Update - 06/08/08

Though it looks suspiciously like I've been mourning the death of George Carlin since my last post, my absence has been due to a hedonistic summer's travelling.

I just wanted to make a record of something I found out upon returning home:
In my hometown in the UK, there are a group of Evangelical Christians who heavily populate a strategic location in the town center where the road acts as a fork leading to all the town's clubs, pubs and bars. These Christians are particularly infamous for their methods of attracting attention. Although the other day I noticed...where have all the Christians gone?! No promises of eternal damnation. No threats of hellfire. No "Jesus Saves!", "Repent, Sinner!" or "John 3:16" sandwich boards. The pavement where they once ominously stood was but a glorious relic to their downfall. I could still smell the sulphur. Needless to say I was a little disappointed. After a little inquiry to those in the know, to my amazement, I swiftly discovered that the group had been arrested for "Breach of the Peace", and were no longer permitted to preach in that location.



Scenes like in the image above are fairly common in UK high streets, but I never had much faith they would ever dwindle in my lifetime. Apparently threatening drunks with hellfire and damnation at night time is illegal in the UK. Obviously I don't wish these people to be stopped through legislation, I do however wish towards a society in the not-so-distant future that is reasonable and intelligent enough to not take these people seriously.

What amazes me about this country, is that I was taught intelligent design in school! In the U.S a teacher would have a hard time even mentioning God in the classroom. Here in Britain, however, we of course have "Religious Education". My experiences of R.E. were essentially of Bible stories, Bible "science", and how to apply Christianity to our lives. Every R.E. teacher in our school was a Christian. We were even forced to pray in our school assemblies. Now this was only 4/5 years ago, and as far as I'm aware the system is the same: Teaching kids one thing in the Biology classroom and another in an R.E. class from an incredibly biased perspective. A friend of mine even applied for an R.E. job and was declined, not for being an atheist, but rather for not being a Christian. It seems to me that Britain's monotheistic history lies festering in the classroom unnoticed, and people only seem to turn up their noses when it overflows into the streets.

In France, students are not taught Religious Education like we are in Britain. Instead, they are taught compulsory Philosophy from a young age, of which Religion is a small aspect of. This much more subjective and progressive method rids the French school system of theological corruption whilst providing their children with essential, unbiased knowledge of what is perhaps - what with all the street preachers - the most important thing to be well informed of in the 21st century: religion.