Those annoying Christians

So, how does your organization feel about the representation of Canada shown in the opening ceremonies of the Olympics? Inuit art was strongly featured and is totally blended with their religious culture. It was used to represent our northern culture but doesn't represent the majority of Canadians either...yet we show it off to the world as if it is somehow intrinsic to our Canadian existance. Why should their religious beliefs be shown to the world when you would like to quash any mention of our larger and still majority Christian beliefs? I'm sick of the minority telling the majority we have to be tolerant of their beliefs when they are openly hostile to those of the majority. Suck it up...our anthem is beautiful and "God keep our Land" reflects the beliefs of a majority of Canadians in "a" God. I question your statistics. Whether or not Canadians believe in the Christian God, most believe in some kind of higher power or "god" and thus the term God is not offensive to them. Even the Muslims believe in a God named Allah. True Atheists are a very small minority.

The foregoing was a comment -- reproduced exactly as received -- that came to me from a Christian regarding an old posting on this blog about the initiative of the Canadian Secular Alliance to get God written out of the National Anthem of Canada.

I am going to assume the writer to be male for the sake of clarity in what I say next.

I think he displays a level of bigotry towards those of different beliefs or non-belief that ought to be worrying when he couples it with a reference to majority rule.

This is a liberal democracy and one of its hallmarks is that society tries to balance different rights and expectations amongst the citizenry. Clearly, we don’t all share the same beliefs and some of us, like the writer above, disdain those that don’t conform to his own beliefs. He may be “sick” of this balancing act, but I would pass back to him the same advice he gave me; namely, suck it up, because you live in the best country in the world where people of all nations, creeds, cultures and ethnic origins freely go about their lives, cherishing the values, institutions and benefits of our liberal democracy.

Those of us who do not believe in a supreme being don’t wish to “quash any mention” of Christian beliefs. The writer is free to go to any street corner in any town and city in this country, or stand outside any liquor store, and sing Onward Christian Soldiers at the top of his lungs. I can always walk away from him if the lyrics offend me. He can go to his house of worship and do the same thing. I don’t have to enter it and listen. He can pray in his own home, office, car, boat, RV, tent, or what have you.

This is a free country and, even though I don’t believe in flapping angels, talking snakes and all the other colourful stuff handed down to us from the ancient sandal-wearing, Bronze Age, desert-dwellers, I support your freedom to believe any old wives’ tales, myths, legends or other magical kingdom nonsense as you wish.

I don’t have any issue with you freely practicing your religion anywhere with the exception that it should not intrude on public institutions or into public places and in public practices that ought to remain secular and free from religious dogma and to which I may wish to resort or enjoy without first having to pay deference to your deity.

The National Anthem belongs to all Canadians, not just Christian Canadians, or any other deists. So why, if I wish to express my patriotism by singing it in public, am I required to pay homage to God? The words were first penned in 1908 and it wasn’t until the 1980s that the Christians in Parliament decided to inflict their religious beliefs on the rest of us by inserting God into the song.

It is particularly galling to me since I used to sing it joyously at school when it was just a rousing anthem to the country and had not been converted into a song of prayer to the Christian God. Now, I don’t sing it because I find myself stumbling over the God line.

Christians ought to become more familiar with their own religious textbook, the Bible, if they intend spout off on this subject. Matthew 6:6 advises that prayer is supposed to be a private matter, not a public demonstration. You can’t get more public in prayer than invoking God to keep your country strong and free in its national anthem.

The writer displays that all-too-common Christian victim mentality; it is Christians who are being denied their rightful place in the firmament. Get over yourselves. The Roman Empire disappeared nearly two millennia ago. You have come a long way from days of being thrown to the lions, brothers and sisters.

It is pretty funny, not to mention highly annoying, when you consider that Christians are forever banging on your door wanting to push their literature at you. They accost you on street corners, or set up kiosks and booths at public events. They put up billboards declaiming all sorts of radical testimony about the Devil and Darwin. They have their own radio shows and television networks, and on Sunday mornings you really have to channel surf to get away from them.

When was the last time your peace and tranquility was interrupted by a pair of atheist strangers at your front door wanting to engage you in discussion about your beliefs and shoving their secular pamphlets into your hands?

When I drive out in the country I am treated to giant signs urging me to “Repent and accept Christ”. Barns are painted with “Christ is the Answer” slogans. I stop behind cars and read “Jesus is my co-pilot” bumper stickers. Just above that is the little fish symbol. When I spend the weekend at my in-laws in a little town of 500 population, my Sunday morning rest is shattered by loud church bells ringing from a half a dozen nearby Christian churches.

Everywhere I go my senses of sight and sound are assaulted by the Christian God, intruding on my enjoyment of the public space, and offending my sense of reason and my beliefs.

