Comprehensive education must focus on all world religions!

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

While I can understand the difficulty of trying to find space for the new Education about Religion, Beliefs and Ethics (ERBE) class in a busy school curriculum, not one cell of me fears for the faiths of faith-based schools.

What are they frightened of? The entire environment and ethos of faith-based schools is single-mindedly monotheistic, and given primary school children’s ability to absorb the entire universe around them, I’m sure that each boy and girl will soak up a heap of religion, which here in the Republic of Ireland means that 90% will start life as Catholics.

Some complain that world religions are too complex for the children’s tiny minds, to which I suggest that if they are old enough to understand Christianity, they’ll equally be able to grasp the basic tenets of other religions.

Later, being sentient human beings, they will decide for themselves which kind of adult they want to become. Well, maybe, if they succeed in breaking out of whichever prison of indoctrination they’ve lived in since birth.

If any religion is worth its salt, it should not feel threatened by education. If your faith, whichever it might be, is the true faith, then it has nothing to fear from knowledge of other faiths, or understanding other less fortunate souls, who live the wrong way according to your laws.

I find it astonishing that there might be any outcry whatsoever about the teaching of world religions. To me it seems beyond belief that anyone might deem it possible to create a curriculum in which world religion as a subject does not exist. How on earth will the next generation pretend to understand this planet and the people on it, without an appreciation of their beliefs?

I recently heard someone on the radio being asked for a definition of culture.

“Culture is the distance we put between ourselves and our faeces,” he replied.

Quite a brilliant answer; there’s buckets of pooh written about culture every day. In some newspapers it has its own section, which always makes me smile, as I wonder how we dare to isolate culture as an end in itself, rather than the product of everything we do.

Take a war – any war. An army marches on its stomach, so the soldiers’ food will be in some way familiar, to remind them of the homeland for which they are fighting. They will have faith that God is on their side. If it’s a religious war their God will be the reason they are fighting.

Before the war there will be propaganda, cartoons of the enemy – and, if their culture allows, other cartoons attacking the war itself. After the battles, movies will be made, books written, frescos drawn on walls, friezes carved on ancient temples.

To read Charlie’s column in full, please see this week’s Galway City Tribune.