I usually don’t rant about things that might touch certain people’s sensibilities and offend them, because it’s the right thing to do and I`m a decent human being. NOT! I rant about offensive things ALL the time, and this is no exception. If you’re offended by what you`re about to read, it means you’re too brainwashed by religion to understand the danger it poses to any individual with more than shit-for-brains.

Fact 1: Romania is a secular state.

Fact 2: Religion is taught to grades 1-12 in Romanian PUBLIC schools.

Fact 3: A highschool student has recently been humiliated in front of his peers by his religion teacher for being an atheist. This has gotten a certain amount of press coverage, bringing with it hundreds of comments from medieval, brainwashed orthodox christians calling the child and his supporters devil worshippers, and even going so far as issuing death threats towards atheists, and exposing their fundamentalist belief system. This made me feel a bit like I was living in Iran. And if things continue the way they are, with the church’s authority growing, and the clergy above and beyond the reach of law, Romania is soon to become a full-fledged theocracy. I hope it doesn’t.

Fact 4: This is not a singular case. In churches, Orthodox priests preach xenofobia, discrimination and hatred against any and all religions that are not Orthodox to people not intelligent enough to discern truth from orthodox brainwashing. No other christian denomination (that I know of) teaches it’s followers explicitly to discriminate against, hate, and socially isolate those that are not of the same faith. Talk about “Religion of love”, eh? Fortunately, there is a positive aspect in all of this: the number of fundamentalists is still relatively low. Most orthodox believers are not as hate-fueled as the church would have them be. A number of believers adhere to orthodoxy for social reasons and less so from true belief, and they too have become very vocal against the abuses of the clergy.

Fact 5: In Romania there currently are 18.300 (eighteen thousand three hundred) churches, but only 4700 (four thousand seven hundred) middle schools and 425 (four hundred and twenty five!!!) hospitals.

Conclusion: If things continue on this downward spiral, with the State too afraid to put it’s foot down and stop treating the church like a porcelain doll, with priviledges growing every day and money being pumped from local budgets into the black hole of the churches`pocket, we’re not far from the days when the orthodox clergy will yet again build pyres for burning “infidels” like in the good`ol medieval times when they could rule with no questions asked. When I wished for a time machine, I never imagined the Orthodox Church had already built one, primed and ready to take Romania straight back to the dark ages.