I was listening to radio 4 this morning in my car on the way to work and there were a couple of religious stories in the news and the usual "thought for the day" which is always religious in nature, one of the stories was about the Al-Madinah school in Derby being shut down by Ofsted because of concerns about over-jealous implementations of fundamentalist Islamic principals like segregation of girls and strict dress codes etc. I was pondering these things and the following analogy came to me,
What religious people around the world (the main ones) believe is like having a school where all the kids turn up everyday (in fact it's mandated they do) but there are no teachers. All that's there are piles of books and ancient (half erased) scribblings in a language no one speaks any more left on the blackboards. Over time the children align themselves to particular books and particular classrooms (mostly depending on which street they live in), fierce arguments and debates ensue about which are the "correct" books and which particular books and scribblings must be interpreted in which particular ways in order to enter particular classrooms. On the last day of school a teacher finally turns up, he (because it's obviously a he) praises the kids who have picked the right interpretations and 2 kids out of hundreds get to go home and have endless ice-cream and Xbox time; the teacher then dowses the remaining pupils and the school in petrol and sets the whole lot on fire.
Who'd want something like that to be true?
1 comment:
Steve, this reminds me of something friend said to me a while back: "if religion is no longer the opium of the masses, then perhaps we should legalise opium for the religious".
Or in the wise words of Elvis Costello: what about peace, love and understanding?
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