Atheist Ireland agrees with Educate Together and with the Humanist Association of Ireland that children should not be separated according to their religion in the new pilot VEC primary schools, and that there should not be faith formation within school hours.
Atheist Ireland believes that State education should be secular. Children should be taught about the diversity of religious beliefs in an objective manner. Children should be educated in critical thinking and the distinction between faith and reason as a guide to knowledge. Faith formation should be a matter for parents and religions.
We believe this not merely because it is good for society, but also because Ireland today is violating international human rights law by denying secular education to the children of parents who want it.
The United Nations Human Rights Committee has already told Ireland to increase its efforts to ensure that nondenominational primary education is widely available in all parts of the State. And the European Court of Human Rights has ruled that children should be taught about religious culture and ethics in an objective, critical and pluralist manner. It has also ruled that primary schools should not display religious symbols on school walls. Italy is appealing this latter decision.
Atheist Ireland wants a secular state for a pluralist people. This nuance is important: a pluralist society, with freedom of conscience, religion and belief, is best protected by a secular government, with public policy formed by applying reason to evidence.
Is ordaining a woman worse than child sex abuse?
Apologists for the Catholic Church are correct that the Vatican is not equating women’s ordination with clerical paedophilia by referring to them in the same document, Normae de Gravioribus Delictis.
In fact, the penalties in the document suggest that the Vatican actually considers attempting to ordain a woman to be a more grave offence than sexually abusing a child.
A cleric who attempts either offence may be punished by dismissal or deposition, but a person who attempts to ordain a woman is also automatically excommunicated, as is the woman who attempts to be ordained.
These are the moral priorities that one might expect from a church that last year excommunicated a Brazilian mother for helping her raped nine-year-old daughter to have an abortion, without seeking to impose any penalties on the man who raped the child.
Ethical issues should be evaluated on the basis of human rights, compassion, well-being and suffering, not on the basis of theological dictates from people who believe they are getting messages from the creator of the universe.