From Michael de Petrovsky.
UNBELIEVABLE, incredible! Having just returned from a refreshing two-week tour of Western Europe, I read that a Jersey magistrate had threatened to incarcerate a fellow human being for refusing to stand up for morning prayers. One shudders.

I can recall supply teaching at most of Jersey’s schools, including De La Salle, Victoria College and Prep, in which most of the privileged members of the establishment receive their education. During those years I had the pleasure of meeting a great number of intellectually stimulating, highly intelligent colleagues, whose main purpose in life appeared to be to impel their pupils into whatever futures they were best suited for.

Regrettably, overshadowing this drive towards academic achievement was this umbrella of religious nonsense. In one school, where the head was a highly qualified scientist, some way-out crank was permitted to perform a ridiculous interpretation of Jonah and the Whale. There, these young primary age children were subjected to an account so absurd that I failed to understand why the staff did not challenge it.

This incredible whale, whose gullet was so small it could only swallow a tiny hill and whose stomach contained enough hydrochloric acid to dissolve whatever it imbibed within hours, swallowed a man, took him down to untold depths that would have drowned him within minutes and then regurgitated him alive days later. The most incredible thing of all was that otherwise intelligent people actually believed in this twaddle.

To this day, I still feel a sense of guilt at not having stood up and asked ‘Why are you filling these young heads with such nonsense?’ But at that time, like most of us, I didn’t want to attract attention or rock the boat.

This is but a small example of the mass of regularly promoted Biblical nonsense that our children had, and continue to have, to come to terms with. As teachers, I felt that we should have questioned more and told our pupils to assume nothing, while demanding proof of all they are told.

In this day and age, I firmly believe that the only place for religion is in the home. It has no place in the law, nor in education (except in a purely academic sense), nor government.

There is no doubt that in years to come the current religions of the world will be viewed by future generations as we now view those of the pre-Christian era. Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Buddha and the thousands of other current deities will one day take their place alongside Zeus, Thor and all those other gods who now appear but figments of an uninformed imagination.

Our descendants must one day say: ‘How on earth could people who reached the stars have believed in such unproven nonsense?’
Le Sellier,
Rue du Rondin,
St Mary.