Which is worse – a hypocritical “faith” or a sincere but demented one? The world is obviously more at risk from the real millenarian rapture-ready Christians and devout jihadists. So hypocrisy must be less dangerous to humanity.

All the same, I can’t resist a cynical shudder at the story, on BBC television and in the press, e.g. the UK Daily Mail, that parents are baptising more and more kids to get them into “good” Catholic schools.

Parents hoping to ensure places in oversubscribed Catholic schools are behind a surge in “late” baptisms into the Church in England and Wales, it was claimed today.
Baptisms of children aged between one and 13 years old made up 5.4 per cent of total entry into the church in 1958 but this figure had risen to nearly a third, or 30.3 per cent, in 2005, according to a report by an independent research body. (from the Daily Mail)

The BBC report says

Children are being baptised several years after birth to boost chances of getting into Roman Catholic schools, research has suggested

This shows both parents and the RC Church to be deeply cynical. Much more cynical than the sceptical atheists who hold to naive humanist values about telling the truth….

These parents miraculously regained their faith at the exact same time that they were looking for a local school for their offspring? Are they happy for their kids to grow up learning by example that hypocrisy is GOOD, if it gets you what you want.

(This may be turn out to be a bit of a Faustian deal for some parents. Exposing your kids to being taught by an organisation that has long been riddled with paedophiles seems like a pretty stupid choice to me.)

The Catholic Church is quite happy with face value adherence. It can buy any number of nominal believers with schools that produce reasonably good GCSE results and have a lower level of shootings and stabbings.

D’oh. Sorry, a bit of an error there. As it happens the Church doesn’t have to buy the believers by funding its schools with its own money. It gets its school funding from the state…..

As it turns out, the state is the organisation that is swelling the ranks of nominal Catholics by mysteriously continuing to choose to fund religiously based schools. Does the state want to bring about loads of Catholic conversions?

Someone explain to me again why this is a reasonable spend of public money.