To think that religous education should be complusory for EVERYONE

[ReallyTired]

I think that everyone should learn about ALL the major relgions in the world, whether they are Christian, Muslim, Buddist, Hindu, or Athesist or agnostic.

However I think that religous education should be taught as "This is what Christians believe" rather than "This is what WE believe". Children should not be subjected to attempts to convert them to different relgions, but they need to understand and tolerate difference. Ie. Learn that there are times that we should agree to disagree.

A basic knowledge of the five world's major relgions helps children understand current affairs, history and avoid offending people from other cultures to themselves.

If parents want their children brought up as a Christian, Muslim, athesist or pagan then they can take their children to church/ Temple/ Mosque out of school hours.

I like the assemblies at the the special school I work at. They have no relgious songs, but the school has fun singing pop songs. Although the songs are non religous they have lyrics encouraging good behaviour.
All the children are included and gain from the experience.

I think in light of the "evidence" (millions of people around the world believe in God), even an atheist will harbour some sort of doubt (will there be a God after all?) enough to make him present the issue in a more balanced way than just saying God is a delusion shared by most people in the world.
Apart from God and religion, there is a whole set of issues related to the spiritual side of our existence which will need addressing at some point, and I find materialism (which is at the heart of atheism) falls short.

But belief isn't evidence. It just isn't.

I harbour no doubts at all - to me the non-existence of God is obvious. I cannot see one small crevice in the universe where God would fit or indeed be required.

Actually Kay, I do think that the only way many people can believe in the Christian God (I know nothing about any others) is by fooling themselves and deliberately not really considering what it is they believe in other than a benevolent deity who will look after them after death. I have friends who are religious and they will not discussion religion with me in case it shakes their faith!

Ok, let's not call it evidence since billions of people COULD be wrong after all. Let's call it an "indication" or a "hint" that there maybe something in it after all.
I mean, they once changed the departure gate of my flight in a country where I didn't speak the language. Not understanding one iota of what was being said on the speakers, our instinct is to follow the others, when we see them rushing to a different gate.
This is a crap example, I know, it's just to illustrate how when thinking about an issue, it is not unreasonable to consider what others are doing/thinking, not necessarily to follow them but to understand why they think in a certain way.

Exactly UQD. Do you believers still think there is a good likelihood or even a genuine possibility that Thor or Bastet or Venus exist somewhere out there? Lots and lots of people believed in them. Plenty of people believe in the supernatural, yes. That's not evidence. Lots of people once believed if you didn't offer human sacrifices the sun wouldn't rise in the morning. Didn't mean it was true.
I don't believe in 'spirituality'. Think it is such a weasel word.
Of course 'materialism' (in the sense of wanting more consumer goods) does not 'lie at the heart' of atheism. If you mean perferring to believe and appreciate things when there is evidence they actually exist, then yes, count me in.

Are you sure that's the reason Goosey?

An instinct to follow the herd (and an instinct to try and find reasons for and explanations of mysterious phenomena - eg the sun rising in the morning) are very good explanations of why religion might exist and why humans are attracted to it, but they is not good evidence of its truth

In general no scientist of any sort ever rules anything out totally. They just go by the likelihood of something, based on the current evidence.

My stance is, "on the current evidence, it's very, very unlikely that there is a god of any sort, in fact, so unlikely to be as near to impossible as makes no odds."

I'm happy to have counter-evidence presented to me as and when it surfaces, and will re-assess my position in the light of this counter-evidence. That's what makes me different from someone with religious convictions.

yes, I meant materialism in the philosophic way MsD, not consumerism.

Well, then I can't see anything wrong with it at all. I'd rather have a real friend than an imaginary one! (says she, on the internte )

Goosey, oh, I don't doubt that many people just don't want to discuss it. Wouldn't have the slightest problem admitting that there are many, many theists who don't really want to reason anything through. In fact, I think it's sort the curse of the post-modern mindset that not many really relish using the mind to examine things robustly.

I don't think that's confined to thiests, though. I know there are some really thoughtful atheists (sorry, UQD!) on here, even the very abrasively anti-theists, like madamez, have clearly thought about their conclusions. But I know plenty of people who don't believe in anything and don't use their minds either.

There are reasonable and unreasonable religious people, and there are reasonable and unreasonable non-religious people. Just like in anything else in life.

Scaryteacher, surely you will be able to cover all children reasonably need to know about religion in history lessons? For eg I 'did' the tudors for A level and that seemed to consist almost entirely of understanding why we ended up with protestants as opposed to roman catholics.

we then 'did' WWII and got a lot of understanding about how Israel was created etc.

that has all really stayed with me and was interesting whereas from my 'RE' lessons I can vaguely remember something about the five pillars of islam.

if the school time table is very squeezed this seems more of a reason, not less to junk RE as separate subject.

And I still just don't get this dice analogy. No one is going around saying aha! My die has eight sides! Die infidel! I know what dice are. We are all agreed what they are whether we chuck em around in the dark or not.

