Just like we knew they would, voters in the capital of atheism (and apathy) have pulled through again and voted against allowing secondary school children the choice of taking religion instead of ethics.

And a whopping 29.2 percent of Berlin’s voters actually turned out to vote too, even though the sun was shining yesterday. Well, 29.2 percent is a whopping amount of voters over here. When the sun is shining and the discussion turns to religion, I mean.

It’s strange, really. There was a lot of heated debate about this so-called issue beforehand but in the end everybody already knew that nobody really would really care. Germans have trouble voting yes for things like free choice, you see (whether the sun is shining or not), but voting no here is always a no-brainer, regardless of the turnout, which in this case is a no vote, too.

“The opposing side scored 48.5 percent but even if it had inched ahead and won, turnout was too low for the referendum to have been valid with only 14.2 percent of Berliner’s 2.4 million voters ticking the “yes” box.”

It’s another one of these typical German moments, fighting about something that doesn’t really matter or mean much in the end anyway. But maybe that’s why Germans fight about trivial things like this to begin with. If it were ever about a real issue, they would have to take a real stand.

Anyway, Berliners are all up-in-arms (yawn) about a referendum on religion and ethics which will be held here this weekend. Being neither particularly religious nor all that ethical, this is the kind of referendum that’s right up their alley.

In a nutshell, students here are required to take ethics at school and have religion as an elective course they could choose to take instead. An initiative calling itself Pro Reli wants students to decide between the two courses, thus giving the religion course a bit of a push, I guess.

Not only are Berliners apathetic about ethics in general and religion in particular (60 percent are officially non-religious), like I said, they aren’t terribly thrilled about referendums, either (see Tempelhof). And being that participation of at least 25 percent of all eligible voters is required for the referendum to even be binding, the whole shebang will most likely have been for naught. So, well, that will make everybody happy in the end, I guess.

„Knapp 50 Prozent der Berliner sind für die Einführung eines Wahlpflichtfachs Religion – doch wollen nur wenige Bürger auch beim Volksentscheid am 26. April für diesen Vorschlag der Initiative Pro Reli stimmen.“