Teaching bioethics and religion

I was in the campus coffeeshop the other day (they are serving much better espresso this semester and I want to encourage this) and I overheard a student describing a bioethics-type course he was taking. It sounded like a pretty typical bioethics course, but then he added that his professor devoted a good amount of time to explaining what people from different religions think about issues like cloning, euthanasia, and so on. I don’t do this in my course, for reasons I’ll cover in this post, but as I was sitting there I started to wonder why. The more I thought about it, the more I thought it might be an interesting issue for discussion. So I thought I’d bring it here.