Teach The Godless About God

Good post. What do teachers think?

Teaching about philosophy and it components, and its start with Plato and Aristotle before the development of Christianity, then how Christianity and other religions changes the landscape somewhat, in conjunction with teaching about the religions, would be a good program.

It is impossible not to agree that professional teachers are better placed to contextualise Christianity, but is that the very best we can do? As far as I am concerned religion should be taught as part of philosophy, as MuchAdo says, and in history, to show the church/s as a socio-political movement. The very seperation of religion into a seperate class plays into the hands of those that seek to teach it outside the realm of the rational.

As for the child abuse question Mark, your story has similarities with that of many people that have told me that they were beaten as a child and it didn't do them any harm. Many of them of course use this as a justificaton for hitting their own kids. Just like atheists who send their kid to Catholic school (for the better education don't you know).

While I try not to be resentful, after all regret is a wasted emotion, I often wonder what might have been if I had not had to use so much energy as a youth escaping the tightly drawn bonds of my parent's religion. At the same time I recognise that I have gained some positive values from it, a vacuum that would have to be filled with superb philosophy teaching if we managed to eliminate school based religion.

I agree too that religious education has little relationship with child abuse, although the power invested in educative representatives of the non-existant god has certainly be used for the purpose of molestation.

That being said we are talking about schools here, and there is no excuse for allowing either professional or amateur believers to peddle deliberate lies, or at best their brand of self delusion. To quote the Simpsons, 'God has no place in schools, just as facts have no place in religion'.

The notion that you need an understanding of the bible to understand history is nonsense . You need an understanding of how it was viewed and abused by those in power and how they enforced their interpretation. What is literally in the bible is not the real issue.

Romanticscience, there is no evidence to support any of the claims of any religion especially regarding life after death, heaven, Paradise, reincarnation, etc.

But there is a lot of evidence that shows that men have exploited the fears of gullible people regarding death for their own selfish and sometimes immoral purposes. They continue to do so!

Religion should be taught as part of history, nothing more, nothing less.

P.S. I am an atheist myself (although when I look in the mirror I know I can't claim to be 'new').

I, also an atheist (and a vocal one at that), agree very much with this article. However, I won't rephrase the entire article with sage nodding since that isn't particularly interesting, I will just focus on the points I disagree with.

Where I felt this article stumbled was the final paragraph, it really didn't add much to the discussion and felt a little bit like it was seeking to inject a little artificial humility.

There is only one thing which can be considered 'new' about atheism today and that is the freedom to self-identify as an atheist and criticise religion (be it justified or not) with little to no repercussions. If one is familiar with the writings of 'old atheists' a mild consideration of what lies between the lines reveals just as striking and damaging barbs of critique as one can find in a Hitchens or Harris article and book. As many commentators have noted from both sides of the fence, the arguments atheists mostly use today to justify their lack of belief are the same as those from hundreds of years ago. This is notably because the religious have barely added to their own arsenal of justifications for quite some time.

Dawkins has campaigned against religious instruction, true, but I think you will find he is more than aligned with your own views regarding religious education. The difference lies between whether religous beliefs are taught as facts or faiths. Perhaps the issue is that often 'religious education' and 'religious instruction' are used interchangeably.

Not really sure religious education 'nurtures their abilities to question their views rationally and to engage the criticism of people with different beliefs'. Religious education would only provide the information one would use to rationally engage with the beliefs of different religions - the rational component is a different issue. This is kind of like assuming that someone who has completed their tertiary entrance units for physics and chemistry would understand the scientific method.

From my own experience I found little in my education which provided critical thinking skills, and given the need to <b>introduce</b> such a concept to first and second year university students (in my job) I have strong doubts this has changed. Much like the understanding of the scientific method in these students, it is disturbing at how poor it is with students who score very high on their entrance exams.

