Recreational Whinge: For more than a hundred years in Australia, religious instruction has been given to primary school students.  Recently a trial has been underway to offer a secular ethics class as an alternative for those who don’t want religious instruction.  And the churches are furious about it!

And I’m furious about that!

There was a fantastic programme on SBS Insight last week that I feel you need to check out.  You can read the overview and transcript of the episode or watch it online if you prefer.

Here’s the link to see the arguments presented and the fears of teaching our children ethics (without religion) that the religious representatives demonstrated to us.

I was amazed to find that they’re concerned about “competition” with their religious instruction courses.

They are fearful that children will learn to think for themselves, make their own decisions and determine their own moral code without being TOLD WHAT TO BELIEVE BY THE CHURCH, SYNAGOGUE or MOSQUE!

Isn’t about time we removed all religious influence in our government and the decisions governments make about our education?

Yes, I’m an atheist.  I just can’t understand how we can refer to the beliefs of people centuries ago in various cultures who believed in numerous gods and we call that “mythology” but once we were told somewhere along the line that there was only one god that remarkably that wasn’t mythology anymore but fact.  What?

Religion today is simply a small number of people telling the rest of us what to believe so they can control us.  It’s so easy to see how this has happened throughout the past few thousand years of our human development and yet so many people obviously want to be controlled and told what to believe in and how to act.

It just seems completely ridiculous to me that we require religious instruction in our schools when we are a secular country.  But I guess, maybe we’re not really secular after all?

My recreational whinge for today = teach ethics in schools, not religion.  Save religion for more appropriate spaces such as places of worship…or better yet, mythology class!

The Positive Spin: At least there are programmes like SBS’s Insight which are brave enough to put this issue out there to get the rest of us engaged in the conversation!  And sometimes these opportunities can create a really positive and powerful shift in societal thinking.  I have faith that our society will come to its senses.

And the more young people who attend ethics classes instead of religious instruction, the more intelligent, independent, free and successful our society will become.  I know my thoughts here are not going to be popular with many and some may think that I’m not being fair.  But I am being honest about how I feel and I’m grateful for the freedoms I have to express these thoughts and which have the opportunity to inspire others to think more critically for themselves.

Recreational Whinge: When you hear stories of stupidity in action, such as when Rep. Hank Johnson stated in a US congressional hearing that he thought the island of Guam would capsize if too many people went there, it makes you wonder if stupidity is a virus that has swept around the world infecting countless millions of people in all stations in life.

Here’s Hank showing us how serious this affliction can be:

The Recreational Whinge: There are so many issues and crisis situations impacting our planet and society and I can get really frustrated, angry and sad when I think about them and what appears to be a crisis of leadership in responding to them.

There’s a great book by David Orr called, Down to the Wire in which he states that the toxicity we find in the planet has a direct relationship to the toxicity of human relationships.

Recreational Whinge:  The poor island nation of Haiti has experienced one of the worst natural disasters imaginable and their people are suffering again.  It just doesn’t seem to stop for them.  What really saddens and angers me at the same time are those who have immediately jumped upon this crisis to take advantage of big-hearted people by running “charity scams”, trying to collect money for the relief efforts when the only people gaining from this is the fraudsters.

Recreational Whinge:  It’s important we remember the past and really look at it closely – and LEARN something – else we’re going to continue to repeat the same mistakes and/or we won’t build on our successes.

There’s a wonderful video on the Australian news (ABC News) online that reflects on 2009.  Please watch the video here and then come back to this blog.

Recreational Whinge: My parents raised me to understand the value of, as well as demonstrate, good manners.  I’m in my forties now and have experienced that everything my parents taught me about manners was worthwhile.

Maybe it’s a generational thing, but I don’t see very many examples of good manners anymore.  Why is that?

Recreational Whinge:  I’m a big fan of the website, The Onion, and recently they came out with this very funny article:  “Group of popular girls reduces nation to tears”.

As funny as I found the article, it also immediately reminded me of a whole bunch of both personal and professional examples of people behaving badly without consideration for the feelings of others.

This is my first official whinge, or whine, or complaint or just sharing with you that sometimes I get pissed off and that’s ok.

Sometimes having a good old fashion whinge about something feels good.

I’ve been a life coach in one form or another for 20 years and I can tell you that we all need to just say what we’re thinking and feeling sometimes without needing to be “policitcally correct” and without the pressure to be positive and rise above it and all that personal development guru stuff!

See, it’s all those times that we never let out how we’re really feeling that it tears us up inside.

So a number of years back I heard someone say they were having a recreational whinge, meaning that they just wanted to have their say, have some fun with it and move on.  The person was making it clear that they had no intention of complaining forever about the point, just long enough to feel better.

I thought that was great and have been working with the concept of a recreational whinge ever since, for both myself, my partner and friends and with my coaching clients.

I’ve decided I really enjoy having a recreational whinge.