• He doesn’t believe in evolution
• He’s a chiropractor
• He’s claimed there’s a link between vaccines and autism
• He doesn’t believe the climate is changing

In his surreal press release (dated March 31, not April 1), he states that he will address his religious beliefs in Parliament at his next opportunity, which sounds like it will be a hoot. Lunney claims that Christians are being persecuted in Canada, a claim that is thoroughly debunked by the excellent Ottawa Citizen editorial:

Add MP James Lunney to the list of people who somehow have come to believe they’re being persecuted — that indeed, their fundamental human rights are under threat — when people disagree with them on Twitter.

Lunney is standing down before the election in October so we’ll only have a few more of his public gems of wisdom.

Good riddance.

Religion poll a waste of paper

Originally published in The Gateway, 9th October 2008

There’s an election going on at the moment. No—not the Obama/McCain one, and not even the Canadian one that you probably know less about, but affects you more. This one went on with almost no warning and, in the end, will have no positive effect at all.

Perhaps by now you’ve seen a certain campus group’s posters asking you to vote on whether you believe in God. By setting up a booth in CAB, and later SUB, they hope to accomplish what the SU has failed at for far too long—getting students to vote. However, one must immediately question several things regarding this concept.

Firstly, you have to ponder the purpose of performing a poll like this yourself instead of hiring a polling company. You would think that a statistically significant poll would be more valuable—but perhaps empirical evidence is a bit too foreign to some believers.

If you want a hint at their results, see if they line up with a Canada Press poll from this past year that found that 23 per cent of Canadians don’t believe in a God, and 36 per cent of Canadians under 25 were non-believers. In a university campus environment, the latter group is quite prevalent.

Next, with polls like these, one has to wonder how the terms have been defined. It’s unclear what they’re talking about when they mention “God.”

Traditionally, big-G God refers to that guy-in-the-sky that Jews, Muslims, and Christians believe in. But some people believe that there’s some universal spirit or force running through the universe, and they call that god.

Others believe in a deity that started the universe and let it go like a wind-up watch. So what definition are they going with?

Then there’s the strangeness of hinging the metaphysical existence of anything on popularity. Humans often believe pretty crazy things. For example, people have believed the earth was the back of a turtle, while others believed that the Milky Way was fluid squirted from a goddess’s breast. So to run a mock election on belief in God makes me wonder what they hope to prove.

There are a countless number of things that the majority of humanity has previously believed without any empirical evidence that later turned out to be false—the earth being flat, the earth being the centre of the universe, the sun being the centre of the universe, humans being utterly disconnected from the rest of the animal kingdom, the existence of witches, and that masturbation will cause hairy palms.

So to ask whether the majority believes in a supernatural being doesn’t lend anything to its existence—we may as well ask if people believe in the Higgs boson. Without doing actual science, we’ll never know an answer about either.

Some will claim that science can’t know everything, and that God can’t be found in a test tube. Well, he can’t be found in a student group-sponsored poll either. And rather than getting their group more believers, they may inadvertently expose how many unbelievers there are on this campus.

Alberta is often seen as the most conservative Christian province in Canada, and election day will demonstrate why. However, when the 2001 census shows that upwards of 25 per cent of Albertans claim “no religion,” second only to British Columbia, there’s clearly more going on than meets the eye.

So take charge, fellow heathens, heretics, humanists, atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, and skeptics: you are not alone.

The Christians are coming!

Originally published in The Peak, 31st May 2010

He shall have dominion also from sea to sea,
And from the River to the ends of the earth.
Those who dwell in the wilderness will bow before Him,
And His enemies will lick the dust.

Psalm 72: 8-9

From this passage, Marci McDonald begins her argument in The Armageddon Factor: The Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada that a Christian Dominionist movement has been growing in Canada. She purports to show how this Northern Christian Right has subtly gained an alarming amount of influence in the government in a short span of time.

In the first chapter, McDonald outlines Stephen Harper’s personal religious history, a taboo in the media. After moving to Calgary and joining Preston Manning’s Reform Party, Harper became a born-again Christian. Harper, unlike Manning and his ilk, preferred keeping his faith and politics separate. McDonald notes that it was only later when, as leader of the new Conservative Party, Harper reached out to other evangelicals.