So, I guess I'm saying religious education is good if there is to be any religious education at all, and it will be beneficial (with regard to tolerance, social inclusion, fear, etc). However, without other features of the curriculum encouraging and requiring students to think critically I wouldn't expect a new level of religious discourse to emerge in Australia should religious education be adopted.

http://thinkingdoesnthurt.blogspot.com/

When I was at school way bay in the 60's, at my schools, we were marched off to the various churches (each to their own, supposedly) for a couple of hours of Religious Instruction.
As my parents were not at all religious, it was never stuffed down the throats of their kids, so we all were brought up as not actually belonging to or interested in any religion. It was like any other fairy story, and there were lots of them, to be ignored or whatever.
I preferred to ignore, but only after trying out all the local religions, tagging along with various mates from the school. Got sick and tired of all this very quickly, often falling asleep in the extremely hard and uncomfortable pews.
So I joined a select band of delinquents playing table tennis instead, and enjoyed myself much better.
As I grew older, I watched with great bemusement the brainwashed people who seemed to believe implicitly in totally irrational garbage. It can not be put gentler than that.
Now, a great majority of the world seems to 'believe, have 'faith' in irrational fairy -stories, to the extent that they commit suicide and mass murder for their beliefs, as we can hear on the news every day.
I hear this morning a 14 year old Pakistani boy has exploded an explosive suicide /mass murder belt on his person in a crowded religious place, only half succeeding, and tells of being brainwashed by a fanatical religious movement (The Taliban) to believe that he would arrive in Paradise after he killed himself and dozens of innocent people, who also believe implicitly in fairy stories. His even younger friend succeeded in killing a mass of people. He will NOT go to any Paradise. He died, along with a lot of other believers in a slightly different religion.
All total insanity.
I have read Richard Dawkins and agree with him. Not implicit faith, but rational belief that he is correct.
I hear of the Orange Roughie totally confusing all her fellow pollies with her seeming conversion to religious fanaticism to attract the religious vote to Labor.
Total insanity, as well as gross stupidity.
Religious Schools are given Tax Exemption, and are then given hundreds of millions of dollars from Taxpayers in order to stuff garbage and insanity down the throats and brains of thousands of Australian children. More insanity. Criminal.
A religious 'state' in the Middle East, gouged illegally out of the lands of other people and propped up the Tax dollars of hundreds of millions of other people around the world, but particularly the USA, where the Christian and Jewish fundamentalists actually totally control the foreign relations of those countries, has hundreds of Nuclear bombs ready to go off and kill millions of people of a different religion ((and others) in all the countries surrounding them. In the name of religion they kill and crucify thousands of Palestinians every year, as they occupy Palestinian land.
Hey, give me a break! Ban all religions and all their manifestations.
Give the whole bloody world a break.
Dazza.

"teach the godless about god"

Teach those who don't know the great spaghetti monster about the great spaghetti monster?

Teach those who don't believe there are fairies at the bottom of the garden that there are indeed fairies at the bottom of the garden?

How about UFO beliefs? Belief in ghosts? ESP? Yeti?

If none of those things, then why the teaching of equivalent beliefs from 2500 years ago, giving them spurious respectability?

Why the push by a self-described (but very odd sounding) "atheist" to have kids in schools taught that an imaginary being is real?

...completely and unconditionally, eh, Examinator? ;-)

Mark Fletcher, I truly congratulate you on an excellent article & which gives view points from all walks, regardless of whether they are one sided or not.

A true Atheist is a believer in the scientific facts & the basis of evidence & unlike a christian whose facts are based on a 'belief' written in a 'bible'. As a true Atheist & a member of the Humanist association of NSW & WA, I support the VIC stance of approach to the human rights commission.

I do not see any moral ethics, or ethical morals in religion that I do not see in humanity & in fact I see more morals & ethics in the non religious side of human nature than in religious ideology. I emphasize the need to teach children real morals & ethics rather than the targeting of children to emphasize the immoral brainwashing of religious dogma.

