FAITH SCHOOLS AND THE BLACKMAIL OF SECULAR SOCIETY

Madrasa

State Funded Religious Indoctrination


 How would you like your children to be told the following:-
“Believers, do not make friends with any but your own people. They will spare no pains to corrupt you. They desire nothing but your ruin. Their hatred is evident from what they utter with their mouths, but greater is the hatred that their breasts conceal.”
No, I thought not. As it happens the quote comes from the Quran, but I could have found something not a great deal different in the Bible. Thus Corinthians 6. 14 -15 “Do not be bound together with unbelievers; for what partnership have righteousness and lawlessness, or what fellowship has light with darkness? Or what harmony has Christ with Belial, or what has a believer in common with an unbeliever?”  
 Islamic teaching however does rather turn this kind of hatred into something of a mantra. “But the infidels who die unbelieving shall incur the wrath of god, the angels and all men. Under it they shall remain forever; their punishment shall not be lightened, nor shall they be reprieved” (2.162). “The unbelievers are like beasts, which call out to them as one may but can hear nothing but a shout and a cry. Deaf, dumb, and blind, they understand nothing” (2.172)
Jewish Primary Faith School
East London 
To teach children to look down on others, to despise them or hold them in contempt seems to me to be a pretty wicked thing to do, that the state should be paying for it seems to me unconscionable. Yet this is what is being taught in some state funded schools in this country.  If children are not being taught these things then these schools are not doing a proper job since these beliefs are central  to all three monotheistic faiths.
The Judeo Christian view of religious teaching can be summed up by the following lines: -
"Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead."
           (Deuteronomy 6:4–8)
Injunctions worthy of a North Korean despot.
“Give me the child until the age of seven,” demanded the Jesuits “and I will give you the man.” Ever since the Church has been successfully gaining access to the education of children. To see the consequences of this one need only look across the sea to Ireland. Only now is the full scale of the abuse, both sexual, physical and mental coming to light. Knowing where the bodies are buried is generally used as a metaphor, not when it comes to the Catholic Church in Ireland. Whilst the sectarian school system in the north has produced generation after generation of mutual incomprehension and hatred.
Further afield one can witness the mass production of warped minds in the Madrasas of Pakistan or the force feeding of irrational dogma in Catholic schools in the Philippines or the hareidi-religious and religious-Zionist school systems in Israel.
Here the Church of England schools appear positively benign by comparison though they can use discriminatory admission criteria that requires church attendance. No small thing in an area which might have only one good state school.
As I write this Islamic fanatics are tearing Iraq apart, women are being stoned in Saudi Arabia and Iran, and gay men and women are facing the death penalty in both Christian and Islamic states. Do we really want more of this irrational and unverifiable superstitious mumbo jumbo taught to children whose minds are by very definition pliable and open to indoctrination? If parents want to pump this kind of nonsense into their children in a free society it’s difficult to do anything about it without resorting to the very illiberality that religion itself requires. Though there does need to be more rigorous proscriptions and what it is permissible to teach children.
In a survey out today 58% of the British population oppose state funding of faith schools.[1]  Even if such schools were operating as benignly as their proponents would have you believe should we really be comfortable about this form of educational apartheid?
Despite growing hostility to faith schools all three major political parties continue to support the idea, indeed under Tony Blair’s administration faith school flourished with many more coming into operation. Leaving aside Tony Blair’s enthusiasm, a rare British politician who ‘did God,’ the reason why there is such little political hostility to faith schools is I suspect fear. Fear of antagonising ethnic minority communities, the Church of England, catholic religious activists, and small c conservative voters; and fear of entering the quagmire that is multiculturalism and religious belief.
Not for the first time our society continues to be held hostage by the pedallers of intolerance and irrational religious dogma.

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