Religion in schools

[Bogdan6]

Small Disclaimer: First off, I'm not against religion itself, I'm cool with anyone believing in anything as long as it doesn't stay 24/7 at my door trying to convince me his beliefs are better than mine. I'm just here to get your opinions on the subject.

Ok folks, so I live in Romania, the country has it's flaws, but there is only one particular thing I want to discuss with you. What's your opinion on teaching religion in school? First here's a little background: after the fall of communism, religion was introduced in school, with the claim that it's "part of our tradition" (ok, most things they added was just to oppose what communism did before). The problem is religion that is taught in all public schools from Romania isn't anything like history of religions or presenting each religion/confession for you to know. It's teaching everyone christian orthodoxism, whenether their pupils are protestant, catholics or jews, everyone must learn orthodoxism and will be examined (yes, believe it or not, they give us tests to see how much we know). There are options to take your child from the religion class and do something else, but in some cases they will ask to either bring "examination results" from your church (yes, actually know a case. Guy was catholic and had to go to the church's priest to give marks so the school folks know whenether or not they would let the guy pass the class) or do work around the school (which is ok, but it's a pretty recent thing around).

Now starting with this year, there came a law in which said religion class is merely optional, so if you don't want it, you can change it with anything else, such as volunteering to help around the school, art class or applied physics. I'm ok with this, I'd always shoot the physics class rather than being examined on prayers, but a lot of people are protesting against this measure and blame that the parliament and gouverment are trying to force us become atheist "like in communist times" or (in extreme cases) claim that "The leaders from Brussels want to send our new generations to hell".

Now my question is, what are your opinions about this and how would you react if something similar happened in your country? I'd mention most religion-class-teachers are actually priests (thus they have the "right" to tell your beliefs are heresy and yadayada) and while they actually teach in a public schools, they directly attack phyisics and biology lessons (in my case, the priest actually screamed when he saw a picture's of Darwin's evolution chain on our wall in the classroom).