VERSION|0.5.1|NAME|Dinah|DATE|1381162184|CONTENT|There is nothing inherently wrong with the idea of teaching the history and beliefs of the major world religions in order to give students a broad understanding of what makes their adherents tick.  The difficulty (which borders on impossibility) is in imparting that knowledge in an unbiased, disinterested way without imbuing it with one’s own prejudices and pre-conceptions.

For better or worse, we live in a country composed of people of different faiths and many of no faith.  This means it is no longer considered good practice for teachers of RE in secular schools to assert or imply Christianity is right and other ways of looking at the world are wrong.  Billings seems to have taken an incredibly long time to realise that if, in the interests of tolerance and &#039;respect&#039;, all religions are taught as being of equal worth, even though they contradict each other, then it is just as valid to argue they are all equally meaningless and untrue.  Not liking this conclusion, he has now decided it would be better to go back to assert the rightness of Christianity, but alas, it is too late:  the multi-faith and multi-cultural genies are out of the bottle, and will not go back.  However, it has to be said that many ‘faith’ schools, particularly in the private sector, do assert the rightness of their faith, and if it is not Christianity, then Billings is presumably dead against that too.
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