I posted a news article a while ago about a group of Mennonites who were forced to leave their homes and province because their school’s curriculum did not meet Quebec’s standards…
I just came across another interesting piece in the National Post about a new curriculum being introduced into Quebec schools. It is very ambitious in scope and will be incorporated into students education throughout primary and secondary education.
Here is a link to a video that is basically Quebec gov’n propaganda supporting the curriculum.
I guess it has always been a struggle for me to understand the separation of church and state. If one of the key tasks of the state is to uphold justice and if justice is ultimately rooted in who God is then the idea of separation of church and state is not clear… I think its a legitimate distinction (Luke 20:25) but it’s not black and white.
The church has already been pushed out of any meaningful contribution to public policy but now the gov’n is intruding into what has traditionally been the role of the church. Their message is relativism, the religion of secularism. And… attendance is mandatory. Maybe we could make church attendance mandatory as well!
Trudeau once said that the State has no business intruding into the bedrooms of its citizens… but apparently that is the only place that is off limits.
Anyway, read this article from the NP. I think the writer makes some good points.
It is interesting that, in the video, the question is posed, “On what is our decision about right or wrong based?” Something like that anyway. The answer seems to come only slightly later in the form of the Bill of Rights. So the Bill of Rights becomes the authority. Hmmmm. Another sample of man’s propensity to replace the Bible with man’s wisdom.
I came across this address by Solzhenitsyn to Harvard students (given one day before I was born!)
The whole thing can be found here
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/solzhenitsyn/harvard1978.html
I think it is worth a read. I just read it again with the media watchwords of our day in mind, ‘consumer debt’,’gov’n deficit’ ‘stimulus’, ‘billions of dollars spent here and there’. Our materialism is driving us into the loving arms of socialism, something, Solzhenitsyn knows a thing or two about.
After having spent four years living in the West, he was no more impressed with Western ideology than he was with Communism. Here are just few segments from his address,
“To such consciousness, man is the touchstone in judging and evaluating everything on earth. Imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now experiencing the consequences of mistakes which had not been noticed at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. This is the real crisis….
If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one’s life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it. It is imperative to review the table of widespread human values. Its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President’s performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism”