Scripture Class

According to Wiki, religious texts, also known as scripture, scriptures, holy writ, or holy books, are the texts which various religious traditions consider to be sacred, or central to their religious tradition.

Now for reasons that probably have roots in the century before last, scripture is taught in our public schools. Once a week each religion proffers up a lay person so that kids can learn their ‘scripture’.

It’s a pretty odd thing; you would think parents that are religious would be taking their kids off to their church or equivalent on weekends or after school. Why mix the two?

Then again I suppose the argument could be made about sport or anything else that they teach at school.

But if you are going to teach something then why not have professional teachers doing it like every other activity at school, including sport?

Kids of parents that don’t agree to scripture classes aren’t allowed to bone up on anything useful in the lost hour; that would be deemed an unfair advantage. So they get ‘Ethics’ classes, also taught by volunteer lay people.

Now there’s a conundrum; some kids get religious teaching from the sacred books of their parent’s religion, and some get a branch of philosophy that involves systematizing, defending and recommending concepts of right and wrong conduct.

Religion and ethics both involve moral rights and wrongs, but one just makes firm rules about them and the other, if taught properly, involves questioning and understanding them.

I still think that the non-religious kids in ethics classes would be getting an intellectual leg-up if their ethic classes were taught properly. Which I very much doubt.

Personally I would like to see professional teachers conduct classes on ‘Religions’. The idea would be to teach the kids all about the history and beliefs of all the major religions so that they can be put into a genuine ethical construct alongside non-religious moral beliefs.

What we need is inter-religion tolerance which can only be taught by mutual understanding, and not by myopic inbreeding of religious beliefs.

And it’s worth noting that there haven’t been too many instances where agnostics or atheists have used these brands as an excuse to persecute other peoples. So in this context maybe these anti-beliefs might just be worth promoting as the more ethical choice for kids.

And right there is the subject matter for the first ethics class.