As a holdover from when churches used to run schools, many states in Australia legislate that the local church can come into schools to teach religion classes for an hour each week.
These ‘scripture teacher’ roles generally do not require any formal education training, and can be filled by just about any random off the street, which means that for one class a week Australian students are subjected to some of the most unhinged people on earth teaching them all kinds of made up stuff with zero supervision.
Aussies: This is a free thread to reply with the stories of the funniest things your scripture teachers said or did when you were a kid.
Ours always gave us Christian themed crosswords that she made herself, but she could never format them properly for some reasons so some boxes had two letters in them, and some had little doodles of flowers or crosses to fill gaps (????). She also told us candy canes were shaped that way because they are a J for Jesus (this is, shockingly, not true), and easter eggs are actually not eggs but a chocolate representation of the stone rolled in front of Jesus’ tomb (this is also, SHOCKINGLY, not true)
This is exactly the kind of unhinged educational material we’re talking about!
Also shoutout to this gold in the tags:
And we forgot, “having to sit in silence on your own for an hour” was up until recently the most common alternative if your parents opted you out of the dumpster fire:
Keep em coming!
Okay this has very much broken containment outside of Aussie tumblr, but we’ve read back through the *hundreds* of amazing replies and here are a handful of the most Batshit so far:
Pretty sure this one is a legit hate crime:
And the absolute pinacle:
im not australian, but i did have religion class in high school and one time our preacher said that animals dont go to heaven the same week one girl lost her childhood dog and she cried so much she puked on top of him
