Last week, Britain’s National Secular Society publicly criticized a new initiative from Tony Blair’s Faith Foundation known as “Face to Faith.” Dedicated to using new “technologies in such a way as to encourage students of different faiths to learn directly with, from and about each other to support encounter, exploration and exchange between students from different countries and cultures,” the new program is part of the Foundation’s wider project of promoting “respect and understanding about the world’s major religions” and showing “how faith is a powerful force for good in the modern world.” The National Secular Society insists that the program will do “more harm than good”:
Keith Porteous Wood of the National Secular Society said: “Mr Blair has single-handedly done more than anyone else to foster religious division in this country by encouraging the proliferation of separatist ‘faith schools’. Now he wants children in all schools to emphasise their differences even more, rather than concentrating on what they have in common. This can only be counterproductive.”
Mr Wood said that this constant categorisation of children by their (or, more likely, their parents’) religion was a disastrous way to break down barriers. And besides which, research shows that very few children—in Britain at least—regard themselves as religious.
Read the rest of the NSS’s press release here. Read the announcement for “Face to Faith” here.
[via: Times Online’s Articles of Faith]