Yet, a year or so ago, when a group of freethinkers decided to have a little fun and launched a short bus ad campaign suggesting the non-existence of God, you would have thought they were advocating the destruction of western civilization. The evangelical leader, Charles McVety, thundered against them as “attack ads”, the Catholic Bishop of Calgary exclaimed how offensive he found these ads. Nearly half the municipalities declined to approve the application for the ads even though some of them had previously approved religious advertising on transit vehicles.

It is odd that these ads can be considered an attack on Christianity, but all of those public promotions of God and Jesus, so beloved of Christians, that I have mentioned, are never seen by them as an attack on atheists. They are.

If it were limited simply to that level of hypocrisy, it might be endurable. But that is not enough for them. Christians get themselves elected or appointed to various boards and commissions and immediately start trying to censor books from public libraries or school libraries that my taxes have paid for. They even go to the extent of trying to ban a writer’s work, not because he wrote anything particularly derogatory about a religion, but because he publicly declared himself to be an atheist.

When did you ever hear of an activist atheist on such a body trying to restrict the circulation of the Bible or other religiously-themed works, or trying to ban works that were not religious, but were written by authors who are Christians? In the United States the activism of Christians has effectively shut down the teaching of the science of evolution in public and high school science classes in many states.

One Christian denomination in Ontario has its own entire school system funded at public expense, even putting the nation in violation of an international treaty to which it is a signatory. Religion is protected as a public charity under the taxing statutes so that its income is sheltered from normal taxation. Its vast property holdings are free from municipal taxation. Religion, and particularly the majority Christian faith, live large and fat off the taxpayers of this country. And we, the non-religious, are expected to have to make up some of the shortfall in tax revenue as a result of these shelters for God with not only no thanks from Christians, but with a sneer.

Who is the real victim in all of this?

It is high time we put an end to the public subsidization of religion. Atheists and the other non-religious folks don’t give a rat’s rectum about your beliefs and your belief institutions, or your entitlement to them, but they should not have to pay for them. You can pay your own way. After all, as you say, you are the great majority, so it shouldn’t be that difficult for you to pony up enough to keep your crosses flying and your fish swimming without picking my pocket while you are scorning me in the process.

Atheists are in indeed a small minority, but including them amongst the category of people who declare no religious affiliation leads to a much larger number. The official statistics can be found in the 2001 Canadian census. Here is an extract from the government of Canada website encapsulating those census results:

In 2001, 7 out of every 10 people still identified themselves as either Roman Catholic or Protestant.

Census data showed a continuation of a long-term downward trend in the population who report Protestant denominations. The number of Roman Catholics increased slightly during the 1990s, but their share of the total population fell marginally.
At the same time, the number of Canadians who reported religions such as Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism and Buddhism has increased substantially.

Much of the shift in the nation's religious makeup during the past several decades is the result of the changing sources of immigrants, which has created a more diverse religious profile. As well, many major Protestant denominations that were dominant in the country 70 years ago, such as Anglican and United Church, are declining in numbers, in part because their members are aging and fewer young people are identifying with these denominations.

In addition, far more Canadians reported that they had no religion. This group accounted for 16% of the population in 2001, compared with 12% a decade earlier.
In 2001, Roman Catholics were still the largest religious group, drawing the faith of just under 12.8 million people, or 43% of the population, down from 45% in 1991. The proportion of Protestants, the second largest group, declined from 35% of the population to 29%, or about 8.7 million people.

Combined, the two groups represented 72% of the total population in 2001, compared with 80% a decade earlier.

The population of Canada in 2001 was 30 million, which means that 4,800,000 people ticked the “no religion” box on the form. This is the largest demographic grouping after Christians and is a far larger body of people than all the other religions combined. It is also the fastest growing demographic, as this 2008 Harris-Decima poll indicates.

The next religious census will occur in 2011 and I would fully expect to see much larger numbers of non-believers and a continued erosion of Christian dominance.

Addendum (March 8)

In response to a comment below by Bruce challenging my assertion that there are many states in the U.S. that do not teach evoloution, I reproduce this map that was first published in 2002 in the Scientific American. I do acknowledge, however, that I may be displaying a bias when I attribute the non-teaching to Christian influence on education.

Jesus the Easter bunny

There is Toronto Sun Columnist, Michael Coren, who occasionally writes something completely stupid and deserving of rebuttal. I don’t think Coren is stupid, but I would classify him as a religious crank. He is a Catholic.

He frequently complains about the media suppressing Christians, yet the Sun, a large Toronto daily newspapers with tens of thousands of print readers and untold on-line readers, publishes his pulpit-proud preachings of the “one true faith”, Catholicism. If there is suppression stalking the land it isn’t obvious in the editorial department of the Toronto Sun.

Nor is it manifested on the Christian Television Network which broadcasts Coren’s week-nightly gab fest.

Since it is Easter, the most important event in the Christian calendar of fictious historiography, it would be unseemly for Coren to pass it by. Today he wrote a column called, Let’s rise and shine.

