How to value religion
By Kevin Baldeosingh (T&T Express)
I wasn't invited to the Education Ministry's stakeholders consultation on the teaching of religion. Maybe the organisers find that I stake religious beliefs too often in my writing. Nonetheless, since I know more about religion than religious leaders in Trinidad and Tobago, I feel I have an intellectual obligation to put in my two cents' worth. And, after hearing Education Minister Tim Gopeesingh's rationale for this new policy, I figure that figure is just about right.
According to Dr Gopeesingh, the Ministry wants "a revised curriculum that mirrors the virtues and values of all the religious groups in the country". But if religion were taught like a proper subject, such as Science, then it wouldn't be a mirror of virtues. Physics teachers don't tell students they should believe Maxwell's laws of electromagnetism because James Maxwell was a teetotaller, and Biology teachers don't argue that evolution is a fact because Charles Darwin never horned his wife. Teaching Religion as it is actually practised here would mean teaching young people how to take money under false pretences such as healing the sick, preventing crime, and stopping hurricanes. (Many students already know how to fornicate while saying "Oh God".) So if Religion is to be a subject which reflects virtue, then English Language teachers would first be required to teach their students a new meaning of the word "virtue".
After all, if nine-year-old school girls are told the age of the Prophet Muhammad's fourth wife, Aisha, they would probably go "Ewww!", indicating that their idea of virtue is different from Muslim scholars', who explain that it was a great honour for Aisha to be chosen by the 53-year-old Muhammad. Now all schools, and not just Muslim ones, will be teaching girls to be ambitious from small, since even a nine-year-old can cook, sweep, and marry their grandfather's friend.
This value of women is also backed up in Christianity and Hinduism, since Corinthians 11:9 says "Neither was the man created for the woman but the woman for the man" while the Bhagavadgita says that women are of "lower birth". Teachers could explain that this doesn't mean women were made to serve man, as a common sense interpretation of these words would suggest, but only that men need someone to wash their clothes. The virtue provided here by Yahweh is the formula to prevent domestic violence in Colossians 3:18-19, which says, "Wives, be subject to your husbands, as fitting in the Lord."
It would be rather more difficult to explain the virtues of the Bhagavadgita, especially to teenage boys from Laventille, since Bhagavan says: "One who is not motivated by ego, whose intelligence is not entangled, though he kills men in this world, does not kill nor is he bound by his actions." Schoolboys may interpret this to mean that, since they aren't doing well in class, they could kill and not go to jail. The teacher should explain that this rule only allows Hindus to kill, and even then only if they're brahmins or ksatriyas. The virtue here is that this would lead to less stigmatisation of little black boys.
On the other hand, teaching Religion could lead to more stigmatisation of little gay boys. Leviticus 20:13 says, "If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death". But if this law was followed, would anyone be left to put on plays at Queen's Hall? Would it have to be renamed Kings Hall? However, teachers can take their cue from Seventh-Day Adventist pastor Clive Dottin, who says this is a moral law and not a ceremonial law, which I assume means that you needn't execute homosexuals nowadays but they're all still going to Hell.
Where teachers will have the most problems, though, would be in reconciling religious facts with actual facts. In Mathematics class, students are told that pi is an infinite sequence of numbers of which the first six numbers are 3.14159: but, in 1Kings 7:23, the value of pi is calculated as 3. The fractions in the Quran also contradict what students are taught in Math, since Sura 4:11-12 and 4:176 state that when a man dies, leaving only his mother, his wife and two sisters, then they respectively receive ·, ·, and · inheritance: which adds up to 15/12 of the man's property. Maybe in the first instance, teachers can say that everybody rounds up figures, including Yahweh, and in the second instance claim that this is proof that Allah performs even better miracles than Jesus feeding the multitudes with two fishes and five loaves.
So, given that religion would still be taught as propaganda in T&T's schools, such a class would mainly impart ignorance and intolerance to the students. Which may explain why the Government is pushing the subject, since these are the two attributes that politicians depend on for votes.
