A CASE CAN BE MADE against certain private religious schools — namely the biggest, most lucrative and most prestigious ones — for exercising a little-noticed form of mental child abuse. Both in the manner and content of instruction, I assert that early childhood education by organized Religions is a form of brainwashing against helpless children long before they reach the Age of Reason. In Catholic catechism classes for example, certain outrageous absurdities are solemnly trotted out as Infallible Truth. The religion textbooks in gilded places such as Ateneo de Manila or De La Salle or Marian Imaculada Schools, the Iglesia ni Cristo and Adventist schools, Muslim madrassahs, Hindu temples, etc, are full of malicious fairy tales and insipid and vapid “dogmas” such as creationist myths, fantastical gods and goddesses and impossible histories of the earth, universe and man. But are these considered “errors in textbooks”? Oh no. It’s Freedom of Religion that has inexorably led to adults worshipping stone-n-wood idols and worshipping at the beck and bell of men in funny hats and silly costumes. This mental illness of epidemic proportions affects most Filipinos, whether they labor as GROs and trike drivers, jueteng or drug lords or as newspaper publishers, extortionists and innuendo-mongers.

What does more damage, I wonder, to the Filipino youth: the absurd but seriously made claims in religion and catechism classes, or some erroneous and badly written science textbooks?

Yet we are all asked to respect and reverence this system of mental child abuse in the name of freedom of religion. In this post I ask only that we, the People, recognize the limits of religious freedom in private and public schools and strictly impose the separation of Church and State, of Morality and Theology in the Constitution. For real. For the future. For the Children.

And please see the recent marvelous discussion on secularism hosted by Benj.