McDonald has some difficulty measuring the level of influence the Christian Right has had on the Harper government. Few socially conservative policy changes have passed. Those that have passed have generally disappointed the very factions McDonald seeks to expose. Harper has repeatedly turned away from the abortion debate. Upon winning his first minority government, he quickly held his promised free vote on same-sex marriage – earlier than many evangelicals had wanted, as it provided them less time to mount a defence. Similarly, by breaking his fixed-election date law in 2008, Harper killed several of his caucus’ private members bills, including an unborn victims’ bill that was called the “first winnable abortion bill” in years.

However, McDonald does point out that perhaps Harper’s greatest success has been in his “incremental” changes, evidenced by his numerous appointments of partisans and born-agains to the courts, the senate, and the civil service. Within the Prime Minister’s Office, Harper counts many evangelical leaders, including the former leader of Focus on the Family Canada, Darrell Reid.

Similarly, Harper has been able to make many changes by the mere stroke of a pen. Harper cut funds to Status of Women Canada and KAIROS, a social justice charity that apparently represented the wrong-type of Christian – a charge levelled against McDonald herself. He has also provided tens of millions of stimulus dollars to Bible colleges and has cut funding to abortions provided as foreign aid.

McDonald also briefly discusses the so-called “Christian Left,” which included Tommy Douglas, the father of Canadian medicare. She points out how both former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff and the late NDP leader Jack Layton reached out to various faith communities through acts like the revival of the NDP Faith and Social Justice committee.

The Armageddon Factor is an enlightening read, regardless of one’s personal views, but the book strays from objectivity enough that it reads as a bit more than just a who’s who of the Christian Right. I had initially hoped that it could have let the subjects speak for themselves, like the documentary Jesus Camp.

Regardless, the book does shed light on what has been taking place in the dark. No democracy is served by secrecy and backroom lobbying. At the very least, this book will hopefully force Canadians to decide what kind of country we want this to be, because if we do not, there are those who have a scripturally-inspired version of what they think it should be.

Case in point, a Victoria Times-Columnist blog asks “Has religion become a dirty word?“

It argues that Victoria, BC, with a non-religious population of 51% according to Statistics Canada’s 2011 National Household Survey and potentially as high as 64% from the 2013 BCHA poll, has become anti-religious. Such is the secular identity that the religious are made to feel “sheepish” and ashamed of their habit.

Yet without citing any specific evidence of wide-spread anti-religious hate crimes* or even anecdotes of real religious persecution, I have to call bullshit.

Religion has simply lost its place of privilege. One is not assumed to be good just because they are religious. It’s little more than a curious quirk of a shrinking portion of the population.

While some anti-theists cheer for the day when religion is a dirty word, this is the future I more hope for: where religion is a private matter and people don’t feel entitled to force their beliefs onto others.

Victoria isn’t hostile to religion, it has become indifferent to it.

*I did briefly look for whether I could find a break down of the number of religious hate crimes by city to compare whether secular Victoria and Vancouver showed a different rate than other, more religious cities, but the data isn’t nicely collected and the incident rate is fairly low. Only a few hundred hate crimes are reported each year across the entire country and only a fraction of those target religion (most are racial). It would be hard therefore, to detect a meaningful trend. Nevertheless, we should be glad those numbers are small. I may still look into this question for a future post.

Nevertheless, parents in the ironically named Godson Elementary School in Abbotsford were shocked by the distribution of Bibles to their children during class time. This violates the District’s own policy, which permits the distribution of religious propaganda following a consent form.

Beverly Egan, one of the parents, says her son was offered a Bible in class despite a permission slip never coming home.

The District and School Board deny this complaint and say the procedure was followed with a total of six students returning slips for Bibles in the school.

That so few students are requesting Bibles raises another question of why this policy continues to be defended besides to attempt to put social pressure on other families to convert to the dominant religion?

Hopefully Egan and the other parents can receive some support from groups like the BCHA and their Fraser Valley affiliate.

They likely have grounds to take their case to BC’s Human Rights Tribunal, especially after the Chouinard’s win against the Niagara School District’s attempt on the issue of Gideon Bibles.

