yep. forget the penicillin, bring back the leeches.

Call me old fashioned but I thought education was about the search for truth. Simply baptizing all culture as worthwhile will lead us into the study of witchcraft along side inorganic chemistry. Certainly the pose of scientists that they alone know truth is fanciful and the subsequent relegation to the margins of other forms of knowledge ruinous. But we do have the powers of discernment as to what is the truth and what is not. If we forsake that then all is lost. We do know that penicillin works and leeches do not. We also know that superstitious religion is a pandering to the human ego and some of us know that Christian faith is deeper than that.

Our aim is not unlimited freedom. That does not exist and the pursuit of it and the abandonment of the critical faculty would produce curricula crowded with rubbish. Let us not abandon the search for the truth and substitute it with an empty idea of freedom.
Peter Sellick

my mistake. forget the leeches. bring back the exorcisms.

I agree with Andrew Baker

Way back in 1932 (it could have been 1934) Einstein gave an address to the Academy of Science in which he said that the failure of Euclidean mathematics in the 19th century was that it sought to determine logically what must be instead of observing what is. Reason has it place but most things are not reasonable, they simply the way there are. Anyone who seeks to find truth through reason is doomed to failure.

The central questions of Science. Who am I? How did I get here? Why am I here?
The central questions of Religion. Who am I? How did I get here? Why am I here?
The central question of Philosophy. Who am I? How did I get here? Why am I here?

There is no reasonable answer to any of those questions. Science, religion and philosophy all have there place in exploring the 3 questions from different angles. As soon as we claim any to be right because it is reasonable it is the end of the line because nobody can progress past being right.

Our education system is about passing exams. This encourages students to learn lots of facts, but do they understand what the facts mean? Where in our education system is there the encouragement for our students to learn to think

Sells...there is no such thing as truth, the world is far too complex. The scholarship of the 20th century has well and truely put paid to the antiquated religious myth of a single all pervading truth.

But anyway, I would like my children to be educated please, not indoctrinated. I know it is difficult for Christians and other religious dependents to even imagine freedom, locked as they are in the prisons of their dogma. But please do not assume that your individual beliefs or experience is a recipe for everyone, it isn't.

Its only with science that society has advanced itself. Science deals in evidence, and facts.

Religion deals in supernatural-inspired texts and supernatural dogma.

We pay more for religion than science. Religion in our country pays no council rates, no motor rego, no stamp duty when dealing in property, no income tax, receives GST input credit, receives M4/M5 cashbacks in Sydney, the list goes on.

To the tune of billions, we pay for religion through increased taxation and having to forgo proper services the money could have alternately funded.