i am praying that religious education will be removed from the Victorian state school curriculum

When I was a child, I had a note from my parents that excused me from religious instruction. This was mainly due to my mother's wishes. She was as staunch an atheist as anyone I have ever met. I believe the class was somewhere from half an hour to an hour a week, during which time myself, a Japanese kid and another boy who I now assume was Jewish, would sit and draw or read. 

It wasn't exactly wasted time, as I have fond memories of how quiet and relaxing it was. A much more effective alternative however would have been to have the whole class sit through a session on ethics, rationality and morality as applied to society as a whole, taken by a real teacher. 

CleanFeed: Rudd and Conroy afraid of Christian Right?

When I first started writing a post on this topic 5 or 6 months ago it was largely a technical detail-based doc that sought to expose the depth of absurdity that Senator Conroy and the Rudd Labor government should pursue this internet filtering policy so fervently, but three to four thousand words later I’d barely scratched the surface on why CleanFeed just won’t work, and why it is ridiculous that the government try and push it through regardless. I still think this topic needs addressing, but I’ve started afresh, and kept it brief...

In the interests of keeping this short the areas I wanted to address are: content and censorship standards, practical outcomes, and motivation.

CleanFeed is being promoted on the basis of ‘reducing child abuse’, that children need to be