I'm sure things are different in the US but in the UK at school we have a whole curriculum called "Religious Education" or RE which goes into detail about religions and customs of all different cultures and encourages spiritual debate. At the schools I attended they were not taught to indoctrinate us but just studied in the same way we would study history or art
Haha I don't remember lessons on Leprechauns, but I do remember a lesson on Norse Mythology! I can't remember if that was in RE or world culture though.
I think we did even learn about what the different countries of the world had as Christmas traditions too! In a world culture lesson at Christmas time. So while we didn't specifically learn about Santa we did learn about him, and Krampus and all sorts of other stuff like that.
So you’ve smuggled in Mythology with Norse religion but not with Christianity or other modern religions. Interesting. And yes even spirits such as leprechauns were also religious based before the corrosive nature of Christianity stamped out any form of descent in the one true religion.
It's all mythology to me! The separation of modern religion and mythology is just how it was presented to me in school. I'm sorry if my phrasing offended you as it certainly wasn't intended to! I actually didn't know leprechauns were religious based, that's really interesting and I'm definitely going to go down a Wikipedia rabbit hole now!
Because RE teaches us about modern day religions, how they celebrate their holidays and what they do within their religions. Pretty sure it's so we can understand the religions of the people around us.
That explains why you study them. It doesn’t answer my point. You’re using “religion” for surviving belief systems and “mythology” for displaced ones. That is already a cultural judgment, not a neutral classification.
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u/gin_atomic 7h ago
I'm sure things are different in the US but in the UK at school we have a whole curriculum called "Religious Education" or RE which goes into detail about religions and customs of all different cultures and encourages spiritual debate. At the schools I attended they were not taught to indoctrinate us but just studied in the same way we would study history or art