Excellent response, Squeers, Pericles and others expressing similar positions. Roger, I think you will have great difficulty finding any thinking atheist who would not want children to be educated about all the important ideas, philosophies and beliefs that have influenced human behaviour. How else can they learn that today's religious beliefs are but the most recent of at least twenty thousand supernatural cults invented for the control of societies?

Christianity has done vast good, and occasionally a little bad.

Unfairly, many wars have been blamed on religion, when they were caused by ability, ambition, technology or demographics... and the leaders were wise enough to enlist religion as an footsoldier in these much greater wars... In other words, religion was an innocent bystander, but ends up being blamed.

The Spanish Inquisiton is cited as the worst excess of religious abuse... but this was a result of the war of demographics across southern Spain... the islamic Moors were gradually defeated by the growing populations of Christians from the north... and, as always, the wars of demographics and race had religion conscripted as an innocent footsoldier and history records it as a war of religion.

The many millions of lifes slaughtered in the twentieth century by 'socialism', the millions of children whose futures are being destroyed by fatherlessness as a result of feminism, dwarf the people killed by Christianity.

"Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition" to be cited as the worst excess of religious abuse… Mostly because it's an inaccurate statement.

"…as always, the wars of demographics and race had religion conscripted as an innocent footsoldier and history records it as a war of religion" is certainly an assertion – unfortunately, when the figures in history who waged the wars claimed them as religious I think it's fair enough to believe them since they were there.

I'd love to hear your take on the ironically titled 'Lord Protector's' motives in the civil wars (one through three) and in Ireland – just a couple of events in history that don't deserve to be dismissed as "occasionally a little bad".

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ARE THERE RELIGIOUS TEACHERS IN SCHOOLS ?

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I am afraid I have been away from home too long to know if there are religious teachers in schools these days.

There were none in my days. We used to have non-compulsory religious instruction provided by a local bush brotherhood Church of England minister once a week when I was a kid.

I enjoyed his classes though he did not teach us anything about religion. He simply explained various lessons from the bible in accordance with the dogma of the Church of England.

Nobody ever taught us what religion was, no more than they taught us what mathematics, phycics, chemistry, history, literature, or geography was. It never seems to have occurred to anybody that that might be necessary. The modus operandi was the same as the way my big brother taught me to swim: by throwing me into the deep end.

That was the method of teaching at school, whatever the subject. We never knew what it was we learned but we learned it - at least, some of us did. We were rewarded if we succeeded and punished if we failed.

As I am slow to understand anything, it has taken me most of my life to resurface and realize what it actually was that I was taught. I am gradually recovering my wits at last.

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Atheists are not militant. Why would one be militant about insisting that something does not exist? what reason has an atheist to consider religion as "enemy"?

The ones who are militant are not atheists, but rather those of a contrary religion, in this case the pseudo-religion of humanism. They hide cowardly under the cover of "atheism", never admitting to being a religion, but in fact, humanists believe in their own god - Man!

So NO. I wouldn't allow a biased humanist teacher to indoctrinate my children in school under the guise of "general knowledge".

"A disciplined study of Christian theology makes one aware that it is governed by a rationality different from scientific rationality but a rationality all the same that governs what can and cannot be said about God." -- Peter Sellick

Gosh, Peter, not so many weeks ago you were lecturing us about how wicked and irresponsible it was to be rational. But now you've apparently decided that rationality is a Good Thing, and so -- like any jealous three-year-old -- you want your Invisible Friend to have it.

OK, if Christian theology is 'rational', give me one example of an widely-accepted fact or item of information rationally derived from its premises. Just one, to set against the millions of facts derived from the rationality of science. If you can't do that then I'll be forced to conclude that Christian 'rationality' is just as elusive as Christian charity and Christian tolerance often seems to be.