KIDS THESE DAYS:

Apparently, some readers used last week’s discussion of the benefits to children of a religious upbringing to tee off on the overall concept of religion, the sex education program in the Newport-Mesa Unified School District and the South.

All of these topics can be followed online at the end of the column. There aren’t many topics that can create such a wide variety of opinions. Mention the war in Iraq these days and you’d chat about it for a couple of minutes. As for the lousy economy, once we all agree that corporations are greedy and poorly run and should not get any more bailout money — which takes about 12 seconds — there isn’t much to talk about.

But say “religion” and everyone has a long, lengthy opinion. From Bill Warmington we got: “The melting pot of the American family can’t be a success without Christ.”

I respectfully disagreed, allowing for the inclusion of non-Christian faiths. Many non-Christian faiths are experiencing substantial worldwide growth, including Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam. Those religions are not exempt from receiving the benefits to kids and families.

“happy Gilmour” believes religion’s benefits to kids are so powerful that we ought to consider mandatory instruction in our schools: “This is a plea to put prayer and Christ back into the public school system. Gang activity, violence and misbehavior would definitely decline.”

This reader, who indicated they were a student in the district in the 1970s, later wrote… “And, yes, school will complicate things by teaching that homosexuality is OK, and how to put on a condom, etc. ... My fifth-grader can learn this from us as well as her relationship with Christ.”

I’m not sure why people keep bringing up anything having to do with sex education in this school district. We settled it months ago: The program is voluntary and all of the materials can be examined at district headquarters. If you don’t like what you see, your child does not have to go through the program.

“alanj” took a shot at our fellow citizens in the South with this question: “By this rational[sic], we should expect that kids in the southern American states — the most pius [sic] in the nation — to have the highest GPA’s [sic] and the lowest rates of drug use and teen pregnancy in the country.

Does anyone seriously believe that’s true?”

I advised alanj that it is not true that the folks in the South are as backward as the movies and television would like us to believe. To the contrary, they do in fact have lower drug use. A 2007 report by the Department of Health and Human Services found that “Five states — Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi and West Virginia — shared the lowest annual rate of using marijuana for the first time.” In the meantime, marijuana continues to be one of California’s largest cash crops. But the best post was from Mike O’Reilly who, after opening his remarks with a mild expletive, went on to write: “… It’s high time reason, science and our own common sense replaced the utter credulity of religious myth. Starting with our kids.”

Ah yes, that would be O’Reilly’s version of reason, of course. And that science? That would be the same science that can’t make up its mind about whether coffee is good or bad, about whether global warming does or does not exist, and still has not figured out a way to get the number of hot dogs and hot dog buns in their respective packages to match.

It’s hard for me to believe that anyone would challenge the concept of religion benefiting kids when it was presented with credible, secular evidence that it does just that. Seems to me that in this day and age, we should be trying something new if the something old isn’t working.

Oh, and spell check is always good to use, too.

STEVE SMITH is a Costa Mesa resident and a freelance writer. Send story ideas to dailypilot@latimes.com.