In Religous Studies one shouldn't study Atheism: it isn't a religion and anyway the material of its belief wouldn't take more than one lesson. I'd like to see RS become "Ideological Studies" so it could take in Communism, though.

In all fairness, I don't think the story of Lot's daughters is presented in the Bible as an example to follow.

That's true. (The children conceived through those incestuous matings become the ancestors of the Moabites and Ammonites, two rival tribes to ancient Israel; the whole story was really just a veiled put-down of their enemies.) On the other hand, the mere existence of sex and violence in other books, regardless of whether or not it is presented in a positive light, is generally enough to trigger demands for censorship from groups like C2A. To be consistent, they should oppose the Bible as well on the same grounds.

That said, there are things in the Bible and Quran which are just not appropriate for young children. Some stuff will scare the hell out of them. Other stuff they may not know how to handle. In fact, every major crime known to humankind is either committed, recommended, ordered, or carried out by the God of the Bible and the Allah of the Koran. (Anyone can verify this in about 5 minutes by looking through the skeptics annotated bible and quran; these are not just descriptions, they are prescriptions for how people should act).

I guess my attitude is, if this is going to be taught, both the believers' perspective and the disbelievers' perspectives of those texts should be taught also. It should not be taught until the child is at an age where they can handle all the criminal activity that those religious books order the believers to carry out. It should be taught from the scholarly frame of reference, not as texts whose contents must be believed.

It does present some practical problems: How for example, does a teacher answer this question from a student: "Will I be punished simply for not being a believer?" The teacher can say some variation of yes, no, or maybe, and in each case has committed to a position. So, I suppose, due to the popular trends in our relativistic (postmodernist, i.e., post-factual, post-moral) society, the teacher might try to be "fair" and present all views, without taking one. But that kind of "neutrality" is not really neutral. To do anything other than condemn the punishment of the disbelievers (who have committed no crime except disbelief) is morally indefensible and indeed dangerous. We are basically giving religion a free pass because we're scared of what believers will do to us if we don't give it a free pass. If this stuff is going to be presented, students should be allowed to carry out a full unapologetic critique of the religion. None of this "can't criticize religion" nonsense. If it can't be criticized, it doesn't belong in a school.

Nevertheless, not too much of the curriculum time should be wasted contemplating the absurdities and immoralities of those books. There is the problem of teaching children scientific thinking, logic, ethics (without the corruption of divine command theory amorality), and critical thinking skills--the very tools needed to evaluate claims and behaviours including religious ones. There's only so much time in the day.

The result is that we are left with RE (Religious Education) lessons which consist of a broad, dull meander through various religions noting the holy days, festivals, key stories of each. I remember a worksheet which once asked 'Draw the creation of the universe according to Scientific and Christian beliefs.' Hence I turned the Big Bang into a Batman-style BANG! in the middle of a blank page before our teacher realised that this pushed the bounds of stupidity too far and told us we didn't have to do it.

In fact, I opposed the idea of adding atheism on the grounds that RE plays a valuable part in making children utterly bored and disillusioned with whatever is taught in those silly lessons. :)