Some Australian students will now have the option of taking religious classes that teach there is no God.
Parents will be able to have their students opt out of the instruction.
Christian groups blasted the proposal.
Jenny Stokes of the fundamentalist Salt Shakers said: “If you go there, where do you stop? What about witchcraft or Satanism?”
Stokes said that humanists should not be able to have it both ways. “It doesn’t make sense because they proclaim themselves not to be a religion.”
However, Desmond Cahill, head of the World Conference of Religions for Peace, expressed a different view.
“Our view would be that humanist studies are a legitimate world view just as Catholicism, Anglicanism or Islam is, and that none are any more provable than the rest, just as theism or atheism are no more provable than the other,” Cahill said.
Currently, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism and Baha’i are taught in Australian schools, with plans to add Islam.
