Public schools need ethics, not religious education

But you don’t need to cite such sensitive and contentious examples as same-sex love-making to show the disconnect between ethics and religious teaching. One situation often cited has Grandma asking her teenage granddaughter what she thought of her birthday present - a highly patterned cardigan that she knows her Grandma must have spent weeks knitting. If the teenager actually hates the cardigan with a passion, how should she answer?

An ethical appraisal would conclude that to minimise the total discomfort she causes, the teenager should hug her Grandma and assure her that it’s the best cardigan she was ever given - especially if there is a good chance that this will be Grandma’s last ever present. But a teenager terrified by the religious teaching in Revelation 21:8. “But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death” would feel she had no choice but to destroy Grandma by telling her that that she hated it.

One of the really sad things is to hear clerics arguing that if it were not for Christianity, we would be unable to work out how to behave towards each other and, for example, would not have alighted on the baseline ethical principle of “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. They seem ignorant of the fact that highly efficient civilisations had observed such a principle long before Christ.

Far from any religion, and especially Christianity, being essential to the development of a sound ethical sense, it is a destructive hindrance from whose influence all children, but especially those in our public schools, should be protected.