New poll suggests PQ's "Charter of Values" may help them form a majority government

From The Globe and Mail:

After months of playing wedge politics, the Parti Québécois has inched high enough in popular approval to be within reach of a majority government, a new poll suggests.

According to a Léger Marketing survey released on Monday, support for the government of Premier Pauline Marois is at its highest since it won a minority mandate in September, 2012...

...The PQ has benefited from a hardening of the support for the charter, with 48 per cent of respondents (57 per cent among francophones) backing the charter, compared with 43 per cent (49 per cent among francophones) in September.

The most controversial aspect of the charter, a proposal to ban public-sector workers from wearing conspicuous religious garments, is even more popular, with 60 per cent support (69 per cent among francophones).

Support for Quebec independence remained soft, with 37 per cent saying they would vote Yes for sovereignty if a referendum was held now, against 50 per cent who would vote No.

The United and Anglican Churches of Canada find a way to get people back to their houses of worship

By selling them off as condos

Religion is the last refuge of a scoundrel - Obama makes last ditch effort to sell his "Christian values"

More at The Blaze

The Elephant in the Classroom

On the basis of legal decisions and relatively recent traditions, Christianity and the Bible in particular are informatis non grata in Canadian schools. The reasoning behind Christianophobia derives from equity policies that strive to remove preferences accorded to what are seen as dominant, privileged forces. People familiar with the system understand that "equity" policies are not designed to create equality. If that were the case than the word Christmas would not be banned from December school "Holiday Concerts" while  celebration of Hanukkah, Eid, Diwali, and a variety on non-Christian holidays are classroom topics. Equality would not prohibit Christian school prayer while allowing school cafeterias to be converted to gender segregated mosques during class time.

So in practical terms, the goal of school Equity policies is clearly not to remove all religion from school, but to take Christianity, the dominant religious force in Canada since the nation's inception, down a peg or two while trying to raise the beliefs of oppressed minorities. At least minorities who are viewed as being in the oppressed class within the framework of the oppressor/oppressed binary equation by which radicalized education policy makers view the world.

But here's the problem with taking the Bible out of schools: you can't really understand anything about western civilization, be it history, literature, politics or culture, without a reasonable familiarity with the Old and New Testaments. Writers like Shakespeare, Melville, Dickens, Twain, C.S. Lewis, even Mordecai Richler and Margaret Atwood cannot be fully understood without familiarity with the Bible. European, and by extension, Canadian and American history, as well as the conquest of New Spain cannot be understood without knowing the religious conflicts that drove events forward, based on differing interpretations of the Bible.

The value system and to a great extent the legal system upon which Canada was founded is based on principles and ideas expressed in the King James translation of the Bible.

But school children are not allowed to be taught that all-important key to knowledge in public schools for fear that they may actually believe what they read.

If only the texts in university courses that produce education policy makers were scrutinized as closely. If they were, we might not have the idiocy that prevails in school boards throughout this land.



Thanks to SDAMatt for the video

There is no requirement for separation of church and state in Canada

John Robson of Sun TV gives an important lesson in history and our constitution that refutes the erroneous assumptions about separation of church and state in Canada.





video by SDAMatt

Declarations condemning Honor Killings don't deserve praise

The past two weeks have been particularly eventful ones regarding the problematic subject of the integration of Muslim immigrants and Islamic culture into Canadian society.

The ongoing Shafia trial in Ontario has been taking up a lot of ink and appears to have been the catalyst for a declaration by about 60 Canadian Muslim groups denouncing Honor Killings. Meanwhile in Belgium, Canadian Muslim reformer Irshad Manji was violently accosted during a book tour by about twenty Islamist fanatics who spat on her and threatened to kill her.

Now before any of us get on a high horse about how much better western religions are than Islam, we should keep in mind that we too all had our centuries-long episodes of religiously-inspired violence. Islam is 600 years younger than Christianity, and when Catholicism was as old as Islam is now, the Church was torturing and burning heretics.  As recently as 300 years ago, Protestant "reformers" were burning witches. Judaism too has a well-detailed history of violence that is extolled in biblical lore.

However there are many religions younger than Islam, such as Mormonism, Scientology, Baha'i, Sikhism, etc, whose practitioners are not bent on mass murder, terrorism, or the elimination of anyone who would dare to utter a word of criticism or mockery of their beliefs.

Even in Canada, up until the imposition of the multicultural, non-assimilating Trudeaupia, we had an extremely well-integrated Ismaili Muslim population that exhibited virtually none of the extremism that has become a somewhat factually-based caricature of contemporary Islam.

