I'm curious as to where everyone gained their negative perspective religion. Just seems like a cool thing to be anti religious. Holy Rollers to cool for the trend though.
Whether you believe it or not, I drew my own conclusions in regards to religion (and they aren't remotely influenced by the whole "being metal" charade, I've essentially held the same views for longer than I've been an active listener of music), and I probably had a bit of a head-start in the sense that my family didn't influence me religiously in any way. The earliest event I can recall that turned me off religion happened in year 5... I don't entirely remember what the class was masqueraded as, but basically it was a Christian "education" class, championed by the school chaplain, that took advantage of us kids' natural interest in Christmas/Easter/etc, to cram religious propaganda in to our minds. I found it extremely boring, confusing, and irrelevant to whatever I gave a crap about at that time, so I told my mother about this class, and she was outraged about the class, and had me withdrawn from it (this was at a public school, mind you).
Scripture they called it. You basically wrote that paragraph for me, so thanks for saving me time. Exact same story as me... only I was grade 4 and my parents wrote a letter so I didnt have to attend scripture because I found it so insanely boring and didnt believe a word of it. Then I got the option to go and play games on this crappy old Amstrad computer, go to the library or play basketball. Of course, given the choices I had, many kids followed suit and by the end of the year I had a whole posse shooting hoops.
Haha... yeah, I was given the option to use the school computers instead too. Hello, Wolfenstein 3D. I don't remember at the time why this information didn't leak and break the entire class to pieces, but the only students exempt from the class were myself, and a girl from one of the higher grades. Perhaps they were silencing us, because we discovered something better than religion, and they didn't want to lose their herd... kinda parallels to the 'ol suppression of science, back in the days. Or perhaps they were appeasing to the kids' senses by giving them free Easter eggs at each class.
But yeah, it is/was fucking rude to just put all the kids in that class, without alerting/asking parents first... whether they don't want their kids taught religion, or they want them taught a different one... the only people who should be making decisions for kids (until they can do so on their own), is their fucking parents.
