Oh dear, Boris grasps wrong end of stick

[UnquietDad]

My mother mentioned she'd be sending me this article, which is always rather ominous - she usually does that to "win" some argument or other, with passages out of context triumphantly underlined or highlighted. (Does anyone else's mother do this? Or is it just mine??)

So I thought I'd better pre-empt her by looking it up.

here it is

Boris talks sense 90% of the time, and indeed does so for about 90% of this article, but then spoils it all by going off into some half-baked non-sequiturs about religion. I hope he doesn't really believe the guff he talks here about it. My feeling is that he doesn't.

He surely comes up with a partial answer earlier in the piece: that they, and other boys like them, are lacking the moral guidance of strong paternal discipline - i.e. a father figure in the here and now, rather than one in the imagined Hereafter.

Contrast Shaun Bayley's article on the same issue, which manages to come up with strong solutions without ever mentioning religion.

Nobody bothered?...

boy, you're impatient just reading articles now.

was also an interesting thread on shaun bailey's views in the 'current affairs' section, btw...

I started a thread about Shaun Bailey here after listening to him on R2 discussing this tragic murder.

I wouldn't have been bothered at 1.25 this morning, and have to go and do some work now....

saw thread title, assumed it was about WelshBoris! Think I should go and sit quietly somewhere and muse on how I may be getting the balance wrong between MN and RL!!

I'm bothered, it's just taken me half an hour to wade through Shaun Bayley's article!

I appreciate what both men are saying, and although I personally think Bayley is barking up the wrong tree in his assumption of why young men become suicide bombers, they both represent viewpoints from both sides of the fence so to speak. Johnson in his squillion pound ivory tower luxury apartment in Kensington and Bayley as someone who grew up on a London council estate and has seen and experienced the issues that he talks about first hand, and that's why he can talk so openly and honestly about what's going wrong.

Speaking of which, where has she been lately?

Doesn't Bayley also make the point that the eradication of religion from our society is something to be sorry about?

Like it or not, religion sets boundaries. Studies show that young people with a faith are more happy. It's very often Christian groups that are out there trying to sort the poverty, the cheap sex culture, the drugs, the hanging around. It's what true Christianity is about - not making arses of ourselves by banging on about women bishops or gay clergy.

Of course, you don't have to be have a faith (I hate the word 'religious') to have boundaries or to care about the poor or to have a moral code to live by. But for those of us who do, it makes a difference to how we live - and it's not hard to see why it might make a difference to those who are totally lost.

Is it really that big a deal to suggest that religion might help? I understand that you have a secular outlook, but if bringing faith to these areas can stop just a bit of what is happening why would you object?

I think Boris makes some good points but coming from him, it sounds hollow. He has no idea of what it is like to live in the environment that these killers hail from. Also, people from these environments do not want to be lectured to by the privileged few like him because they know that Boris and his ilk cannot empathise in anyway with how they live day in and day out.

As for Boris calling on religion to be used as a tool to provide moral instruction, these kids are likely to call him a hyprocrite when it comes to morals as he is an adulterer. Shaun Bailey on the other hand, knows what he is talking about, he grew up in these deprived areas and it is people like him who actually work with these problem kids, who will make a real difference and be listened to. Not the likes of Boris who only ever talk without actually doing anything whilst sipping Pimms in their cosy ivory tower.

I found the comments to Boris's article very disturbing, I just can't get my head around the idea that murder by an individual is wrong, but murder by the state is all fine and dandy

Shaun Bayley's article was disturning in a different way, as it highlighted some of the fears I have for my own children, in particular his comments on overcrowding (I have 3 children in one bedroom too).

Having said that, I live in South London and I feel safer walking the streets now than I did a few years ago, but I don't live on a dodgy estate. When I was a child it was fear of gluesniffers, skinheads and muggings, the fear just seems to have shifted onto another section of society now.

Shaun Bailey certainly does mention religion:

"Removing religion and what it is to be British from school has been a disaster. Where else are young people going to learn ethics?"

I think Boris should stick to keeping us entertained!

Every reasonable person will share his contempt at the little bastards, but I found his article lazy and his suggested solution even lazier.

To be fair, he's limited by column inches, but if I was going to over-simplify I'd have pointed to a benefit system that penalises households where ANYONE works. Hence the predominance of non-working single parent households with limited discipline and no working role-models. And religion ain't gonna solve that little gem.

I agree religion CAN provide a moral frame-work. It can also provide an extrememly immoral one.

It actually saddens me that society's lost an intrinsic sense of what's right, wrong or just downright inconsiderate, and the suggestion that we need to look to religion to provide this guidance.

It didn't even occur to me that "boris" might be ambiguous! Sorry.

OK, my mistake: Bayley does say in passing "Removing religion and what it is to be British from school has been a disaster. Where else are young people going to learn ethics?" (I'm not sure quite what he means there. When he says "where else", does he mean from religion, or in schools?)
You can learn ethics with no reference to religion.

Has religion been "removed" from school? I'm all in favour of children learning about religion, as it's culturally significant and it would be stupid to ignore it - just not that a particular religion is the path to moral rightness.

It's not the main thrust of his article that we "need" religion, though, and it's not part of his "action points" at the end.

It seems worryingly simplistic to say that people's lives can be turned around simply by exposing them to a religious framework. People have to realise that their actions have an effect in the real world - surely faith only works as a deterrent if what is being preached is undeniably true. For a moral framework to work, the effects of evil actions have to be clear and demonstrable. So far better surely to concentrate on what happens in this life, and to educate young thugs and hooligans in the demonstrable real-world effects of their actions.

