I was listening casually to the radio on Tuesday of last week when I heard a man say ''I've been comfortable with Roman Catholicism. I accept the teachings of my Church''. Now you don't hear sentiments like that too often in the media so I started to pay more attention.
It was Newstalk's Lunchtime programme, and Prof Maurice Nelligan, the well-known heart surgeon, was speaking to Damien Kiberd, whose laconic style is growing on me. Nelligan stressed that he wasn't what Kiberd called a ''holy roller'', just outlining his views and experiences.
His own experiences as a doctor had led him to stay on the path of faith, and he just recounted some significant events rather than making any large claims about them. One woman had heart failure, was nearly given up for dead, but was resuscitated after many efforts by the medical staff - later she asked Dr Nelligan if anything strange had happened to her, and told of a typical near-death experience. Another patient, a man whose death seemed imminent, gradually recovered after his sisters went to the hospital oratory to pray for him.
At the other end of the belief scale is campaigning atheist Richard Dawkins, and on Wednesday of last week (on More4, from the Channel 4 stable) he got yet another chance to promote his views without challenge in the documentary Faith Schools Menace? With a loaded title like that you don't expect much objectivity! As Dawkins made clear, near the end of the programme, ''I want to persuade you that education is better without faith''.
The broody music suggested that religious schools were something sinister, the ominously dark clouds suggested we should dread the rise in faith schools. And wouldn't you know, when Dawkins envisioned a future for his kind of education we saw him pictured under a sky with the sun breaking out! And the language - faith schools were ''on the march'', their influence was ''creeping''. Gimme a break!
Dawkins always seems blithely unaware of the contradictions in his approach, so convinced is he of the rightness of his views, but wait isn't that what he criticises religious believers for? But Dawkins would claim he has EVIDENCE for his views (having neatly defined evidence in such a narrow way as to exclude other people's evidence!). Well, for a man committed to evidence, he was on shaky ground - for example, in looking at the interesting issue of parents joining a religion to get their children into a faith school, he interviewed one couple who had ''become'' Catholic. It was strange, though. She was Protestant, and according to Dawkins there were plenty of Protestant schools around, so what was going on? Then we got anecdotes, oops sorry, evidence, of unsavoury goings on. The woman in question felt that she had to ''be nice to the priest'', and ''feed his ego'', for example by giving him cough mixture when he had a cold!
Dawkins went to Northern Ireland to illustrate the pernicious effects of faith schools. He conveniently forgot the faith school education that many of the peacemakers received, and the role of clergy in the peace process. He suggested that tribal divisions started in the nursery -these are hardly faith-based, which kind of undermines his blaming of the denominational education for sectarian divisions. We saw footage of young rioters in the July disturbances - is he seriously blaming religious schools for this? Were these youngsters the ones who paid most attention in RE class? In fact, if they paid a scrap of attention to their religious education they would have been out loving their neighbours instead.
At one stage we saw Dawkins, preacher at heart, in a pulpit reading scripture (he likes it as literature, you see), and later, in a cringe worthy conclusion, conducting an ''alternative assembly'' in what he called a ''normal school'' (i.e. not a faith school) - he was up on another podium addressing the toddlers below, as captive an audience as in any RE class. The good news is, they weren't paying much attention, and I'd say it was way over their heads anyway.
Dawkins saw himself as a defender of the rights of children over their parents, and fair enough, parents don't own their children, and the State must always be vigilant about the likes of abuse in families. But really, is what children are learning in RE class a threat to society? Picture the day when faith is taken out of the schools - would we have inspectors coming to remove the crucifixes, and the holy pictures the children have drawn? When it's too late we might find ourselves saying ''that is not what we meant at all''.
