RELIGION PART 2 SECONDARY SCHOOL

At secondary school there was a big difference in the way we were taught religion compared to primary school. Instead of being taught one belief system as fact we learned about religion. This is what a muslim believes, this is was a Hindu believes, this is was a Sikh believes etc. We did also look at superstitions that are not part of any religion as well. Personally I believe this is how religion should be taught to us in schools and don’t have any problem with it.

However the underlying message was that “everyone believes in something”..... in fact that was the title of the first piece of work I did in that class. On the surface I simply did what I was told to do in class as Miss Crockford was one of the stricter teachers at that school. It was here that I started thinking more and more about it. For example if 2 different religions have 2 completely different creation stories they can’t both be right. They can both be wrong or one of them can be wrong.

It seemed that every religion made equally valid (or invalid) claims. Everyone claims to worship the one true god and have the correct set of rules to follow. Yet it seemed that they all had completely different rules to follow that were inconsistent  with each other. I had seen on the news how members of one religion could persecute another. Outside of school I went to a christian holiday camp and noticed how some christians openly criticized members of other christian churches (Note: this will be covered in Religion part 3). On the other hand our christian religious studies spoke of the “hurt caused to muslims” during the satanic verses controversy.

In the final year we had a module called “social and moral issues” and part of this included classroom debates. The teacher would set the subject of the debate such as “capital punishment” then split the class up into “for” and “against” and we would then fire our points of view at each other. Miss Crockford had the unfortunate habit of taking sides instead of moderating the debate which I didn’t agree with but overall they went ahead ok. I do remember it was partly my idea one week to have a debate on the existence of god. I headed the “against” side with a few others.

Initially I entered that debate with questions fully expecting them to be answered by the teacher.

At the time I did find the “argument from design” to be the strongest argument used by the other side. (I didn’t a few years later!!!). However some of the arguments I found to be obviously flawed such as “x billion people around the world believe in god they can’t all be wrong”. Needless to say the debate provoked heated argument from both sides and was over in an hour.

It was in the days and weeks after that debate that I looked back at some of the arguments that were given and started to pick them apart. The claim that “most of the worlds greatest scientists are christians” is completely meaningless. The existence of god is not a scientific issue. The claim that “Albert Einstein was a devoted christian” was just laughable since it took only a few minutes research to discover that he was a Jew which is why he emigrated to the USA to avoid Nazi persecution. Was Miss Crockford that uneducated or was she just using that argument because it sounded good ???????

There was also a lot of arguments from personal experience and emotional pleading. I have a book my shelf which is full of people who claim to have been abducted by UFOs, come face to face with bigfoot, spoken to the dead and performed impossible feats. Why should I take one vague unsubstantiated claim at face value over any other.

Things just didn’t seem to make sense and it was going to get worse outside of school when I attended a religious holiday camp in the summer of 1991.