23 July 2007

How the Government tests for faith

This is a bit worrying; how the government assesses whether someone is genuine in a claim of conversion. For example one Afghani; "In court he was required to name Jesus’s 12 disciples to prove his conversion was genuine. He answered this and other questions correctly, but was unable to name 'Advent' as the run up to Christmas."
While I'd be okay on Advent, I'm not sure I could name all twelve apostles off the top of my head: after all a big chunk of them don't really crop up again and so end up not in active recall. There are sensible ideas for tests in the rest of the article, but really: is this an illustration of government education policies: only what's susceptible to a standardised test of pub-quiz is worthy or of value ... ? It's a shame people's lives literally are at stake in some of this.
How the Government tests for faith -Times Online:

1 comment:

James said...

There's an episode of The West Wing called "Shibboleth" that addresses this issue rather well.

"Spend and tax" not "tax and spend"

 I got a response from my MP which got me kind of mad. You'll see why as I reproduce it here. Apologies for the strange changes in types...