I grew up with spiritually inclined parents. This meant church on a Sunday. Afterwards people would congregate outside crushed in a near sea of faith talking at each other fast and furious with the usual staccato beat about their families, children and their work. Basically, the world that they inhabited. The working classes seemed persecuted and tortured to me even then while the middle classes were given this seemingly angelic dispensation that allowed them this access to having a superiority complex. Thinking that they were better than others. They did not do community service, offer to volunteer or help others. If they were intellectual, I despaired at this even as a child. I felt that intellectuals had few allies, fewer alliances even than someone who did not despise religion.
I saw oppression a lot growing up in apartheid South Africa, in my parents’ quaint relationship, in the colonial thinking of the liberals around me and in gender bias. Today I can speak freely with my father as an adult as an equal about the inhumanity and barbarism we live with on a daily basis in the sub economic institution we find ourselves living in that we call and that is known as our community. Religion has always been tribal, and one has always had to be circumspect around issues of religion. It touches and impacts lives in ways that are classified as manifold and sovereign. What has happened to be being religious in the home if our children are not being taught norms and values their grandparents and parents were raised with, what is the basics we are foregoing in the name of Christianity? There is no psycho-social dynamism between insight, awareness and the framework of the justification of the broader picture of the political system that the spoiled identity finds itself in. In the here and the now we speak of either or being depressed or mentally ill as if there is some integral justification for it in today’s modern society. It is being replaced by inhumanity and the social application of barbarism.
I speak on these terms because you see what is happening in society and it gives rise to questioning the mindset and attitude of the working classes and the middle classes. We can speak of class, but I am speaking of the party politics, the crusade via the introduction of a baseless and inactive jurisdiction of the school of parental thought and vision into religion. If we do not teach and educate a child, who will? How can the child, the adolescent, the youth but not grow up with and into a spoiled identity if care is not taken with his attitude, his mindset, the significant role players and stakeholders in his education, his values and his norms must they also not be inter-faith based as we are living in a different dispensation in the world today, so must we not minister to the child’s intellect and not the parent’s acquisitioning of that intellect, the near-future environment, identity, advent of a psychological or philosophical crisis, fostering and engendering a workplace-friendly environment for the child as an adult? This child must grow up to become a positive contributing factor to their community, their family, their chosen and not necessarily given the religion they were born into or raised with.
With order comes directives, with routine comes articulateness, cleverness and a manner of expressing yourself and the child will henceforth grow up needing comfort. It goes without saying that this is one of the goals of religion. It will give the child a kind of freedom, a kind of spiritual comfort, the kind of trajectory that leads to building a sanctuary from the rest of the world. So as a child I saw the persecution of the oppressed in many things and one of them was the difference between party politics and the middle classes and the poverty level and breaking point, in other words the tipping point of the persecuted working classes. I write now to salvage something from the inner workings of my childhood that functions as a creative instrument and that serves all aspects of my adolescence and the basic language and trajectory of my early adulthood. Will having a discourse on inter-faith educative relations in religion tether all of us of living in a world where we acknowledge the cultural background that we each come from, will it give the spoiled identity a break from being marginalized from society and being touted as difficult, domineering and subversive?
Yes, we use words like religion, oppressed, persecuted without understanding that there are also underlying motives there that have the aftermath of far-reaching consequences like the experiences of depression and mental illness. Religion has its moments and yet without those values and teaching the dynamics of inter-faith educative relations in our schools to our children we will continue to live in this state of sheer flux in perpetuity never reaching and finding an end to this eternal vilification of what is right and who is in the blame and the spotless worship that is so paramount when it comes to raising children and teaching them what is right from wrong. Religion is worth its weight in gold when it comes to raising a child and teaching them the key structures and dividends of dignity, integrity and humanity.
You see politics will remain in the fray of the politicians, but religion is in the hands of the able-bodied parent willing to go the distance for the child in their care. The question is to inspire where you see the difference.
