Too Cruel for School

This, dear friends, is one of many of the faces that will launch a million tears someday down the line in history when the Islamic Regime of Iran is finally replaced by a secular constitutional government for the first time in its history.

This remnant of seventh century stagnation is none other than the President of the University of Tehran -- one of the most prestigious universities in the world, boasting a student body that despite all odds, is carrying Iran through the 21st century. He is the first cleric president of this revered institution. Let us hope he is the last.

This, too, dear friends, is the reason why the clergy are a danger to everyone, including themselves, why an apparent member of society such as Khomeini would be so indifferent to other members of society that when asked by a reporter what he was feeling upon returning to Iran on 1 February, 1979 after decades of exile, could only muster a mumble through his beard: "hichi" (nothing). The clergy everywhere in the world, whether they be Muslims or Catholics or Buddhists or Jews or anything can and should never be expected to know anything of our world, let alone how to guide us in it, since they've never experienced it.

People like this guy, like all the priests of the Vatican, the monks of Tibet, and the rabbis of Jerusalem are confined, from a very early age, not only to the education system of the seminaries and madressehs and monasteries but to the isolated life within the four-walls of these institutions. In short, they could memorize holy books front to back and never have a fundamental sense of the practical lives of anyone who lives in normal society. Their advice, their counsel, their knowledge is meaningless because it lacks empathy -- empathy which is derived from living with and learning to love one's neighbor -- something these people are never exposed to.

It is a crime against society that these people are allowed to be indoctrinated in these confines. It should be a mandatory law of all societies that even clerics -- ESPECIALLY clerics -- should be required to be educated in a public schooling system from the age of 5 until 18, just like everybody else. Clerics, of all people, need to know what real life is like if they intend to devote their entire lives to improving it.