The teaching of Religious Studies in Greece has always been the subject of intense debate and controversy. The case law of the Council of State mandates a denominational course, allowing exemption only on the grounds of religious conscience. The Supreme Administrative Court even considered the introduction of a compulsory Religious Studies course for all students to be unconstitutional. In this sense, the Religious Studies course in Greece is seen as outdated, and an increasing number of students are seeking to be (...) exempt from it. In a recent case, the Council of State, in an attempt to depart from its previous case law on the exemption, essentially referred the decision on the matter in question to the Greek Data Protection Authority, which was requested to give its opinion on the status of the currently applicable exemption. In the context of this contribution, we argue that: a) The Council of State erred in its approach of shifting the burden of this decision to the Data Protection Authority. b) These issues should not be decided by the courts or independent authorities but by the democratically legitimized legislature. c) Religious knowledge is an indispensable element of education and, as such, the Religious Studies course should have an encyclopedic, rather than a narrowly developed denominational character and remain compulsory for all pupils. (shrink)

Most modern ethicists and ethics textbooks assert that religion holds little or no place in ethics, including fields of professional ethics like medical ethics. This assertion, of course, implicitly refers to ethical reasoning, but there is much more to the ethical life and the practice of ethics—especially professional ethics—than reasoning. It is no surprise that teachers of practical ethics, myself included, often focus on reasoning to the exclusion of other aspects of the ethical life. Especially for those with a philosophical (...) background, reasoning is the most patent and pedagogically controllable aspect of the ethical life—and the most easily testable. And whereas there may be powerful reasons for the limitation of religion in this aspect of ethics, there are other aspects of the ethical life in which recognition of religious belief may arguably be more relevant and possibly even necessary. I divide the ethical life into three areas—personal morality, interpersonal morality, and rational morality—each of which I explore in terms of its relationship to religion, normatively characterized by the qualities of devotion, diversity, and reasoning, respectively. (shrink)