I honestly believe in man's fundamental right to be a monkey at any costs. I have got nothing against those crossing themselves when passing by proves, not by churches. I put up with getting swears invoking my faith, still I leave no one in Darwin's hands. But Romanian society has got a problem, since the time has come for proposals such as to ban religion in state schools on scientific and methodological grounds, just like it happened under the Communist regime. This is not a stupid, but innocent slide. It is an overt war against the Church, no matter which Church. The "Solidarity for Freedom of Conscience", an organization headed by Remus Cernea, has opened a campaign so that evolutionism and more philosophical approaches critical of religion should be in the curricula again. While in tight connections with all sorts of fishy European foundations and organizations, Remus Cernea's "free consciences" are collecting signatures and arranging marches to persuade the Ministry of Education into allowing for the defiling of the Bible and the Alcoran in the school curricula. Practically speaking, the group wants things to look as follows: a priest, a rabbi or a mufti preaches about the sacred things and there follows a genetics engineer to use the undeniable tools of science in order to dismember all the mystical theories the innocent children were poisoned with one hour before. So after one spoonful of religion there follows a dipper of science, as the only way for the pure minds to be well informed and vote for who created the monkey. The plate showing the 4-5 famous creatures, from the least upright to the most upright, marching towards a future to become rather scientologic than Christian, will have to be hanged in a more visible place in classrooms. It will also have to have the same size as the plate showing the Redeemer. Or it should in no way be smaller than Saint George's lizard. They are proposing for study an object explicitly hostile to religion, just like in the good days of communism. As for religion, it has always failed to get along with evolutionism. Didn't they teach about the soul and passion of the small frog dissected during the biology class? Why wouldn't Tom Cruise, the scientologist, not the pilot, share the same page with Newton and Thomas of Aquin? Romanian education is about to become an experiment anyway. It is just like the craftsman looks like a chimpanzee frenetically fixing the human condition. But it is all for the children's good, isn't it? They must learn that, apart God, there are other things too. Civil society has got the duty to inform them. It is anyway enough that they were baptized without being asked for opinion. There are enough opinions claiming people should be baptized only when ready for it, when reasonable, maybe when graduating high school or instead of graduating. Culture minister Adrian Iorgulescu proved understanding. He took efforts to express a smart opinion in this case too. Therefore he described himself as the dignified successor of the monkey, but one who believes in God passionately. So this is how far man deviated from the initial project! This is some coherence, isn't it? (...) Such initiatives would be just funny, didn't they emerge at times when Romanian society is still deeply troubled by the long decades of communist doctrine practices, apart from the two decades that came next, those dominated by Silviu Brucan. As for the cults in Romania, their representatives have failed true dialogue with society. If the Church is silent, the biology teacher is free to say: "Dear children, please take a look at this nice paramecium. Don't you find he takes after someone in your family?"

Rene PARSAN