I was refused the education of anything but religion as I grew up. Evolution was a dirty word on par with sex, even though it was common knowledge that some of the priests were paedophiles & child abuse was a part of Catholicism within the child protection system, as it maintained the stolen generation & sexual abuse in other children's institutions.

If anyone wanted me to teach my children religious morals or ethics, I would refrain for the fear of creating terrorists or propagating a seed for the next world war, or an evangelistic criminal who claims to have found god.

A fair article until the last paragraphs. Indoctrinating children to believe there is an invisible superman in the sky who will send them to hell if they're 'naughty', is child abuse. Can't deny that.
To suggest that atheism - new or otherwise - resembles a religion is too stupid and shows a complete lack of understanding of it.
Philosophy courses in a national curriculum designed from infants to university is the solution to the dangers of evangelising religiosity.

Surely the BIG issue here is whether we should allow enthusiastic amateurs - no matter how well-intentioned - to get anywhere near our kids' heads. Or other bits for that matter.

I'm all for kids learning comparative religion, ethics, morals, philosophy and well anything at all really, but I am most vehemently opposed to allowing some bloke in a black skirt and funny collar anywhere my kids. Never again.

Education is the antithesis of indoctrination and that I'm afraid is often all these characters know. They have only ever read one book and that has all the answers no matter what the question. I wonder what they can actually teach, other than blind faith and superstition.

So it has to be qualified teachers only, working on a broad-ranging non-aligned syllabus.

But more serious are these facts: The major Christian churches here and elsewhere have a history of systemic child abuse, of tolerating, even encouraging pedophiles and of protecting the perpetrators. They are still doing so today. These organisations operate a criminal conspiracy that protects such monsters and allows them to operate outside and above the law, hiding in their holiness.

Until that is fixed - if it ever can be - they should be totally banned from schools. Until churches admit to their crimes, hand over their perpetrators and compensate their victims fully and openly they have no place near our kids. It is criminally irresponsible of educational authorities to permit such access.

The school authorities will be held legally and morally responsible if they expose my kids to such risk. Lock them out.

Dear fellow Atheist,

Despite my typos I actually choose my words rather carefully. I would be 100% hostile to anyone teaching "religion" in our schools ... comparative religion is rather different... it's more a survey of what different superstitions exist about the place. That's handy if you're going to read or write anything or try and understand why people hate each other.

As for leaving it up to parents ... my goodness have you seen and heard some of the parents out there? I barely trust them to feed their kids let alone feed their kids' minds.

And I should also point out that any serious attempt to teach comparative religion should include a decent slab of the course being devoted to atheism... the "no" case. Seems fair.

And trying to get kids to think about what's fair is what it's all about really.

But all I'm saying in my earlier contribution is that blokes in black frocks with funny collars should not be allowed to hang around near schoolyards while their multimillion dollar outfits protect pedophiles and canonise pedophile apologists. Same goes for anyone with an axe to grind or a cross to carry.

Dear fellow athiest,

I am mortally offended that you would call me religious ... I have no religious beliefs whatsoever. Like you I am an atheist.

But I have read the Koran (only in English), a couple of versions of the Bible and quite a bit of Buddhism. I've tried wading through the Hindu stuff but I don't understand much of it... or what it means. But I do actually know a bit about what I'm talking about.... and more importantly I know a bit about what they are talking about. I do this because I'm interested in history and how people think.

Please do me the courtesy of reading my words before labelling me religious. I will be sending down a thunderbolt via return post if you don't retract this vicious libel.

I won't add my hominem to this "discussion"... makes me rather sad though that rational discourse is reduced to this. Hoped for better. Thunderbolt en route.

Dr Dog,

the educated uneducated trying his hand at attacking someone on another's behalf. Let me guess, your secret lovers! I couldn't expect you to find any educational quality from another's discussion, just as you can't define the foreign policy of Samoa.