Head of BBC's religion and ethics department claims that the British are so non-religious these days that they "would not get most of the jokes" within the movie "The Life of Brian."

Courtesy of The Independent:  

The British public has such “poor religious literacy” that a modern audience would be baffled by the Monty Python film The Life of Brian – because it would not understand the Biblical references, a senior BBC figure has claimed. 

 Aaqil Ahmed, the BBC’s head of religion and ethics, told The Independent that failings in religious education over two generations were undermining public understanding of contemporary national and international issues. “You had generations that missed out. We have poor religious literacy in this country and we have to do something about it,” he said. 

He was speaking at the launch of an ambitious three-part BBC2 series which will address the subject of pilgrimage from a broad perspective and is intended to attract the interest of Atheists as much as religious believers. 

“If you tried to make The Life of Brian today it would fall flat on its face because the vast majority of the audience would not get most of the jokes. They don’t have the knowledge,” Ahmed said. He questioned whether modern audiences would appreciate that the “great joke about the Sermon on the Mount” in the 1979 Python film, where a woman asks “What’s so special about the cheesemakers?”, was a reference to Jesus’s words “Blessed are the peacemakers” from the Bible. 

He also claimed that comedians such as Eddie Izzard, Tim Minchin and Ricky Gervais – who he said he found “really funny” – tended to tackle religion in very general terms. “They don’t take on specific aspects of religion they take on bigger things – such as the Bible. They can’t go into specific stories anymore because no one knows what the stories are.”

Okay well I am going to go on record as saying that though I lament the fact that people cannot appreciate the genius of "The Life of Brian" (Which I love) that overall it is a very good thing that people are less indoctrinated into religion these days.

I actually hope for the day, here in America, when we see the Bible and Quran relegated to the mythology section of our local libraries, and when they will be treated as interesting fables and nothing more.

I don't believe I will see that in my lifetime, but there is always hope for the next generations.