No special status

I COULDN’T agree more with Richard Lucas (Letters, 6 August) that schools should be “places of open and stimulating debate, offering pupils the opportunity to engage with a range of world views and philosophies”.

If that is the desired model, it would make sense to remove any special status for Christianity as school religion, to better enable interaction with a range of world views on an equal footing.

That means doing away with assemblies and services in which the supernatural beliefs of Christianity, including monotheism and salvation through Christ, are presented as though they were fact, and ending organised common prayers and acts of worship which imply that the Christian God exists.

If Richard Lucas really does want Christianity to be seen as counter-cultural rather than the boring official line, life-changing rather than a default culture to which pupils are presumed to belong from birth, and a source of stimulating debate rather than a given to be uncritically accepted, he should oppose its privileged promotion by schools as revealed truth.

ROBERT CANNING

Vice chair, Scottish 
Secular Society

Broughton Street

Edinburgh

Richard Lucas refers to the “life changing teachings of Christianity”. I can confirm they are “life-changing”; I was trapped in the religion as a teenager and spent 17 years embroiled in it.

I only escaped after improving my education and the application of rational thought. It was huge relief to live a life free of superstition and mysticism.

As a result, I still take great interest in the origins of Christianity and am the author of a book about it. So it was “life-changing” in a different way.

STEUART CAMPBELL

Dovecot Loan

Edinburgh