Letter: Religious Education in the past, Catholic or Protestant, sometimes seemed to be about rote learning creeds or catechisms

A letter from Very Rev Dr Norman Hamilton OBE on Saturday considered the need for children to pick up 'the basics of intelligent, coherent Christian faith' and a failure 'to deal with the very real secular objections to our faith' ('Christianity is not being backed up at home and passed down the generations', February 4, see link below).

I have sometimes come across atheists who describe themselves as "hard materialists" or "moral relativists".

Hard materialist believe there is no supernatural, mystical, or mental sphere, so that atoms and molecules are the final or only reality. Hard materialism may sound impressive to a teenager or college student, but has hard materialism a grave fallacy of logic? If physical reality is the final and only existence, then the concept of materialism itself can be discounted, because so-called materialism idea does not exist in the material sphere, which defines reality according to the materialist. Consider the wise words of the early Christian writer and philosopher, Saint Augustine, who described words as "precious cups of meaning." If words, or ideas, have no deeper reality, then why pay attention to any of them?

The hard materialist has a close cousin called the ‘Moral Relativist’. The relativist discounts ideas like The Ten Commandments and Divine Revelation, or universal values of conscience shared across human societies down aeons of time. But does the moral relativist flounder on similar rocks to the hard materialist? If all morals are relative, with no absolute or universal standards applying at any time or in any place, is all talk of morality irrelevant in a deeper sense? Claiming that all moral ideas are of equal value, is really just shorthand for saying no moral standards exist at all. Mother Theresa and cruel cannibals just happened to have different cultural values.

Queen's University students of the past (in pre-Woke times) may have read a saucy Rag Week magazine called PTQ. I recollect seeing hilarious items as a student, inferring how 'fighting for peace' was like 'fornicating for chastity'. Lots of modern ideas are laced with logical fallacies or contradictory flows of thought. The 1970's and 1980's Red Army Faction (also know as the Baader–Meinhof terrorist group) sought to reshape imperial errors within West German society, yet this paradoxically involved hurting, harming, terrorising or killing citizens. Ideas have consequences, and Christian values produce tolerant and productive societies, where universal values of conscience are allowed to shape how people treat the vulnerable.

Irish Religious Education in the past, Catholic or Protestant, sometimes seemed to be about rote learning creeds or catechisms, sometimes against an atmosphere of perceived threat or fear. Maybe it is good, in our very confused modern era, to also analyse the robust evidences for faith and the serious weaknesses of the atheist alternative. The created order, human conscience and the historical Christ, draw serious inquirers to the rational and mystical basis for belief: 'faith is beyond reason but not contrary to it.'

James Hardy by email, Belfast BT5

Rev Hamilton: Christianity is not being backed up at home and passed down the generations, February 4

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