In not really liking my mum singing Christian songs to my baby?

Pointy, obviously you can't make people stop saying it. But I think it is harping on about the past, so people need to let go. It's a bit like saying "hey did you know Catholics used to burn Protestants at the stake, so let's not have Catholicism because it's anti-Protestant". Why am I so keen that the national anthem isn't seen as anti-Scottish? Because it isn't, now, because the anti-Scottish bit is never sung.

There may be plenty of things for the Scots to reproach the English for nowadays, but I can't accept that the existing national anthem is one of them.

Also there may be plenty of reasons for changing it, but again I don't think verses which are never sung should be one of them.

DC - presumably you meant 'beset', not 'best'

Hadley even.

quite possible DC. I had a very nasty contemporary poetry tutor [also a Tony Handley fan]who must have totally obliterated all my ability to think coherently on the subject.

Still a crap song though.

ruty, Dr. Handley speaks eloquently in "you are Gold, always believe in your soul".
Hardly the self or materialistic.
I fear your ill conceived hatred of Thatcher is blinding you to contemporary poetry.

Thank you for coming home I'm sorry that the chairs are all worn

If you consult the lyrics, you will find they are spoke as a Brechtian "common man", who finds in his distressed furniture a voice for his lack of materialistic success in the Thatcher era.

I left them here I could have sworn
These are my salad days
Slowly being eaten away

The common man is best by mental illness, presumably because he is a victim of the ill conceived "care in the community" program which emptied the mental hospitals.
These are clearly paranoid delusions, his life is being eaten by giant blue caterpillars, resonating the "Blue Meanies" ,the Beatles film "Yellow Submarine".

But even in his Kervokian despair,
Theres nothing left to make me feel small
After his beatings by the polices, Proazc is making is life bearable.

You?re indestructable
To us it is revealed that he is addicted to LSD with attendant feelings of invulnerability to both him and those he cherishes.

Remember we were partners in crime
Its only two years ago
The man with the suit and the pace
You know that he was there on the case
Now hes in love with you,hes in love with you
And my love is like a prison wall

We earn that he has served time in prison, presumably after being convicted under the notorious "suss" law, presumably driven to live in a foetid squat by Tebbit's drive to eliminate the unemployed.

I leave the rest as an exercise for the student.

LOL UrbanDryad.

I'm no fan of the National Anthem, but do we really want 'Gold' that great tribute to the Thatcher years and to the obsession of the Self? and so crappy.

Shame Douglas Adams isn't around to write a new anthem. That i would like to hear.

I think we just need a new national anthem. I and many others have petitioned Parliament to have "Gold" by Spandau Ballet.
As far as I am aware it doesn't offend anyone, may be sung both by choirs and football crowds.

Petition Here

On the off chance that we win any medals at the London Olympics, it would work better than obsolete digs at the Scots.
Of course you could take the principal discovered by Douglas Adams, and commission lyrics that enumerate every group in the world, insulting them in a manner appropriate to their culture.
Insult

"If people stopped saying, "hey did you know there's a verse of the national anthem about crushing the Scottish", then it would disappear into the mists of time"

and how do you get people to stop saying that, fluffy?

How do you get people to stop passing on knowledge?

And why are you so keen that the national anthem is not seen by anyone as anti-Scottish?

It's not important. What is is to have proper discussions about the place of religion in our culture. Everyone needs to know their religious heritage.

i agree with ruty in that i don't particularly see singing even happy clappy stuff as indoctrination, it is part of our British culture, etc to sing hymns, etc. i used to be in our school choir, had to sing in church, etc, never objecetd nor did my parents, we had a rather devout head master at my private C of E school, so i wasn't given much choice, although i remember there were Muslims in my school who were given alternatives to eating pork at lunch, etc. so it wasn't an entirely pushy sort of school.

my objection is more to do with in-laws or other family relatives actively encouraging church-going or talking about Jesus Christ in my home or singing about God, etc. because dh and I don't have a particular religion and it seems strange/fake to have long discussions about it in our home.