What has happened to the west in the last 40 years or so is the mass immigration of Muslims from what, in non-cultural relativist terms, one might refer to as backwards Muslim countries. The problem the west faces is not really Islam so much as it is the culture of these third world countries which happen to be predominantly Islamic. And the challenge we face is that the narrative of contemporary Islam has increasingly been dominated by those who hold on to those cultures' regressive interpretation of that religion.

Where we are failing miserably is by allowing that narrative to continue.

If a group were to make a grand announcement declaring that they believed it was wrong to rape cats, and tried to organize a campaign to denounce cat rape, people would, quite rightly, view them as crazy. Anyone with a modicum of intelligence and moral sense knows it's wrong to rape cats and no sane person would do such a monstrous thing. It shouldn't require anyone to speak out against it.

Yet when Canadian Islamists declare that it's wrong for Muslims to murder their wives and daughters, they are embraced by the mainstream media as being progressive.

This truly is a sign of the soft bigotry of low expectations. When a community feels the need to make a pronouncement opposing infanticide and domestic violence, and the addled minds of an enabling media behave as if this is some significant achievement, it bespeaks a disgusting rot in our entire culture.

What's worse is that the trend to try to accommodate the troglodytes in the Islamist community tacitly undermines genuine Canadian Muslim reformers like Manji, Tarek Fatah, Salim Mansur, and many others. Most Canadian Muslims are not extremists, but when we engage and praise extremists, merely for meeting the minimal standards of civilized behaviour, it sends out a message that is not only condescending, but implies that the extremists are the mainstream. That message allows the real reformers to be marginalized as radicals within the Muslim community.

We should not be engaging extremist groups who have been denounced by the government for anti-Semitism and support for terror, like the Canadian Arab Federation or the Canadian Islamic Congress, whose president recently spoke at a multi-faith conference at the University of Toronto. Engaging them merely allows reformers like Irshad Manji to be tagged with the description "controversial." What should be controversial is that the president of a group that expresses support for terrorist organizations was welcomed at Canada's most prestigious university.

This whole matter points to the challenges facing and the many failures of Canadian multiculturalism whose guiding philosophical moral relativism is poorly adapted to responding to inherently bad cultural practices.

When Canadian Islamists feel the need to condemn the murder of women in their community, our response should not be, "aren't you wonderfully progressive!," it should be: "What the hell is wrong with a culture that needs to say that in the first place?"  

Satan lures the child of idiot mom with dino-toys

A mother is concerned that the gift of dinosaur toys may turn her son into a devil-worshiping believer of the heresy of evolution:

"I know that Satan tries to trick us in many ways, and this is one way that he tries to fool man into believing that there isn’t a God who created the universe. How can they be bones when they are made out of ROCKS? I told my son that dinosaurs are one of Satan’s many ways of tricking man, and he must talk to God before he plays with them."

Canadian terrorist says his religion requires him to kill you and he is being discriminated against if you don't let him

According to The Toronto Star, lawyers for convicted terrorist Momin Khawaja are going to the Supreme Court to argue "that because the definition required the terrorist conduct to be performed for political, religious or ideological reasons, it infringes the Charter right to express religious beliefs and political opinions."

Is Religion a Tool of the Devil?

Religion has been giving God a bad name for all of recorded history, and probably before that too.

Abram, who later became Abraham and fathered what would become Judaism, Christianity and Islam, left his home because he was fed up with the local religion. So he took off and started a new one. And it has continued in much the same way since then.

The fact is that there are some astoundingly good people who are religious. The three Abrahamic religions are based on noble principles of justice and charity. Most people who devote their lives to their religion practice those principles to a greater degree that the average person. Critics of religion who point to all the evil done in the name of God by religion naturally provoke the sincere souls who practice the humanitarian aspects of their faith and participate in a community of others who do the same.

That religion has corrupt, evil practitioners no more makes it an inherently malignant institution than Tammany Hall made American democracy inherently malevolent. It is, however, undeniable that lots of very, very bad people do very bad things in the name of their religion, while claiming they are doing the work of God or Allah.

But in the increasingly heated debate between atheists and defenders of traditional religious practice, there is yet another approach.

.....................

From the outlook of a believer, any obstacle between a person and God is an evil impediment.

Is organized religion something that fosters closeness to God, or is it a deceptive obstruction that encourages sublimation of our relationship with the Almighty in favour of a tellurian authority, making it a metaphorical tool of the devil?

To examine that question, let us begin with another: What is the most precious gift that God bestowed on Mankind?

Other animals have great strength, remarkable speed or the ability of flight, any of which in a human would be considered superpowers. It is man’s ability to reason, to learn, and to build upon this body of knowledge that distinguishes our species and has given us the ability to dominate and shape our world.

