Following an attempt by atheist parents to sue a Christian school for doing Christian stuff, the Department of Education announced that it will introduce ‘Atheism Studies’ as a ‘meaningiful and educational’ alternative for those wishing to opt their children out of RE – and to give those children some respite from their parents’ public displays of hyper-litigiousness.

Full details of the new subject have yet to be finalised, but a government source said it will cover the following key curriculum areas:

History

Instead of learning about the pyramids and Victorian child chimney sweeps, students of atheism will be taught the history of atheist thought, from reciting the nihilistic ramblings of Frederich Nietzsche to a VR tour of the Godless utopian paradise of Stalin’s Soviet Russia.

Field trips will include a visit to North Korea, where children can see first hand what official atheist government policy looks like in practice, which they can follow up with some labour camp building in Minecraft.

Science

Science lessons will focus exclusively on evidence for atheism. As such, the government has allocated a £50m budget for schools to rent out empty sheds for periods of up to five hundred million years so as children of atheists can observe how living things can come from nothing.

Experiments like making and freezing slime will be replaced with experiments showing how slime, under the right conditions and given enough time, can become fully functioning members of society worthy of rights and personhood.

The Arts

Those taking Atheism Studies can dispense with the Christmas nativity and instead do a play based on atheist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel, Being and Nothingness.

Pupils will get to dress up as their favourite atheist and lounge around the stage smoking cigarettes, contemplating the merits of living a conflicted life of misery and pleasure versus simply committing suicide.

Welcoming today’s announcement, secular campaigner Casper Sage Floyd said: ‘This is great progress. Even though I believe you get to make your own meaning in life, religious meaning is more meaningless than atheist meaning. And even though I believe that morality is subjective, it is objectively wrong to indoctrinate kids into religion. As as a society we need to be tolerant and inclusive, which is why we must banish religion to the ideological gulags – or else.”

However, some atheist parents did express concern over the use of Sartre’s books given the author’s well-documented sordid sex life —although plans to teach primary school children that sex between two and any number of consenting people is acceptable were warmly received.