Writing in the current issue of ‘InTouch’,
the magazine of the INTO, Fionnaula Ward, Primary 
Education Officer of Educate
Together wonders how to go about teaching atheism in Educate Together schools.
She acknowledges the potential difficulties while obviously hoping they can be
overcome.
She points out that Educate Together schools
currently try to acquaint pupils with the various religious traditions but
worries that this makes religious belief the default belief for primary school
children.
She admits the difficulty of putting up a
banner in class proclaiming ‘God is dead’.
The difficulty runs much deeper than this
though. Many parents send their children to Educate Together schools precisely
because they want them to be exposed to all the major religions and also to the
view that God is a fiction.
But many other parents send their kids to
such schools because it is the nearest school to them, or because they don’t
want to send their kids to a particular denominational school although they are
themselves religious.
Into either of these categories could fall
Muslim parents, for example. How happy would they be if their children came home
having learnt about atheism and its supposed association with “the rise of
reason in the 18th century” as Ward puts it? Not too many we can
guess.
Educate Together is therefore forced to
choose between an approach to religious education that treats all religions as
though they are equal (which can easily promote indifferentism and relativism),
or one that also teaches them a philosophy that denies the existence of
God.
If it opts for the latter, it will be deeply
alienating to many immigrant parents in particular and it will likely lose many
of those parents.
In any event, many Muslims are perfectly
happy to send their children to denominational schools because they like schools
with a specifically religious ethos that treats religion as though it is true,
rather than an optional extra, a lifestyle choice.
Ward, by the way, also describes atheism as
the “most humble of belief systems” because we are all, according to atheism,
“scraps of energy, randomly generated”.
Hmm, ‘humility’ isn’t the word that comes to
mind when thinking of the proponents of the New Atheism. Richard Dawkins,
humble? Christopher Hitchens, humble?
Ward might also contemplate why “scraps of
energy, randomly generated” should necessarily and as a matter of objective
morality, be treated with dignity.
Indeed, can you believe in objective
morality at all if we are simply scraps of energy, and if everything else that
exists is ultimately a scrap of energy?
You cannot. If we are “scraps of energy”
then the ideas of objective morality and human rights are simply human
inventions, delusions like belief in God and there is simply my morality and
your morality. Nothing is right or wrong in itself. There is simply what we
like, and what we dislike, what is social, and what is anti-social.
If atheism is to be taught in Educate
Together schools, then teach its full implications, and also its often awful
history. (To be fair, the sometimes awful history of religion would have to be
taught then as well).
