But in vitriolic conflicts there is neither appropriateness nor proportion, so the arguments of history and justice become lost in vengeance. - A. C. Grayling

Most moralists, and certainly all those of a religious persuasion, think that pupils should be “taught values” at school, not mainly so that they can apply them in thinking about the implications of science, history and other subjects, but to make them behave in ways that they (the moralists) find acceptable.
But the point of equipping people to think about ethics is not to impose some partisan set of principles upon them, but to develop their powers of reflection, and to inform them of possibilities and options so that they can think for themselves.

If there is a deity of the kind imagined by votaries of the big mail-order religions such as Christianity and Islam, and if this deity is the creator of all things, then it is responsible for cancer, meningitis, millions of spontaneous abortions every day, mass killings of people in floods and earthquakes—and too great a mountain of other natural evils to list besides.

People not only live by symbols, but die by them, as wars of religion and nationalism attest.