Atheism in religious education - Why I will not sign the petition

Every three days at the moment I am using this blog to post about the continuing story of our Ethiopian pilgrimage. If you came to the site expecting that, you only have to wait until tomorrow for the next episode. But I hope you will read on…

As I struggled to open a new DVD packet I wondered why it had to be so difficult to gain access through all the cellophane and stickers. Cynically perhaps, I thought this may be an anti-theft device. But then am I so wrong? We seem to be living increasingly in a dishonest world - where the prevailing attitude seems to be that if we can get away with it, then why not. Shop lifting statistics are appalling. I see petty pilfering all around me. Without the cellophane I assume the fear is that someone would remove the DVD in the shop and walk out with it without paying. 

Where the Ark of the Covenant holding the
Ten Commandments is reputedly kept in Axum

I was brought up in a Christian culture and household, I learnt the Ten Commandments by heart and knew that it was wrong to steal. It would never ever have occurred to me to take anything from any shop on the long walk from the school through the town to the school bus. Now our local town has to impose a rule: no more than two students in the shop at any time and all bags to be left outside. I find that shocking. "Thou shalt not steal" still guides my life - that and all the other Commandments too. But that is not what I see all around me. What has happened to basic morality? A morality that has been grounded in religious values for so many years.

I have just been asked to sign a petition to tell Nicky Morgan to teach humanism and atheism as part of religious education in British schools. I won't. Whatever the November 2015 High Court judgment and the subsequent Department for Education statement say, religious education should be about - guess what - religion, in the same way that history lessons should teach history, science lessons teach science, and so on.

Worship Ethiopian Orthodox style

The organisation American Atheists says on its website that "the only common thread that ties all atheists together is a lack of belief in gods and supernatural beings." They stress that it is not a belief system, or a disbelief in gods or a denial of gods, neither is it a religion. Why therefore should it be included in Religious Studies. There is no place for it there - indeed nothing to teach about it.

When we teach about different religions, we teach about understanding those different religions, including the moral values which they support. And only with understanding can we foster respect. And I do not see that respect for religious beliefs from where I am sitting - it is certainly lacking among some of the new angry militant atheists who are anything but neutral and seem to argue their non-beliefs in their own fundamentalist way, almost like a new "religion." And an irreligious society does not seem to have served our moral and ethical values too well.

All of this is behind why I wrote Why Religions Work. The title could have been Why Religions Matter - because that is part of my story, and a very important one. Religions are social capital writ large, in many different ways. But there is a subtler more spiritual and transcendent message in the book which is not always being picked up on by the readers and in reviews. And that is a shame.

Because whether we like it or not we are all spiritual animals. And if we share a common spirit, then the religions have so much more in common, share so much more than is often given credit for - and this I believe is a key to interfaith harmony.

Debre Birhan Selassie
church wall paintings Ethiopia  

Of one thing I am sure. There is simply not enough respect for religions, particularly in the Western world. In writing Why Religions Work I wanted to make a serious contribution to understanding why we all need to support religion as well as spirituality. Further, I wanted to explore how a global spiritual awareness, an appreciation of spiritual human inter-connectivity and therefore shared responsibilities, may help; why different ideas of spirituality, alongside advances in the scientific understanding of empathy and consciousness, may be closing the gap between science and religion, between spirituality and religion, perhaps even helping to forge a clearer path towards better inter- religious and inter-denominational understanding; and why this matters for the future of our world.

We need spirituality. And we need religions. We need them both very much indeed. And there is nothing to teach about atheism in a class on religions. So I will not sign that petition.

    

War and Religion

It is so terribly sad that flawed assumptions are allowed so often to tarnish the image of religion. This is one reason why I wrote Why Religions Work. "Why they don't work, more like," I hear quite a few people say, and they dismiss the book with a sneer. Just look at the world and all the wars- that's why they don't work, someone said recently.
One of the most common reasons given for not wanting anything to do with religion is that religions cause most of our wars. But do they?
Excuses abound for war and violence without any need for religion at all! The religions’ historian, Karen Armstrong, in her book The Case for God, shows us that wars are more about greed, envy and ambition, cloaked perhaps in religious rhetoric to give them ‘respectability’. And they can certainly be fueled by religious difference. But we are also attached to too many possessions, and Aidan Rankin in his book Many-Sided Wisdom: A New Politics of the Spirit claims that it is this attachment, rather than religion per se, that is the cause of so many wars that are too often blamed exclusively on religion.
It is true that many conflicts are fought over geographical boundaries, hypothetical lines drawn on maps, although religious passions do run deep when that land or property is sacred. For many people the religious Crusades come first to mind. Yes they were bloody, and the reasons behind them enormously complex; basically they were great military expeditions undertaken by the Christian nations of Europe for the purpose of rescuing the holy places of Palestine from the hands of the Mohammedans. But here again we are talking about the fight for possession of land and property.
In Gustav Niebuhr’s book Beyond Tolerance, he refers to a night in 1993 when there were 40 wars going on in the world, but on analysis most of them were fueled rather than caused by religion.
However, it is indisputable that we now live in a more perilous world than those of us who are children of the 1950s could possibly have foreseen. There are more wars worldwide than ever before. It is true that in the Western world many of us have experienced unbroken peace since the end of the Second World War. But we can no longer ignore the wider global picture. In those terms the future is bleaker, with so much war and civil unrest and dreadful violence obvious from our daily news, And we all see current atrocities on our TV screens where religious hatred is cited as a cause. But sadly and worryingly it is too often the case that politics is masquerading as religion, the faith differences being used for political purposes, and it is true that religious fundamentalism/extremism is often implicated. But a moment’s reflection tells us that hunger, injustice, inequalities and tyrant dictators also play a significant part in most unrest today. We witnessed in 2011 the most extraordinary events that have been collectively called the Arab Spring. Were not these uprisings more about injustice and inequality and tyrannical rule than about religion? It is quite likely that wars of the future will be similarly caused. Researchers have also found that environmental shifts are already contributing to war and strife and we can expect further displacement of refugees through climate change in the future that will threaten peace in the areas affected. The adverse effects of climate change could easily deliver the knockout punch if there are serious social inequalities which cause tensions waiting to be sparked into action.
The fact is that religions are social capital writ large, of vital significance to the vast majority of the world's population, 

and they work tirelessly to address the causes of so many of these tensions.

So perhaps instead of endlessly debating the role of religion in past and indeed current wars we should concentrate on how the religious – and for that matter atheists and humanists – can peaceably coexist. This needs respect, based on understanding, which can only be achieved through education. Remember the common features of most if not all faiths: the Golden Rule of loving our neighbors as ourselves; the rules that call for universal love and that forbid killing; the common concern for Creation; the notion of hospitality.

I shall look at the the whole issue of religious fundamentalism and extremism in more detail in a later post.
Meanwhile see in this respect the report in the Independent , February 21st, and a related editorial from the Barnabas Fund, of the speech given by Baroness Warsi, the UK Coalition's Minister for Faith, during a recent trip to the Middle East. 

See also this article re. wars and religion or this blog and also Jimmy Akin who has quite a few words to say about this issue.

And please read the book before dismissing religion with an ill informed sneer!