Atheism

I don't see what you're complaining about....except when one of you dumb asses quotes the trolls

You're easy to frighten hinge.

This will seem weird to 'no prayer in school' merkins but oz public school do dedicate time to religious education, sort of. Author makes a good point about the ramifications of children being segregated by family belief so young.

Having grown up in the system I was a little surprised it still exists.

WORLD NEWS AUSTRALIA 15 Hours Ago
Comment: We don't need scripture in public schools
by Saman Shad

Three weeks into her kindy year at primary school my daughter attended her first non-scripture class.

She didn’t like it, of course, as she was taken away from the new friends she’d tentatively been making and put into a room away from them. At the same time, the other children in her class were divided into their respective religious groupings and separated off accordingly. It was probably the first time any of those children experienced segregation based on personal beliefs (or rather, the beliefs of their parents).

Every week, each one of these children will spend 30 minutes in the company of a volunteer from their nominated religious order. What these volunteers teach during that half hour of scripture is generally neither regulated nor observed. They pretty much have free reign to impart whatever belief system they hold true into the minds of the very impressionable and the very young – my daughter and her classmates for example, are only 5 years old.

Joe Kelly, the principal of Cranbourne South Primary school in Victoria said he “blindly supported” the religious curriculum being taught by volunteers at his school, until he decided to closely observe what was actually being taught at these classes. From his observations he concluded, “It is not education. It has no value whatsoever. It is rubbish - hollow and empty rhetoric ... my school teachers are committed to teaching children, not indoctrinating them.”

He made the decision to stop religious instruction at his primary school and is now part of a growing group that is calling on the government to stop making religious education compulsory at schools in Australia.

He’s not the only principal to have made the decision to stop “Special Religious Instruction” (SRI) classes in his school. In 2013 there were 666 schools in Victoria that had an SRI program – down from 940 schools in 2011. Clearly many principals agree with Joe Kelly that scripture classes have no place in our public schools.

In NSW, ethics classes were tentatively introduced in primary schools in 2010, for those parents who didn’t want to send their children to scripture. But volunteers needed to run these classes are high in demand and low in supply. In my daughter’s school there is no one available to run or teach the ethics class in Kindergarten, so my daughter sits in a room with her classmates and has 30 minutes of “do-nothing” time (children are not allowed to be taught anything during this time for fear their classmates might miss out).

The question that occurs to me is that how can I, in 2014, be subjecting my daughter to the same thing that I was subjected to as a child? I remember spending what felt like endless hours in a room with other bored kids not really having anything to do as we waited for our classmates to finish their scripture lessons. Now, here I am with a child of my own and nothing it seems has changed on that front.

Despite believing we are providing a secular education for our kids by sending them to a public school, we are in fact once a week drumming into them that they are different - that because of the beliefs into which they were born, they need to be divided and separated, right from the outset. What sort of values is that teaching them? What sort of message is that sending? That those who don’t hold your religious beliefs can never really be like you? That they are different and therefore should be excluded from your life? Doesn’t this create a sense of alienation and separation? Hasn’t this lead to the sort of problems we are now facing in our society?

Religion is a part of life and continues to play an important role in society. All of us hold our own respective beliefs or non-beliefs, and I feel that there is a place in the classroom for all of these to be discussed together – as a whole. Our children should learn about all religions of the world – about how these religions came to be, what impact they have had historically and how and why they are popular in different parts of our very diverse planet. This sort of teaching should be approached from a perspective of education and not indoctrination.

Religion should not be used as an excuse to inadvertently teach children that the person they sit next to in class is different and not really like them because once a week they get segregated into another room. Impressionable children should not be taught that it is ok to be divided or excluded. Many of the problems we face in our world today are due to this very factor.

The power that the church continues to hold over the government - despite our claims of secularism - means I don’t see scripture classes not being part of our educational system any time soon. I do however hope that perhaps by the time my children are sending their children to school we aren’t still reinforcing the concept that exclusion and division in our public schools, however unintentionally, is acceptable.

Saman Shad is a storyteller and playwright.

Thanks, Boss--i was wondering about this after your earlier remark. When i was a child, not only would no preacher be brought into a school, but the community would have howled if it had happened. Teachers would, from time to time, ask the students to describe their experiences "in church," but that was more an exercise in the nature of discussing the various ways people lived. Certainly there were fundamentalists around in the 1950s and -60x, but they weren't the ranting, in-your-face type we see today. I think the decision by the Supremes in Roe versus Wade (1973?) was the tipping point that got the religious loonies out onto the streets.

Again, thanks, that's a good read.

When they rant about putting the church back in our schools, I always wonder which schools they are talking about. The schools I went to barely acknowledged religion. The only thing offensive from my perspective was when they added two words to the Pledge of Allegiance.

mark

I can see what a powerful effect on kids that is going to have I must say.

Ooops! She's a Grauniad contributor. 'Nuf said squire. Say no more.

My daughter's school does provide activities for children not doing scripture. This came up just last night. She said something about the room she goes to where they "say nice things to each other". Her exact words.

Hehehehe . . . best one i've seen in a long time.

What Edgar said . . .

Why would any woman be a christian?

Why are atheists so angry?

That's the whole point Wilso.

I'm sorry it is me who has to bring you the news but somebody has to.

The writ of the Matriarchy ran for a few hundred thousand years and got nowhere you see.

Why would any woman get married? Emperor Augustus brought in laws to try to get women to have children. It failed.

Hence today's Australia. And hence your good-self. Neither would exist if women were not Christians.

I have no view on whether that is a good thing or not.

You're like a kid gorging in a toffee shop who is oblivious of how the shop and the toffee came into existence and is whinging about the wrappers being hard to remove.

A bit like a monkey in a zoo not being conscious of where the bananas come from and having no capacity to ever know no matter how often it is explained to it.

Paul was simply laying down ground rules for the early churches which some airhead chatterbox women were using as "drop-in centres" and "coffee mornings" for noisy gossip..
He had no beef at all with sensible women and paid glowing tributes to them-

"I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a servant of the church in Cenchrea..she has been a great help to many people, including me..
Greet Priscilla , my fellow worker in Christ Jesus, she risked her life for me.
Greet Mary, who worked very hard for you..
Greet Tryphena and Tryphosa and Persis, those women who work hard in the Lord.
Greet Rufus, chosen in the Lord, and his mother, who has been a mother to me, too.
Greet Julia.." (Romans ch 16)
And he reminds us -
"There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28 )

Jesus spent a terrible long night before his death,unable to sleep and racked with loneliness as his disciples fell asleep,
But next day on the cross, as he slipped into death his tired pain-filled eyes saw a host of loyal women who'd stuck with him to the end..
"Jesus cried out with a loud voice, and breathed his last. There were also women looking on from afar, among whom were Mary Magdalene and Salome, who followed him and ministered to him when he was in Galilee, and many other women who came up with him to Jerusalem" (Mark 15:37)

They gave him the last womanly comfort they could by making sure he never died alone..





Some of his disciples ran off in fear of the Romans, but women stuck with him to the end-






It's almost as if he knew they'd be there for him, so he made sure he was always there for them during his lifetime-

Wilso defines women as the type he has chosen to know Romeo. That they might be considered representative of women, in the Daughters of Eve sense, is laughable.

It is like talking about horses solely in the context of racehorses. Or cats in reference to pet pussies.

He's a raging misogynist.