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Comment by geonaut | Hacker News Reader

As an atheist parent being forced consider Catholic faith schools out of sheer necessity, this is far from a help. This is geographical blackmail. I have seen teaching material, and it is subtly biased towards Catholicism. Spending valuable contact hours on Religious Education is a waste of time. I will respect my child’s choice if they find religion as an adolescent/adult, but I do not respect an organisation that depends on indoctrinating 5 year olds and filter-feeding on the local inhabitants.

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If it is any consolation, as someone from a Catholic family and who spent 11 out of 13 years of K-12 schooling at Catholic schools, mainstream Catholic schools do an utterly woeful job at indoctrination. Your average Catholic school is more likely to turn your kid into an atheist/agnostic than into a convinced Catholic.

The really conservative ones, like Opus Dei or SSPX schools, arguably do a much better job of indoctrinating their pupils (although even for them, there are plenty for whom it doesn’t stick)-but I assume they are not on your menu. Even if you were willing to consider them, they probably wouldn’t be willing to consider you.

I went to a catholic school (in a place where public ones are readily available, but my parents thought the education there was better), and while they did talk religion, except for the religion class (which i'd have had in public school as well) I don't think it was very faith oriented. Notably they had evolution, big bang, sex ed and so on.

I think anglosaxon world religious schools are much different, and I have the impression that people in USA collate creationism and catholicity, while it's a strongly held belief in their country, across all faiths.

I'm an atheist now, so I don't think the indoctrination was so good.

> I have the impression that people in USA collate creationism and catholicity

I've noticed this as well. It's kinda weird, since the Catholic Church has officially held that it has no conflict with respect to evolution for around 75 years now (they basically take no position on the subject), and some of their scholars were pro-evolution for many years before that.

Nowadays, it's generally just fundamentalist Protestant churches which insist on literal creationism.

> while it's a strongly held belief in their country, across all faiths.

It's actually a minority belief in the United States, although a substantial minority.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/261680/americans-believe-creati...

Basically it's all WASP propaganda against italians, mexicans and irish people… to brand them as intellectually inferior, when the reality is different.

Is this satire?

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