VALUE-FREE EDUCATION SUPPOSEDLY LEAVES THE STUDENT WITH A NEED THAT IS NOT FULFILLED THAT THEY WILL TRY TO HANDLE IN A HARMFUL WAY

We all have heard of doctrines of God and religion that say that if you discard them you will deal with an emptiness with superstition, sex, drugs, lies and money.  They are the ones saying that sin is bad for us rather than God and God wants us to refrain for our sake.  They say God is bigger than our sins and mistakes and we can have him when we think we have not found him.  Catholicism for example argues that when St Teresa of Avila and Jesus Christ felt abandoned by God he was never closer.  The religions do not agree with themselves.

Then there is the argument that people need an education ethos grounded in the formation of virtue and instilling moral values.

Many psychologists believe there is there is no such thing as having a virtuous character. They would say that the good Samaritan JUST helped the beaten man though it was at grave risk to himself. The man helped as in a once-off or a lucky happenstance. Maybe if it had happened a minute earlier or later he would not have helped. 

How many weeks do we need a person doing good to be considered good inside? Nobody tells us.

Perhaps a man being good for weeks is only a happenstance too. A long coincidence is as much of a coincidence as a momentary one for but for some reason we only seem to think of the latter as coincidence.

We all know that people have self-serving reasons to let others praise them and to seem good and caring. We all know you only see a small part of a person even if you live with them. So assuming a person has a truly virtuous character is based not on faith, not on evidence, but on nothing. It is just a guess. We might pressure people to make that guess but we have no right to complain if they defy us. We have to condone them guessing the way we do not like.

Now you would hope that if somebody lives by love and justice and compassion that they are doing so out of the goodness inside and not because of fear.  There must not be anything that could threaten them.  Value free approaches ensure that nobody feels they "have" to do anything or that bad things might happen if they do not.  They allow exploration. 

Christianity boasts that its God loves you so much he will not force anything on you.  Yet it says that without him you are at the mercy of Satan and ruthless blind nature.  So you will feel forced after all?  Many will actually be forced.  If you want people to choose spirituality and faith freely saying God does not force is only a detail and is actually unimportant.  It is manipulative how religion makes a lot of fuss about it.

Many say, "If education is given in a value free or virtue free vacuum, something will have to fill the void and it will be vice which may often dress itself up as virtue. If virtue is not there then fake virtue will be there. Pride will grow. It is the foundation of all vice and false virtue.  We end up with things such as racism and hate and warmongering."

This obviously presupposes that we do not have inbuilt goodness which will emerge and develop even without guidance.  You do not need anybody to tell you that you can't kill your classmates for fun.  Those people are really about trying to come across as helpful to those who need wisdom when it fact what is happening is, "You need wisdom as I see it."  It is an excuse for indoctrination.  The Church has stolen the beautiful ethics of Aristotle and given the impression that they are her ethics.  She has hijacked them.  She gives them a bad name by putting them into the mixing bowl that contains alleged revelations from God and rubbish religious history and superstition.  The end result is that if people are conditioned to believe in rubbish religious doctrines they end up accepting the ethics as part of the deal.  Proper acceptance of something means seeing it as true without being unduly influenced.  As the ethics is more conditioned into a person's mind than accepted it follows that religiously conditioning a person to believe a ridiculous religion with a good ethics will lead to the detriment of the ethics.  When the superstition goes the ethics will be in danger as well and if you can condition yourself to accept that hurting a baby for fun is wrong you can condition yourself to believe it is okay if the baby is of another religion.  A conditioning religion is to blame for evils it does not approve of for conditioning can take a new direction - a deadly one.  Part of the conditioned person knows a wrong has been done to her head and that will have consequences.

If we are made to love then it follows that if we say we don’t love we are wrong for we do but just in another way. The vacuum is filled with bad love not good love. This bad love will harm and lie and it will easily blind the person and others under her or his influence.   The religious doctrine that we are made to love then is cynical and has nasty implications.  It accuses bad people of making a huge effort to be bad and resisting their nature.  It is bad enough to hold that we exist to love and leave it at that but worse to hold that an all-perfect and almighty God made us to love and made us for love alone.  It is salt on the wound.

What if we are not made to love but to choose love or whatever is not love?  This is a better view.  It does not degrade and insult those who do bad but stresses how they don't have to.  It is better to do good if you are not made to.  The best person is the person who does good regardless of what his nature wants.  The person is bigger and better than their morally indifferent make-up.  This is why true atheism is fundamentally about human dignity.  A God who is good by default must make free agents so that they may love.  This doctrine like much evil, looks pretty.  If we are made to create love or not create it that means whatever made us is not a God.  A purpose can be a real one or a functional one.  The universe acts in a purpose way but has no purpose.  Something acting like a purpose is more important than it being a purpose.  It is more important that a purpose exists than that a person exists to have the purpose.  Those who go on about a divine purpose care about who has the purpose not the purpose.

What if you are made to be indifferent?  That means you are not about love for indifference is the true opposite of love.  It turns the other into a complete unimportant object.  If you are indifferent the reason is because you love yourself and you feel it is good for you not to care.  If you love then you are better than what made you be it chance or gods or a God.

Like it or not, teaching maths or geography or whatever is about teaching maths and geography - period.  It is cynical for people with faith in their religious code or whatever code to try and piggy-back their notions on something that is not about them.