Religion should be taught to children because it is a big part of our current society and it has been for millenia. Just like history is taught, children have a right to education and they NEED to understand how the world works.

I am not a fan of a single religion being taught to children however. They need to know about all the major religions.

I am an atheist myself, but I have no problem if people want to believe in something. To me it's the same as believing in fairiytales (or horror stories for some religions perhaps), but most of my family is religious. From my point of view, it doesn't do anything particularly bad to them but I suppose it gives them some hope. Some hope of life after death, some hope that everything will be OK, some hope that people are good, ... whatever it is, hope is good and if you need religion to have hope, go for it.

You hear a lot of people that say that you need religion to have morality, that without religion, the world would be in utter chaos... but from what I can see, most choas, most wars, most negative things in this world are based on religions.

Children should know what religion is and they can only know so if there is someone teaching them. Whether this happens in school or whether parents teach them, friends, anyone else, I don't care, but they NEED to know. It's a big part of life (still) and it is only with knowledge that people can get smarter and make better choices for the future.

That being said ...

We got religion in school. Just 1 religion (supposedly the one you believe in), and even though they touch a little on other religions, I think this way of teaching is wrong. I call it indoctrination, brainwashing, whatever and it keeps people dumb. Children need to know about the variety of religions that are out there so they can make up their own minds.

The other thing I highly object to, is the fact that these courses are rated like any other course. There are always people who think religion is nothing but BS and have a complete lack of interest in it. I've seen people fail religious classes and it's wrong to make a person fail a year of schooling because of it. It's important that people know about religion, but it's not that important to mess with a person's future because he's more focused on other, more important things in life.

Then again, if it isn't taught in school, you can't really rely on parents or anyone else to give a good unbiased overview of what we're dealing with in the world.