Somewhere across Australia there has been a furious debate going on. Some of the religious big-wigs are trying to get control of kid’s minds. They want religious studies back in schools. Like Macdonald’s and the big cigarette companies they recognize their best chance to flourish is if they can program the population from an age that is too young to know there are choices and options.

Some of the people involved in the debate want to see ethics installed as a subject rather than religions. These are the secular version of the early-programming group. Some want consumers, some want a servile population and a few even genuinely want the children to grow up into adults who can make their own decisions.

The Church’s need to attempt this experiment again is  a flight into futility. They had the opportunity to seduce school children’s minds when I was a child in the 1960’s and ’70s. You don’t have to look too far to see what a failure that was. Declining attendance rates at mass and Sunday services all over the country by the generations that had the religious classes imposed on their educational time.

Having a religious element to school curriculum is a good idea. Comparative religion! That is not the comparative religion where a local pastor pops in once a week and tells everyone what a great religion Christianity is, even the other forms of it. That is the comparative religion where there is an honest effort to discover what practices people engage in and getting the actual practitioners in for those time blocks put aside for religion.

It could be broken up even further. There could be a section where historians pop in and teach myths and anthropology. That is to say, having a scientific look at the way beliefs can be influenced by culture and geography perhaps. The interlocking of spiritual and cultural beliefs in people like Mayans, African and Islanders could be taught and discussed with a view to comparing the way culture, geography and politics influenced other beliefs.The wide range of Christian sects and their beginnings could be discussed under the same light. The wide range of Muslim beliefs and their beginnings. Hindu and Buddhist.

Neo-pagan practitioners could come in and show Tarot, meditation and candle magic if that is their bag although there are as many types of pagan as there are ways of cooking meat. Catholics could have a mass, explain why the Pope doesn’t encourage birth control in AIDs torn countries. The students could be encouraged to ask questions such as why Christianity failed to predict and then deal with so many of modern life’s crisis. Evangelists could explain why they thought rock and roll was demonic when it came out and why they now embrace it to bring in young people. They could explain why they think all common human decency begins and ends in Christianity and why so many other religions make the same claim.

Muslims could come and explain the headdresses of women. In the case of the hard core believers they could explain why women should do as they are told, keep their faces covered, and spend so much time bowing to Mecca. They could explain how gentle Islam actually is and where Mohamed comes into the picture.

Christian missionaries could pop into some schools and explain why they feel that getting people to give up their culture is a fair exchange for medicine and food when your children are dying. There are Cabbalists, Occultists, Brothers of the Left Hand, Luciferians and a rash of other ideas about humanity’s spiritual congress.

It is school being discussed. A place of education rather than a place of programming. We program our children at the very real risk they will not have the intellectual capability to act wisely when they face a crisis. Very much like now! We cant stop consuming, breeding, selling off our farmland to developers for housing and an endless list of really stupid things we should have had in hand long ago.

And really, ask what harm programming can do! God did not give us this planet to screw with and abuse as we feel fit to do. Nor is he saving anyone from climate change or high waters or declining stocks of everything. Nor is Allah. Nor is Haniman nor Zeuss! If god said “Go forth and multiply.” He must surely regret saying it to such a stupid group of creatures!