Its time to prise open this closed shop

In the first major review of RE teaching in 15 years the wishes of the vast numbers of non-religious people in this country are again being ignored. New guidance fails to give secular groups any voice in drawing up RE syllabuses even though this content is supposed to reflect their views. The big problem is that there is no national curriculum for RE and every local authority has a committee called the Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education (SACRE) that decides what should be taught; as is typical of unfair and closed practices, certain religious groups get a free pass to these committees, i.e. C of E, Catholics, Muslims etc. It was hoped that secular/humanists would be included in this core group simply because this would represent a fair and proper cross section of the religious views of modern Britain.

The fact that religious interests continue in their thinly veiled attempt to suppress reality is very annoying to Atheists like me, but also very telling at the same time, such groups are shining a light on their deepest fears by doing things like this and making it easier for non-religious people to campaign for equality.

Teaching RE without reference to the long and established tradition of non-belief is rather like teaching maths without the numbers 2 and 6, i.e. pretending they don't exist, a hopelessly closed minded and solopsistic perspective. I think we are rapidly approaching the time for a more active campaign. We need a more open debate on religious education in public schools, perhaps religion should be subsumed into History, after all that's essentially what it is, i.e. cultural history, or perhaps it should be made optional and more like the US system where religion and state are more clearly separated.

Strangely for a modern society the UK still clings to the notion that religion has some kind of "special" status and yet millions of her citizens vote with their feet and reject that view. It is high time that we properly represent the views of the majority of people in this country and remove the priviledged position of these sects who by their selective and partisan actions are more or less admitting that RE in its current form is nothing more than indoctrination in bubble wrap.