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It was bound to happen: the
Religious Right gripes about having both feet in their mouths, until
someone will come along and provide an answer to their constant
complaining. If they would pay as much attention to their own business as
they do to that of everyone else, and learn to understand what they don't
know about everybody else's way of understanding things instead of finding
ways to mistreat them, they'd suffer a whole bunch less from the results
of all their own backfiring torment and misuse of language.
Back when the ability to read a Bible and count the cattle
in a field was all anyone needed to become a teacher, we only had the
three R's to learn. Life was simpler then, until a bunch of rightwing
fundies decided to try to take over the country and started betraying our
trust with that end in mind. The leftwing fundies got caught by surprise,
and were so far behind by the time they caught on to what had happened
they still haven't caught up. They've been scrambling and, mouths lathered
with toxic vocabularies, the extreme rightists are scrambling just as hard
to get out of their way. Aghast at all the galloping hordes clawing toward
them, the finicky fanatics have only one direction to go, and that is
onward, but to the right. Always, to the right. It is like a race course,
always running in reverse, toward regression so that now the left is to
the right of center.
Lately, they've been looking over their shoulders and
laughing. It appears the lefties have been following their lead by
imitating them and, in the process, are now occupying the positions they
once had.
The biggest problem is, that is just plain not funny. It's
dangerous and wrong. Read the Ten R's and see if you can figure out what
the once-secular left has abandoned.
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Reading:
A solid foundation in human linguistics not
only enables a grasp of sometimes esoteric concepts and an ability to
learn new subjects, it increases the range of thought available to
individuals and groups. Persons well-schooled in grammar, spelling and
punctuation will find subject matter now deemed to be "hard" and
mystifying has become easy to understand. Such persons will also spot
errors in text that lead to false logic, and so will be harder to
manipulate by those with questionable intentions.
Writing:
Reading does not automatically lead to great
writing. Holding a reader’s interest is a skill that can be taught, to
be sure, but the ability to express one’s thoughts without obfuscating
their meanings requires experience and practice. Grammar that
makes reading materials obviously correct becomes a stumbling block to a
writer just learning to apply it to his own work, and great spelling
gets lost among the flying fingers tangling their way around on a
keyboard, as does punctuation.
As we negotiate what has sometimes been called "the
information age", the ability to express ourselves needs to be taught
and nurtured. Writing helps us make our inner self visible to others,
more visible to ourselves, and enables us to become aware of
contradictions of thought that we can then research and set straight.
Arithmetic:
Math enables conceptual thinking that cannot
exist without it. Math, combined with a good grounding in logic, enables
one to spot the fallacies inherent to much of what passes as creative
thought. Math also provides direction in scientific research by enabling
a form of proofing that does not require a material presence in order to
verify a concept. Math eliminates much of the necessity for trial and
error approaches to many elements of our existence by enabling us to
figure ahead of time what will work, what will not, and how best to
configure and lay it out for actual testing.
Reasoning:
The ability to figure things out will grow out from all of the
foregoing, plus a carefully nurtured environment that spawns freedom of
thought. Most of us, untrained and unskilled in critical thought
techniques, reason according to emotional inputs, and end up choosing
what feels best rather than what would be most beneficial. All of
humanity suffers accordingly when even a large portion of us perform
wrongly, as a result. Where one is well aware of the natural
consequences of most potential actions, however, one schooled in reason
and science can extrapolate the consequences of unfamiliar activities
and devise safe experiments to verify their results. A long passage of
time in a purely secular setting will enable a human culture to gain the
experience necessary to eliminate the need for most such experiments,
since they will have already been done. Whereas, for now, few have been
done yet.
Relationships:
A ‘no-no’ in polite discussions under our
current standards, human relationships of all kinds must be taught to
every student beginning at their youngest ages. First, though, adults
must learn a factual understanding of the hows, whys and wherefores
about natural human beings in a purely secular society, rather than act
according to the misrepresentations, assumptions and unsupported dire
predictions that we live according to in our current primitive social
world. Such elements as compunctions and all the various fears must be
addressed, their sources made known, and their necessities or realities
assessed according to whether they enhance and stimulate healthy
relationships, or actually work to prevent them. All of that should
result from a careful experimental science rather than hypothetical
notions set forth with trepidation and no real foundation.
Responsibility: Under current conditions we
must resort to teaching ourselves to become aware of how human
relationships work. As a result, most of us never get to observe that
what we expect from others may not be what they expect from us.
