Pink Shirt Day: Stop Bullying Now

Well, I'm not wearing what you'd call a pink shirt today - it's more like a reddy-brown - but be that as it may, today is apparently celebrated as Pink Shirt Day, and that relates to Bullying.

I quote:

Pink Shirt Day aims to show that bullying is not ok and won't be tolerated. By encouraging the people of New Zealand to wear a Pink Shirt on the 28th of April we can help to raise awareness of bullying and show the massive amount of people who support taking a stance against bullying and believe that bullying should not be tolerated anywhere no matter what the reasons or circumstances are.

I say Amen to that. You can read a good deal more about bullying and what's being done about it on the Pink Shirt site, and also catch up with the recent Massey University study on bullying here. The latter deals primarily with workplace bullying; the Pink Shirt site is more focused on bullying in schools.

The patient is as well as may be expected

Massey University, in a survey of a 1000 New Zealanders, says results show there has been a 'sharp rise' in the number of New Zealanders with no religious affiliation. However, the 'sharp rise' has taken place over 17 years, and the rise is 11%, from 29% to 40%. Naturally, this survey result has had all sorts of anti-religious bodies telling us that religion is dead, from people on the RichardDawkins.net site to Jillian Whyte, who forecasts the future, to the Society of Atheists, Rationalists and Skeptics.

According to the survey, just over a third of New Zealanders describe themselves as religious, even though the last Census has more than 50% of people saying they have a religious affiliation, be it Christian or Buddhist or Muslim and so on.

As always it would be good to know what questions were asked of the respondents. We can get some idea from these 'results': Fifty-three per cent say they believe in God (although half of those say they have doubts), 20 per cent believe in some form of higher power and about third say they don't believe or don't know.

However, 60% (of parents, presumably) say they would prefer children to have a religious education in state primary schools - with strongest support for teaching about all faiths. Hmm, your children can be religious, but you as an adult don't have to be.

In the media release, Professor Philip Gendall, who led the research team, says the view that New Zealand is a very secular country is supported by the relatively low levels of active involvement in religion. “The survey shows that God is not dead, but religion may be dying," Professor Gendall says. This quote from Professor Gendall has made its way across the Internet in a couple of days. It's catchy, has a ring of truth, and is oddly ambiguous. The survey shows that God is not dead. Well, that's good for God to know!

Professor Gendall adds, “There is evidence that New Zealanders have become less religious over the last 17 years; however, most New Zealanders believe in God and there has been no change in the proportion of those who say they believe in a higher power.” So that bit about the 'sharp rise' was a bit of a headline rather than a reality? New Zealanders have become less religious but most still believe in God: does this mean that believing in God doesn't mean you're religious? I guess it could well do...

“So perhaps the apparent decline in religiosity reflects a decline in traditional religious loyalties - rather than a decline in spirituality as such.” And that may be much closer to the truth, a truth which churches are finding everywhere. People may not align themselves so readily to a particular denomination these days, and there is evidence that many people still regard themselves as Christians (as others probably regard themselves as Buddhists) without actually going to a church (or a Buddhist temple).

The study found that significant numbers of New Zealanders believe in the supernatural with 57 per cent believing in life after death, 51 per cent believing in heaven and 36 per cent believing in hell.

A quarter of those surveyed think star signs affect people's futures, 28 per cent say good luck charms work and 39 per cent believe fortune-tellers can foresee the future.

If religion is 'dead,' superstition is alive and well!

Stopping Violence

In an article entitled, Rethinking Stopping Violence Programmes, Stuart Birks, the director for Public Policy Evaluation at Massey University, says this:

One of the most puzzling aspects to me is that we allow interference in our lives to an extreme degree, up to and including the routine destruction of relationships between parents and their children. This is permitted despite the open admission that the theories are questionable, the data are problematic, and the effectiveness of the interventions is unknown. The people proposing and implementing these policies are subject to limited accountability and may not have the training, skills, experience, awareness and impartiality to justify our confidence in them.

Most of Stuart's article is about male/female violence and the ways our society is dealing with it, such as recent ideas that different races should be treated differently. He expresses a number of concerns, looks at readings of data that may be false, and wonders whether we're really making any inroads into treating violence - and whether there are other agendas at work complicating Government policy on the matter.