The absurdities of an atheist school?

[sawyl]

According to a recent and rather muddled piece on the Guardian's Comment is Free site — the article is, in essence, little more than a strawman set up in response to a throwaway comment by Richard Dawkins — the idea of an atheist school is a non-starter because it won't be able to talk about religion in a coherent way:

So, how would this free-thinking school be different? It would, Dawkins explained, "teach comparative religion, and teach it properly without bias". In case you were wondering, "without bias" means "as a branch of anthropology". What about religious texts? How exactly do you teach them "without bias"? Quite simply, you teach that they are untrue. "The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality", Dawkins explained. "It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality."

This is a legitimate opinion – although one from which millions would dissent – but to imagine it is neutral, objective or self-evidently correct is absurd. To arrive at (and teach) such ideas is to take a whole series of contestable positions on a range of theological, philosophical and scientific questions.

To claim that an atheist school would "teach comparative religion, and teach it properly without any bias towards particular religions" is so naive as to beggar belief. Does it mean you should dedicate equal time to Zoroastrianism as to Christianity, take the claims of Judaism as seriously as those of Jedis?

Unfortunately, this argument is extremely weak. When I studied RS, each of the major religions — givn Coventry's big christian, muslim, hindu and sikh communities, the choice of which religions to study was an easy one for the teachers to make — were taught in just such a neutral way. We discussed the beliefs, practices and scriptures of each religion and we were required to understand each faith in the context of what its adherents believe to be the truth. But we were not asked to do was take a position on the truth of any particular religion. Rather, we simply had to ut ourselves into the mindsets of others and to understand their ideas — something that surely counts as part of the basic skillset of being human.