Teaching values

Re: “Education and ignorance” (Your Views, Feb. 21).

These letters reveal the depth of the problem in teaching values in a secular society. To those of a secular outlook, society is a rat’s maze of conflicting beliefs all of which are partly true and partly untrue. It is the role of the good citizen to navigate through this maze and come to his own conclusions about what is true.

This, however, is a philosophical mission and is already based upon the tenets of the Enlightenment itself only one belief among many.

Roman Catholic teaching is intended to develop a sense of the transcendent in its charges; it is not simply a system of ethics. This is not a sense that can be easily instilled; it has to develop over a period of years through faith, work, struggle, community and study and usually while one is a child and a teenager.

To complicate this development by teaching young people that their faith is only one of many possible beliefs is something that simply must be viewed as problematic by faithful people.

Moreover, given that the church offers comparative religion courses, presented from a Catholic perspective, and that there is no evidence that these courses teach contempt for other beliefs and there is every reason to leave well enough alone and grant exemptions.

The elephant in the room is that we have religions in Quebec that are much less generous toward those who are in “error”.

The state believes religions must not be granted exemptions and so neither must the church, for fear of setting a precedent.

This is the fruit of multiculturalism.

John Purdy

Kirkland