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Title:	Mort is angry at religous schools.
Author:	Mort	Posted: 25-01-2007
I was looking at some booklet for catholic schools the other day when I came across a mention about primary schools. Now even though I suppose it’s obvious that there are catholic primary schools, as well as primary schools for many other religions I had never really thought about it. Quite frankly I found it rather horrifying. Kids start primary school at about 5 years old. At that age most kids still believe in the tooth fairy and Santa Claus as a matter of course, and they are being sent to a place where the are being “educated” concerning god. Yeah I’m sure that’s an excellent way for them to make an informed choice on their own. I mean religion secondary schools are bad enough but at least by then the kids attending are old enough that they don’t just believe everything they hear and have been exposed to different view points. Can you imagine if there were different schools for each political party? Labor parents could send their children to Labor schools where they were taught specific beliefs. The same for Liberal, National etc. This is no different then what they do with religious school, (except maybe that political parties actually exist). Of course this wouldn’t be acceptable but for some reason it is with religion. In fact the whole act of questioning someone’s religious views and asking them to provide some sort of proof seems to be socially unacceptable. We have to “respect their beliefs” where it’s perfectly normal to question and debate people about other things. I just think its ridiculous that children of this age are being indoctrinated into a belief system before they even are aware that there are alternatives. I went to a secular public school (thank “god”) but even I had to put up with religious “education” in primary school. Now if this education comprised of an impartial look at the many varied belief systems that people on our planet have I might not have had a problem. But instead we just got some crusty old lady from one of the local Christian churches coming in and espousing about her god each week. Yeah thanks for that. It was just the one religion, hell just the one branch of Christianity, being shoved down our throats. You would be forgiven for thinking that other points of view didn’t exist. I can’t imagine how many times worse an actual religious school must be. I remember once she was talking about Noah’s ark and I challenged her on how every type of animal on earth could fit in that ark, that’s when she replied that it was just a story and not meant to be taken literally. What makes this so disgusting is that I actually had to ask her before she said this. Maybe we were just suppose to figure out for ourselves that the bible stories that are ridiculous and can be proved wrong are just stories, while all the equally ridiculous ones that can’t actually be proved wrong are literal. Convenient that. It’s like churches can’t convince an educated adult to join their religion so have to rope people in when they are kids. Religious people usual seem to be either brought up religious, or became religious when something bad happened to them in life and they turned to religion for comfort. Perfectly happy people who weren’t indoctrinated into religion when they were children don’t seem to feel any need to join. Of course this is just a generalization, I’m sure there are exceptions. What does it say about an organization if they can only get lots of people to join by either getting them when they are young and more gullible or if they are unhappy or otherwise have something wrong with their lives. Now I don’t want to go into what is actually taught in religious schools too much (beyond the fact that they teach religion, which I think can be assumed) as I really don’t have any personal experience. But I noticed in this booklet that I mentioned earlier that it had a section concerning sexual education and mentioned how it was taught in line with church teaching. Therefore I must assume that if you where raped and had a fetus which when born would explode and kill you and everybody else in a 10 km radius the school must teach that you could definitely not have an abortion even when it was a week old. Either that or the school is not teaching in line with catholic religious values. And lastly I was looking through various websites relating to religious schools and I came across one which had a little essay about religious schooling by a Sebastian Camilleri (not that the person is relevant I just wanted to cite the source.) The essay has this one particular sentence in it referring to Jesus, or God, or are they actually the same guy? Anyway that doesn’t matter. “[i]Students cannot leave before they meet him, hear him, know that he loves them and duly acknowledge his law in their lives[/i].” I don’t know of any secular schools where anyone would consider hearing voices in their head as a requirement for passing.