I read this opinion piece by the Australian Christian Lobby’s Victorian director Rob Ward, with regards to Special Religious Instructions in Victorian schools, and it’s so full of inaccuracies, misrepresentations, strawmen and outright lies, that I had to resort to the time-honored Owlmirror way of responding, by translating Ward’s words into what he really means.
It is unclear what damage to children 100 years of voluntary Special Religious Instruction in Victoria’s schools has caused.
Translation : I, as a Christian who was indoctrinated into the Christian faith myself, can not see what damage the indoctrination of children into the Christian faith might have caused.
But an action by three parents in that bastion of political correctness, the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission, has sparked a flurry of articles in The Age by militant secularists and atheists seeking to expunge Christianity from the classroom.
Translation : I don’t like the concept of equal opportunity, if it prevents Christians from openly discriminating against, and indoctrinating, children whenever we like. And I am purposefully conflating people who drink beer and write newspaper articles, with terrorists who fly planes into buildings, to further my cause by unashamedly using demagogy.
Many of the critics of SRI seem to assume Christianity to be a dangerous toxin from which children must be protected.
Translation : We are scared shitless by the idea that you could take away our chance to get to the kids while they are young.
But even Prime Minister Julia Gillard, an atheist from the left of the ALP, acknowledges the truth that one cannot understand Western literature without understanding the Bible.
Lol wut ? I have to be a specialist in Stone Age fiction to understand Joyce, Flaubert or Hemingway ? What utter nonsense. Should I also study the Quran before I read a Star Wars book or Superman comic ?
Not content with their choice to remove their kids from SRI, militant atheists seem hell-bent on ensuring everyone else’s kids are blocked from exposure to Christianity in the fear that they may not come to the same conclusion Gillard did.
Translation : I am really, really scared that I can’t get to them while they’re young !
With Christianity all but written out of the new national curriculum, what’s wrong with accredited volunteers teaching kids a few Bible stories and telling them about Jesus?
Translation : We really, really want our proselytisers from Access Ministries to get to the kids and indoctrinate them into our cult, never mind that 40% of school children in Victoria are not actually Christian !
Only the most churlish deny that Jesus was a good man whose teachings offer us much. No credible historian doubts his historicity. Despite some notable blemishes, Christianity has been an overwhelming force for good.
Translation : Only those mean atheists would deny us the right to lie to our kids about made-up goatherder fiction from 2000 years ago, or to teach them morals based on fictitious undead sons of fictitious god persons who noone has ever seen, a morality solely based on guilt, and the threat of eternal damnation and hellfire if one does not comply with the god person’s rules. These atheists are so militant and amoral !!
The intolerance and bad language with which opponents are prosecuting their case probably shows they didn’t pay enough attention in SRI when they were at school.
Translation : I want to give the impression that by proselytising to primary school kids, the untrained, unsupervised Access Ministries volunteers not only teach them about our cult, but at the same time teach them to use kind words, how to be polite and soft spoken, and how to not be intolerant ever. Where by intolerant I actually mean, “daring to voice disagreement with any of my false bigoted beliefs”.
Exposing kids to values which pre-date consumerism and humanism’s rights-obsessed individualism can’t be all bad.
Translation : Teaching kids the so-called values from our Stone Age ethics manual, while at the same time leaving out the parts that make said manual look like what it really is, an antiquated and outdated collection of Stone Age myths with no relevance to our, or anyone else’s cultural heritage or moral behaviour, is how we try to get the kids hooked up to our cult.
It’s not flying anymore, Rob Ward. Parents see through your web of deception and misrepresentations, and we’re not signing up for your cult anymore, nor will we tolerate religious indoctrination in public schools any longer. Throw around the cultural heritage argument as much as you like, in the end, what we have here is Christian cults that are losing members faster than they can replace them, and a society that is starting to realise that religion is not only not needed for people to be good or moral or responsible, but that religion is in fact more often than not in the way of people to be good moral citizens. And, and this is my main concern, don’t impose your cult onto our children, not at home, and not in our schools. We have a responsibility to protect the kids from this. If someone wants to read the Bible when they’re 18, and they find it convincing, I will protect their right to practice that religion. But keep this stuff away from children, especially primary school children.
To those that demand that we teach our children one particular religious flavor, effectively to the exclusion of all others, I want to say, the same is done by teachers and politicians in any other area of the world, areas where different gods are revered, like in India, or Germany, or Brazil, or Greece, or Tonga, or Pakistan, or the USA. Those people believe just as fervently and passionately in their gods as Australian religious folks believe in theirs. And they just can not all be right, so therefore if one of those myriads of variants of religious beliefs should turn out to be be right, all the others would have to be wrong. Common sense tells us that it is much more likely that they are all wrong.
