Replace religion? Religion doesn't need replacement. It was a means of explaining inexplicable phenomena like birth, death and the progression of seasons to a pre-scientific mind. Our areas of ignorance have lessened although they will always exist. Now religion maintains ignorance. Human virgins don't have babies unless a male sperm is introduced. Some religions ask us to believe in a mystical process where people are required to believe that a woman can become pregnant without a male sperm. Most people no longer believe that the sun circles the earth, but some believe in a virgin birth. That is an example of ignorance maintained by religion.

The most important thing our kids need to learn is, how the think critically. One can love to read, but a matter of choice and not force fed onto dry classics. And ideas that are of a bygone era.

A secular education is better than the brainwash of the religious schools. I've had both!

How many wars were fought over religion and some need to be the dominate culture. How many were put to the sword because of different belief. The Crusades, the Spanish inquisition and bishops at the head of blood-soaked armies.

Teach them to read and to love to read and let all else follow.
Alan B.

Which level of "education" is she referring to? Pre-school/kindergarten, primary, secondary, or tertiary in its various forms.

During my "education" including going to university in the fifties and sixties there was hardly (or no) reference to love or how to cultivate it. Such "education" was always and still is only about "creating" grey-flannel-suited conformists, or factory fodder (workers). Little boxes made out of ticky-tacky, little boxes, ALL the SAME.

In primary school we had a once a week "religious" session, which looking back was painfully awful. There was no "religious" content in high school, and none at university too.

Apart from the study of two Shakespeare's plays in secondary "education" there was no reference or study of the so called great books. But even then the study of these plays was painfully superficial.

Meanwhile the great mass of students are now mostly "educated" or more correctly brain-washed by the various forms of social media. Most such young people have a sound-bite attention span of a few seconds In the face of that anyone who thinks that studying the "great books" can or will make a difference to the moral tone of our culture is seriously deluded.

Meanwhile the culturally illiterate and morally bankrupt world-view promoted by Donald Trump via his deeply psychotic MAGA movement, and Fox(faux) "news" too, holds sway in Amerika. So too with Ron Sanctimonius. Some right-wing christian religionists even pretend that the culturally illiterate Donald, is going to re-invigorate the Christian tradition in Amerika.
The Donald is of course famous for not reading books of any kind, including of course the much over-rated Bible.

"The secular education system, was founded on a set of beliefs that, although not transcendental or explicitly spiritual in nature, nonetheless prescribed virtuous behaviours, attitudes and values for a citizen, that occupy or rather replace the role of religion."

When education is well made and brings about virtuous behaviours, attitudes and values, it does not replace religion but becomes itself a wing of religion (tough it could possibly replace the dead-wood of teachings that used to be religious but no longer are): even if such education does not explicitly mention the transcendental and spiritual, it can still help most people to progress towards God, which is all that matters!

But does secular education actually bring about virtuous behaviours, attitudes and values?

In our modern world, 'knowledge' which is fed to people is decided more by the need for monetary gain than otherwise?
To suit this goal, knowledge is 'rearranged', to favour a particular thought or concept.
Which works in the short term.
But we have created a world which needs to be governed by solid long term reasoning.
And for reason to work, we rely on truth.
Which means that truth is, overpoweringly, the greatest and most significant factor in life.

Fortunately, truth is invincible.
It is in everything we see and feel, and in distant places we are just starting to explore.
It is always there to be found.
Religion is a local man made idea, used to control the masses, and explain the inexplicable to them.
Religion, in one form or another, has probably been around for a longish time.

But is it based on truth?
The reading I have done, and observations I have made, lead me to believe it is not.
To make it work, it relies on superstition and fear.
And as inevitably, undeniable truth gallops up to discredit its concepts, a new religious interpretation is engineered.
So it twists and turns in an attempt to maintain some kind of validity.
Over time, it has worn more 'colours' than a chameleon in a frenzy?
But ALL the time, plain old reliable truth underpins man's destiny.
Even when he doesn't interpret it correctly.

Dear Ipso Fatso,

«Religion is a local man made idea, used to control the masses, and explain the inexplicable to them.»

Where did you get that idea as if religion was an idea?

Religion is not an idea - it is a process.

Well of course there are man-made ideas and cultures surrounding this process, some better than others, some more accurate than others, some innocent, others cunning, some straight, others weird and superstitious - that's human nature... but that's not religion itself.

- It just seems that you confuse between religion and the ideas and cultures surrounding it.

«Religion, in one form or another, has probably been around for a longish time.»

Indeed, from time immemorial: since there was a universe there was religion, long before mankind even.

Now conceptualisation is man's specialty: before humans came along there were no concepts of religion, but then gravity too was there all along and was only conceptualised by Newton in the 17th century.

«The reading I have done, and observations I have made, lead me to believe it is not.
To make it work, it relies on superstition and fear.»

It seems that you have been studying human behaviour, not religion.

«And as inevitably, undeniable truth gallops up to discredit its concepts, a new religious interpretation is engineered.»

And isn't this wonderful?

By God's grace, when people get stuck in a concept, when they think that they are being religious only because they lazily agree with some concept that someone else presented, when they believe that they can hitchhike their way to God without efforts of their own, there comes the Truth and slaps them in the face, urging them to find God within rather than in the words of others. Zen Buddhism refers to this holding blindly onto rusty ideas as "holding a dead mouse by the tail".

Dear Yuyutsu,

Saw the following:

Forgotten gods: When we buried Summanus’s lightning

He was at one time a god so widely respected and feared that Romans went to great lengths to escape his power. But by the first century BCE, he had fallen into such obscurity that Ovid could refer to "a shrine dedicated to Summanus, whoever he is." What can the followers of other gods learn from his fate?

Same thing will happen to your God

Dear David F.,

Summanus must have done his job as a god, he served his purpose, then made way for others.

The role of a god is to provide a focal point for devotees to concentrate their mind on, thus gods have attributes that attract the minds of their devotees and help to keep them steady. New generations tend to be attracted by different attributes, thus require new gods.

Over millennia, some Hindu gods too became less popular and others took their place and came to the fore - that is as should: all that is born must die and that which is born of the mind must be forgotten.

The Biblical god has fewer attributes than other gods, thus he survived that long and probably will for some further millenia, but yes, he too will eventually be forgotten.

God has no attributes, God does not even exist, not even as a concept, God was never born thus cannot ever die, God cannot be conceived by any mind, thus cannot be forgotten either.