The tendency to assume responsibility where it is not
obviously required, and make it obvious to others we consider ourselves
responsible for the effects of our own deeds and will act accordingly,
while present in most people, does not get the development it deserves.
While the responsibility to steer ourselves on a pathway to our goals
belongs to each of us and no one else, a large portion of us do not
accept that as factual. A majority of us get instilled with an idea that
we are somehow undeserving of opportunity, that natural individuals are
incapable of moral thought and behavior, and that we must each be
controlled according to unsubstantiated edicts from unverifiable
sources. As a result, not only do we maintain a tendency to blame others
for wrongs we see as such, rather than express tolerance for others'
rights to behavior and lifestyles innocent of real harm to themselves
and those around them, we are in social decline as a result of those who
have found ways to take advantage of dogma developed from those errant
teachings and develop it for their own ends.
The problems rise from our absence of understanding that
and, even though we expound upon the way we value freedom in our western
cultures, our absence of full acceptance of self-responsibility, and
intolerance of others' unique attempts to apply it in their own lives,
all give rise to a general refusal to accept it as a necessary adjunct
of personal freedom.
Respect:
Another aspect of relationship knowledge, students are taught to be
respectful (if at all) but not respectable. In a kind of circular
relationship, the only way to gain respectability is to earn and give
respect, which requires each one of us to learn tolerance and to not
demand that others be clones of our own selves, and also to learn how to
think for ourselves and to prioritize.
Advice? If you fail to set a goal that you respect,
reorganize yourself to see what went wrong. Look for a respectable goal
if you don't already have one in mind, and work to establish that and
tend to it. Remember, it is you who must respect your goal, and no one
else. Self respect is where respect begins. Self respect provides the
instruction set for gaining the respect of others.
Religion?
NO! We all must face life with many questions not answered, and with
no idea whether any or all of our questions are valid. Religion is built
from hypotheses, not answers, but provides a framework in which to hold
tentative answers while we go about our daily lives. We who function
without religion know we function best when we maintain awareness of its
correct role in each of our existences, and at our worst when we fail to
keep our hypotheses synchronized with the current state of general
knowledge.
So, what is the '8th R' if it's not religion? We who
function without religion also know that double-duty is performed in
this position, by Rescue and Recovery. The
role religion plays, in the lives of those who suffer from it, is to
usurp self-awareness and force a religious guidance system into its
place. In all the Arabian religions it begins from shortly after birth
and continues through aversive reinforcement for the victims' lifetimes.
Religion is not an intellectual problem, but a problem of the emotions.
Without an emotional input demanding precedence over the intellect,
religion is meaningless. Most people on the brink of leaving their
religions feel an emptiness, and realize that is telling them something
is missing from their lives, and mistake that something for some
emanation of a god. Most never realize that something is the
'self' that religion took away from them before they ever had a chance
to become self-aware. Some have lost their sanity, most lose their
exuberance and never discover what they lack. Rescue and
Recovery, then, are large-scale operations typically
undertaken by lone individuals not quite certain what it is they're
after. Atheists and other secular people must learn to understand that,
come to terms with it, and learn effective teaching methods to help
those searching for what they often call 'spirituality', the missing
'self' and the sense of direction that gives to all who find it.
Rectitude:
We are not honestly taught, and so cannot understand how the straight
and honest person of recognizable rectitude will not always be the one
with correct answers, but will as often be the one with the best-aimed
questions. Admission of ignorance is the first step toward rectitude's
acquisition, and saves many hours, and sometimes whole lifetimes, of
living through the application of wrong answers to questions improperly
posed and asked. It is, of course, important to be right about
many things, but misinformation that dominates educational systems
cannot provide more than a chimera of rectitude that requires a
majority's unquestioning belief for its endurance.
Righteousness:
A cousin of rectitude, it is not the being of
right, but the search for what's right, that promotes righteousness in a
person. Only an honest person on a quest to practice factuality can
rightfully claim to be morally upright. Diligent adherence to such
standards as are set forth in this list of Ten R's prepares a person for
elevation above simple animal existence as suffered by the apathetic and
dogmatically blinded who will consider him or her to be a fool.
Righteousness, the wise will know, results from one's own standards as
set forth in this list, but applied from within and not imposed from
without.
FREEDOM must necessarily be understood to refer to unrestrained
individual capacity to do what any person understands to be right, with
laws set in place for guidance more than restriction.
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