I wanted to kick off this blog by recounting a yarn from my childhood that has stuck with me and now when I recall it, thoroughly irks me.
When I was 10 years old, I had a teacher who I had a lot of time for. How much of this was down to her rather than the fact that the guy she replaced was a truculent so-and-so I'm not sure, but she was definitely amiable enough. (As an aside, I once bumped into her predecessor one night after school in the town library - my Dad came over and I didn't think to introduce him, leading my dad to the assumption as I later found out, that he was a nonce looking to pick up an unsuspecting youngster playing 'Granny's Garden on the BBC Micro).
For the sake of this post, I'll call her Mrs. Green. And I'll never forget what she said during a religious education lesson one afternoon. These were the exact words as I recall: "We know that Jesus existed, because of reports in newspapers that existed at the time." Pretty compelling to a class of 10-year-olds, yes?
It's only in retrospect you can see what a statement of abject idiocy that was. It's no exaggeration to say I feel cheated...if the people trusted with my education could come out with such risible nonsense on that occasion, what other gibberish did they feed us? However much you dislike teachers as a kid, you do tend to have a grudging respect for them on the basis that you think they are fountains of all knowledge. Then the great disillusionment!
Now, either Mrs Green was ill informed, or she was shamelessly teaching us utter fiction. I have to confess I have no idea which it was, but you would like to have think she would have checked her facts. Because there isn't a shred of evidence for the existence of Jesus as a genuine historical figure. Not an iota. Neither were there 'newspapers' as we understand them in a contemporary sense - and even if there were, they would long have disintegrated after two millennia. What did exist in the Roman Empire were 'bulletins' carved out of metal or stone, and you would think that the deeds attributed to Christ might have warranted a mention. Again, nothing. The one artifact that is consistent with the stories of Jesus's life - and death - has been exposed as an amateurish fraud by modern science.
There may have been a Jesus of course, but certainly not the one depicted in the New Testament (written well after his supposed death). Even if there was though, it is pure conjecture.
Anyway, the point of all this is that we were being brainwashed. Deep down, I knew the concept of Jesus and God was ludicrous when I was 10. I was passionate about astronomy and pre-history, clearly disciplines which did not square with the bible's version of events. Added to which, by age 10 we were being taught not to rely on hearsay, groundless assumption and wild conjecture.
We were encouraged to find evidence to back up our claims, to think logically and to shed puerile beliefs in fairies, Father Christmas, ghosts and the like. Yet the religious education we received (no opt-out in those days!) ran contrary to everything else we were being taught. A man could rise from the dead, walk on water, turn water into wine. Our gut instincts were telling us it was nothing short of fantastic - but if our teachers were telling us that's what happened, then that's what happened. Besides, at that tender age you still want to believe that the impossible is possible - it is a bulwark against the dawning realisation that the world is a harsh place. That's comforting for a child.
It took a long time for the penny to drop with me at a conscious level that religion, in all its many forms, is contemptible nonsense. I don't lay all the blame for that at the door of Mrs Green, I just wasn't very quick on the uptake as my family certainly didn't force Christianity down my throat. Possibly I felt that to renounce Christianity was to be unpatriotic. Just think though, about how many times of magnitude greater the levels of indoctrination into outmoded dogma are in other parts of the world. Young, impressionable minds are being moulded with harmful lies at a critical time when humanity needs to lean on science and reason if we are to survive and thrive.
Religion no longer serves any useful purpose. It's a house of cards just waiting to be toppled. It can, must be done.
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