With our nation having just played host to a big atheist convention trumpeting the intellectual superiority of unbelief, many may well be wondering why we still bother gazetting an extended long weekend to celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

For future generations this perplexity will grow if the NSW Government, dancing to the tune of intolerant secularists, has its way in our schools.

For more than 100 years, Scripture classes in schools have provided an avenue for children to learn about the Bible, the person of Jesus and the ethic that has underpinned societies such as Australia's.

This is entirely appropriate. No serious historian – regardless of whether or not they are religious — doubts the formative influence of Christianity, its ethics and values on the legal, cultural and political development of Western civilisation. Indeed it is the Judeo-Christian ethic that sets the way we live apart from the way other cultures live.

Now there will always be some parents who conscientiously object to their children being taught the Bible. This is their right.