Well the older I get the less I see things in the black and white of my youth. I can't decide whether I agree with bombing Syria. I think that nuclear power is the best way forward. I think we all need to cut politicians some slack. I support the work that the police do on the whole. Stuff like that. Thirty years ago I'd probably have been saying the polar opposite of all those things. Issues such as those all have lots of things to argue about. It's a long time since I was a person of faith. I exited Catholicism gradually and gently, no apostasy traumas in sight. There are many Catholics in my extended family still. I do see some of those constricted notions among a lot of them that Shimrod mentions, though I wouldn't issue a blanket assertion about them. All the awkward questions and challenges I put here are the same ones I put to myself decades ago. I was just like Joe, Kevin and DMcG. The difference is that I did confront those questions as honestly as I could and found that there were no satisfactory answers. It simply isn't all right to send children to schools in which they will be lied to. And it is lies. There is no evidence that anything in your belief system is founded on biblical truth, no evidence for a deity. Confront that, please. Lies can never be an artful way of getting at deeper truths. Only the truth can do that, and children in faith schools of all varieties are simply not being told the truth. I did it myself when I started teaching in 1973. For a year I took Catholic assemblies, sang in the school choir and even taught RE to 11-year-olds. I was telling them the same lies that I'm accusing others of telling now. Instead of beating myself up about it, water under the bridge and all that, I've decided to do the honest thing and fight it. I have actually seen it from the inside, everything I'm arguing against right now. It doesn't matter what you believe. It does matter a great deal what you do with your belief, especially when you belief becomes a conviction and when the conviction is distorted into fake truth. Similarly, it doesn't matter what science discovers. Science and culture are what make us human and both are unstoppable. It does matter what is done with science. Science will never wreck the planet, but the misuse of scientific discoveries probably will. Same but different. Belief is a house built on sand. Tread carefully in it and stop trying to draw other people in.