Year 11 2011 daughter that is.

"@Bronwyn The extent of our 'Christian heritage' has been massively overstated ..."

Your post made for delightfully reassurring reading, but I'm afraid you've linked it to the wrong person. :)

Just for the record, you won't find me defending our so-called 'Christian heritage'.

Oops - sorry Bronwyn. Posting too late at night!

Mc(un)Real..... mate....you say:

"There is virtually no evidence for Jesus of the Bible outside the Bible narrative"

Hmmm.. I guess the Church just APPEARED out of nowhere :)

Kris Angel can do that..I saw it today.. amazing...but methinks a body as big and widespread as the Church diaspora with so many langauges and cultures... was a tad more than just morons following some self opinionated 'messiah' figure.

Loveday and Runner
I proposed that we should have a comprehensive course about religion with content controlled by an approved published syllabus rather than disjointed sets of lessons in the faith-based dogma of certain religious denominations whose content is unconstrained and a mystery to both the school authorities and the parents. You argue that there shouldn’t be such a course because two teachers once said something biased in subjects having nothing to do with religion. Pardon? If your observations imply anything at all, it would be that there should be no syllabus in any subject because some teacher might misrepresent it to students.
Loveday, you assume that the teacher who wrote “that's not what I wanted” was rejecting your wife’s belief that “nuclear” bombs do good. You cannot conclude that this is what “that’s” meant. Maybe the teacher was noting that your wife had written in a genre different from that required: maybe she argued only for the pros when the assignment called for a comparison of the pros and cons; maybe the assignment was only about contemporary nuclear bombs which are 3000 times more powerful than the one your wife approved of.
But even if you are right, so what? Do you seriously argue that we should not have a syllabus in English because a teacher might intrude a personal bias? Do you seriously argue that we should not have a syllabus in religion because of one English teacher’s bias in English on one occasion?
Runner, I will dream on. I dream that soon we will free little children from the mental and emotional abuse of having strange adults tell them that they must believe dubious religious propositions or go to hell; that they will be taught about all the different and conflicting god-stories that some adults believe; that they will be told honestly about all the good and bad things that religions have been responsible for; and that they will grow up knowing it is up to them to pick their own god-story or reject the lot. Will you share that dream with me?
Glen Coulton

Glenc,
there's one problem with your enlightenment project.
However spurious, religion offers hope, of forgiveness, salvation, God's love, Christian ethics (even if they are only observed in the breech) and eternal life. What does your programme proffer? Once kids and generations accept their lowly place in the scheme of things, what then?
Since we then have to invent our own purpose, what is it?
What purpose do you propose? On what do we base our ethics? What do we tell kids is the goal in life?
Surely a "good life"? But there's some stiff competition out there in terms of hedonism.
Rationalism is just as much a doctrine as religion, you know?
This problem goes back to Coleridge and co., who saw the poverty of positivism and wanted to replace religion with humanism and inspirational literature, a religious compromise: pantheism.
It's all very well dumping religion, but what do we replace it with?