These are some of the things he had to say:

What I particularly love about Easter is the joy it brings to all those tired old atheist hacks who can sell articles to newspapers explaining why Easter isn't Easter, Jesus wasn't Jesus and Cadbury Creme Eggs are all some sort of Christian conspiracy to cause obesity and heart disease. Much as I dislike hurting these little darlings, their attacks have to be challenged.

I am an atheist and I am getting old, but I don’t think I am particularly tired and even though I am a writer I would have to say to Mr. Coren, on the subject of hack writers, pay attention to what the alleged Jesus had say: Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. But he does raise an important point about how Easter gets confused with a bunny delivering Easter eggs. I have resolved this problem for my 3 year old granddaughter quite simply by explaining that the Easter bunny’s name is Jesus.

More people have died in the name of religion than anything else. The century that saw the most violent deaths was the 20th, when the atheist monsters Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot and their Fascist and Marxist buddies slaughtered hundreds of millions.

Boy, talk about the utterings of tired old hacks! None of these people that he mentions murdered in the name of atheism, unlike the inquisitors of Catholic fame and the witch-burners of Protestant persuasion, who all justified their acts by reference to God and the Gospels. But that is simply quibbling, because he is resorting to a numbers game. My response is to suggest that the outcome might have been even more appalling in the 15th and 16th centuries if the weapons of modern slaughter, communications and logistics had been available to folks like Torquemada.

People have, however, killed in the name of religion and will doubtless continue to do so. Generally these days in the name of Islam, but most Christian bashers are too intimidated or cowardly to say too much about this particular issue.

One might add that nary a peep comes out of Christians about the murders committed by Muslims. Coren himself wrote a column praising the Muslims for being visibly angry about the Danish cartoons about Mohammed. He put in the obligatory “I don’t mean to endorse violence” sentence, but this amounted to praise by faint damnation in the overall context of his column. He also wrote a column saying that we had to rush out and drop nuclear bombs on the Muslims in Iran (later retracted).

Perhaps, in light of this history, calling him a crank was being too kind. He’s a wingnut. But, divinely guided, of course.

In fact, Christians are the enablers of the Islamic will to hegemony through its intimidation and violence with their limp-wristed inter-faith initiatives and their pressure to try to introduce Sharia law into western societies. The fact is that the so-called Abrahamic religions share a kind of an unwritten understanding that if you don’t piss on my faith I won’t piss on yours. Note that when imams call for the slaughter of Jews they don’t condemn the religion, just the people who practice it.

People commit evil in the name of everything and anything, including the faith we celebrate this weekend. It is that very faith that gives us an absolute sense of right and wrong and thus leads us to know that killing, abuse, oppression and selfishness are unacceptable

.

So the upshot is that evil has nothing to do with religion, it is a force that infects all mankind, but faith in a religion is the way to overcome evil and if you don’t have that you will be doomed to commit evil because you will have no sense of right and wrong. No moral compass.

This is such arrogance and nonsense. How do people who believe this crap explain the millions -- 5 and counting -- of people in this country who identify themselves as non-religious who live very ordinary, peaceful, law-abiding and moral lives? Like the theory of evolution, the facts are in front of you – all you have to do is look at them to realize that your religious prescriptions don’t stand up.

If there is no God and no universal moral code, why bother to behave and -- important this -- what criteria do those trendy God haters have to judge people as being right and wrong or good and bad?

Well, here are a couple. Don’t steal other people’s goods and don’t murder other people. Why? Because, if you are going to be a social animal and live with your fellow humans these are very useful rules to follow to avoid chaos, bloodshed, anarchy and tyranny. Here is another one – respect every person’s right to dignity. Why? Because you would want your right to dignity respected and you cannot expect to get what you are not prepared to give. Did we really need a story about a man going up a mountain and returning with stone tablets to figure these things out for ourselves?

Atheists are not “God haters”. How would it be possible to hate something that you do not belief exists? Did I mention how much a really hate green unicorns?

Yes, but even if there is a God, He must be nasty because He allows all sorts of bad things to happen. Oh please! Bad stuff happening to good people is a problem for the atheist, not the Christian.

Au contraire. It is a problem for Christians who believe in a loving, compassionate and benevolent god who listens to and answers personal prayers. How to explain the contradiction? Explanations are required and that is when most of those who are going to be turned off by religion begin the withdrawal process, after they hear these unconvincing or ludicrous explanations. The atheists just shrug and say “shit happens”.

We believe eternity is more important than the 70 or 80 years we spend on earth so that while we may suffer here, our end is our beginning. The humanist mob thinks this is it, that at death we are dust, food for worms.

Yes, and that is the problem. Humanists think we should focus on this life and do the best we can with it because there is no other. The heaven worshippers can dismiss this life and the awful things that happen in it because they think it is the unimportant one.