Yet organized religion frequently requires us to discard this gift that God gave us in favour of faith. But not a faith in God or our individual ability to be guided by Him. Religion often demands we stifle reason in favour of catechism. In effect, telling us to affirm obedience, not to God, but to humans claiming to know His will. Many of whom, throughout history, have had rapacious motives. What could be more an instrument of the devil?

Religion abhors atheism, but does God? If God lives, He is not an imaginary friend who ceases to exist if you don’t believe in Him. God can employ atheists to His purpose just as He does believers. In fact, atheists are frequently more moral, better people than many who profess religious beliefs.

God does not require worship and he does not require one insignificant being in His incomprehensibly large universe to defend his reputation from another.

The biblical story of Babel in the Book of Genesis describes God’s confounding the language of the peoples of the earth, ”that they may not understand one another's speech.” But people have the capacity to learn other languages. What they can learn but not accept is another’s creed.

What if the story of Babel is not about God separating and setting the peoples of the earth against each other with language, but with religion? And what if that was not the work of God, but of the devil?

Tower of Babel
MC Escher

The idea that religion can stand in the way between us and our relationship with God is not a new one.



Religions frequently become institutions concerned more with their temporal authority than being a conduit for the divine spirit. The Reformation and Luther’s 95 Theses were a reaction to corruption within a Medieval and early Renaissance Catholic Church which sold, for money, not only ecclesiastic authority but tickets to Heaven. Indeed Christianity emerged as a reaction to the stagnation and rigidity of Judaism.

The founders of the first monotheistic religion understood how codification of religious practice countered God’s design that our relationship with Him should be evolutionary. Judaism separated the Written Law, consisting of the Five Books of Moses, the books of the Prophets, and Psalms, from the Oral Law. Jewish tradition teaches that the penalty for writing the Oral Law was death. The motive being that old beliefs and traditions were supposed to die out as our progressive comprehension made them irrelevant.

The Babylonian Talmud was recorded in violation of the law to preserve knowledge that Diaspora Jews feared would be lost. By doing so, they created a template changing Judaism from an evolving body of understanding into a time capsule of antiquated rituals. And all major religions operate from similar templates.

If we are God’s children, then evolution can be seen as the maturation and education of mankind. Religion is the invention of answers of which the inventors have no way of knowing. As a caveman would not be able to comprehend the principles of advanced physics, we are far from the ability to comprehend neither the nature nor the will of God as it applies to the universe. Yet the arrogant presumption of that capacity is the embodiment of what religion represents.

To criticise religion is not a denigration of religious people. But just as Marxism has individual adherents who are good people, in practice, that system always leads to totalitarianism. So is religion a poison tree that sometimes produces beautiful fruit.

This is not an argument to discard faith. It is an argument to have faith in God and His ability to guide you personally and directly without an intermediary.

Every soul is its own cathedral, each mind its own bible. As God’s creations, we have the individual capacity to be a prophet and messiah to ourselves, if only we learn to listen and to use the gifts He gave to all of us.

At The Christopher Hitchens/Tony Blair debate over the resolution "Religion is a force for good in the world"

The pre-debate survey indicated the majority of the crowd agreed with Hitchens' opposition of the resolution. Given the ample ammunition to support his position, Blair was on the defensive for most of the night in front of a crowd in liberal downtown Toronto. In fact, Blair spent a lot of time reiterating that while religion is responsible for a great deal of the world's ills, it does not mean that all people of faith are bad, or that faith in of itself need be an evil.

Blair acknowledged that the scriptures themselves are a source of a great deal of the evil perpetrated in the name of religion. It is a source of concern to him and one that requires great introspection from organized religion. As an analogy for the closed-mindedness of some religious people, Blair relayed how a Labour party member came up to him after an election loss and said, "We've had four elections and the public has voted against us four times. What's wrong with them?"

Speaking of closed minded people that don't get it, the single disappointment of the night for me was the imperceptible presence of James Clark's deceptively-named, "Toronto Coalition to Stop the War" who failed to turn out in noticeable numbers at an outdoor protest.

Read the whole thing at The Propagandist

UPDATE: Here's me beside Hitchens

Link to debate videos here.

Win front row tickets to see Christopher Hitchens debate Tony Blair on November 26

The semi-annual Munk Debates series is featuring its most high profile event ever.

On Friday, November 26, Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens will be debating the proposition,

"Be it resolved, religion is a force for good in the world."


I'm sure you can guess who is taking the pro and who the con.