Not many people it seems can agree on what god 'is'.

And btw if my plane was crashing, 'praying' to anyone or anything would probably be pretty far down my list of Things To Do, certainly after screaming a lot and crapping my pants.

If god was that concerned to intervene, surely he'd be holding the plane up in the first place??

Kayharker, I like your posts because you say what you mean and stick to it. I always read your explanations with interest. I think you're completely wrong of course, but you think I am so that's fair enough

InLoveWithSweeneyTodd, you misunderstand what being an atheist is. I have no doubts either.
Consider this. Do you ever wake up and think "hmmm maybe father christmas is real!" no? not even sometimes? whatever thoughts you have about father christmas being real are probably similar to mine about your gods being real.

As for the millions who believe not being all wrong you are forgetting that we covered that. Most of those millions are deeply and sincerely sure that YOUR god is a myth. You personally don't believe in the Hindu god Hanuman do you? (the monkey god)

Something like 90% of the religious people in the world would vouch for your god being a fake.

I'd be interested to know if anyone has a better knowledge of anthropology than I do and can point to any (current or past) societies which have/had no creation myth or belief in a deity. I feel there must be some, but I can't assert that there are without evidence!

In general we are "culturally hardwired" to believe the same thing as our parents. You get taken to church, synagogue, temple or mosque and don't really have any choice in the matter. I think I was about 10 before I realised that there were people in our village who didn't actually go to church! All this time, you could get out of it and nobody had told me!!

spero: "My die has eight sides! Die infidel!"
I loved that

Of all the thousands of gods available - those whose believers are still going and those who have died out - it seems hugely unlikely that any one will have The Answer and will be The One who did Everything. It just doesn't make sense.

People can (and do) talk to me about their personal experience of him and their relationship with God (I have some Christian friends who steadfastly refuse to be called religious, saying instead that they have this "relationship"), but it doesn't change anything.

We're all at least 99% atheist. (For all the available gods.) Some of us are 100%!

See, that's really interesting, and in some ways I wouldn't disagree, given that most of the early Christians were in trouble under the Roman empire for the crime of 'atheism' - because they refused to worship the local Gods and the Emperor.

how do I misunderstand Grey?
i think you confuse "religion" (of which there are several) with "belief in God". Not the same. I am not talking about a Christian God, I am talking about a theistic God, which is the same for all theistic religions.

Societies without belief in deities - Buddhists. The 'buddhist deities' aren't in any sense gods, are they?... the term is probably a mistranslation by westerners who saw images and assumed they were idols.

To hark back a long way in the discussion, the Buddha doesn't seem like a candidate for sectioning - he didn't claim any special status for himself or divine revelation or anything like that.

I was sort of discounting Buddhism, but it;s an interesting one.

MsDemeanor, I like your points about the whole forgiving and dying on the cross thing.

It's been said many times that morals are whatever god says they are. He makes the rules. Christians must stipulate that or we would say god was evil for breaking just about every law of decency we have.

So he made up the rules which required him to punush us all.

He then made up the rule that said the only way round it was to kill an innocent man.

He then created (so they say) himself a human body and killed himself to satisfy the rules he has made up.

It could be worse if you believe that it was actually his son he was killing.

If it wasn't his son then the whole "why have you forsaken me" was put on to impress the audience.

Unquiet Dad, but aren't Buddists the only ones who DONT want to 'live' after they die, isn't the quest for nirvana (which i understood to mean obliteration). They would seem to be the only sensible ones out of the whole bunch.

thanks for the appreciation of my post - do you remember Emo Philips? he did a fabulous sketch about two religious people meeting, celebrating all that they had in common and then finding out that one was in a sect with a slightly different name. Wish i could remember the joke but the punch line was 'die heretic!'

Made me laugh for days.

I'm an aetheist too (I considered being an apatheist for a while and then decided my views were too strong) but I think that comparative religious studies well taught is an exteremely good subject. Not many subjects at school are about thinking, which is what RS when taught from an ethics point of view is primarily about. I guess that you could decide to have an ethics and philosophy class instead, but I really don't think that history or geography, certainly as taught to GCSE level are enough about the why rather than the what of life. One of the most interesting (and relevant) things about the great monotheistic faiths is how fundamentaly similar they are, which I think in the current climate is particularly relevant.

It is at primary school that you get problems, because small children have a much higher tendancy to believe their teachers, and because outside of the story side of religions (which I have no problem with at all) you can easily get very different pictures from different teachers depending on their point of view/faith. Maybe the answer is to better teach primary school teachers about presenting faith and talking about belief.

InLoveWithSweeneyTodd, you proposed that the millions who believed in god were some kind of evidence for his existence. A sort of "millions of people can't all be wrong' thing.

But clearly the millions that believe in the monkey god ARE wrong (according to your religion). Therefore "millions of people CAN be wrong"

This doesn't disprove gods existence. it merely (and completely) wrecks your "millions of people can't all be wrong" argument.

Spero:
cmgm.stanford.edu/~lkozar/EmoPhillips.html