that these experiments have been done so often and so rigorously here on Earth that there isn't any reasonable doubt left about the parameters involved. The fact that the data thus produced enables us to construct spacecraft which can successfully land on Titan is powerful evidence of their capacity to predict conditions which none of us have ever measured. There are various religions, for example, whose followers claim to be able to defy the law of gravity by levitating. So far as I know, such claims have never survived this sort of rigorous scientific testing, so they can't be seen as scientific facts, no matter how many adherents of those religions testify to having levitated. This doesn't mean that they can't be seen as religious facts. It's just that everyone wants the kudos of being thought to be scientific (q.v. 'scientific socialism', the infected debate about whether 'social sciences' like economics and sociology are scientific). My reading of the matter is that there's a lot of confusion about what qualifies as a scientific fact, and that people get taken in by the kudos surrounding ideas like 'a scientific discovery' and 'proved by scientists'. For me, scientific proof is a far more austere process, involving careful cross-checking and exhaustive testing. It may be that one day a god or gods will emerge from this process, but I don't think it's happened yet. If it does, though, a true scientist would check the results, examine the parameters and replicate the experiment lots of times. If the same results came through, she would then say "yes, the existence of this god or gods is a scientific fact (at least until a new set of parameters comes to light)". And, naturally, you can't run your life on a day-to-day basis like this - life's just too short for all the testing! So, if the religious set of social constructs does it for you, then that's fine by me.

I don't think so, Doug. There's no problem referring to your own experiences - the only problem comes when someone elevates their experience to the status of scientific fact, without all the groundwork you otherwise have to do to establish something as scientific fact. And, as I've posted earlier, scientific 'facts' are always temporary - waiting on the next time they get falsified … which gives us new scientific facts to have a go at. Thus, I have no problem at all with, say, Tim's descriptions of his experiences … but the idea that this account proves the existence of a god is to use the word 'prove' in a different way from the way that scientists use it, that's all. It doesn't detract from Tim's experiences or make them less real to him, though.

Despite all this stuff about science that I keep spouting, I actually work as a teacher of humanities (often English Literature). This distinction which Mike makes between the things I understand with my rationality and the things I don't is really important for a student of literature. I'm just rounding off a long cycle of distance courses where my students have learned how to analyse a novel from an academic point of view. I started them off by asking them if and how you could apply Aristotle's theory of tragedy to Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe), and warned them of the danger that learning to look below the surface and talk about literature using dispassionate techniques more akin to natural sciences risked killing off their love of literature. I.e., if you know how the trick is done, you could stop believing in magic! We're finishing off with The God of Small Things and Beloved, now two years later. These are novels which definitely lend themselves to 'objective' analysis on a number of levels - but they're both much too powerful as books for most of my students not to also respond to emotionally. Which is as it should be … When you look at a spectacular sunset, it can take your breath away - despite your conscious knowledge that the effect is probably due to air pollution! I wonder if the participants in this thread who seem to be feeling that atheistic scientists can't really appreciate the wonder of life and the universe are falling into the trap of thinking that just because we're interested in understanding those bits we can understand, that means that we're not capable of awe. I remember the feelings of both awe and home-coming the first time I stood under an African sky. This doesn't necessarily mean that there's any such things as 'race-memory' (i.e. that I was wondrously communing with my homo erectus forefathers) - I could just have been standing in an awesome place. It doesn't really matter which, though.

Despite the personal experiences and beliefs of various religious believers or various atheists, I still see a fundamental difference between science and religion: science is based on evidence and religion is based on faith. For me, this doesn't mean that a particular individual can't 'split herself up' intellectually, and have one part of her life based on evidence and another part based on faith. However, it does mean that you can't be a scientist (in the sense of a practitioner of the scientific method the world has developed since the Ancient Greeks) if you apply the faith-based principles of religion to the work you're trying to call 'scientific' (in my world, anyway). Thus, if a state government wants to stop US schoolchildren learning about evolution, all it means to me is that that state government has decided that science is not something it wants taught in schools - it'd rather teach religion in those lessons instead. As a human being, I think that that is a derogation of responsibility with regard to those school children. As a European, I just think that it's about time there were more handicaps on US progress, so that we can catch up!

… this is why I always use green ink to correct work with! This is the issue we were discussing last week at our Marratech meeting about learning objects (didn't you catch it? I announced it in Swedish on the 'Svensktalande' forum!). The argument against a national register of freely-available learning objects from many universities is that they want to sell their products, not give them away. The problem is that they haven't found anyone who wants to buy them … My own feeling is that there's a philosophical problem at the heart of the issue of on-line resources which hasn't been resolved yet and, until it is, we aren't going to be able to construct a system which rewards producers (in some way - even an intangible one), allows for development and growth, and makes resources available in a way learners can use them. This problem, in my opinion, is that we're still seeing learning objects as 'shrink-wrapped', discrete objects which can be imported into the classroom and later discarded, without anything else about the way we teach and learn being subject to change. The reality that I live in is that there's a complex ecology of teaching styles, learning styles, learning objects, physical environments, mental environments, etc, where the learning object is merely one ingredient in a very rich stew. The idea that you can take that learning object out of the mix and give it special treatment (such as paying for it … in the way you *don't* pay for the welcoming smile on the teacher's face, which probably does a lot more to get people to dare to learn) just doesn't hold together. Add in to the equation the fact that really snazzy electronic learning objects cost an arm and a leg to produce (and teachers are usually 'armless - and often 'legless' by the end of a working week - scuse the pun) and you can see why the great e-learning revolution hasn't happened yet. If my image of a primordial stew holds true, it's also a reason why 'second-wave' (à la Alvin Toffler) organisations like Microsoft and the Departments of Education are almost biologically incapable of bringing about change, whilst individuals, like Grahame, John and David are. Such organisations are hierarchical and expert-driven, whilst the new world is niche-based. In other words, the only way the Minister or the dot.com company are going to get things going is by releasing the control they want to have over what is used and how - and that is exactly what they're constitutionally incapable of doing. I've only come across one, reasonably-successful register of learning objects so far. It's called 'Kursnavet' … but you have to be able to read Swedish to participate (http://kursnavet.cfl.se/broker/portal/cfl/Login.aspx). They've got 10,000 downloadable learning objects available, most of which have been contributed by people working in schools. However, they still haven't addressed the important issues yet. Participation is free and unwaged, and you have to relinquish copyright on anything you put in there. On the other hand, Kursnavet is reaching a point of critical mass, where the issue of how to handle free material is coming to a head. I think it's very likely that they will devise a system to deal with the problems … and I think that the solutions will be collective, and will address the power structures within education. However, time will tell …

If "religious values are objective", why do we keep having all these wars of religion?