VERSION|0.5.1|NAME|Tesh|DATE|1366909870|CONTENT|Off topic – sorry I’ve been too unwell to use the computer for a while,  have done a huge catch-up today and  I want to be allowed to write about yesterday please!  First though, Graham, I do so agree with you over God’s emotional health problems – the thought of this ‘Being/non-Being forever bawling “I want somebody to love me” never fails to amuse me! I see him in his nappy with his nose running!
However....different topic- 
“Nursing is nowadays seen as a career rather than a vocation. The ideals of dedication, and self-abnegation that nurses were once expected to aspire to may seem quaint and old-fashioned today. Nevertheless, the exacting training, intolerance of bad practice and strict supervision of staff that used to prevail on hospital wards ensured that leaving patients to starve or lie in their own excrement could never have happened. This is not to say there were no bad nurses then, but at least they were less likely to get away with neglecting or ill-treating patients.”
Dinah, don’t wear nostalgic glasses on this one.  I did my degree [nothing to do with nursing] in the 1960s and one of the most agonising books I read was called “Sans Everything” – from the terrifying Shakespearean line. It was not a history book; it was a study of the care of the elderly both on wards ‘for the elderly’ and in other institutions,  and was so horrifying, heart-breaking, terrifying, vomit-inducing I swore I would shoot myself when I was thirty just to make extra sure nobody could get their hands on me and force me to end my days in such a way. These were not isolated examples.  
More generally - I want to do a bit of defence of Sikhism.  It is not a carrier of the Caste system.  There was a lot of ‘yucking’ over the word Kaur for princess some time back and I understand why – but for me that is more about our present yuckiness over ‘pink’ and the only virtue for little girls being that of ‘sweet and pretty’. However my understanding is that what was happening in the India of that time in a predominantly Hindu society, was that your  middle name revealed your caste and could be demanded of you. The Sikh leaders  struck away and replaced that name by giving  every woman the same middle name – Kaur; and every man the same middle name – Singh.  So you were a princess in your community even if your role in your village was to take out everybody else’s shit at night for which they despised you. It was an astonishing piece of symbolism for its time. [Officials at either end of the migration services got the naming system wrong and that is why we are convinced that every Sikh man has the surname ‘Singh’ and why teachers in our multi-ethnic inner city schools some decades back could get confused over who actually were brothers and sisters]. Meanwhile in the Langar – the kitchen -  segregation by caste or gender was forbidden. At a time when a Brahmin could claim to have been defiled if the very shadow of a low-caste person fell over his bowl of soup of whatever, anyone who converted to Sikhism had to accept eating together with a total of mix of people and taking turns to provide, cook and serve.  Some of the Gurus were very highly respected in their time and it is said that anybody who wanted an audience with them had to enter that Langar and meet and eat with everybody first. This seems to me a thousand times more practical and revolutionary than a ‘miracle’ of ‘feeding the 5,000’ which would change nothing.   Sikhism is also the only religion I know of that has a martyr  - Tegh Bahadur - who died for the right of the freedom of religious expression for others [Hindus who would not convert to Islam].  Even if the ideals get frayed around the edges over time the sources of those ideals are still accessible.  Maybe ‘humanists’ could have done the same – but could there have been such people at that time and even if there were, were they in large enough numbers to have any such organising power? And there have been humanists of the earlier twentieth century who make me feel a bit queasy now. 

|EMAIL|lornacrossman@yahoo.co.uk|IP-ADDRESS|86.138.234.54|MODERATIONFLAG|