Bully’s Blog

Many atheists think it is their void-given right to make disrespectful, insulting or condescending remarks about religion. One I have heard a number of times is a common atheist response to “Your atheism is a religion”: If religion were a hair colour, then I am bald.

In the Australian state of New South Wales, we still have religious instruction in state schools. Volunteers from local churches (which now includes Buddhists if there are enough takers and willing volunteers) have an hour a week set aside for this instruction. Students can opt-out of this instruction with permission from their parents.

The legislation states that no classes can be taken by the opt-out students during this time, because the SRE students will miss out. So, these students spend the hour reading in the library, doing literacy or numeracy, or in rare instances, such as one country school many years ago, digging up and clearing rocks from school property.

With the slow increase in parents opting their children out of Special Religious Education (SRE), the Department of Education recently allowed some trial “ethics” classes for theses students during SRE time. The controversy has been very interesting. The secularists argue that their children shouldn’t miss out and that this time should not be wasted. Why not fill the gap with something helpful?

The religious leaders argue that:

1. ethics is already part of the curriculum, and to run it during SRE time means that a large percentage of students are missing out on the benefits of these extra classes. An analogy might be: only teaching mathematics during P.E. which limits the mathematics classes to the sick and crippled;
2. shouldn’t representatives of non-secular worldviews be present in any discussion on ethics?
3. many non-religious parents, who currently send their children to SRE because they value moral instruction, will be duped into sending their students to “ethics” classes which in reality contain no moral instruction, despite their usefuless in helping students to make tough decisions in hypothetical scenarios. And from a Christian perspective, this boils down to the sad old “every man did what was right in his own eyes” scenario of Judges. It is actually a failure in judgment, not instruction in judgment. We believe and obey and only then do we understand.
4. This reduction in SRE attendance will only exacerbate the problem, which means that if SRE becomes unworkable, a large percentage of the community which values SRE (including Muslims), a group that has become surprisingly vocal during this debate , will miss out on a valuable part of their children’s education.

Many secularists are earnest, but spiritually blind. For others, these trials were a way to remove the last skerrick of religion from a supposedly “neutral” education system (neutral being, in practice, anything goes except Christianity. The amount of time spent analysing Australian indigenous animism is preposterous.). Despite all of this, the answer of some secularists has been that the religious are intolerant of those who have no faith. The secularists act like victims to eradicate any opposition. In reality, they are fools. Have they not seen the bloody result of this banning in American schools, and the contorted, comical and tragic efforts to maintain this ban, such as disciplining a student for thanking God for her success in an acceptance speech?

It is a ban on what is most important, yet they see the hole that is left without faith and want to fill it with a whitewashed sepulchre.

The issue here isn’t intolerance at all. There is no such thing as a neutral education. The real issue is atheists wanting to teach and propagate their atheism without the label and the stigma. They want to pass it off as morality without faith. Sure, let them explore their views, but let them also call it what it is, so they don’t sucker a lot of well-meaning parents. I’d be fine with a class for atheists. To keep them happy, let them call their class NSRE. Then let them find enough atheist volunteers willing to give up their time to teach other people’s children. This lack of volunteers has already become a serious problem that threatens to derail the program. The atheist worldview doesn’t produce volunteers in a country without a dictatorial regime to overthrow, a country which enjoys the manifold spiritual, legal and material blessings of Christianity which they stupidly and arrogantly assume is the result of centuries of rational thinking. Western culture is a shelter for peoples of other faiths because Christians are tolerant. Western culture is a tree under which secularists shelter, yet they are intent on cutting it down.

So, what can be done with this “wasted” hour? There actually is no alternative because they have no hair. Aside from ethics which are “borrowed capital” from Christianity, what is there to teach? You might have seen the cartoon with the two guys in ties out doorknocking. The homeowner remarks that their literature is blank, to which they reply, “Yes, we’re atheists.”

I’m not trying to be difficult, but the athiest/agnostic position that ethics can be secular is, I believe, a false assumption.

A tree is known by its fruits. We live in a culture that has opted out of its source, a culture that is ungrafting itself from the Tree of Life. It still wants the fruits of Christianity as its birthright, but without Christ, without the tree. Secularism is a parasite that is killing its host. The secularists believe that rational thinking can maintain morality, but the secular west is disintegrating around us as we watch. This is the price of their “freedom.” And this is the vindication of Christianity, a faith that continually rises from the dead and leaves its bankrupt leeches in the ground.

So, there is really no option. What the atheists/agnostics want does not actually exist—or at best cannot be sustained. Western secular humanism is just a perversion of Christian humanism. It cannot survive on its own. We have the Words of the Living God. Secularists have an ethics “wizard” that turns out to have all the authority, effectiveness and cultural integrity of a little bald man behind a curtain with a microphone.

The future belongs to Christ and Christians.