A former officer of Atheist Ireland based in Monaghan has responded to the results of a survey which highlighted how 34 per cent of school age children want more religion taught in the classroom. James Hamill was speaking on the Joe Finnegan Show about the results of the survey carried out recently by the Children's Ombudsman, which also showed that only three per cent of kids want to see religious education removed from the curriculum.
Mr Hamill said that, for example, he has different morals to Catholics about the way women and homosexuals are discriminated against by the Catholic Church. Therefore, he does not believe that the predominant religion in the country has a right to impose its morals on a nation's children.
The atheist posed the question if the majority religious denomination should get to impose their religiosity on the minority: "And there's a very good answer to that actually; human rights law says well, actually we need to defend minorities from the tyranny of majority and that's something that was argued in the North, for example" James Hamill said, "Within living memory we had a Protestant parliament for a Protestant people but the Catholic minority was perfectly able to argue that actually just because you're in the majority you can't abridge the rights of the minoprity and the same thing 's true in our education system today."
