Memories of my High School Religion Classes

Today I'd like to take a trip in a time machine back to ... The mid 90's [Duh, duh, DUH!!!]

My family is a-religious and I went to a public elementary school, but I went to a local area catholic highschool for the simple reason that my area public highschool was old, run-down, smelled like urine, was farther away, had low educational standards, and was filled with hicks. To give you an idea how bad the public highschool was, my grade 8 public school teacher recommended going to the Catholic school. So, for the sake of my education, away I went the land of horrible school uniforms with itchy pants and drab colours...

... and much to my annoyance (though not to my surprise), I found that religion courses were mandatory for grade 9 and grade 10. Of course, it wasn't really "religion" so much as it was "Catholic doctrine." The grade 9 class was taught by a Sri Lankan priest, while the grade 10 class was taught by a math teacher with incredible armpit stains who always rested his hands on top of his head (yikes) and accused us of mentally goofing-off ([snarly]: "You look like you're all paying attention, but I know that you're all mentally goofing-off!").

These classes were weird beasts, full of strange indoctrination and nonsense. We recited the Lord's Prayer and Hail Mary, we read New Testament stuff, plus scant Old Testament stuff (namely the 10 Commandments, where our teacher reworded each of the "Thou shalt nots..." to the more positive "Do...", as in "Do respect the life of your fellow man"). We had some hokey stuff, too, like coming up with ad campaigns to promote Catholicism, including drawing posters (Garfield, with the slogan "We put the 'cat' back in 'catechism').

The Catholic church hasn't really done much in recent times to dissuade scientific teaching, and our school taught evolution as fact. But these classes introduced some concepts that were just silly and ridiculous to me. In grade 9, we were taught creationism, including the creation of Adam and Eve, the Garden, and the Fall, though it was never made clear if it was intended to be Young-Earth, Old-Earth, or just allegorical. We were then taught something called The Ladder of Being. This is an old conception of the classification, or ranking, of entities created by God, starting with God at the top, followed by Angels, then Humans, then Animals, Plants, Rocks, etc.

One day, we had a quiz on what we had learned. I quote (to the best of my recollection):

Today, we will have a quiz. Write down what you believe [pause] about how the world was created. It's not supposed to be a hard quiz. Just write something, as much as you can, about the creation of life and all the things we've gone over. Remember, I'm interested in what you believe. I'll give you 15 minutes or so, and include sketches if you can. {Emphasis his.}

Of course, being a science-minded atheist, I took my 15 minutes writing about the big bang, billions of years of stellar evolution, and the evolution of life on Earth, including drawing a very lame sketch of tetrapod evolution from a lobe-finned fish. I didn't mention God once.

Of course, after picking up the quizzes, the teacher took an informal survey and asked, "Who wrote about Adam and Eve?" and everyone other than me put their hands up. "Who drew the Ladder of Being?" Again, just about everybody put up their hands.

I knew I was in trouble.

Later on in the week, everyone got their quizzes back, graded based on how much stuff they had included from the class. Everyone, that is, except me. My quiz had mysteriously disappeared. The teacher ignored it without a word.

Another time we discussed goodness. A scenario was presented where three people are each tempted to steal something but don't, each for a different reason. The first doesn't because he fears getting caught. We all agree that he is not a "good" person. The second person is much better because he follows the golden rule, and decided not to steal because it's not nice to others; he is deemed to be good. Our teacher then tells us the third person is the best yet, because he remembers that God says stealing is wrong and to love your neighbour, so he doesn't steal. I asked, but it was never explained why doing the right thing because you are afraid of God is better than doing the right thing because you are afraid of mortal authorities. The teacher merely said it was because he recognized God's love.

In grade 10 we talked about more topical subjects, like abortion and homosexuality. I say "talk" rather than "debate" because dissent was discouraged and rarely did anyone voice arguments for non-Catholic views. The topic that stood out the most was euthanasia. One student actually went against the official Catholic stance and spoke in favour of euthanasia. He told a sad story about how his grandfather had an excruciatingly painful tumour that was slowly killing him. Near the end of his life, he was in so much pain that he repeatedly requested to be overdosed with painkillers; his requests were always denied, and he suffered for many extra months before he died.

I'll never forget the callousness of the teacher's response: The student was coldly admonished that he needed to "do more research."

Fortunately, this fascist mentality toward teaching didn't extend to the other classes at school, and I was able to survive those years despite my lack of belief.