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Atheists to do religious education in schools

by and Russell Grigg

Image Wikipedia.org Joseph Stalin atheist removed God from schools
Atheist Stalin rid education of God, but created hell on earth, not utopia.

“Religion in schools to go God-free” read the headline in The Sunday Age newspaper of December 14, 2008 in Victoria, Australia.1 The Humanist Society of Victoria has developed a curriculum, which the State Government accreditation body says it intends to approve, to teach “Applied Ethical Humanism—Humanism for Schools” in primary school religious education classes, from prep to grade 6 in 2009.2

Accredited volunteers will thus be able to teach children their atheistic philosophy that there is no evidence or reason to believe that God exists, and what is acceptable behaviour, based on humanist standards. Such ‘standards’ include promiscuity, gay rights, abortion, euthanasia, infanticide, situation ethics, etc.3

Victorian Humanist Society president Stephen Smart said, “Atheistical parents will be pleased to hear that humanist courses of ethics will soon be available in some state schools.” The report says that parents will be able to request that their children do not participate, but we wonder how long this will apply.

Soul-destroying

We wonder how any parent could want their child to be indoctrinated with such soul-destroying ideas? As the more candid atheists admit, atheism means that life is meaningless; it has no ultimate purpose.

Humanists accept evolution as foundational to their ‘faith’. The Humanist Manifesto III (2003), an atheist’s statement of faith, states that, “Humans are an integral part of nature, the result of unguided evolutionary change. Humanists recognize nature as self-existing.”4 (Emphasis in the original.) Putting it another way, our existence is nothing but a cosmic fluke, with no ultimate purpose. As the atheist Professor of biology, William Provine, said,

“ … There are no gods, no purposeful forces of any kind, no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be completely dead. That’s just all—that’s gonna be the end of me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will for humans, either.”5

Richard Dawkins, one of the atheists’ modern day ‘saints’ said that, to him, it looks like, “we live in a universe which has no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference”.

Singing from the same hymn sheet, psychologist Dr Susan Blackmore, friend of Dawkins said,

“In the end nothing matters … If you really think about evolution and why we human beings are here, you have to come to the conclusion that we are here for absolutely no reason at all.”6

“In the end nothing matters”? It is just plain crazy to be teaching this nihilistic doctrine to children.

Educational authorities go on about the ‘outcomes’ of their policies. What will be the outcome of atheists being given such input into our education system? Will the outcomes be good? No, it will be death and mayhem. Yes, atheism is the religion of death: 200 million people died because of atheistic political movements in the 20th century: see Communism and Nazism. Just a few weeks ago a young man in the USA committed suicide when he was encouraged by his professors to read Dawkins’ The God Delusion. Yes atheism kills. It is a pity that this young man had not read a good refutation of Dawkins’ delusional rant such as: Atheist with a mission (critique of Dawkins’ "God Delusion"). Unfortunately, part of the problem was a rejection of apologetics (defending the faith) in this young man’s church culture.

Cartoon on how teaching self-esteem is needed because of evolutionary indoctrination in schools

Social welfare authorities are concerned about teenage suicide; it is a big problem. But students are already being indoctrinated in evolution at younger and younger ages, which is indoctrination in the foundations of atheism. As William Provine said, “ … belief in modern evolution makes atheists of people.” And atheism means meaninglessness, nihilism. Is it any wonder that many young people see no point in living, or that shooting up drugs or regularly getting drunk seem like good options?

Ethics without God?

As Provine admitted above, in this atheistic view, “There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning to life, and no free will for humans, either”. So what sort of ‘ethics’ will atheists teach? It is no accident that atheists are at the forefront of efforts to legalize same sex ‘marriage’, addictive lethal drugs, partial-birth abortion, euthanasia, infanticide, ‘gay’ rights, , etc., which destroy lives. Anything goes when you get rid of God, because God is the only source of ultimate moral law, as distinct from moral opinion.

self-esteem

And why should any of the students take on board the values of the teacher, even if the teacher espouses ‘good’ values, because in the end they are just the dreams resulting from the movement of electrons in a brain that resulted from a cosmic accident (as C.S. Lewis pointed out many years ago). Why should the teacher’s values be any better than those of mass murderer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer? And how is anyone to judge one is better than the other? Oh, “society’s agreed values”, is it? Which society—a cannibalistic tribal society that sacrifices children to demons? What benchmark can be used to judge, if there is no ultimate foundation for ethics (i.e. the Creator and Law-giver)?7

There is nothing new about all this. In the times of the Judges nearly 4,000 years ago, as recorded in the Old Testament, when people turned their backs on God, ‘every man did what was right in his own eyes’. Was the result ‘good’? No. It resulted in anarchy, death and destruction. Similarly, the Nazis based their law on Darwinian principles.8

Atheism is a religion?

Humanists have often claimed that atheism is not a religion, but now, when it means that they can proselytise young impressionable minds, they want equal time in religious education classes. A similar thing happened in the USA: to get tax deductibility for donations, the humanists registered as a religious organisation! The Supreme Court in the USA described secular humanism as a religion in the 1961 case of Torcaso v. Watkins. More recently, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled, ‘Atheism is [a Wisconsin prison inmate’s] religion ’. So, when it suits them, atheists are happy to hypocritically claim ‘religious’ status.

