That and the whole 'hey, let's found a religion based on my wish to marry my pregnant mistress! Yeah! And let's steal all the stuff those bloody monks have got, while we trash their monasteries. Hmm. I liked it when the Pope called me Defender of the Faith for refuting some other guy's protestantism, so I think I'll keep that title. But bollocks to his Church! Yeah! Go me! Somebody bring me another stoop of WINE!' approach to Christianity demonstrated by Henry VIII. Which tends to stop me from taking the C of E terribly seriously as an institution. But that's just me.

I just bought a board game, called Here I Stand, which covers the period of the Reformation. It's rather delightfully asymmetrical. The players are the Hapsburgs, the Ottomans, the French, the English, the Papacy and the Protestants. And they all have different goals (the Ottomans are pretty much entirely conquest-and-piracy focused, while the Papacy and Protestants fight over the hearts and minds of Europe, and the Hapsburgs, in addition to their extensive territorial concerns, also get points for exploring the New World). The English player gets extra points for Henry VIII cycling through his six wives in an effort to produce an Edward.

Interesting.

There was a girl in my sister's class in elementary school who was Jehovah's Witness (I think), and she always left the room in the morning when the rest of the class said the Pledge of Allegiance. Other than that, we were never divided up by religion. (Well, except for one awful high school English teacher, and a biology teacher who, when we each had to write a paper on a genetic disease, would always assign Tay-Sachs to a Jewish kid.) Teachers generally wouldn't assign homework over Yom Kippur (though we sometimes had to remind them), but they pretty much ignored most other Jewish holidays. The cafeteria always served fish on Fridays during Lent. There weren't really enough Muslim kids to make Ramadan an issue. (As far as I can recall, there were only two Muslim kids in the school the whole six years I was there.)

I can only recall a few times that religious issues became anything more than a "Huh, you do that? That's interesting." There was one time that a kid on line for pizza in the cafeteria asked a friend (loudly enough for the whole line to hear), "What's the difference between a pizza and a Jew?" The answer was "A pizza doesn't scream when you put it in an oven." (Ouch. That hurt just to type it.) A Jewish kid threw a pen at him, and a teacher who had overheard yelled at the kid who'd told the joke and made him apologize. Another time, some Catholic kids put up signs all over school advertising a CYO event. Several of us complained to the principal, since we'd been told that we couldn't put up fliers for a Girl Scout event because no signs like that were allowed for anything that wasn't school-sponsored. The principal said we were right, they shouldn't have put up the signs, but he didn't make them take the signs down.

(My school was somewhere around 50% Catholic, 30% Christians of other sorts, 5-10% Jewish, and most of the rest Hindu.)

Um. I think I lost the point of this post somewhere a few paragraphs back.

That's - well, I see what you mean, but I don't think I'd have put it that way. But I see what you mean.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if I hadn't expressed it very well.

school assemblies are less overtly Christian than they used to be

For sure. That is to say, if they used to be Christian at all, they now almost never are. At my primary school we had a few overtly Christian things-- like a nativity play-- but I think we spent quite as much time on Eid (we had a large percentage of Muslim children). I missed a chunk of my secondary education, but in the five years I was attending assemblies there I don't think I heard more than two which were religious-- usually there was vague moralising, so if anything we were being pushed towards a sort of wishy-washy unnamed utilitatianism. I always suspected that it was less because it would be offensive to teach Christianity than because not enough of our teachers had a strong enough faith, of any religion, to actually stand up and talk about it confidently, but that could be wrong.

school uniforms, hockey sticks and mandatory Latin

I did have two of these three. But there wasn't even an option to do Latin, which I now rather regret.

Hil, your story reminds me of overhearing two boys discussing a classmate of mine (who, for added irony, would later convert to Islam when his mother started dating a Muslim). The first boy said, "I hate M." The second agreed, "Yeah, he's a Jew." The first added, "And a Nazi." The second concluded, "That's right-- he's a Jewish Nazi."

I concluded that they didn't know what the words actually meant.

I don't recall religion being mentioned once when I went to highschool. No prayer at school. No special privileges for certain religions. No marking religious holidays besides the standard xian holidays of xmas and Easter. No special foods in the tuck shop. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Which is how it should be in a secular state school.

You want religious shit for your child, then you pay the dosh and put them in a religious school. You want your kid in a secular state school, then fuck off with the religious crap and get off your high-horse when it comes to school prayer and bending over for the priest.

I am very glad for the extra exposure I got to Judaism. Above and beyond what you learn from your frieds, I got to listen to rabbis speak, and hear traditions explained, the whole deal.

I think my school, once they got over my way of not being Christian, was a very good just-a-little-religious school.

the Papacy and Protestants fight over the hearts and minds of Europe

Do the Protestants actually manage to caucus and, like, work together on stuff?? Or do they suddenly in the middle of the game get to attack each other and burn each other at the stake?

Do the Protestants actually manage to caucus and, like, work together on stuff?? Or do they suddenly in the middle of the game get to attack each other and burn each other at the stake?

The Protestants are a single player, so barring multiple personality disorder or being played by my brother, they work together. However, the game does allow for different personalities among religious debaters (both on the Protestant and Catholic sides) in the form of different bonuses to religious actions.

Does anyone know the keyboard shortcut to make the pound sign? I tried alt + some numbers, but it didn't work.

ita's entities page has it - [link]

This one? £

Obama hits back at Howard

February 12, 2007 - 8:02AM

US presidential hopeful Barack Obama this morning blasted as "empty rhetoric" Australian Prime Minister Howard's attack on his plan for a 2008 withdrawal of Iraq troops.

"I think it's flattering that one of George Bush's allies on the other side of the world started attacking me the day after I announced," Obama told reporters in the mid-western US state of Iowa.

"I would also note that we have close to 140,000 troops in Iraq, and my understanding is Mr Howard has deployed 1400, so if he is ... to fight the good fight in Iraq, I would suggest that he calls up another 20,000 Australians and sends them to Iraq.

"Otherwise it's just a bunch of empty rhetoric."

Howard earlier attacked Obama's plan to withdraw US combat troops from Iraq by March 31, 2008.

The conservative leader said on commercial television that Obama's pledges on Iraq were good news only for insurgents operating in the war-ravaged country.

"I think he's wrong. I think that will just encourage those who want to completely destabilise and destroy Iraq, and create chaos and a victory for the terrorists to hang on and hope for an Obama victory," Howard told the Nine Network.

"If I were running al-Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008 and be praying as many times as possible for a victory not only for Obama but also for the Democrats."

Democrats react angrily

A string of Democrats have reacted angrily to Mr Howard's comments which have received widespread media coverage in the US.

Terry McAuliffe, a former chairman of the Democratic National Convention, criticised Mr Howard's strong links to US President George Bush.

"The prime minister has been a great friend of George Bush's, he has been with him lock-step from day one on this war in Iraq," Mr McAuliffe said.

"He and George Bush, they can go off and talk to each other, we don't care what he says."

Democrat senator Ron Wyden said it was hard to be polite about Mr Howard. "The most charitable thing you can say about Mr Howard's comment is bizarre," Senator Wyden said.

"We'll make our own judgments in this country with respect to elections and Barack Obama is a terrific public servant."

Even Republicans have criticised Mr Howard for interfering in US domestic affairs.

"I would prefer that Mr Howard stay out of our domestic politics and we will stay out of his domestic politics," Texas Republican senator John Cornyn said.