Sunday school for atheists. What do you think?

One of the common misconceptions among persons without an active and lived faith community is that religion is ONLY about teaching people values and morals.

Of course morals and values are an important part of most faiths. However, Christianity would certainly say that worship, and a deepened relationship with God and the world that God loves is a central part of the Gospel (values and moral conduct are an aid in doing this effectively).

However, here's an interesting story about people in America who do not believe in God, but wanted something akin to a Christian Sunday school so that their children can learn good values and morals. I think it is a good idea (at least from that perspective, i.e., morals and values), however, I don't think that it replicates or matches what a good Sunday school should be (i.e., helping young people to learn to live with a sense of God's sacred, gracious, and loving presence in all of creation, and learning to honour and worship that God not only through moral acts but through spiritual discipline)....

That's what I think... What are your thoughts?

Sunday School for Atheists

"When you have kids," says Julie Willey, a design engineer, "you start to notice that your co-workers or friends have church groups to help teach their kids values and to be able to lean on." So every week, Willey, who was raised Buddhist and says she has never believed in God, and her husband pack their four kids into their blue minivan and head to the Humanist Community Center in Palo Alto, Calif., for atheist Sunday school.

An estimated 14% of Americans profess to have no religion, and among 18-to-25-year-olds, the proportion rises to 20%, according to the Institute for Humanist Studies. The lives of these young people would be much easier, adult nonbelievers say, if they learned at an early age how to respond to the God-fearing majority in the U.S. "It?s important for kids not to look weird," says Peter Bishop, who leads the preteen class at the Humanist center in Palo Alto. Others say the weekly instruction supports their position that it?s O.K. to not believe in God and gives them a place to reinforce the morals and values they want their children to have.

It's all in the details... Did you notice that the guy who teaches the 'humanist pre-teen' class is called Peter Bishop!? Ha ha! Quite and irony.

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