Who would you rather have looking after your current affairs?

So, Ezra, where are the Muslims radicals?

On February 3, I took issue with Ezra Levant for mocking atheists with their bus ad campaign. Ezra’s main point was that atheists should be attacking Islamists.

I tried to put paid to the notion that Islamists were a problem for atheists in Canada, that atheists still had issues with the majority Christians.

Since that post, the Canadian initiator of the campaign, Justin Trottier, has written an op-ed piece in the Ottawa Citizen pointing out that the neutral reference to God in the ads could just as easily apply to the God of Jews, Muslims and Christians. He is correct. He is also correct in stating that the purpose of the ads was not to attack any religion, but simply to promote discussion around the concept of God and morality.

I have been following the editorials across the country on this matter, as well as the letters to the editors, and in each and every case where a religious person weighed in on the issue, either for or against, they were Christians. I have yet to see an opinion expressed by a Muslim. I think this vindicates my view that Christians are more concerned with atheism, and its potential impact, than are the other religions.

Oh, yes, and as far as I been able to determine to date, Ezra is the only Jew who has commented. Unfortunately, he found himself on the wrong side of this one.

Attacks on atheist beliefs

As I go about my daily business I find myself surrounded by images, icons, symbols, and representations of religion.

Women will wear little crosses around their necks. Other women will wear headscarves and some even burquas. Jewish men sport the yarmulke. Priests and pastors wear their vestments outside of their churches. Imams favour full beards and headgear common to the Middle East. West of Toronto, there are thousands of men wearing turbans.

Their houses of worship are unmistakable.

Christian churches will be topped with crosses and if they are Catholic they may have statues of Mary near the front doors. The same is true of some Catholic schools. Around Christmas, some churches will display a Nativity scene on the front lawns. Protestant churches are fond of placing large signs facing the street announcing the hours of worship, the names of the pastors and the subject of their sermons. Some of these signs also announce religious events and others use humour to attract attention.

All of these things, directly and indirectly, are the ways the pious advertise their fealty to their god, or gods, as the case may be.

I have always thought that these were merely an exercise in the normal civil rights that our citizens enjoy in a free and liberal democracy, the right to visibly demonstrate their beliefs.

But, apparently, I have been deluding myself. Advertising these beliefs is nothing more than a blatant attack on atheists.

I have to thank Dr. Charles McVety and Bishop Fred Henry who took the time to comment on the proposed atheist bus advertisements for causing the scales to fall from my eyes and the light of truth to penetrate.

Between political correctness and McCarthyism it's tough for a simple atheist to get a break

What would you say about an ad on the side of a municipal bus that said this: “You can be good without God”? Inflammatory, outrageous, criminally blasphemous, scandalous, shocking – would those be the descriptions that would immediately spring to mind? Or would you just shrug and say, “Well, it kind of makes sense”.

If your reaction is the latter then don’t apply for a job on the Halifax transit authority. A local humanist organization applied to put that ad on Halifax buses and was turned down. The letter of rejection told them the transit authority would reconsider an application if the applicants “toned down” the ad. Tone it down! How? Remove the word “God”? Change “without” to “with”?

This is simply censoring free speech and you can bet it was politically-correct idiots afraid of offending Christians or Mulsims who made this decision.

But be glad you are not a Texas teacher . Here is a guy who taught in the Texas school system for more than 35 years and suddenly found himself suspended because the Christian riddled school board drew up a list of teachers suspected of being atheists and/or liberals and started a campaign to get rid of them.

Note that he never said he was an atheist, the school board just suspected him of being one. McCathyism in all its glory.

Christians putting atheists in their place at the back of the bus

We have a society in which we are told that there is no state religion and that secular interests, when it comes to the public square, trump the religious.

And yet, and yet, the huffing and puffing this week over a couple of perceived atheist intrusions into the area of the separation of church and state brought out the conservative editorials in full force in defense of the supremacy of the Christian god.

First up was The National Post commenting on the New Brunswick flap over the elementary school prinicipal who cancelled the singing of the National Anthem as part of the morning ritual. He never did come clean on why this was done. He claimed privacy for two alleged families who wanted it stopped for reasons unknown.

That did not prevent the Post from speculating that atheists were the root of the problem, without any proof. After sounding off about patriotism and preventing the minority tail from wagging the majority dog, it had this advice:

It may be unfortunate that God still persists in the anthem as a historic holdover. But atheists cannot begin too soon in educating their children that they live in a historically monotheistic civilization, and that, for better or worse, we signify respect for tradition on public occasions as a matter of continuity with the past.

I wonder how this would have been received if it had been written like this:

But Jews, Muslims and Hindus cannot begin too soon in educating their children that they live in a historically Christian civilization, and that, for better or worse, we signify respect for tradition on public occasion as a matter of continuity with the past.

That is to say that Christians are running the show and we better get used to it.

