Could you clarify something for me. I regularly listen the Australian podcasts "The Skeptic Zone" and "The Pseudo Scientists" They have discussed scripture lessons in Australian schools in their respective shows and claim that children can be opted out of these by their parents. However the schools are not allowed to provide alternative lessons for these children during scripture lessons. Is this true?

I can't provide a link to this but, I have heard that in the USA, the states that provide abstinence only sex education tend to have the highest rates of teenage/unwanted pregnancies and STIs.

Why, was it too formal? Why not encourage him to use "Rock"?

I'm not.

Firstly, as has been pointed out, many of these faith schools are selective in who they will accept.
Selection by faith is immoral ... and selection by merit skews their results.
I am not against selection by merit per se, but where selection occurs you cannot make a fair comparison.

Secondly, how far do you go in allowing something just because they improve standards in one area?
What do these faith schools teach when they find that science and religion differ? Which side of the argument do they present? How do we enforce a balance?
More to the point, why on earth should we offer-up innocent children to be taught unproven and superstitious nonsense?

Thirdly, to re-iterate slightly, is indoctrination a fair price to pay for apparently higher academic standards?

Fourthly, it is not possible to give a truly representative picture of what science is (with its built-in ifs and buts and constant searching) when you are also going to teach the kids that God definitely exists, in which it is implicit that searching for any other answer is futile.

When I was in hospital to have an ear operation in the 1960's I was asked my religion (it was one of the boxes on the questionnaire) and I replied "agnostic".
Later, I saw in my file, "C of E".
The bstds had ignored what I said because I was under 18.

Nowadays I'd say "humanist/atheist".

There was a documentary made about exactly this, rl[iThe Education of Shelby Knox[/irl.

Creationists ask for balance in the evolution vs creation debate. What in fact they asking for is false balance since, IIRC less than %1 of working biologists disagree with natural selection. The balance is achieved by teaching only peer reviewed science in science lessons and religion taught in the context of culture/literature/history in a comparative religion class. This one area where I wouldn't mind us being more like the USA where teaching of religion is forbidden in state schools along with school lead religious observance. It doesn't stop creationists trying have force their own agendas into schools but, when it gets to court they nearly always lose like in rlKitzmiller v. Doverrl What is really annoying about such cases is the level of dishonesty displayed by those who claim to hold the higher moral ground.

A lot of this is down to the spread of US-style evangelical fundamentalism.

Not that long ago, even most evangelicals in the UK would not have made an issue of the subject. Most church people accepted what had been a routine way of interpreting the [iBible[/i story since Darwin published [iOn the Origin of Species[/i – that the seven days of the creation story was a simple way of explaining what might have meant seven millennia, for instance. In this way, a divine creation could sit alongside evolution with no major clash. It was known as ‘old Earth theory’.

And that, in essence, was the approach when my father was doing his theological training in the 1950s. But that decade also saw the start of a more US-style evangelism in the UK. Billy Graham’s first major crusades in the UK were in 1954.

By the time there was a major, two-week evangelical crusade in the Thameside in the mid-1970s, at least two of the three-man team of evangelists were from the US, if I remember correctly.

That approach has been spreading. You can equally see it in the rise of small, evangelical churches in the UK – there’s an African and Caribbean influence there too.

So you had people who grew up with that or were introduced to that much more fundamentalist approach and who then took that into their workplaces and that included schools, while business people with similar beliefs have used their own money to support such independent churches and, indeed, to spread the same creationist approach in academies, as has been mentioned.

Nor is it just about schools. In Wigan, for instance, a few years ago, one such local congregation (with big-money backing) was contemplating trying to have a local, independent business closed down. The Coven was a sort of new age, hippyish, pagan café and shop. But this latest incarnation of fundamentalists don’t like such things. They’re not much cop at tolerance. And they believe that such things are of the devil and are evil – which isn’t really that far from believing that a teenager is a witch and needs it beating out of them, even if that leads to murder.

We sneer at such beliefs though – and conveniently forget just how many of our own fellow citizens are really not that far from very similar views. My own father has attended exorcisms and absolutely believes that some unexplained things he’s seen have been miracles.

It does also seem that fundamentalism across a wide spread of religions is growing – perhaps we’ve become particularly aware of it since 9/11?

But you see it in the worldwide Anglican communion, where the clash is not simply Western congregations v developing world ones; you see it in the dogma of successive popes and their drive to drag that church back into older practices. You see it in the rise of the evangelical churches, while many of the conventional denominations in the UK are slowly dying. It seems that the only growth area for religion is among people who want the simplicity of a fundamentalist approach.

And that, of course, is without mentioning the rise in Islamic fundamentalism and Jewish fundamentalism – the latter, as illustrated by the recent events in Israel, where some ‘ultra-Orthodox’ Jews share many of the same attitudes as fundamentalist Muslims toward, say, the segregation of the sexes. Indeed, the ultra-Orthodox (polite speak for fundamentalist) Jewish community in north London, which I have already mentioned in terms of its girls’ school where the pupils will spend 50% of their time being taught the [iTorah[/i, is hardly light years apart.

So it can hardly come as a surprise that the CofE sees an opportunity in the government’s plans to let (indeed, encourage) increasing numbers of new, independent schools, together with existing schools being able to opt out of the state system and even into partnerships with the church.

rlThis article on that subject includes the impact on education.rl

Speaking of which

I can get my head around not liking LGBT people.

I can get my head around people believing, because of their religious beliefs, that any 'alternative' sexuality is immoral.

I can get my head around people believing that gay marriage is not a good or desirable thing.

I might not agree with them, but I can get my head around it.

But such statements simply leave one flabbergasted as to their complete divorce from any logic.

However, as only a slight aside, given this thread, what are nearly 180 diplomats doing being addressed by the pope? Why? Do vast numbers of diplomats go to be addressed by the heads of any other religious group?

If ever you wanted an illustration of the sway that religion holds over our lives, this is it. And yes, I do know that the Vatican is a state and the pope its head. In which case, I'd ask how many times anyone thinks the head of, say, Switzerland sits down to address 180 diplomats on the biggest threats facing humanity?

For balance, I note that the page Rock God linked to does, further down, have a picture gallery of progressive religious leaders spanning a wider religious spectrum than some might expect.

Good for them. But one wonders whether – and to what extent – they will prevail against what seems to be rising fundamentalisms.

You'd think he'd be all for it, after all they're hardly likely to breed more poofs & lezzas are they?

~s~