On being in a religious country

Here's a question.  And I'm not being funny, it's actually serious.  If you'd want your children to opt out of the Nativity play/Christmas activities would you also opt them out of Diwali, Hanakka, Chinese New Years activities that most schools have children participate in? 

That is a good question.  And then indeed what do you do when they start introducing curriculum that is based in a particular philosophy (and what isn't?).  Humans rely on belief systems to exist, even if it's a simple empiricism, so there would be no way to extract ourselves from them if we wanted to.  I think the reasonable thing to do is to allow our kids to participate in return for the schools doing the reasonable thing and trying to weight things as evenly as possible. 

I don't have kids so I'm a marginal commentator here. But I'd prefer if children didn't do any kind of religious ceremony, which is a different thing than having them learning about different customs. Here's my reasons, other than separation of church and state. Firstly, there's too many religions that would require observation and I'm not sure that this is the best use of schooltime.

Secondly, when schools tend to do these things, they tend to homogenize them as if the holiday meant the same thing to all the members of that religion. Obviously this isn't the case. Christmas means differnt things, has different emphases, and even different dates among the spectrum of Christian groups (Russian Orthodox, greek Orthodox, Catholic, analytical Protestantism, evangelical Protestantism). Here's another example: Chanukah. In the hierarchy of Jewish holidays, Hanukah is nearly at the bottom of the list of importance. Essentially, it's a holiday celebrating national independence with the Macabbee insurgency throwing out the Greek imperialists. That is to say that it doesn't have much religious components. The rabbis who decided what texts would be included in the Old Testament where so upset by the secular nature of the Book of Maccabees that they did something very unusual: they added a second book, which now contains a description of "miracles" in order to give it a religious overlay.

For many centuries, Hannukah wasn't celebrated that deeply, and often its main image, other than the special candle-holder, was that of elephants, since they were used by the Greeks as war-machines. Only after the State of Israel was declared did Hannukah began to be a big deal, since Israelis turned it into a kind of second Independence Day celebration (something that makes the days awkward for non-Zionist Jews). And with the increasing commercialization of Christmas in the US, Hannuak became a kind of surrogate retail opportunity, which also bothers a lot of Jews, since traditional Jewish law has a lot of regulations about not allowing wealth disparities to be seen within the ethnie. Now it would be interesting for students to know the internal differences among holders of the same religion, but I'm not sure that a relatively untrained secular teacher could pull this off in ways that aren't offensive. These would be better served in a space about the sociology of religion, not in an attempt to mime the events.

Back to context. Why can't the period be simply a secular holiday time? England has a perfectly fine alternative tradition for this period, which is the tradition of children's pantos. I'd rather children act out some fairy tale or pirate narrative than a nativity scene.

There are plenty of non religious traditons associated with Xmas -  hanging up a stocking, pulling crackers, and as lightbulb mentions, pantomimes - these are all non religious aspects of the "festive season" which encompasses not only Xmas, but also the New Year (- the Gregorian New Year that is - will anyone else here be celebrating Nor Ruz with me in March?) but as has been said previously, Xmas is, when you come down to it, a Christian festival. So, when your (real or hypothetical) kids ask you what it's all about, what should you tell them? That it's a commercially driven consumer gimmick or that some people believe that the son of god was born at this time?   

I don't have kids so I'm a marginal commentator here. But I'd prefer if children didn't do any kind of religious ceremony, which is a different thing than having them learning about different customs. Here's my reasons, other than separation of church and state. Firstly, there's too many religions that would require observation and I'm not sure that this is the best use of schooltime.

But there is no seperation of Church and State.  That was my origional point.  You and I knowingly moved to a country where the head of state is also the head of the church.  I knowingly placed my children in a school where RE is taught and Christmas is observed.  Therefore it is a bit rich to want Christmas to be observed as a secular holiday.  It isn't.  It's a Christian festival.  And as a person who DOES have children in the school system, I would say that they don't go over the top in the religious aspect.  They have the nativity, they go over the birth of Jesus-in more detail than I ever learned in Sunday School I might add-and they make decorations, exchange cards and have trees.  They really are not forcing a belief on the children. 

I do think it's interesting how the Americans and British have sorted out the religious and the secular.  It was confusing me for me because I come from an overstatedly Christian country that still somehow manages the, 'separation of church and state' thing (sorta).  Here was my mistake; I figured that The ACLU = lefty politics.  In the US, schools are very much governed by politics. The UK is more lefty politically (I think), than the US.   Hence, I figured that the British would take the ACLU-type ethic even further and the public sector would be even more secular.   In other words, I expected the UK to be every bit as binary as the US.  I expect that countries will have different ideas, but that they will be similarly partitioned.  I'm not sure how to describe it, but in the UK it seems that ideas and practice are more infused and intertwined and everything amalgamates to make British Culture.  I think it's almost a good thing; commonly held notions like those relating to human rights are enacted upon more quickly and meaningul cultural elements, like little kids in nativity plays, take longer to disappear.