Had they printed that there would have been weeks and weeks of pundits and editorials from one end of the country to the next, castigating the Post for being insensitive to Canada’s diversity and the religious sensibilities of non-Christians, even if it was right about the importance of respecting tradition. The Post would have backed down.

The point of this observation is demonstrate yet another instance in which it is taken for granted by the main stream media that atheists are second-class citizens when the sensitivities of the religious are weighed in the balance, and like the generation of feminists before them, they should just suck up the objectionable language and like the homosexuals of twenty years ago understand that remaining in the closet is still society’s preferred option.

By the way, I would be more impressed with the heritage argument if the words of the song hadn’t been rewritten more than half-a-dozen times. The current version is actually circa 1980, when it was blessed by an act of Parliament. Hardly a heritage year, if you discount the fact that the government of the day was being run by Saint Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Canada’s patron saint.

If it can amended to change with the times, as this site so readily shows, it can be amended again to get rid of this obnoxious Christian diety, and then it can be sung by everybody as lustily as possible, instead of having about a third of the participants remain silent – the 25% who are non-religious and deeply resent these words and the other 8% who are of non-Christian faith and feel that they are being disloyal to their faith if they sing the praises of the Christian god.

But of course if we did that sensible thing we would forgo the opportunity to be a good example to the rest of the student body, as in this suggestion of the Post:

And if you don't like it, you don't have to sing along; that might be the most important lesson of all. It's one that is crucial not only for children of atheists or religious minorities, but for the classmates who might see their example and discover a new dimension in that quality supposedly most prized by educators: diversity.

Gosh, what to do, what to do? Be patriotic and sing the National Anthem or shut up and teach fellow students about diversity? So many roads are open to atheists.

I just don’t think the thick-headed Christians understand (or truth be known, care) how unsettling it is to have to choke back on the Anthem when these words pop up.

Then we have The Calgary Herald rattling on about some atheists at the University of Alberta rolling back the references to God in the Convocation ceremonies. The Herald wags its finger at us and warns us about how ungrateful we atheists must be to do such a thing when we consider what our fates would be in more faith-dominated societies:

There are many countries where they would be very silly atheists, (sic) if they challenged observance of the dominant religion.

True enough, but we are not acting in those countries, we are acting in this one which claims not to impose religious observance of any particular faith on its citizens.

One could just as easily have written, “There are many Muslim countries where they would very silly Christians, if they challenged observance of Islam.”

Does that require Muslims in this country to go about and wish everybody Merry Christmas in this country? Of course not, that would be tantamount to imposing one religion on another. But it is ok to impose it on atheists, because, well, they are only second class citizens anyway.

Do these people understand the implications of what they are actually saying?

It goes on a historical road, drawing on the U.S. emphasis on individual liberty and trying to weave that with Christianity. You would think that the well known rejection of a religious creed by the American founding fathers was simply an accident, nor did the impact of the Inquisition or the French revolution have much to do with the fate of Christianity.

Canada has always shared proudly in the so-called Anglo-American tradition of personal liberty, that (sic) regards individuals as society's building blocks and joint owners of the state, rather than the other way around. This belief in personal liberty is peculiarly compatible with what Christians understand of God. For, this Sovereign is nevertheless a respecter of individuals, making His appeal to people one by one rather than by race or tribe, leaving them personal responsibility for accepting Him -- or not.

Well, Calgary, get this. Atheists accept that personal responsibility and reject him. So why keep shoving him literally down our throats? If I attended a Christian church I would expect to be treated to that and would have nothing to complain about. But when I attend a publicly funded educational institution, I don’t have to praise anybody’s deity, nor should I have to.

On bigotry and buses

Canadian atheists are launching a transit campaign like the one started in Britain and copied in Spain and the United States. Buses will carry advertising suggesting that there is probably no God, so just enjoy the life we have now. In short, stop fussing about the supposed one in the hereafter. The point of the adverts is to simply cause people to think about the concept of God and any religious notions they may harbour. It is also to give more prominence to atheism, a creed which has been kept in the closet or under the stairs for centuries.

Christians are bewildered by what they see as “in your face” efforts by atheists, their organizations (yes, they do have organizations – I’ll bet you didn’t know that) and their prominent spokespeople to let the world know they exist and that they have something to say. Christians have never before been faced with organized atheism in a liberal-democracy.

But true to form, the instant reaction of Christian spokespeople is to resort to censorship, since burning heretics at the stake is no longer fashionable (damn!), as reported in the Globe and Mail.

Upon hearing that the Toronto Transit Commission had approved the atheist ads, Charles McVety, president of the Canada Family Action Coalition, which fought against the legalization of same-sex marriages, said his group has not decided whether it will formally complain about the ads once they appear.

"On the surface, I'm all for free speech. ... However, though, these are attack ads," Dr. McVety, president of Canada Christian College in Toronto, said in an interview yesterday.