other than that, we are very happy to discuss religion in the context of culture, art or world politics, etc. i absolutley love going inside church/cathederal/mosque whenever we are on holiday, in fact i always have religious building as important places to visit on my list in terms of architercural interest.

it would be absurd to try and "shield" a child from all religious talk, songs, influence, etc. 100% it just isn't possible. in fact i think any one doing this would be an extreme atheist, which is yet another form or extremism and really would not help a child develop an open, inquisitive mind.

agree urbandryad - i would be irritated by the happyclappy stuff no end. comparing it to S club 7 is quite apt. Or even Scooch.

Disagree that is made for children/indoctrination tho. Happy Clappy Evangelists are on the simplistic and ultra trite side of the Christianity scale. Look at the Alpha Course [not designed for children but for adults] Unfortunately this breed of Christianity is booming, because there are no problematic theological questions to be discussed, and because you don't have to think very hard.

Kids like happy clappy stuff, which is presumably why they were written that way.

I don't know how well it works these days, but the motivation is to get kids to accept certain things as given facts. Familiarity is hoped to lead to belief. Even those that aren't in any way superstitious talk of things like the nativity and the parting of the Red Sea as facts.
In that way mozhe's right, our culture is descended from a Christian one. But our kids are growing up at a time when most people are more than a little bit vague about what Easter is, and who simply don't know what the Python Spanish Inquisition jokes refer to.

Christian songs will form part of your DSs christian heritage/culture....why not just see it in those terms. Also friendly relations with a granny are worth their weight in gold.

We may all know it and it may have passed into common parlance, but children don't literally believe that black sheep talk.

Which is what I think you were saying when you were talking about indoctrination through repetitive chants, e.g. the world is flat.

Fluffyani,ma; you're 100% right.
The "three bags full" is so embedded in our brains that not only do we all know it, but it's part of normal speech as in "yes, sir, no sir, three bags full sir".

There is a famous German childrens song which warns against drinking coffee
by suggesting that it is a Turks brew ('Türkentrank') and by saying don't
be such a muslim who just can't help himself ('sei doch kein Muselmann, der das nicht lassen kann').

Would be fascinating to know exactly how many Germans have been affected by this song.
I would have thought none as the fact that their own parents drink coffee surely gives the lie to this ditty.

The worst song I sometimes sing to dd is '10 German bombers'
It's got a catchy tune, is mindlessly repetitive and given my own teutonic connections
I have no doubt that dd will realise soon enough that it is just one Big Post-ironic Piss-Take!

DC, then by that reasoning, it is bad to sing Baa Baa Black Sheep because its catchy tune and repetitive lyrics will convince children that all black sheep can say "yes sir yes sir three bags full".

you really don't have a clue DC.

Actually the songs we sing to our kids are far from exclusively British.
But yes, apart from amusement, the idea is to hlep with language development. IE getting to kids whilst their neural nets are most flexible and can absorb fastest.
Certainly Christians still succeed in getting many to treat many ideas as "fact", even when objectively they are entirely false, and often not actually part of official doctrine or even in the Bible.
You get kids to chant "the world is flat" long enough, and for the rest of their lives there will be part of them that has that hard wired.

But the issue is how they interpret it.
My DS understands the idea of "wishful thinking, but I think the thing that philosophically undermines Christianity more than atheism, or the actions of their priests, or their history of torture and murder, but TV advertising.
Kids learn young that adults will lie to them to get them to do stuff, Note that ads use very similar techniques to religious people, ie frequent repetition, half truths, and catch tunes.

and it is absolutely laughable that anyone should thinking singing songs aboug God is going to brainwash a child into being a rabid believer. Questioning and inquiry are part of growing up. My whole family were brought up in the church and half of us believe[but are not churchgoers] and half are athiests. So it has no bearing on your eventual outcome.