Welcome to Affirming The Faith
The Fantasy of Faith-Free Schooling
Regularly we hear the complaints of secularists and militant atheists against Church schools, faith-based schools, or the presence of religion in education.
They urge that not only should we scrap such education (or rather, public funding for schools that have a denominational allegiance) but that all presence of religion in school life should be proscribed.
They are, of course, practising deception, either upon us or on themselves. Religion-free education (or culture, or news reporting, or media) is impossible, and certainly it would not be to the atheists’ advantage.
We see this immediately if we consider that “religion” means not just the traditional, established faiths, but also any world-view/value-system, and its transmission. Every school (and the culture, and the media) promote the acceptance as objective fact of a world-view/value system – that of materialism – and they do it to a greater or lesser extent consciously.
Richard Dawkins would replace faith-based schooling tomorrow with education which actively promotes materialism and derides all else – not that he really needs to; all people, brought up in our culture, have acquired a “religion” (worldview/value system) some while before they left infants’ departments.
In our culture, materialism (i.e. evolutionism and all that follows it) is not recommended as a personal choice or something for our opinion or private view. Make no mistake about the people who call shrilly for the ending of Church schools: they are in reality saying that it is wrong to educate children in the acceptance of any kind of worldview/value system "except my own", and for Christians and others to expose their hypocrisy and duplicity is only to serve truth and reality.
November 2010