Surely the one key thing in disciplining children is making them realise that actions have consequences - that's why I, as an atheist, would not go out and stab someone. I know it would hurt, I know it would cause untold grief, I know it would make me end up in prison.

To teach that WE, as a human race, find such things abhorrent, rather than God - and that someone who wants to be a decent member of the human race should not do such things - is, for me, a stronger message than one framed by religious teaching.

Religions have come and gone with civilisations - humanity, and rationalism, have endured. Who, these days believes in Zeus, or Isis and Osiris? Christianity is still a young religion, and probably hasn't yet peaked, but in two or three thousand years' time, to worship the God of Christianity may well be as laughable as sun-worship is to us today. More meaningful, surely, to establish our own code of behaviour based entirely on how we, as human beings, would like others to behave towards us.

Yes, Speedymama, Henley on Thames doesn't exactly qualify you to comment on inner London estates!

Not that he isn't entitled to an opinion, but I doubt very much that Boris has spent much time in that environment which (for me) just proves Shaun Bailey's point about ill-informed, misjudged policy making. However well intentioned.

Becky, I was not disputing the fact that religion should not be used. I was pointing out the fact that coming from someone like Boris, it sounds hyprocritical and I think that is something that people like him do not consider. These kids see people like Boris lecturing to them about how they should be living but at the same time, he is commiting adultery and jeapordising the security as well as the emotional welfare of his own children. It is a case of do what we say but not as we do. Cameron talks about broken families but how many MPs themselves are responsible for creating single parent households?

If I was from a deprived environment, I'd be more inclined to listen to someone like Shaun Bailey who actually knows what he is talking about rather than the likes of Boris who thinks he knows. That is how one gets through to these kids.

Becky, after seeing Unquiet Dads post, I think your comment was aimed at him - sorry for confusion.

Unqueitdad, of course it is possible to have a moral framework without God. But without God some people have no such framework - so might it not be an idea to see if for them a faith-based way of living might work? There are different ways for different people. I'm no fan of Alpha, for example, but for some people who are very lost its certainties provide the rock that they need to turn their lives around.

You also misunderstand why Christians try to live by a moral code. It's not about worrying what God approves or disapproves of. It's because we try to see the world as we think God does. So it's about trying to love other people as God would. It's about the outcast, the rejected, the lost - and that includes the rich as much as the kid on the estate. It's about regarding every life as sacred, even those I might feel are unfit to live. And it's about loving myself as God loves me, and so wanting to avoid what is destructive to myself. And truly aiming for the Kingdom of God means bringing that about now, by eradicating poverty and injustice, not by waiting for the second coming.

Of course, there are some out there who distort religion for their own ends. It saddens me more than I can say that in Blair and Bush we have two immoral leaders who parade their piety. But a secular viewpoint doesn't automatically come with a moral framework either, or we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Nearlythree, I just don't see what introducing God adds when it comes to a moral framework. (brought up Catholic, so I do understand the Christian structures).

Is it the idea of the 'higher power'? i.e. they don't respect the authority of anyone on this planet, therefore lets defer to an even more important guy?

Shouldn't we just fix the social issues that have caused their attitude and lack of respect in the first place?

Sometimes I think religion is misunderstood.
Religion provides a framework, yes. However, the framework cannot be understood unless you believe in God enough to understand what it means.
I think it's easy to be religious without understanding God.
But it's understanding what God means that makes good people not religion.
God is such a personal thing and I really do think that talking about religion quite often misses this important fact.

No, it's because if you really have a belief in God - really believe in God, not in some institutionalised religion that (probably unconsciously) has its own ends in mind by keeping people 'faithful' rather than freeing them - then you know yourself to be loved, and of worth. That is what these kids don't have. They have no self-love, no self-worth, other than what they can steal by destroying it in others.

Our churches seem to be more keen on our 'sinfulness' than the fact that we are sacred beings and are worthy of love.

But there are no certainties in religion. You may find them, nearlythree, but that's because you are coming from a particular religious standpoint which is - if you'll forgive me - inevitably going to be coloured by what you believe. I know all about Alpha courses - DW went on one.

Why should I structure my moral framework around your God rather than Isis or Thor or Apollo? (Why should a young thug do so?) As a Christian, you are presumably sceptical about these gods - in order to believe in your Gods, you disbelieve 99% of the Gods who have turned up in human mythology throughout the ages. I just go one step further and disbelieve 100% of them.

I still maintain that "a decent member of human race doesn't DO this" it is a far stronger message to give to young people who have gone off the rails than any religious teaching.

in your GOD, I beg your pardon. Typo.

I understand what you're saying about true belief in a (good) god leading to a greater sense of self-worth, but you can't really create that belief if it doesn't already exist, can you?

And the 'discipline' side of religion (thou shalt/shalt not) does tend to come from religious institutions. To understand what God would want/would have done (to treat him as a role model in the way you suggest) you need to have studied some form of text (unless you make up your own God!) and it's at that point that religion gets distorted.

Of course there are no certainities in religion, it's faith. But faith works for some. We've tried secularism, why not give faith a try?

(Did your dw like Alpha?)

I don't think we HAVE tried secularism, have we? (We've tried denial of Christianity as part of multi-culturalism, but that's not the same)