Ethics Trial: Religious wish to be part of evaluation. Biased much?
I must say here right at the start that I am very pleased with the New South Wales State Government for continuing with the Ethics Trial. It would have been easy enough for them to bin the whole idea before it even got to this stage. So kudos to Verity Firth and Penny Sharpe. But now we have another problem that I hope can be sorted out before it erupts into a vicious battle of words between the secular and the religious communities. The problem is this excerpt from the Sydney Morning Herald:
On March 17 religious educators including Mr Haddad, Bishop Ingham and the head of the Inter-Church Commission on Religious Education in Schools, Ann-Maree Whenman, spoke to ministerial staffers, seeking an assurance that religious educators would be part of the trial’s evaluation.
I cannot in all honesty see how allowing them to be a part of the evaluation is in any way proper. Isn’t this exactly what the phrase ‘conflict of interests‘ is all about? It would be much easier and quicker for whoever do the evaluation to take the religious sides arguments as ‘noted already’ and get on with the job of looking at the real outcome.
There is another point to be made here that the religious may not like one bit. As they are so fond of saying that the trial is competing with the SRE and that they want to be part of the evaluation, I’d be interested to see St James Ethics Centre be a part of an evaluation of the whole SRE debacle. Why? Take a look at one comment I’ve seen lately:
Who is vetting the scripture curriculum? Our oldest started with scripture because we thought it might be useful for him to learn the bible stories that Jensen claims they learn about – he would recognise allusions in literature and art as he got older – however all they did was happy-clapping “God is Love” colouring in. We pulled him out when we saw the rubbish he was working on. It was woeful. The last straw was when he asked if he could watch the Christian Television Channel, because their scripture teacher had told them to!
I assure you that this is NOT what SRE is supposed to be. So maybe it is time they were re-evaluated.
Greybeard is discussing.
Greybeard 11:01 on April 20, 2010 Permalink
Let me see if I have got this right.
Large numbers of children are pulled out of religious indoctrination classes at schools around NSW by parents. The Government realises it's wrong for these kids to twiddle their thumbs while the rest learn how to be Jesus' Little Sunbeams. So they decide to teach non-religious children how to cope properly with the realities of human behaviour they will meet in the real world.
So what happens? Organised religion steps in and wants to teach religion in these non-religious classes which are an alternative to religious classes, taking us back to where we started.
I am so sick of organised religion. It teaches religion at church. It teaches religion at schools. It sets up private religious schools. It interferes with government policy. It teaches religion on it's own radio and tv stations. It runs coffee shops. It elects nitwits to parliament. It has government sponsored chaplains. It brainwashes innocent children. Every memorial service has to be run by preachers. Wherever you go, they want to interfere.
They just won't get out of our faces and we won't progress very far whilst the lunatics are running the asylum.