There are two subjects that seem to dominate the Romanian public sphere (I would say blogo.ro-oaie, but that's defunct): the religion choice in schools and the New York Times Op-Ed on corruption in Romania. I’m very tempted to make a nice hot stew out of both, but I’ll try to keep each to its own article.

Let me start with religion and see if I manage to stick to this subject until done with it (“fac rahatul praf”).

I started looking into this when I noticed that my article on St Ioan Pop the Rapist was now the most accessed article of the past 7 days. Whenever my article on 1974 gets dethroned, something important happened, and looking at events, it became obvious that “religion choice” in schools is the main culprit.

So what has happened? It turns out that back in November 2014, Romania’s Constipational Court had found that an article of education law that stipulated that kids or their parents not wishing for the kids to attend religion classes must make a written request is unconstitutional, as the default should be no religion. (hn-neconstit, ET).

By the deadline yesterday over 89% of kids and their parents had expressed a written desire to be indoctrinated (hn-89%).

How did Romania get to this point?

Writing about church and religion is no easy task. Though I am not a religious person, I am not an atheist either (to my mind, atheism is a religion much like communism, hence the previous sentence is a tautology). Since I have never been religious, or force-fed religion in school, I do not hate priests or the Romanian Orthodox Church (aka BOR). After all, people like Dawkins hate it for this very reason: the lack of choice and the constant inducement of guilt that consumed their youth.

I suspect that this (the love and hate relationship people have with priests and religious figures in general: they perceive them as needed and simultaneously hate them for telling them what to do) is what may have led to the complaint against Father Ioan Pop. The other part may be the perception of “open season” on authority figures people from more oppressed parts of the world have when coming to Canada, feeling as if the more grievances they file and the more they pose in victims, the better their lives will get and the usually unrelated wrongs they suffer will be corrected.

There are some limited advantages to believing in God and going to church, but it seems to me that Romanians have gone way overboard with their religious fervour. Part of the reason is communism, which “forced” a quasi-religious indoctrination of people, with its patron saints Marx, Engels and Lenin and the supreme deity who was first Stalin, then Ceausescu. With “freedom” came a backlash against anything on the left of the political spectrum. Everything banned or discouraged during the communist era suddenly became indiscriminately cool, desirable and awesome. People fell back on the familiar default: fellating Jesus through priests who often have very little to do with Christ’s original message, which, incidentally, most people do not know and/or understand: just look at the interviews asking poor villagers what is celebrated at Christmas or Easter.

*(*This article is unfinished – it was scheduled to appear in the hope that it will be finished before, but since this message is here and until it is removed, the article is to be considered work in progress*)*.

Sources / More info: tnr-patri, hn-neconstit, hn-89%, wr-edure, hn-sarko