blogcutter

Forty years ago today, John Lennon was shot outside his New York City apartment building. He died soon afterwards. Here's a news item from ABC, which will be televising a special on Sunday:

https://abc7ny.com/john-lennon-murder-eyewitness-news-the-dakota/8229799/

A decade or so earlier, he had prophetically sung "The way things are going, they're going to crucify me." Some radio stations bleeped out the word "Christ" because used in this way, it's a naughty word, don't you know?

Over the past few decades, we've increasingly moved towards a more secular society. It's a funny thing, though. Whereas in my young day, daily Bible readings and religious instruction were part of my school life regardless of our personal or family beliefs (this was in the "public" school board, i.e. not the Roman Catholic one, even though both were in fact publicly funded), nowadays we have Quebec's Bill 21 which forbids any outward sign that some people may not self-identify as part of the homogeneous secular crowd.

And then there's another Lennon/Ono classic. The Woman is the N-Word of the World? Doesn't have quite the same power when you put it that way, does it? Whatever happened to literary and artistic licence, anyway?

I wish I could truly believe that the pen was mightier than the sword - or the gun or the van - but I'm not sure that I do. There's still a lot of violence occurring in the world and we can go around holding memorials and saying "Lest we forget." But even if people remember us when we're gone, we mere mortals can't just rise up from the dead and save the world, at least in my belief system.

C-word, you know it ain't easy...

On the Faith and Ethics page in yesterday's Citizen, the question asked of the experts is "Should children be left to make up their own minds about religion?" The Roman Catholic priest and the pastor from the Metropolitan Bible Church came down on the "No" side while the other experts, to my pleasant surprise, seemed to lean towards a qualified "Yes".

By the time I came along, the youngest of four children, my family was not affiliated with any particular church. So until I started school, I had no exposure to religion. But in the 1960s, even in the public school system, there was no escaping it! School officials didn't believe you if you said you had no religion, so my parents taught me to say I was Anglican or, more generically, Protestant. They had come over not that long ago from England where, even if you were not devout, you could sort of say you were Church of England, and Anglicanism was and is the closest Canadian equivalent.

At school, we started each day with the Lord's Prayer and some sort of a Bible reading. We also sang hymns and had "religious education" once or twice a week. Up to about grade 5, I'm sure I won no friends in telling my peers that I didn't believe in God. Fortunately I was not one to speak up much in class, so I never got into trouble that way with my teachers nor did I have the Christian Aid Society sicced on me! Yet just as I entered the intermediate grades and was starting to explore new ideas and wonder if perhaps I DID believe in something, suddenly my fellow students were tripping over themselves to proclaim their non-belief, with Christianity (and probably just about any other religion unless it involved the Maharishi) being mocked as being as naive as believing in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy!

When I went to Arch Street School, I remember the principal telling us all during an assembly that if we didn't already go to church or Sunday school, we should go home and tell our parents that we wanted to start going. Nowadays, of course, he would be severely reprimanded for doing something like that but I'm sure he meant well and believed he would be saving our souls. Anyway, that was one instruction that I didn't follow because my contemporaries, even if they were believers, assured me that church and Sunday school were boring. Still, I think I did fleetingly wonder if I was destined for eternal damnation!

When I moved back to Vincent Massey for grades seven and eight, the grade seven teacher suggested that we have regular classes in comparative religion. He wasn't the most popular teacher around but in that particular respect, I think he was extremely progressive and well ahead of his time. But by this stage of our development, a majority of the students were at the all-out religious rejection stage and for lack of popular support, nothing ever came of the idea. In grade eight, our home-room teacher was atheist or agnostic and refused to teach religion in any form. But I guess maybe it was still a curricular requirement, so he went and taught a math class to some grade sevens, while the grade seven teacher (not the progressive one who had wanted to teach comparative religion) came and tried to impart his religious faith to a typical classful of smart-alec grade eights (us). I don't know what particular denomination this grade seven teacher belonged to but he WAS rather odd! I later heard he had been fired for refusing to shave off his beard but that might have been an urban legend.

But back to my religion or lack thereof. I certainly don't fault my parents for not giving me religion. In fact, I think it would have been decidedly hypocritical of them to insist I attend church or Sunday school when they themselves were non-believers. And in many ways, it was the best situation I could have been in - they raised no objections, for example, when I attended Day School Gospel League after school, or the local United Church for services or CGIT. They simply asserted their belief in freedom of religion.

Still, I AM glad that I went to school when religion was still taught. After all, religion is about much more than just saving souls! It serves a social and community function and is a crucial piece of our culture and heritage. Think of all the allusions in literature, art, music, theatre and so forth that we could not appreciate if we did not have at least a passing acquaintance with the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Or mythology, which was also people's religion in earlier times. Yes, I think a comparative religion approach would have been more appropriate, at least from about grade five or six onwards. And there's no reason why we have to stick to learning about Judaeo-Christian religions either - that's all the more true as we become a more cosmopolitan and multicultural society. But I do sometimes wonder if kids at school these days may be missing out on crucial elements of their cultural heritage as we rush towards political correctness and the reluctance to offend anyone in our diverse society.