Secular Right

By way of celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, I reviewed Kevin Myers’ memoir of the Northern Ireland troubles, Watching the Door, for Taki’s Magazine. (Review not yet posted.)

I noticed the following curiosity on p.159, though I didn’t include it in my review.

Within the Protestant folklore [i.e. of working-class Northern Ireland] Catholics were immigrants from backward, southern Ireland …  into Protestant Ulster. Catholics didn’t keep their word, and were lazy and ignorant; and indeed there were elements of truth in the broadstroke mythologies.

For there was a dysfunctional quality to Catholic education. Catholic schools did not teach engineering, metalwork, or mechanical drawing — and this in an economy which had been traditionally based on engineering. So, if a business was looking for a fifteen-year-old apprentice, which would it choose — the little Catholic lad with his Latin, or the Protestant boy with an entire array of technical skills?

To be sure, there was little enough evidence that engineering firms were thirsting to give jobs to Catholics: but the Catholic educational system actually made discrimination against Catholics wiser to implement. For Catholic schools had their eyes on the professions: low achievement for the unscholarly was a pathological norm within Catholic working-class society. One can loathe [Provisional IRA terrorist commanders] Martin McGuiness and Gerry Adams and their deeds, yet at the same time recognize that they are men of extraordinary intelligence and talent. Both left school without a single qualification, McGuinness to become an apprentice butcher, Adams to become a barman.

This prompted a number of thoughts. There is, for example, the broad educational issue probed in Charles Murray’s recent book Real Education, about the overly academic emphasis of current U.S. public education, with its implicit assumption that every student is headed for law school — what Steve Sailer calls the “Yale or jail” approach. My son’s school has no shop classes.  This seems to be the same educational problem Myers is talking about.

Then I got to wondering if this a true thing about Catholic education in general. I have no clue, but perhaps readers with an experience of parochial education in the U.S. might offer opinions. It does seem to be broadly true, in my experience anyway, that there’s a sort of nit-picking argumentativeness that you find much more in well-educated Catholics than in others. Do Catholic educators spend so much time hammering grand metaphysical schemas into their students’ heads — the blessed Aristotle, the sainted Aquinas, and the rest — and training them in arguments they can use to confound heretics and unbelievers, they have no time for anything practical? It fits with the general high quality of Catholic intellectuals (assuming you like intellectuals …), but I’m really just curious to hear opinions.

Kevin Myers is himself Irish-Catholic, by the way, though he was raised in England.

Writing in the London Times, Dominic Lawson interviews a Muslim woman who converted to Christianity:

Hannah’s description in the book of the moment when her “community” discovered the “safe” home where she had fled after becoming an apostate is terrifying. A mob with her father at its head pounded and hammered at the door as she cowered upstairs hoping she could not be seen or heard. She heard her father shout through the letter box: “Filthy traitor! Betrayer of your faith! Cursed traitor! We’re going to rip your throat out! We’ll burn you alive!”

Does she still believe they would have killed her? “Yes, without a doubt. They had hammers and knives and axes.”

Why didn’t you call the police after-wards? “First, I didn’t think the police would believe me. That sort of thing just doesn’t happen in this country – or that’s what they’d think. Second, I didn’t believe I would get help or protection from the authorities.”

Hannah had good reason for this doubt…

Indeed she did. Read the whole thing.

Via the Independent…

Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, the student journalist sentenced to death for blasphemy in Afghanistan, has been told he will spend the next 20 years in jail after the country’s highest court ruled against him – without even hearing his defence.

The 23-year-old, brought to worldwide attention after an Independent campaign, was praying that Afghanistan’s top judges would quash his conviction for lack of evidence, or because he was tried in secret and convicted without a defence lawyer. Instead, almost 18 months after he was arrested for allegedly circulating an article about women’s rights, any hope of justice and due process evaporated amid gross irregularities, allegations of corruption and coercion at the Supreme Court. Justices issued their decision in secret, without letting Mr Kambaksh’s lawyer submit so much as a word in his defence.

The notion that a bright line can be drawn between ‘Science’ and ‘Politics’ is as often used to mislead as to enlighten. The stem cell controversy was always about more than the science and it was typically disingenuous of President Obama to pretend otherwise. Quite how disingenuous is highlighted by this piece in the Economist, which notes the irony implicit in the fact that the president has also taken it upon himself to condemn human cloning for reproductive purposes as “profoundly wrong” (indeed he has said that it should be prohibited). Now Mr. Obama may or may not be right about this (the answer, I suspect, is that it rather depends…) but his own comments show that when it comes to this whole field, the debate will be anything but just-the-science. It would be a great deal healthier if everyone could just admit it.

Mr. Hume’s post on “Religion & Age”  left hanging the question whether there might be a general trend for individuals to get more religious as they get older. The Inductivist has taken up the issue.  He says no.

This report in Christian Science Monitor is getting some air time. It seems speculative & data-free to me, but I really don’t know much about evangelicals.

A follow up to Bradlaugh’s post. In the GSS you can look at religious identification as a function of age. Below the fold is a chart where each bar is a year from age 18 up to 88. 89 and up are aggregated as the last bar on the right. Nothing surprising, but the clarity of the trend is bracing.

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From the news wire this morning:

A wide-ranging study on American religious life found that the Roman Catholic population has been shifting out of the Northeast to the Southwest, the percentage of Christians in the nation has declined and more people say they have no religion at all.

Fifteen percent of respondents said they had no religion, an increase from 14.2 percent in 2001 and 8.2 percent in 1990, according to the American Religious Identification Survey.

Northern New England surpassed the Pacific Northwest as the least religious region, with Vermont reporting the highest share of those claiming no religion, at 34 percent. Still, the study found that the numbers of Americans with no religion rose in every state.

“No other religious bloc has kept such a pace in every state,” the study’s authors said.