THE Hobart school chaplain terminated for Facebooking an anti-gay message highlights the entire odd business of employing preachers in educational institutions.
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Chaplains preach, don’t they? Sure.
And the feds fund them to turn up at schools? Spot on.
But teaching kiddies in the classroom about Jesus or the Bible’s attitude to gayness? Sorry, no can do.
Even if trendy vicars are busting to sex up the old story about a charismatic Hebrew freedom fighter who rose above the stigma of disputed parentage and the working class mentality to lead a campaign of peaceful protest against Palestine’s occupiers before being executed after a show trial.
You would probably be aware that the federal government’s four-year $243.8 million National School Chaplaincy program pays the theologically-inspired an average $20,000 a year to legally wander around school and college playgrounds.
OK, crunch time, to do what?
In case you’re on a learning curve with this one, discard any pious thoughts of thumb-twiddling clerics proselytising (fancy-pants theological talk for preaching).
That includes leafing through the Bible seeking relevant passages to convert the Heathen, especially feral grade 9s who have gone forth to multiply behind the bike sheds.
A recent American guest on ABC TV’s Monday night program Q&A pointed out that having non-preaching preachers, in Australian schools ‘‘was about as pointless as dressing someone up as a clown, but telling them they’re not allowed to make anyone laugh.’’
A usually reliable source confides that the religious persons are there to ‘‘to provide reassurance and act as a sympathetic listener to students’ problems’’.
‘‘Fine words don’t butter parsnips’’, as late (atheist) communist leader Nikita Khrushchev mysteriously deduced.
Hey, perhaps successful candidates for the role could show their street cred by performing miracles such as levitating, walking across the school lake or building a new gym-pool complex in seven days.
The real reason for this whole weird business must be that, unlike the olden days, no two people can nowadays agree on what the kiddies can be told about the Bible.
Once upon a millennium, the Good Book laid down some fairly awesome, if not ironclad, rules on everyday conduct.
With the warning that transgressors would be smote mightily.
Now even preachers hedge their bets.
With the number of believers falling off a cliff like so many gadarene swine, remaining hot gospellers become more desperate and finger-wagging with their various interpretations, often traditional, but edging towards the all-inclusive and, with an eye on current moral standards, fashionable.
Christians must feel themselves besieged by other belief systems, not just the tide of strident Middle East-based beliefs, but sandal-clad Greensters who warn that we have sinned against Mother Nature (and all her works) and the only way to penance is to genuflect to Gaia.
How different to a time up to and including the 1960s when Jehovah was in his Heaven and dispensing punishment to presumed evil doers.
Biblical sanctions against homosexuality, St Paul’s dictum concerning women being silent in church, you get the picture.
Religious rulers now bend the rules quite a bit — no more eternal damnation, for example.
Why, a rural operative can nowadays even get away with ploughing his fields on the Sabbath without incurring Jehovah’s wrath or even a public stoning.
And whatever happened to punishment once meted out to a person wearing two different types of material about their person, consuming pork or shellfish (while allowing the devout to sell one’s daughter into slavery)?
Let alone condemning those folk without 20-20 vision who attempted to approach the altar of the Lord.
Christians now tread softly around these issues or plain ignore them.
Meanwhile, how about the feds spending big bucks on more practical school matters including health and hearing checks (abandoned due to ‘‘lack of funding’’), speech pathologists and school psychologists?