Blog - Tuesday, August 16, 2011 16:52 - 0 Comments

Demons in our midst

Anyone who follows this blog knows I firmly stand against the National School Chaplaincy Program.  According the the official government guidelines the majority superstitious view in a community trump all other beliefs, and all efforts to hire a suitable religious crackpot must be exhausted before government officials can turn to more sensible people in society.  To pour battery acid on the wound and rub it in with a wire brush, the guidelines then bar these religious folk from acting religious in their capacity of school witchdoctor chaplain.

For the most part we end up with well meaning (yet unqualified) people hosting pancake breakfasts, organising rainbow craft, and playing x-box.  The general population excuse this $475 million pancake eating game fest because “chaplains are there to help the kiddies”.  However, there are snakes in the wood pile.

In the last week Queensland school chaplain John Donaldson invited known crank and anti-intellectual John Mackay to Gympie State High School to:

“… give a science presentation examining the evidence for the Biblical account of Creation and current Evolutionary teaching.”

That should take about 5 seconds:

Student: “Have you ever seen a god create something from nothing?”

John MacKay: “Derp.”

Teacher: “Thank you for your time.”

As Dave “The Happy” Singer points out, these loons have very weird ideas about dragons, “darwinists”, and homosexuals.  These attitudes bring into sharp focus the poisonious underlying attitudes some chaplains may hold, which bring me to the genesis of this outburst.

Below is a excerpt from Pat Robertson’s “700 club” in which a young mother is told by her 7 year old son say he hears voices in his head telling him to stab her.  His advice?  Well, I’ll let you watch the video:

This is the kind of insanity our government has spent almost half a billion dollars on promoting into public schools.  Even if this were a exclusive private school there would be tremendous public concern if school officials were promoting such dangerous nonsense.  So why have we allowed this to go one for so long?

Is it because we have yet to hear a taxpayer funded ridiot blathering on about demons and the urgent need for an exorcist? Do we have to wait for a tragedy to occur before we realise properly qualified professionals would have been a better option?

Whatever the case, it is clear that religious thinking can result in dangerous mind sets which collide with reality often causing tragic results.  While most chaplains are genuinely honest people who do best they can for Australia’s youth, I suspect there is a small subset of lunatic believers who actually see demons lurking in every corner.  A government program which favours these individuals places our kids at risk, and we simply cannot accept that.