This will be entertaining to watch:
The Swedish government has announced plans to clamp down hard on religious education. It will soon become illegal even for private faith schools to teach religious doctrines as if they were true. In an interesting twist on the American experience, prayer will remain legal in schools – after all, it has no truth value. But everything that takes place on the curriculum’s time will have to be secular. “Pupils must be protected from every sort of fundamentalism,” said the minister for schools, Jan Björklund.
Creationism and ID are explicitly banned but so is proselytising even in religious education classes. The Qur’an may not be taught as if it is true even in Muslim independent schools, nor may the Bible in Christian schools.
The “why” of this law is pretty clear. In recent years, a great many immigrants have moved into Sweden… immigrants of the Islamuslimohammadanism persuasion. With them has come Islamic fundamentalism and a *lot* of trouble (look up the troubles in Malmo, for instance). And as with the rest of Europe, Sweden’s birth rate is pitiful… the end result being demographics show serious trouble in the future for Swedes who *don’t* want to live under Sharia laws. So… they’re trying this. Making it illegal to teach religion – *any* religion – as factually true. It is not a surgical strike against Islamic fundamentalism, but a general carpet bombing. And I suspect it’ll create little but a whole heap of trouble.
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