Halt Religious Indoctrination: 18 Should Be Made In Law The Age Of Ordination To Clergy
Ruwan Laknath Jayakody
Ismail Aslama, a seven-year-old male child of Muslim parentage, is no more. He is now Rathnapure Siri Sudarshanalankara/Sudarshanalankaram. The conversion took place recently when his father, Hameed Ismail, brought him to the Dimbulagala Forest Monastery (Aranya Senasanaya – there is also the Dimbulagala rock) and subsequently Chief Incumbent of the Monastery, Millane Siriyalankara ordained him as a monk in the Buddhist faith. The boy’s mother is abroad (working as a housemaid in the Middle East) and allegedly reported to be missing (or perhaps not in touch). According to Siriyalankara, the child is now residing alongside children from different ethnic groups such as Sinhala, Tamil and Veddah children who have been ordained into the sasana/sangha (monkhood/clergy). The indoctrination complete, consent be damned, all seems well in the earthly kingdom of organized and institutionalized religion. The scourge of poverty and parental neglect of children has once again reared its ugly head.
In 2001 June, within a house with a well-manicured lawn in an affluent suburb of Houston, Texas, United States (US), a cast and crew of Biblical characters were found dead. They were namely Noah Jacob, John Samuel, Paul Abraham, Luke David and Mary Deborah and were between the ages of six months to seven years. Some of them lay prone, floating face down in a bathtub while some lay in it supine like overturned puffer fish, marinating in a boggy murk of their urine, feces and vomitus, bloated and snug in their amniotic grave, and still some more lay supine on a bed (sister in the crux of a brother’s arm and the arm of the brother slung over her protectively), all physical forms of the elfin like cherubim tattooed with a stigmatic rictus of contusions. Cause of death: asphyxia by drowning. Was the tragic and unfortunate incident, a case of death by misadventure, in this instance one due to overzealous skinny dipping gone awry? What it eventually turned out to be was a killing/murder for the purpose of obtaining eternal salvation for the deceased. The flotsam and jetsam, damned to eternal life. The family dog caged, the husband, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration engineer called at work, the mother of the dead, a registered nurse and high school valedictorian proceeded to confess of her flesh and blood and of youthful innocence snuffed.
Of interest to the Sri Lankan case mentioned above is the fact that their infanticidal and filicidal yet loving and sacrificial (“I didn’t want my kids to go to hell.”) mother, who for years had been on the long days’ journey into madness, a clinical case of severe post-partum major depressive disorder with psychotic features and suicidal and homicidal ideation, during a disoriented and cryptic rambling made as a series of responses to questions posed by a psychiatrist while in Police custody, made mention of her children stumbling and of a burdensome feeling of guilt of having placed a stumbling block on their path. In a particularly satanic verse she is quoted as saying “It was the seventh deadly sin. My children weren’t righteous. They stumbled because I was evil. The way I was raising them, they could never be saved. They were doomed to perish in the fires of hell.” The Bible in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke is littered with references to the fate befitting those who cause little ones to stumble – thrown to the sea necklaced with a noose of millstone. All is not so well in the earthly kingdom.
What, one may ask was the stumbling block placed on their path and what if at all is the parallel between the two narratives of delusions? The parallel is religious belief.
In both the cases, religion has proven the stumbling block. All religions theistic or otherwise, such as Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, are a volatile mélange of superstition and dogma. Should the right to think freely or to exercise free thought be sullied by being taught what to think instead of how and worse still being taught drivel which stunts and maims cognitive action, is prejudicial to the imagination and stifles independent thinking, not to mention giving birth to paralyzing neuroses? In the case of the latter, the vividly perceived consequences of concepts of sin and karma, truth and falsehood, right and wrong, (fire and brimstone), have for centuries held back individuals from giving expression to their destinies and from turning their natural curiosity piqued by education and wanderlust inwards towards traipsing the terra incognita of their inner life of the mind and the heart and the outer world. Children have a right to be protected from thus and all are duty bound regarding such.
Religion is the bully at the pulpit, the totem which is the main culprit behind the thought process of telling individuals what to think, usurping passion by breeding masochism through prostration, veneration, submission and subservience, all the while providing the illusion of choice whilst feeding the potion of faith. That religion is the foundational basis of ethics and the bedrock of morality has been confidently proven as being not only a historical fallacy of fact but also a logical fallacy. Morality and ethics existed prior to the formation of religions and religions at a later date sought dominion over such matters. Also of note is the fact that all religions do not say the same. There are a plethora of inconsistencies and incompatibilities between them. Some of it is simply bad ideas and crooked are its ways. Temples, churches and mosques and the like are apothecaries of dogma and superstition.
However, this does not vindicate not teaching religious texts which have much in the way of literary and aesthetic value (in for an example iconography) and socio-cultural and anthropological interest in terms of religious rituals, traditions, heritage and practices, to appreciate their meanings and participate in either requires no belief in a religion. Being educated of and being in full possession of the facts surrounding such including information about available alternatives (studies in comparative religion) are helpful in this regard.
What is the impact of religion on the child’s right to education?
