4 reasons ethics classes will ruin our kids*

* According to the Reverend Fred Nile.

Every kid across the country has access to special religious education in schools. It’s an opt in thing where their parents can send them to learn about Catholicism or Judaism or Islam or any denomination in between. And it’s perfectly lovely. But if you don’t want to do it? There’s no alternative. You just sit in another room somewhere and pretend to be a bookend or a potplant or something. Gold star! Considering you’re in school, this seems to be a massive waste of time when you could be, you know, learning.

What a novel idea indeed. I mean, why should our agnostic and atheist friends (or religious parents who just want their kids to learn something a bit different) be punished for being temporarily sacrilegious?

New South Wales tried to put a stop to that by introducing the alternative ‘ethics classes’ during a trial. But now Reverend Fred Nile (an MP with the Christian Democrat Party) wants to put a stop to it all by withholding his vote on Industrial Relations laws and forcing the Government to hold an ‘inquiry’ into whether our kids should be learning anything at all if they’re Godless fiends.

An inquiry. This must be pretty serious stuff so, without further ado, here are the reasons ethics classes will ruin our kids (and why they must be stopped!)

1. They will force our kids to think.

Everybody knows teaching our kids to think will eventually be our undoing. It’s a slippery slope this ‘thought’ business. First the young ones are asking apparently innocent questions about where clouds come from and the next moment they’re fashioning shivs and projectiles with their rudimentary knowledge of physics to cede control from the adults and install pinball machines in every room.

We know critical reasoning is a corruption of us all. Why waste all that time on figuring out why we think certain things and what the evidence (and reason) is for those thoughts when you can just listen to a few adults who apparently know better?

Critical reasoning has led to abominable things like almost all the science, which has plainly been of no benefit to anybody ever.

And that’s to say nothing of the minor influence it has had on our democracy and justice system.

The good old days of witch hunts and throwing people off cliffs to prove their innocence are sorely missed.

Here is a terrifying video of children thinking:

2. But the Ethics classes won’t teach our kids what to think

I know, right? How will our kids know what terrible traditions to inherit and foster for themselves if they don’t have a bunch of grown-ups telling them what to think? Won’t somebody think of the children? Mr Nile has a bee in his bonnet about what he thinks is an element of basic moral relativism in the ethics classes. That is, that they don’t actually admit to having any standards for telling the difference between right and wrong. Basically, Fred thinks teachers will be asking kids whether it is really all that bad to hurt a kitten. He’s confused, of course. What the classes will be asking is: why do you think the way you do?

3. Only religion can teach us morals!

Kids who don’t attend any sort of religious instruction are doomed to live a life of moral destitution, smoking illicit drugs while turning tricks on street corners. Only religion can teach them right from wrong because they got all the answers many, many years ago and nothing has changed in the intervening millennium or two. Nile himself wrote: “I agree with the teaching of ethics in NSW schools, colleges and universities, provided it is based on history’s greatest teacher of ethics, the Lord Jesus Christ.”

4. Ethics classes will take all the kids away from religious classes.

Giving the kids a choice between religious education and twiddling their thumbs in a room is better than giving them a choice between religion and ethics. Clayton’s choices are fun. Cake or death! But introducing ethics classes will make it, heaven forbid, a real choice and that’s just a terrifying thought because what if the kids stop learning about their religion during school hours and do something else?

Oh, the humanity!

Would you send your kids to religious classes or ethics classes, if you had the choice? Do you remember religion classes from your school?