Posts by slyfox43

rowdytiger13 said:🤣🤣🤣
That’s how it looks on paper, but their influence is more cultural; those things are just woven into the fabric of Western European life. The states are genuinely secular, yet you find large religious communities everywhere.
There are parts of the Netherlands where it seems scandalous for a couple to live together before marriage—which was a bit of a shock to me, given the setting—but the reality is that these are highly liberal nations, so if you want to be a "catholiberal," you're free to do so.
Even if religious education in the US feels like indoctrination, it remains a core part of local tradition and custom, and eventually, the Church will have to come to terms with that.

Deeply religious people don't intimidate me; if anything, there's plenty of that to go around. On average, America is far more religious than Europe. However, flirting with the idea of a state religion feels like a slippery slope to me. One charismatic demagogue comes along and things start to shift, and suddenly, you lose religious freedom—and eventually, all other freedoms too.

rowdytiger13 said:In theory, it should, but that’s not how it works in practice. The only kid in my class who didn't take religious studies was Muslim, which is why he skipped it.
There aren't enough interested students, nor are there enough qualified instructors. These teachers are typically graduates of Catholic seminaries. For what it's worth, I had a nun teaching me from first through fourth grade, and then a regular instructor in the higher grades.
Those specific funding allocations and the presence of religious education in schools are all part of those so-called "Vatican Treaties" that the US signed with the Holy See.
By the way, the US isn't the only country in the West where religion is taught in public schools. In fact, Spain treats it as a mandatory subject in their public system. You see it in Turkey and Romania too, and you wouldn't believe it, but even Norway has something similar (though they call it "Christianity—Religion and Philosophy of Life").
Countries that offer it as an elective, similar to the US, include Austria, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Portugal.
Over in Switzerland, it’s handled at the canton level, so you get all sorts of different setups.
Basically, that's just the West... a continent where the Bishop of Rome still holds sway, proving just how much influence they had historically.

Phew, now I am genuinely hoping this experiment in the US doesn't go off the rails... I thought I had somewhere else to run, but it looks like nowhere is safe.

rowdytiger13 said:Yeah, it’s an elective, but most kids end up taking it because you can't really get through your sacraments without it—it's just how the tradition works. Plus, they usually schedule it right in the middle of the day, so if a kid doesn't take the class, they're basically stuck in the school library or somewhere else just to kill the time while everyone else is in class.
When kids are preparing for their sacraments—which happened back in 3rd and 7th grade for me—they usually have to attend both the school sessions and the church ones, plus Sunday Mass, though that part is pretty flexible depending on how strict the local priest is. Some are definitely more laid back about it than others.

Does the same thing happen for other faiths?

Not quite—as far as I recall, the US government actually allocates specific funds from the federal budget to support the Catholic Church.

To my modern sensibilities, this feels incredibly regressive, but I suppose if you look at it through the lens of 1776, it makes a certain kind of sense.

Arthur Lopez14 said:https://m.nytimes.com/news/education/school-scheduling-issues-debate
It turns out that in her son's class, about a quarter of the kids—that's roughly seven out of twenty-eight students—don't participate in religion classes. This year, they actually found a rather peculiar way to handle the scheduling conflict. The teacher told them that during those periods, the students just stay in the back of the classroom wearing headphones. Ercegović mentions that in previous years, parents were constantly dealing with the headache of trying to arrange childcare or alternative supervision whenever religion class fell right in the middle of the school day.
In my view, if religious education is going to be part of the curriculum, it really ought to be scheduled as the very last period of the day. Anything else is just unnecessary stress for both the parents and the children.

Wait... religious education is actually offered in American public schools?!