Saturday, November 11, 2006

Inclusive religion, Fry & Laurie style

My complete collection of "A Bit of Fry & Laurie" came Thursday, and I was watching it this morning, and they did this funny sketch about religion in schools (British schools have mandatory religious lessons, or at least they did - and there are still a lot of faith schools*, with the nod to minorities being that they can have their very own faith schools):
Tony Radcliffe is headmaster of Lanark Primary School in Thurloe. The school has 84 pupils of mixed race, religion, gender and shoe size. So how does he deal with religious instruction at the school's morning assembly?
And then we see the kids singing their morning hymn:
We worship you, o god or gods,
Whoever you may be.
We realise that you operate
Supernaturally.
We thank you for the birds and bees,
For creatures live or dead.
But if you actually don't exist,
Then ignore what we've just said.
A-ah.
Lovely.

The skit moved on to say that Radcliffe had decided he needed to meet the needs of all his pupils, that "any religious package that we offer must take account of all those differences under a basic overarching umbrella... What we've done is to sweep away all these old divisions and basically invent an entirely new religion. A kind of religious Esperanto, if you like."

This being Fry & Laurie, of course it develops that the kids have already developed heresies...

But the basic idea is pretty useful for those who want to sneak religion into the classroom.
* I recently read in the Guardian that there is a problem with people trying to get their kids into C of E schools to avoid the inner-city community schools. People are the same all over...

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