"These ads are not saying what the atheists believe, they are attacking what other people believe," he said. "And if you look at the dictionary definition for ... bigot, that's exactly what it is, to be intolerant of someone else's belief system."

There is no doubt that Mr. McVety will complain to the TTC, notwithstanding his "thinking about it" posture. Naturally, if Mr. McVety can make the case for bigotry, then he may succeed in causing the TTC to review and rescind its decision.

These ads state exactly what atheists believe if one adopts the position of the world’s best known atheist, Richard Dawkins, author of The God Deception. He says that there is a possibility that God exists, but that the probability that there is a God is very low. Furthermore, if bigotry is attacking a belief rather than a person who holds that belief, then McVety is guilty of exactly the same thing he is complaining about.

It is perfectly reasonable to attack a belief, but it is not reasonable to attack a person simply because he or she holds a certain belief. Everybody is entitled to believe any old nonsense they want and to express their views about beliefs.

Poe's law

Now here is another one under the category of “you are never too old to learn new stuff”, although I am sure any twenty-something year-olds reading this will laugh their heads off. I am comforted in the fact that I don’t believe my blog is likely read by that demographic.

A few days ago I read a column in the Toronto Sun by broadcaster and journalist, Michael Coren, in which he made the monumentally stupid observation (he is prone to such pronouncements) that, without exception, all the atheists he has debated are unhappy people. I know of only one atheist that he has repeatedly debated, and since I work with the guy, I know he is not unhappy. But, even if he were, what does that mean?

A short time later, while surfing the Internet, I came across the cartoon at the top of this page. The coincidence was too much and I thought, “Ha. That is a message that I should blog about the relative happiness and unhappiness of atheists.”

However, I began to read the comments of the viewers of that website and somebody said: “Poe’s law”. Being a curious sort, and never having heard of Poe’s law, I decided to run that one down.

Poe’s Law, named after Nathan Poe, who wrote on a Christian website, “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing.” It has become an Internet phenomenon. When people are debating on-line some piece of writing, the first one to determine that it is not genuine and is a satire calls “Poe’s Law” and gets bragging rights for unearthing the deception. It’s a contest.

So the question remains, is the cartoon above a genuine religious cartoon or an instance of Poe’s Law?

To see other examples, go to this site.

Ah, religion, what would the world do without it; Chapter 3: Divisiveness in a pluralistic country

There was a story in the Toronto Star yesterday that parents in Quebec have revolted over a new course that has been unveiled in the public school system, comparative religions. The course is intended to broaden the students's minds and knowledge concerning the world's religions. It is a course for which parents can require exemptions for their children. In one school, out of 800 students, 700 were exempted.

"How can they teach them about other religions when they don't even know their own", is a common theme. "Religion is not a menu in a fast food restaurant", was another. "Give them a good grounding (meaning indocrination) in their own faith first, before introducing them to other ideas." "If they are offered too much choice, they might become (horror of horrors) atheists."

Education is all about broadening students' intellectual horizons and inspiring them to seek out new knowledge. Religion is concerned with closing minds to other ideas, but from historical and cultural aspects it is important that students learn how other religions stultify enquiry and discourage open learning just as much as the one their parents chose for them. The Quebec government should be congratulated for its pioneering effort and let us hope it is adopted as a standard in other educational jurisdictions across the country.

Does God believe in free speech? And why not discuss religion during elections?

Michael Coren is a Toronto-based broadcaster and journalist. He writes a column in the Toronto Sun and has a talk show about public interest matters on the Christian channel. He claims to be a Roman Catholic.

Last week he had a show on faith and politics. His guests included a Catholic theologian, an Imam and the head of an atheist organization, Justin Trottier. He had another guest, but I did not turn the show on in time to catch his reason for being there. But, clearly they were all religious except for Trottier.

One of the many things I find annoying about Coren is that he is a whiner. According to the last Canadian census on the subject of religion (2001), 72% of Canadians claim to be Christian. They are the majority in this country. Yet time and again Coren tries to paint them as if they were a persecuted minority.

He targets the MSM as being hostile to religion generally and dismissive of Christians particularly. I think it is fair to say that a great majority of Canadians are reluctant to bring matters of faith into the public sphere and I don’t see any conspiracy in that regard from the MSM other than reflecting the perceived will of the marketplace.

Coren brought up the abandonment by Random House of The Jewel of Medina book project in the face of perceived hostility from Muslims and moaned that publishers seem to have no problem publishing anti-Christian material. Trottier responded by reminding him that Catholics engage in book banning, as for example, in the case of the Golden Compass being banned by the Halton Catholic District School Board.

Naturally, Coren took exception to this trying to make a case that the author was an atheist who pointedly said he was attacking the Catholic Church and the church was entitled to eschew the book. Lost in his thoughts were the logical relationship between seller and market. If Catholics can successfully convince the marketplace not buy a book, then that amounts to the same thing as stopping publishers from publishing anti-Catholic books.