This event, which will occur at Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto, was sold out immediately upon becoming available and tickets are very, very highly sought after.

But you and a friend could end up in the front row. If you have a friend (or enemy) with whom you want to debate the same proposition, go to the Munk Debates website and you can create your own head-to-head debate using the website's technology.

Each week, between now and November 25, one debate will be selected to win front row seats to the Blair/Hitchens debate. You can enter the contest through this link.

The intolerance of the tolerant in Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden

A very interesting column in Open Democracy argues that contemporary intolerance of Islam in certain European countries is paradoxically, but actually a measure of those countries' overall tolerance. The reason being that Islam, as practiced by the new wave of immigrants, is incompatible with western liberal values and democracy:

..findings indicate that the “former” bastions of tolerance in fact are still tolerant - just not toward Muslims. Moreover, in this particular intolerance toward a religious group they outdo generally less tolerant other European countries. Why?

A possible explanation, counterintuitive as it might seem, is that it is because of their overall social tolerance - rather than despite it - that these countries have become among the most openly Islamophobic.

The logic of the argument is threefold: relating to nationalism, conformism, and tolerance itself.

First, in all three countries tolerance was closely associated with a negative attitude toward ethnic nationalism and a self-perception of being that unique thing, a “non-nationalist nation”. In part because of the particular way the countries dealt with their experience of the second world war, nationalism was linked almost intrinsically with Nazism and the Holocaust. Hence, ethnic-national discourses (let alone racial ones) were suspect, and shunned by all but the ostracised extreme right. So, whereas radical-right parties in countries such as Austria, Belgium, or France could relate their anti-immigrant struggle to more broadly shared national narratives, this option was not available in Denmark, the Netherlands, or Sweden.

Second, most everyday citizens in these countries self-identified as tolerant, and would in any case self-censor where this was felt necessary; but in addition, their elite had a special weapon in its struggle to keep politics “politically correct” - conformity. After all, northern Europe is as well known for its conformity (which traditionally includes a high trust in state actors and institutions) as for its tolerance. The often genuinely pro-multicultural elites were able to keep the immigration issue off the agenda, because the most intolerant people were also the most conformist (this is shown in the case of the Netherlands by Paul Sniderman & Louk Hagendoorn, When Ways of Life Collide: Multiculturalism and Its Discontents in the Netherlands (2007).

Third, the countries under scrutiny (Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden) and their close neighbours have traditionally been - and still are - among the most tolerant in Europe, particularly regarding issues such as women’s rights and gay rights. In addition, they are now among Europe’s least religious societies, with a dominant secular majority and formerly influential religious interests now politically marginalised. In this context, it is easy to construct Islam both as a threat to the national way of life, and to liberal democracy as it is understood in these countries.

read the entire article here at Open Democracy

Neighborhood comes together to drive off religious bigots

This happened in an east end Toronto neighbourhood. It's too bad this had to go on for 7 years before the neighbors finally got fed up.

The person who posted the video described it as follows:

"This is a group from a church at the end of my street. Apparently they have been grouping in front of a gay couple's house and reading their bible loudly for the past 7 years. They may have also driven a lesbian couple from the area as well by doing the same thing. Tonight most of our neighbours came out and were successful in getting them to leave"

UPDATE: Evangelists deny they were targeting Gay couple

UPDATE 2: the deeper the digging, the more it turns out the evangelists may have been telling the truth after all.

Is It Bigoted to Criticize Religion?

David Harsanyi provides the best analysis I've read so far on the Ground Zero Mosque controversy.

From Reason.com

Here's an excerpt:

There are those who continue to make the facile claim that any protest over Park51 is a display in un-American intolerance and contempt for the Constitution. This position treats criticism of faith—religious institutions and symbols included—as tantamount to "bigotry." 

Given that there remains overwhelming opposition to the ground zero mosque, this viewpoint would mean that 70 percent of Americans are impulsively hostile to freedom of religion and irrationally narrow-minded.

Could be. Or, maybe a few of these folks believe the First Amendment features more than one clause. Even a newfound reverence for religious liberty on the left does not negate our right to protest and criticize the philosophical disposition of others. And applying public pressure in an effort to shut down a project is as American as protesting the arrival of a new Wal-Mart. Religious institutions, as far as I can tell, are not exempted from these disputes.

In 2008, thousands of gay-rights activists protested the Mormon temple in Westwood, Calif., for its role in passing Proposition 8—the ban on same-sex marriage. This grew into a national protest to undermine the influence of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—even though not every Mormon was involved.

I don't recall anti-Mormon protesters being referred to as bigots for targeting religion..

Read the whole piece here at Reason