I didn’t intend to write anymore about the WYD (well, it should really be named WCYD - add the word ‘christian’ in there), but all the media coverage just got up my nose.

I mean, look, as was reported by the Seven network - 25% of Australians classify themselves as ‘christian’ and presumably this would include hundreds of thousands who just put that down on the census because they can’t be bothered putting ‘other’ or ‘none’ down, from some deep sense instilled into us all that we must be christian (or some other faith) to be ‘good citizens’. Oddly though, catholic church sites reckon that 25% of AUSTRALIANS are catholic… ok, so something is odd there. By my maths, I make it around 6% of the population may have been indoctrinated into the catholic religion - but I bet that far less are actually ‘practicing’.

So - why the hell does less than 6% of the population (well, in Aussie anyways - I know there are countries that are more like 90% so inclined, lack of education causes insanity …) have the right to screw with our major city?

And now, Australia has contributed to the spread of this particularly noxious faith around the world by sucking-in possibly thousands more impressionable kids.

I come back to the same word time and again - education. Religious HISTORY must be made a compulsory subject at our High Schools (including the free loading ‘church schools’. The curriculum would be to provide all the facts about all the world’s religions - past and current - in a completely impartial way.

As Dan Dennet says in his book, Breaking The Spell:
“Let’s get more education about religion into our schools, not less. We should teach our children creeds and customs, prohibitions and rituals, texts and music, and when we cover the history of religion, we should include both the positive—the role of the churches in the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, the flourishing of science and the arts in early Islam, and the role of the Black Muslims in bringing hope, honor, and self-respect to the otherwise shattered lives of many inmates in our prisons, for instance—and the negative—the Inquisition, anti-Semitism over the ages, the role of the Catholic Church in spreading AIDS in Africa through its opposition to condoms. No religion should be favored, and none ignored.”

That’s the only answer, so as we farewell the silly guy in the frock and red shoes let’s all remember that education, real education is what is needed to bring about a kind of world that is finally free of religious dogma, hate and bigotry.

OzAtheist has a great post about WYD too - have a read here.

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