Bishop of Waterford and Lismore Alphonsus Cullinan has said yoga is not suitable for parish schools

Bishop Cullinan’s crusade against mindfulness and yoga in schools is to be applauded – let the streets of Waterford and Lismore be spared the scourge we in Dublin endure of calm, mindful youngsters terrorising us with their placidity.

Yet this should merely be the first step in ridding schools of subjects that, as his grace notes, are “not of Christian origin.”

We inculcate our children with algebra and arithmetic, as though we are ignorant of these dark arts’ Sumerian and Babylonian roots.

Considering too geometry’s origins in classical Greece (you say pre-Christian? I say un-Christian!), one must conclude that all maths should be banned from primary and secondary education.

The heathen Greeks were also responsible for the pestilence that was natural philosophy, which – in its elaboration by the heretic, occultist and alchemist Isaac Newton – gave us classical mechanics. Thus, let us scrap physics.

Biology too must go, given its origins in a Humboldtian conception of science as separate from religion, while our Creationist brethren in the US and elsewhere have shown the fallacy of many so-called sciences from geology to archaeology.

I know from Bishop Cullinan’s valiant efforts in 2017 to discourage the administering of the Gardasil HPV vaccine to schoolgirls that he is with me in this crusade against science.

Were Herodotus and Thucydides Christian? Of course not – no more than Anaximander or the Imago Mundi. Thus we must ban history and geography.

We teach innocent children English literature, yet examining its development from the bawdiness of Chaucer, to the violence and licentiousness of Shakespeare, it seems clear that English too should be jettisoned from the curriculum.

What of our own native tongue? Tracing the origins of the Irish language back through Old and Primitive Irish, we arrive at ogham, inscriptions in which were (largely) non-Christian.

Ban Irish from our schools!

“So teach them practical stuff,” you say – “boiling eggs and darning socks.”

Phylogenetic analysis demonstrates that the origins of cookery go back two million years, far pre-dating Christianity. Sewing too is palaeolithic, while weaving is neolithic.

Free our schools of the un-Christian tyranny of home economics!

The only subject worthy of being taught is religion, though when the reforms I propose above are implemented, its teaching will be impossible owing to the lack of literacy skills.

As such, we may sack all teachers and sell school land for residential development, resulting in savings of billions to the national exchequer.

Dr John Kearns,
Terenure,
Dublin 6W.

Bishop Cullinan, yoga and Zen (Irish Times letters page)

Catholic bishop warns against yoga and mindfulness in schools (Darren Skelton, The Irish Times)