Letter: Retain Christian education
The Courier & Advertiser 6 Feb 2016
Dear Editor,
John Munro (Feb 2nd) asks what I mean by Christian beliefs. Its not difficult – I mean those beliefs shared by all Christians as expressed in the Apostles Creed – held in common by Catholics, Presbyterians, Anglicans and others. It is also a bit of a cheap jibe for Mr Munro to say that my beliefs seem identical with Sarah Palin’s – I suspect she doesn’t even know what the Apostle Creed is! But sadly this kind of superior “I know better than you do about your own beliefs’ is all too typical of the atheistic secularist approach. Mr Munro says he knows of no person who wants schools to promote atheism, I know many. And yet he then goes on to say that schools and parents should not promote religious ideas. I do agree with him that pupils should learn to think for themselves, but in the one size fits all education system of the atheistic secularists that is going to be increasingly difficult.
I agree with Mr Munro that schools should promote values such as honesty, reliability, responsibility, empathy and compassion. The question is not only what is the basis for these values, but how should they be promoted. Christianity has an excellent track record on promoting such values – atheism has so far not shown those fruits.
Finally for once I agree with Alistair McBay of the National Secular Society when he says that it is not the governments job to fund sectarian indoctrination via schools. That surely equally applies to secularist schools which only teach secular humanist values. Would it not be better to stick with Scotlands tradition of broadly Christian education, rather than replace it with the narrow social engineering of the atheistic secularists?
Yours etc
David A Robertson
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