I am not clear what Coren’s world view might be. Does he want to stop publishers from publishing anti-Christian literature, or does he want publishers to voluntarily not do this? Fortunately, the Imam brought some religious sanity to the discussion. He said the answer was not to try to stop publishers publishing whatever literature they thought might have a market, but to counter the anti-religious messages with religiously positive literature – to fight ideas and arguments with other ideas and arguments. He gets it.

Later, Trottier brought up an incident that occurred at the University of Calgary where an atheist student organization’s banner was defaced with Christian messages. Coren tried to fluff this off as a flash in the pan, but Trottier’s point was well-taken: had this occurred to a Jewish organization or a Muslim organization, it would have been a front page news story about discrimination against minorities. But because the minority in this case is a bunch of atheists, nobody cares. It will not be recorded by the police as a hate crime and will not show up on hate crime statistics.

At one point Trottier reminded Coren that Coren held free speech to be above all. To which Coren responded that he held God to be above all. This raises an interesting dilemma for our Mr. Coren. He has claimed to believe in free speech, which is why I have difficulty understanding his complaint about the publication of anti-Christian literature, yet he believes in God and, more particularly, a God defined by the Catholic Church.

Question: does God believe in free speech? As a Catholic you would have to say no. After all, why would Protestants be cast into the everlasting fires of hell if free speech reigned in heaven?

Another thing about religion and politics. It is often said that Americans bring politics into their election campaigns and Canadians don't. I don't really think Americans do as much of that as they think they do and Canadians should do it.

For example, if a Catholic political candidate were asked questions about his or her stand on abortion, fornication, adultery, birth control, the death penality, homosexuals, the dispostion of the immortal soul of those who are not Catholics and other matters that are the subject Catholic teaching, there would be one of two answers, or no answer. We would hear that the candidate fully believes in the teachings of the church or that he/she doesn't fully believe. Or the candidate may refuse to answer. All of these would be quite telling on what sort of a person is running for pubic office, and whether we should feel comfortable casting a vote in his/her direction.

Similarly, it would be interesting to hear somebody who claimed to believe Jesus Christ was coming back any day now, that only the virtuous would saved and raptured into heaven before the final conflict, that Israel must be preserved at all costs to fulfill this prophecy and that the Earth is only 6,000 years old, finish all of this off with, "Please vote for me."

When we keep a person's religion off limits for discussion and debate we never really know what they truly think. For an interesting view on this, read Sam Harris's take on Sarah Palin in Newsweek.

Ah, religion, what would the world do without it? Chapter 2, Honour killings.

Honour killings are not Islam, they are barbarism, according to Steve Rockwell, an imam in Toronto (see story at this site).

The columnist who wrote this, and included a number of similar claims by Muslims, took it at face value; i.e., if Muslims say that it is not Islam, then he will print that. There is a sense in the Canadian mainstream media that Muslims get too much bad press and this type of story appears mainly to balance the equation.

I think I would not be too far off the mark if I were to suggest the columnist knows very little about Islam, and if he had not been trying to use his print pulpit to “balance the cosmic scales of justice”, might have consulted with other spokespersons to get a balanced view of the subject.

This response of Rockwell and others was provoked by the news that the brother of Aqsa Parvez, the 16-year old girl who was strangled to death in the Greater Toronto Area, has now been charged with first degree murder. Aqsa’s father had already been charged with murder, and had recently had that charge upgraded to a first degree category (meaning the murder was planned and deliberate, not a spontaneous act).

The allegation in the media, from interviews reporters conducted with Aqsa’s friends at the time of her murder, is that she was the victim of an honour killing because she was refusing to wear the hijab and other traditional Muslim garb when outside the house. She was supposedly fighting with her family over these matters.

If these facts are true, then this would be Canada’s first recorded honour killing. There have been honour killings in the United States and a number of them in West European countries.

When Aqsa’s murder was first in the news I scanned a great many letters to editors from Muslims all saying the same thing: this sort of thing ought not to be laid at the door of Islam. It was tribal, or it was “cultural” or, as depicted by the outrageous Dr. Mohamed Elmasry of the Canadian Islamic Congress, it was just the normal teenage daughter-father fight one might expect in any family.

For balance, I would say I saw a similar thing coming from a columnist in the Sun chain of newspapers urging her readers not to put any significance to the fact that Catholic trustees on the Toronto District Catholic School Board were stealing from the public purse. Her argument was that their kleptocracy was outside of their religion, so bracket the religion and put it aside as an issue in this case.

My response to that is simply this, if the whole point of having a separate school system based on religious grounds is not to provide a superior moral grounding (in Catholic eyes, that is), then the taxpaying public is being cheated out of education dollars needed to provide two costly competing systems instead of one simple school system for all. Her argument wasn’t helped by the fact that the Toronto Archbishop wrote a stinging letter claiming that the trustees had stained Catholicism. In short, one must ask oneself what is the point of religious training if not to prevent public servants from stealing the public’s money?

