ABSTRACT
Being honest with oneself is one of the most testing demands in life. It is not something the religious educator should evade. The prescriptions by theorists for Religious Education (RE) are shown to possess inherent ambiguities that contain the potential of deception. The call to include atheism in the curriculum is a particular case in point. Through an examination of five different forms of atheism clear educational conclusions are drawn. Either atheism cannot be taught for good reasons or many professional RE teachers are led, perhaps unwittingly, into committing a deception. In 1848 S. Kierkegaard wrote a book, The Point of View, in which he confessed that 'from the point of view of my whole activity as an author, integrally conceived, the aesthetic work is a deception'. Kierkegaard took seriously the religious life, and as an aesthetic author examined the religious life a-religiously even though he did not share that point of view.