Education is already thoroughly atheistic

Atheists have already made education ‘God-free’ inasmuch as God is never mentioned in any subject except ‘religious studies’ (for those schools in countries where this is allowed and there are sufficient volunteers to teach this). In many countries there is no religious education in state schools at all (this is the case in the state of South Australia). So education is nearly 100% atheistic already, but now the atheists want to give no quarter for anything to do with faith in God. As one of the humanist signatories to the original Humanist Manifesto I wrote,

“Education is thus a most powerful ally of Humanism, and every American public school is a school of Humanism. What can the theistic Sunday-schools, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching? … Not only public school education is an ally of Humanism: science [by which he meant evolution] itself is its mother.”9

He wrote this in 1930; how that statement has been prophetic! (see also Government school classrooms: temples of humanism?) And today there are not many children going to Sunday schools to even partly counter the five-days-per-week of indoctrination in atheism (and that’s in the Sunday schools that teach the Bible as real history not just “Bible stories”).

Isn’t it ironic: creation is not allowed in science or history or any class because ‘it’s religion’. So atheism is taught by default (evolution, for example, is the atheists’ creation myth). But if atheism is a religion, it should not be in classes in school either. But what would be taught then? The point is that education is religious; it’s just a matter of which religion is taught! Little by little, Christianity has been eliminated from the class room and atheism has replaced it (secularism = godlessness = atheism).

When God was removed from education, as He has been with the advent of ‘secular education’ in once substantially Christian nations, it reduced belief in God to an irrelevant optional extra. As the Scottish theologian, James Denney said in 1894 regarding the secularisation of science:

“The separation of the religious and the scientific means in the end the separation of the religious and the true; and this means that religion dies among true men.”10

This process of secularisation (removal of God) happened apace in many countries following World War II and particularly from the 1960s in Australia (see Secularizing America). And now they want to make ‘religious education’ God-free as well!

Atheistic indoctrination via the public school system is working well already. A survey done recently of Australian Gen-Y (born 1976–1990) indicated that only 48% retained a belief in a Christian concept of God.11 This contrasts with their grandparents, where 80% or more believe in some sort of Creator-God.

Destroying the foundations of freedom itself

As Bill Muehlenberg, an American Christian social commentator living in Melbourne, Australia, points out,

“By attacking Christianity in particular and theism in general, they are undermining the very ground on which they stand. That is, the main reason why they have the freedoms to engage in atheistic proselytising is because of the Judeo-Christian heritage of the West. Freedom to believe in various religions—or no religion—is one benefit of Christianity. So too is the freedom to attend different types of schools, to hold to contrary views, and to enjoy freedom of conscience. All these benefits flow in large measure from the very Christianity which these atheists so deeply deplore.”12

A saving ‘grace’

It is hardly likely that any real atheists will be bothered to sacrifice their leisure time to go into schools, because for a real atheist, it doesn’t matter in the end if you are an atheist or a Christian; we all end up as fertilizer anyway! See this explained in: Is Richard Dawkins (really) an atheist? However, these vocal proselytisers for atheism are more likely to be God-haters, in which case their mission in schools will be to inculcate hatred of God (as Richard Dawkins tries to do), which is hardly in keeping with the pluralism (tolerate everything) that is the philosophy that permeates modern government-sponsored enterprises.

Madness upon secular madness

Here is the tragic madness of western ‘education’: governments spend huge sums of money on public education, which inculcates materialism. This materialism (atheism) is ultimately destructive of purpose, morality, goodness. Then our authorities wonder why youth suicide, drug taking, alcoholism, and all manner of lawlessness go through the roof. So then those same governments spend even more taxpayer money to ‘fix’ the problem that they created through ‘secular’ education. This money goes on social workers and the public health system, which is supposed to pick up the pieces and help people get their lives back together (if they are still alive). And of course more police to keep a check on things.

Claiming to be wise, they became fools (Romans 1:22).

Published: 19 December 2008

References

  1. Bachelard, M., Religion in schools to go God-free: Humanists get OK to teach in religious education classes, The Sunday Age, 14 December 2008, p. 1. Return to text.
  2. Many other news media picked up the story, e.g. AAP, Students to be taught there’s no God, www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,24797395-1243,00.html, 14 December 2008. Return to text.
  3. To underline the incredibly harmful effects of atheism/scepticism on society, consider the international Humanist values and ethics convention Australis2000 held in Australia. One of the speakers was Vern Bullough, the Humanist pedophile advocate and an editor of Paidika: The Journal of Paedophilia, an absolutely horrifying example of how low organized humanism can stoop. Return to text.
  4. The Humanist Manifesto III Return to text.
  5. Provine, W.B., Darwinism: Science or Naturalistic Philosophy? The Debate at Stanford University, William B. Provine (Cornell University) and Phillip E. Johnson (University of California, Berkeley), videorecording © 1994 Regents of the University of California. (See also: Origins Research 16(1):9, 1994; arn.org/docs/orpages/or161/161main.htm.) Return to text.
  6. Blackmore, S., The Independent (UK), 21st January, 2004. Return to text.
  7. Zimmermann, A., The Christian foundations of the rule of law in the West: a legacy of liberty and resistance against tyranny, J. Creation 19(2):67–73, 2005, . Return to text.
  8. Zimmerman, A., The Darwinian Roots of the Nazi Legal System, J. Creation 22(3):109–114, 2008. Return to text.
  9. Potter, Charles F., signatory of the 1930 Humanist Manifesto I, Humanism: A New Religion (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1930), p. 128–129. Return to text.
  10. Denney, J., Scottish theologian, Studies in Theology, London, 1894, p.15 Return to text.
  11. Mason, M., Webber, R., Singleton, A. and Hughes, P., The Spirit of Generation Y: Summary of the final report of a three year study, June 2006; Return to text.
  12. http://www.billmuehlenberg.com/2008/12/14/destroying-the-foundations-of-the-west/ Return to text.