Here's another way of conceptualizing it. The US was founded on the cutting-edge, for the 18C, notion of inalienable human rights. That means we have certain rights that are "natural"; they come with sheer existence. Monarchical and despotic States attempt to impinge on these rights and therefore there has to be protective devices, like the separation of church and state.

The UK's evolved history depends on the notion of civil liberties, not civil rights. The keyword distinction matters. Liberties are social powers that are granted to a subject (in this case by the monarch) and they can be removed. Rights are not given to us, we automatically have them.

One of the confusing things in UK juridicality now is the that there's a cross-hatching between EU law on human rights (since modern France also was based on the universal rights of humans) and UK law of civil liberties. So for instance the Law Lords declared that detaining the Belmarsh prisoners violated human rights, but this declaration doesn't have any force to change the event, which a Supreme Court ruling would. No one here exactly knows how to bring the two systems into harmony.

I'd argue that one reason why customs last longer here is that because it is a liberty-based society, rather than a rights-based one, there is the tendency to expect that change must come from the top-down. Right-based Americans think that change comes from the bottom up, from the demos.

So when the government, ie Blunkett, badmouthes multiculturalism and talks about how British Muslims need to acculturate in dominant British society, then there's not going to much change.

It would be unconstitutional for the courts here to be able to strike down legislation or actions of the government as the judiciary are not elected, they are appointed by the Government. Supreme Court judges in the US are elected.  That's the difference.

Sorry, that's incorrect. Supreme Court justices are appointed by the President and must be approved by the Congress. Furthermore, the position of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is entirely the President's prerogative and isn't vetted by Congress (so if Rhenquist drops dead, Bush can make his two morons of choice, Scalia or Thomas, the highest juridical authority in the land). While local judges are elected, anything above that (State Supreme court; federal circuit court; court of appeals; supreme court) is appointed. The distinction is that the UK ultimately believes in centralizing power and the US system was set up to decentralize it.

added later And that's the root of the problem with UK harmonization with EU. No one here really has a good conceptual grip on how a highly centralized system can be integrated within a federated one.

The distinction is that the UK ultimately believes in centralizing power and the US system was set up to decentralize it.

Though neo-con policy might lead a thinking person to question that. :/

Sorry, that's incorrect. Supreme Court justices are appointed by the President and must be approved by the Congress. Furthermore, the position of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is entirely the President's prerogative and isn't vetted by Congress (so if Rhenquist drops dead, Bush can make his two morons of choice, Scalia or Thomas, the highest juridical authority in the land). While local judges are elected, anything above that (State Supreme court; federal circuit court; court of appeals; supreme court) is appointed.

sorry you're right, my mistake, I don't know why I was thinking that. (too much Xmas cheer?!)

Yeah..certain populations are practically foaming at the mouth with anticipation that judges will die and candidates sensitive to their goals will be put in.  I've always thought that was a dodgy system.  Similar to a governor being able to ignore a board of appeals and send someone to the execution chair against their advice.

sorry you're right, my mistake, I don't know why I was thinking that. (too much Xmas cheer?!)

Not at all. Enjoy!

I suppose you could opt out of the Nativity play if you wanted to.  But in my opinion that would be akin to hanging a sign around your child's neck saying 'I'm different, please bully me'.  And part of that is from experience, I too went to school with a Jehovas

Yes, the pressure to conform (in a superficial manner) seems enormous here.  Which I suppose contradicts the idea that the Christmas emphasis is part of a light, cultural festivity, not at all about deeper experiences of the divine (baby X) and 'miracle' of God made flesh, etc.

Since many families decide prior to having kids, how they will deal with fantasy like fairies, Santa, Jesus, etc and whether these figures are 'real' or not, do you think these types of family discussions occur as a result of the nativity re enactment at school?  Or does it then swing back to 'it's just a tradition, no big fuss'? 

As I said previously, taking part in those kind of activities all through school did not stop me being an atheist. I knew at the age of 12 that I didn't believe in god and could have opted out of school prayers etc if I had wanted to but I didn't. Kids learn more than the story of Jesus from being in a Nativity Play. They learn social interaction skills, public speaking skills, how to memorise and repeat lines, have fun dressing up etc etc etc.  I strongly believe in letting children decide for themselves about religion. How can they do that if they are never exposed to any religious practices or traditions?