Johann Hari: "Dear God, stop brainwashing children"

[ciphergoth]

Johann Hari, The Independent, 2009-05-08

Dear God, stop brainwashing children

Why is worship forced on 99 per cent of children without their own consent or even asking what they think?

Let us now put our hands together and pray. O God, we gather here today to ask you to free our schoolchildren from being forced to go through this charade every day. As you know, O Lord, because You see all, British law requires every schoolchild to participate in "an act of collective worship" every 24 hours. Irrespective of what the child thinks or believes, they are shepherded into a hall, silenced, and forced to pray – or pretend to.

If they refuse to bow their heads to You, they are punished. This happened to me, because I protested that there is no evidence whatsoever that You exist, and plenty of proof that shows the texts describing You are filled with falsehoods. When I pointed this out, I was told to stop being "blasphemous" and threatened with detention. "Shut up and pray," a teacher told me on one occasion. Are you proud, O Lord?

[...] I am genuinely surprised that no moderate religious people have, to my knowledge, joined the campaign to stop this compelled prayer. What pleasure or pride can you possibly feel in knowing that children are compelled to worship your God? Why are you silent?

[...]

Are there prominent religious campaigners on this issue in particular or State secularism in general that he's not taking into account? Are they getting articles in the national press, or trying to? Pointers welcome!

Comments

[lizw.livejournal.com]

The media seemed to want the story to be OMG LIBERALS WANT TO BAN ALL FAITH SCHOOLS!!!! AND PROBABLY EAT BABIES!!!! (Not that we don't have a small minority who'd like to ban fee-paying faith schools, but the substance of the debate was all about state-funded schools.) Or failing that, OMG LIBERALS WILL FORCE KIDS TO BE INDOCTRINATED BY ISLAMIST TERRORISTS!!! AND PROBABLY EAT BABIES!!!! There really wasn't much interest in subtlety, as far as I could tell.

I've never tried to get a religious opinion piece into the broadsheets, but I do have experience of trying to place business pieces, and that's quite tough - especially if you're perceived to have a commercial or, I imagine, a partisan interest.

I'm finding it difficult to Google articles on this by Christians without bringing up a lot of mostly-irrelevant stuff like individual schools' collective worship policies. Fwiw, this piece quotes the convener of the Church of Scotland's education committee as being against compulsory worship (as well as another C of S minister and also Richard Holloway, but I think the latter had stopped identifying as Christian by then.) C of E bishops do tend to be pretty hopeless on this, though, unfortunately.