Mary Kenny, last week in the Guardian, poured scorn on the idea of atheism being taught in British schools, and wrote of the dreariness of the atheist imagination.
"All in all the imaginative resources of atheism are pretty thin ... I pity the child deprived of the life of the imagination that is illuminated by the light of faith." How can one teach without the stories that give flesh to a faith, from Adam and Eve, to the lives of those like Joan of Arc, St Angela de Medici or St Brigid, the role models which, Kenny claims, made her a teenage feminist?
The diatribe was prompted by reports that the British Qualifications and Curriculum Agency wants to upgrade the status of atheism in the RE curriculum, arguing that "there are many children in England who have no religious affiliation and their beliefs and ideas, whatever they are, should be taken seriously."
Polls show 7 per cent of the British population attend a weekly religious service, and a think tank close to New Labour has also argued that RE should be renamed "Religious, Philosophical and Moral Education" as it has in Scotland. In Ireland the 2002 census also reflects the retreat of "faith": those who do not share the religious outlook of the State's 3.5 million self-professed Catholics include "no religion" (138, 264) - outnumbering C of I members and Presbyterians combined - while atheists (500), agnostics (1,028), "not stated" (79,094) all add to the mix.
The editor of the Irish Catholic, Simon Rowe, asked ironically of the British report last week: "I wonder will children's 'beliefs and ideas, whatever they are' be taken as seriously when it comes to the trifling matters such as the existence of gravity, geometric calculus and the history of Europe."
Rowe's dismissive contention that the belief there is no God can be equated in some way with a rejection of the scientific basis of gravity is a bit rich from someone whose church has only recently reconciled itself to Galileo.
More importantly, however, it appears to presume that RE teachers are in the business of passing on the faith and specifically of promoting the idea of the existence of God. Mary Kenny also describes the "prime purpose" of religious eduction as "to teach faith".
In fact the Junior Cert RE syllabus explicitly avoids such talk. The "Aims of Religious Education" are expressed as assisting in the moral formation of students and are geared "to foster an awareness that the human search for meaning is common to all peoples, of all ages, and at all times ... \ to appreciate the richness of religious traditions and to acknowledge the non-religious interpretation of life".
Although the tone is non-prosletysing, humanists might fairly contend that the latter phrase implies giving primacy to the "rich" religious traditions while relegating non-religious thought to an "acknowledgment".
The study of atheism, agnosticism, and materialism forms a tiny part of the syllabus, confined to the higher level part of the course. Anecdotal evidence would also suggest that many in RE takes theism, if not Catholicism, as a given.
The idea that atheism cannot be taught because either it has no stories to tell or that, as one teacher told me last week, it consists only in an assertion that there is no God which can be disposed of in two minutes, is fallacious.
Examples of role models and heroic personal sacrifices abound - from many of America's founding fathers to, not least, some of our own.
Kenny's contention that for atheists "when people are said to act morally or altruistically it is merely the urge to protect the species and the survival of kin" is a dangerously misleading caricature. Atheists, no less than theists, approach morality in many different ways. They are utilitarians, nihilists, socialists, existentialists .... For many a personal ethic flows from the idea that life as a social animal is given meaning - self-realisation - through one's relationship with one's fellow man.
Indeed, students might do well to weigh the sacrifice by an atheist of his life for his neighbour against that of someone for whom there is the promise of another life.
Atheism, moreover, has a rich history that goes back as far as Epicurus in Greece, and spans such diverse, great thinkers as Diderot, Marx, Sartre and Russell more recently.
Humanists share with those of religious faith concerns about both the moral vacuum at the heart of our society, and the perniciousness of new forms of moral relativism, and they vehemently reject attempts to associate humanism with such phenomena. In demanding the right to have their arguments heard properly in schools, they are not seeking to undermine faith but instead to fill a dangerous void for those for whom faith is not enough.
In the words of Charles Darwin: "It appears to me ... that direct arguments against Christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public, and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds which follows from the advance of science." Mr Rowe, please note.