First Post and a rant about First Confession

The trials and travails of the United States' education system are many and well-documented and my friends across the Atlantic will surely forgive me if I admit to, on more than one occasion in the past, smugly surveying the statistics that placed Ireland, as with many European nations, firmly ahead of the world's only remaining superpower in the key areas of mathematical, scientific and reading literacy. But be that as it may, one area in which the US can claim to be far and away ahead of the education system of our humble Emerald Isle, and a point over which I envy them immensely, is in the commitment to separation of church and state enshrined in their constitution, keeping the influence of religion safely out of public schools. Here in Ireland, as far as we would like to imagine we have come in the past few decades, the reality is that in this area we have barely progressed since the birth of the Free State and it is a problem to which no easy solution can yet be seen, so ingrained has this state of affairs become in the fabric of our society. I raise the point because a recent conversation with a friend illustrated to me in stark terms how the educational life of Ireland's young people in the 21st century remains shrouded in the dogma of religion (in this case Catholicism) and punctuated with its unnecessary, frequently ugly, rituals.
My friend, a teacher at a local Primary School, is currently in the process of preparing their group of 26 kids, aged 7-8, to receive First Communion in the latter half of the school year (March, I think), one of the first steps towards which is the dreaded First Confession (apparently the current euphemism is "First Penance", which probably sounds less scary when you're too young to understand the word penance but does nothing to make it sound any more appealing to me). It was telling that even my friend, a lapsed Catholic but still perfectly happy to perpetuate the dogma as long as its in the job description, seemed to balk as they described having the introduce the concept of sin to the children, many of whom had never encountered the term, and then go on to explain to them the supposed necessity of confessing one's sins to a complete stranger so that they might be "cleansed". I remember very little of my own days as a Catholic schoolboy but it isn't hard to imagine what the introduction of these concepts changes within the psyche of an impressionable child, affecting a very real loss of innocence and the implanting of a sense of paranoia and fear that, for many, will stay with them into adulthood, if not for the remainder of their lives. While on the subject, my friend also digressed on their own memories of First Confession, recalling with some emotion the sense of guilt and shame in the run-up to the event, leading to sleepless nights and tearful outbursts at the thought of being shunned by the priest or, worse, by god.
All this troubles me for a myriad of reasons. The inherent immorality of infusing young children with this very real sense of guilt, fear and paranoia speaks for itself, and the fact that this is occurring not only in private, religious-run institutions but PUBLIC schools seems to me nothing short of shameful, as it should be for any civilised 21st-century society. But there are subtler issues here too. For one, there is the issue of accountability, which many critics of religion have commented on but will do us no harm to revisit here. For confession is, by its very nature, an act which robs people of their accountability, lessening the burden of having to confront and deal with one's actions by inserting god, divine middle-man that he is. To teach anybody, especially a child, that they are not accountable for their actions by virtue of the fact that their invisible sky-daddy, through the un-asked for proxy of vicarious atonement, has authority to issue blanket forgiveness and give them a clean slate is to retard the moral and intellectual growth of that individual as a reasoning and discerning mind, capable of distinguishing RIGHT and WRONG as they exist in real societal terms, not RIGHT and SIN. For when you call a wrong "SIN" you are masking the reality of your action by transposing it to some metaphysical plane, where the affront is not to another person or even to your own sensibilities as a creature of reason but to god, who will conveniently issue forgiveness at your token signs of repentance.
Finally, there exists the problem faced by my friend, a person who has little time for the mores of religious life on a day-to-day basis but who is REQUIRED BY LAW to spread this diseased dogma in the classroom, a moral dilemma I shudder to imagine myself in the teeth of. Even if we weren't in the grip of an economic crisis, wherein nobody will dare challenge the status quo for fear of ending up unemployed, it is unlikely we would see this state of affairs challenged, at least not from within the establishment. And in the meantime how many more generations will have to undergo this same system of brainwashing, a throwback to the dark days of our nation's traumatic birth, when religion and state were inseparable? We have done a lot of growing up in this country in the last couple of decades, but there is much still to be done. For despite our newly cosmopolitan way of thinking (especially about ourselves), unparallelled access to knowledge from all around the world, the revelation of abuses too numerous to catalogue and the inherent ludicrousness of the whole sorry enterprise, in a time when information can cross the globe in a microsecond, bronze-age religion remains a sacred cow in Irish society.