There is an online explanation of honour killings by the BBC at this site. It talks about how it is prevalent in the “South Asian” and “Middle Eastern” communities. Not once does it say the words Islam or Muslim. It does mention how a girl was stabbed to death by her father Abdullah over her western dress and her Christian boyfriend.

Since the article does not tell us why the religion of the boyfriend should be objectionable, I suppose we can speculate that her father was simply a murderous raving atheist. God knows, there are plenty of those walking around.

That last sentence was an oxymoron in case you missed it.

Near the end of this most PC piece we get some slippage:

Ram Gidoomal of the South Asian Development Partnership has campaigned for years for people to open up and turn in those who get away with justifying honour crimes.
He has consistently called on leaders in mosques, temples and churches to do more…

If honour killings have nothing to do with religion, why badger these folks about it?

I would go along with the assertions that honour killings are more culturally understood than religiously defined except that cultures are bred by religion, nourished by it, and continually informed by it. You cannot simply bracket religion as being an unimportant context to be ignored.

I joked earlier about atheist honour killings, but the fact remains that all honour killings occur amongst people who practice one of the traditional religions. It is also true that most of these reported killings are committed by persons who come from very ordinary walks in life. In short, they are not Koranic or Biblical scholars. They are simple people who were taught some religious precepts, and, if they keep up their attendance at their various houses of worship, continue to be fed the doctrine. Furthermore, almost every instance of an honour killing is the result of a male (father, brother, uncle, cousin) attacking a female; sometimes mothers join in to support the males.

Could there be something in the religious texts that would give these South Asian and Middle Eastern cultures the idea that males have some right to dominate women, and give some women the idea that they should be submissive to such males?

That is simply a rhetorical question in case you missed it.

The Koran, Hadith, Old Testament and New Testament are rife with misogynist and male dominance pronouncements. Maybe the culture would improve if the religion were improved.

The evil atheists do is interred with their bones, the good lives on

I received an e-mail invitation the other day to attend a forthcoming seminar on the danger of radical Islam to our society. It came from some Christian church organization and I have no idea how I got on its mailing list. In the message portion the organizers pointed out that radical Islam was an even greater danger to western civilization than “secular atheism”.

Hmmm. Should I be pleased that I am ranked second only to the likes of Osama bin Laden as a threat to western civilization?

A short while later a headline in an on-line conservative newspaper caught my eye. The writer was expanding on the theme that we are being targeted by a conspiracy of liberal leftists, Islamists and atheists. I read the piece and the writer was quite clear in connecting the dots between the intellectual leftists and the Islamists.

This is not new. Other writers have pointed out how the intellectual leftists, who despise capitalism and the power establishments in the west, sought common cause with the Russian communist regime of Stalin. They became, in Lenin’s apt phrase, a legion of “useful idiots” for communist propaganda. With the disgrace of the Stalinist regime and the exposure of its crimes against humanity the left became muted.

Until the Islamists came along and gave them heart: “Now here’s a bunch of guys we can support because they hate all the same things we hate.”

But other than using McCarthy-style “naming” the writer made no attempt to show how atheists fit into this. I suppose the unarticulated code is that they are evil people and would somehow be behind other evil people. Lost on the writer is the fact that Islam calls for the death penalty for atheists.

There was a national poll carried out some time ago in the United States. I think it was by the Pew Research organization. People were asked who they trusted and who they would be prepared to vote into the office of the President. Atheists came dead last. Parents said they would rather see their children marry a person of another faith than an atheist.

It reminded me of an apocryphal story. A religious mother is berating her young son who has come home from college but is not attending church. He finally admits to her that he no longer believes in God. After catching her breath, his mother says she can accept that as long as he doesn’t become an atheist.

And people ask, “Why are these New Atheists, Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris so strident?” Gee, I wonder.

Dawkins says that atheists are in the position that homosexuals were 25 years ago and that they should learn some lessons from the “coming out” and “demand for respect” that has advanced the gay community’s stature. Harris says that is a good idea, but he doesn’t think the Atheist Pride Parade will be nearly as colourful as the Gay Pride Parade.

I wish some of these religious people would wake up and realize that our present western civilization would not be as liberal and free as they now enjoy it if atheist thinkers had not had a seminal role in the creation of our modern society.

The list of names of secular humanists and atheists who have contributed something on the path to reason over superstition and magical thinking is a long and honourable one. It includes: the Budda, Confucius, Lucretius, Omar Khayyam, Copernicus, Montaigne, David Hume, Harriet Martineau, Charles Darwin, Ernst Haeckel, John Dewey, Albert Schweitzer, Julian Huxley, Bertrand Russell, Sartre, Camus, Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, Edward O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins and many, many others.