Let's talk about the issue of educating or raising your children within your religion.
Christians do it. Muslims do it. Jews do it. So do Hindus and Buddhists.
Each of them has their own private schools, but only Christianity has encroached into PUBLIC schools to the point where you have public schools pushing Christian religion into the school values, ethos and curriculum, paid for by parents AND the state via the tax payer.
Does this sound fair?
These schools entertain Christian evangelical "experts" who visit to warn of the "dangers of "satanism" and "the occult" who slander Pagan and other occult religions which happen to be protected by the Constitutional right to freedom of religion in this country.
Ministers of religion and education make careless inflammatory statements about "making war on Satanism" in schools, not in the least bit educated about what they are talking about. Meanwhile, Pagan parents are intimidated by all the pressure to conform (or to make their children conform) to a Christian identity, intimidated into registering their Pagan children as "Christians" when applying to public schools so that they will not be turned away. Non-Christian children are having a religion foreign to them forced on them, in state schools. This is unconstitutional.
If the Constitution is secular, then the State must be secular - and so MUST be all organs of State - including the police service, and schools belonging to the State. This is logical. But then, our State is anything but logical, and as time progresses, anything but secular either.
State bodies swell with the number of Christian ministers, reverends, pastors and lay preachers and wannabe prophets, many of who act not in the interests of the people, but of their piety.
And yet while there are NO private Pagan schools in the country, the constitution argues against the notion of using state funds to set up a Pagan or occult religious focused public school. This is nothing short of paradoxical. Why then is the encroachment of ONE religion into a public school viewed as perfectly acceptable? Surely, under the constitution, what is good for one should be good for all?
If these public schools want to maintain their prejudiced and biased ethos which holds to only one religion, then they should be made to privatize and stop using tax payer's money in order to evangelize their own religions and persecute those of other people. OR to be fair, religious minority communities should be enabled by the same state which allows this to continue, to set up their own community schools as public entities on an equal footing, while sharing equal benefits, while embracing their applicable religious ethos.
The fact is, public perception is and has been for so many years hysterically biased because of evangelists preaching non-facts and propaganda against occult religions, which are equated with criminality and 'evil' etc. Paganism is equated by them with Satanism - and Satanism is misconstrued with the criminal acts of the fall guys who turn their mythical "satanism" into a media-inspired criminal fantasy manifestation of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If a religion is legal for adults, protected by the Constitution, then it should be legal to raise your children in that religion - but just imagine the Christian hysteria should some Pagans or Satanists open a private school on their own in order to raise their children in their religions away from the crazy fundamentalists!
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All material copyright © Christina Engela, 2019.
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