Date: 19/09/2001
I was attending my five-year-old granddaughter's school assembly, to see her receive a merit certificate for good work.
I don't know whether there has ever been a time in my life when I have had to struggle so hard to keep the tears inside as when I looked at the faces of those children, wondering what sort of a world my generation was leaving them. I didn't quite manage it.
The principal, a fair-haired, sweet-faced, youngish woman, said: "Children, we are all a bit sad this week, aren't we, because a very bad thing happened. Can you tell me what we can do to make it feel better when bad things happen? Do you think it might help if we are all very nice to each other? Can you think of ways we can do that?"
The children put up their hands. "We can play with someone even if they're not our friend." "We can share with each other." "If someone wants to get in when we are lining up to go somewhere, instead of pushing them away we can just let them in."
This is a public school. The children are from many and different racial backgrounds. They hold hands as they walk into the assembly hall and later sing Advance Australia Fair. But they do not say any prayer and the name of God is not invoked. The children at this school are not chanting verses of the Koran or the Catholic catechism. They are not being told that theirs is the one true faith or that they are God's chosen people. They are not being taught that they are better or different from others because of what they believe. They are simply being told: be kind to one another.
This is what last week's tragedy is about, surely? About what we teach the children? The men who made missiles out of planes were once some mothers' little boys. I look at the faces of the children at the school and I think, "You could take any one of these and teach them to hate. You could make them think people of another race, another religion, another sex, are beneath their contempt."
Five thousand innocent people died terrible deaths because some men were absolutely convinced they were fighting a holy war. People who have never read a word of the Koran are now competing to absolve Islam of any blame in what happened. Perhaps part of the reason is that to blame Islam would force them to wonder if all religion, even their religion, is to blame. Religious fanaticism, not religion, is to blame, they say.
I don't know at what point belief becomes fanaticism. I understand the comfort that religious ritual, prayers, the singing of hymns, can bring: "Goodness and mercy shall surely follow me all the days of my life ..." At these times we crave goodness and mercy.
But in the 21st century, can goodness and mercy be found just as well outside religion as within it? Does religion make good anyone who is not already good? It certainly makes some mad, or bad, who would otherwise not be.
All written religions have some terrible passages. Christians, in general, appear more able to ignore the bad bits than some other religions. There are plenty of exceptions, but in Western countries at least, these days Christians tend to be not very close to their religion. In a recent survey in Britain, only 11 per cent of Anglicans but 75 per cent of Muslims said their religion was "very important" to them.
Of course people should be free to believe what they like. But to believe too fiercely can be dangerous to others. Any decent society allows religious freedom. The most humane countries are those in which all religions are tolerated, but religion is low-key (the fact that it is tolerated helps to make it low-key).
I do not think schools that teach religion should be publicly funded. I say this despite knowing that church-based schools are mostly very good schools, in which good values are taught. I think we should value and protect our free, public and secular education. We should be grateful that young people of calibre still want to be teachers.
"Be kind to one another." Little children can understand that. Maybe, without invoking a God to tell us whom we should hate, we could all be kinder to one another.
Pamela Bone is an associate editor of The Age.
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