"Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong."
Wonderful - where do I sign?
The compulsory religious education of young children is little short of brainwashing and should be a criminal offence. The Jesuits were fully aware of this when they made their notorious boast, "Give me a child for for his first seven years and I'll give you the man".
Religion should NEVER be compulsory, and the right not to have your child religiously educated should be enshrined in law and should NEVER be influenced in any way by outside pressures (humiliation by the church was always an effective weapon when I was growing up). It should be a free and conscious decision of all parents to have their child religiously educated if they chose to do so, and even this must be carefully monitored. At a certain point in a child's life they should have a say in their religios upbringing. If a child receives religious education they should be made fully aware of all religions as philosophies and given the free choice to investigate; once you withdraw the right of free choice, you create automatons.
I grew up in Liverpool, a city sharply divided on religious lines, the consequence being a permanent undercurrent of tension and unrest,.
I worked on the docks, where, if the work was plentiful, you got on with everybody, but if the ships were few and far between, the Catholics or the Protestants were laid off, depending where you worked, and you went off to seek work among 'your own kind'.
Even our two football teams were religiously divided which, at certain times in the season, led to actual open violence (I know this also to be the case in Glasgow; a Celtic/Rangers match was the first place I saw men in cages, divided off into Catholic and Protestant).
The "Glorious Twelfth" was invariably open street warfare.
I have never seen anything resembling this between the church laity and non-believers - the clergy certainly, with their patronising pity and unspoken condemnation, but not from 'real people', whatever their beliefs and non-beliefs.
I really don't know what world you people occupy.
Jim Carroll