True Christian Website that speaks of why religion is WRONG!!

Oh, dear. Yet again, we seem to have fallen Below.

Why even use a religious text to teach morals when it is unnecessary?

Because if I felt that a religious text was the best way to make a certain point, then I would favor its inclusion in the curriculum.

Word-for-word, I don't know a better refutation of consequentialism than what appears in the Bhagavad Gita. Why would I care that it is a religious text, if I am reading it because it is exemplary in its treatment of an important moral question, something not at all peculiar to believers in Krishna?

I am also a great admirer of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Although his approach to ethics stems from a Protestant perspective, it is readily applicable to secular concerns and non-religious bases.

What service have I done to the student by pretending that Bonhoeffer has nothing to say about morality? What am I telling the student if the reason why Bonhoeffer isn't taught is because he believed in God?

Not anything I'm interested in teaching.

If you seek to simply teach morals why complicate it with religious claims that either the child must prove or disprove, believe or disbelieve? The object is to teach morality, isn't it?

It is uncontroversial that every subject provides the opportunity for students to practice language. Writing exercises, spoken recitations, and so forth, occur in every classroom, not just English class.

As with language, so, too, critical thinking. Your very hypothesis morality can exist separately from religion is fair game for in-class criticism in an ethics-and-morality class.

I don't see that I am complicating anything. The religious literature of the subject is voluminous. If the student wishes to know the best of what human beings have thought about the great moral questions, then the student must accept that much of that thought was framed religiously.

How will the child know any different that a deity may not exist if you're instructing him/her to accept the morality the deity espouses?

Good question. If the child cannot already follow that

A implies B

B is true

does not imply that A is true, then that, too, should be taught. Problem solved.

Why not use fables instead?

The two examples I have already given illustrate the costs of instead. There is no anti-cosequentialist fable with the force of the Bhagavad Gita, and there is no fable, period, with the cogency of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Substitution, then, is simply out of the question.

Supplementation, though? Yes, I like that.

What age student are you speaking of here?

I was thinking 3 years through about 15 years or so. Roughly "school age."

Obviously, whatever anyone teaches needs to be age-appropriate. Nothing special about morality in that regard.

This includes not only the morals, but the metaphysical claims and possibly the fear of deities, and/or anything else that accompanies the morals you intended to teach.

Yes, but that's true anyway. I cannot discuss thou shalt not kill apart from the metaphysical claim that other people are truly other from thou, that death is or is not irreversible, etc.

I also don't see that "fear" of deities is an inherent part of religion. It's not really anything an agnostic is likely to teach, I don't think, so not my problem. I also see plenty of religious folk who don't fear the deities they believe in, and don't teach others to, either.

There's bad teaching of every subject. So what?



[edit on 9-8-2010 by eight bits]