Questionable knowledge

The last time I clicked the random article link on Wikipedia, I was served up an article on Galina Antyufeeva, which led to my discovery of Transnistria. How many people lived their lives in blissful ingorance of these facts, I wonder. Fortunately for my three readers, there are people like me who not only compulsively dig up such facts, but also feel compelled to share them with you.

Yes, you're welcome.

So, in keeping with this unofficial and self-appointed mission, I once again went trolling for knowledge on Wikipedia, with an eye for something truly obscure to enlighten you with. However, I'm sad to report I didn't get far in this respect. Instead of random knowledge, I came across something which now compels me to write more about it.

I was served up an article on what at first seemed an unassuming school located in Toronto, Canada, called the Hawthorn School for Girls. What caught my eye wasn't the fact that it is a private school of the Roman Catholic denomination (I myself went to a Roman Catholic private high school, and then to Notre Dame). Rather, it was the organization with which it is affiliated: Opus Dei.

Opus Dei, as millions now know, was brought unwillingly into the international spotlight by being a prominent plot element in Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code". As unflattering as the portrayal was, a lot of what was shown of their practices has been chronicled by other sources, some of them ex-Opus Dei members. The self-flagellation, use of the silice and, most of all, the rigid adherence to doctrine which underlies the daily activities of its members, all have been amply documented.

But I'm not writing about Opus Dei per se. As far as I'm concerned, it is but one of a great many such organizations, each having more bizarre beliefs than the next, and none amounting to much more than what my father would have called "shovelling clouds".

What I wanted to write about goes beyond this particular example, though I will use this one to make my point. On the Hawthorn School's website is the following statement:

Underlying all the activities of the school is the unquestioned acknowledgement of the existence of God, of knowable objective truth, and of moral absolutes.

And its mission statement:

To assist parents in the integral education of their daughters to become free and responsible women who know and love the truth.

I recently wrote about Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion". In the book, Dawkins makes an argument that calling a child either a Muslim, a Catholic or a Protestant child is as meaningless as calling them a liberal, republican or a fiscalist. To him, tarring a child with such a loaded burden is tantamount to child abuse:

There is no such thing as a Christian child, there is only a child of Christian parents. Whenever you hear the phrase Christian child or Muslim child or Protestant child or Catholic child, the phrase should grate like fingernails on a blackboard.

I suppose I should feel lucky. After all, I was likewise raised in such a biased way. I was never given a choice as to what spiritual path (if any) I wanted to follow. The idea seems ridiculous to most people, so deeply-ingrained is this notion that a child's spirituality is a parent's purview, but that a child should de facto be submitted to the same spiritual strictures as their parents is utter madness. The girls of the Hawthorn school, despite the best intentions of the parents who founded it, will be spiritually stunted, and will likely never even come to realize the blight that this original bias imposed on their ability to think critically.

They will come to understand the existence of god as being 'unquestioned' and, in all likelihood, will indeed never question it. Just so it's clear, I don't care if the belief is in the christian god, Mohammed or even Thor—what bothers me is the fact that children are presumed to be of one faith or another simply by being born in one place rather than another.

Kinda gives the expression "there but by the grace of god go I" another meaning, doesn't it?