Do not teach them ethics, please

The Polish concordat with the Vatican allows for catechism instruction in state schools; children are allowed to opt out – and two in thirty do, a surprisingly high and impressive statistic of independent-mindedness. But thereby they are missing something, thought a mother of one of them, and sued the state demanding that a substitute subject be taught to her child. The state lost, the subject is ethics, and the state is about to make it mandatory for those who do not attend religion. An unfortunate outcome, if you ask me: first, it makes ethics a punishment for not attending catechism; which is neither fair to the irreligious children, who should not be punished, nor to ethics, which should not be a punishment; but, second, and worse, it frees the religious from attending ethics instruction. The pretense is that catechism is ethics, which the religious like to say, but without a shred of credibility. For, after all, what is ethical about the biblical code of conduct: “though shalt have no other gods before me”, “one does not cast pearls before swine”, “the head of the man is Jesus, but the head of a woman is the man”? The truth is that proper ethics instruction, by teaching children how to think independently about their moral choices, would undermine catechism, whose point is mindless submission to The Lord (and his earthly representatives); and therefore the reason why the church prefers that ethics not to be taught to the religious is – to protect the ethical shenanigans of the church from independent evaluation and the severe criticism which must invariably follow. If you ask the church, the religious ought not to be ethical. God forbid.