Costco has Bibles for sale under the genre of FICTION Hmmmm…… pic.twitter.com/mLZVogkSfd

— Caleb Kaltenbach (@calebwilds) November 15, 2013

It’s not the price that Pastor Caleb Kaltenbach is upset at but the “Fiction” label.

Naturally, this leads to Faux outrage over how this is intolerant and these “actions undermine Christianity” – the religion of nearly 3/4s of Americans.

I don’t really have anything else to add other than to encourage you to read the Fox News article for how to write a sensationalist piece over what amounts to little more than a labeling error (seriously, this wouldn’t be more than an amusing anecdote were Hunger Games labeled “History”).

Supposedly the Parti Quebecois will now include a provision to remove the crucifix that has been hanging in the National Assembly since 1936 and “a previous exemption for lawmakers will also be struck from the charter, which would presumably make it against the law for Muslim, Sikh and Jewish politicians to sit in the legislature while sporting clothing and symbols important to their faith.”

One month ago, I wrote about the proposed charter, criticizing its hypocrisy for singling out some religious symbols while enshrining Catholic privilege. I also decried the antagonistic approach of the Quebec government, stating: “If you have to pass laws banning religious iconography, you’re doing secularism wrong.”

I stand by those words today.

It’s promising to see the government recognize the criticisms it received over the 1936 Crucifix but the insistence on uniformly banning religious symbols, now including elected representatives, is unconscionable. Our political representatives should be that – representative. The culture of Quebec is no longer homogenous, white, male, and quasi-secular Catholic.

Presumably candidates for Quebec’s National Assembly will be campaigning while wearing whatever religious attire they believe they are compelled to wear. If the citizens of their riding then choose to elect that person to office, why should they be forced to then remove it?

Clothing has no rational ability to affect one’s ability to draft laws.

We should enact no limits to the free practice of religion where:

• it has no impact on one’s ability to do their job,
• they are able to offer services without discrimination,
• it harm no one else,
• or it will not be viewed as state endorsement.

Debates over clothing are generally little more than attempts to dictate what is acceptable within your existing culture. As Muslim feminist Shelina Zahra Janmohamed writes, “stop fighting over what I wear, and start addressing who I am. I am neither burqa nor bikini. I am woman.”

Meanwhile, the small leftist-separatist Quebec Solidaire (with two seats) is proposing an amendment to the Charter to promote both secularism and reasonable accommodation. I’m not sure if this is the best answer (I haven’t read their bill yet), but it’s definitely a better approach then the attempt to blanket ban religious symbols of minority faiths. Unfortunately, the PQ is unlikely to listen to these arguments and will likely push forward with its hardline Charter with support from the right-leaning Coalition Avenir Quebec.

The debate will continue and ultimately this Charter, in the extreme PQ format, will land it in the Supreme Court of Canada. I see little chance of the clothing bans standing against the protected freedom of religion based on precedents protecting reasonable religious accommodations.

The separatists will then get to fight their favourite battle against the rest of Canada as they decide whether to enact the notwithstanding clause to preserve their Charter.

At the very least, at least this revised Charter will remove some religious privilege in Quebec, although it will be obscured by the battle over what minorities are allowed to wear to work.

One ambitious member of a local Young Liberal riding suggested merging the Catholic and Public school boards to save money and end the religious privilege. The idea gained quick traction and made it to the top four spot.

Unfortunately, this caught the attention of the Catholic school board administration, which circulated emails calling on their staff and trustees to crash the poll, down-voting the idea. At the time of writing it sits at –220 votes.

Go to the site, register, and vote up the idea and spread the word.

Chubb was asked in 2011 about a proposed anti-homophobia policy at the Edmonton Public School Board (which was passed). As head of the school, Chubb stated in an interview about his school:

It’s not that we are anti-gay in any way, shape or form. We just need to be able to articulate the moral element to all Christianity … and our Christian community is not able to accept that homosexual acts are not immoral. If you don’t feel comfortable with your children in that kind of milieu, don’t send your students here.

It’s worth noting that since 2004 Meadowlark Christian School has been operated as an Alternative Program within Edmonton Public School Board. This means that despite parent’s paying up to $1,600 in tuition for their child to attend, the school still receives public funding and can discriminate against staff and faculty who aren’t Christian enough. Furthermore, it means that Chubb’s 2011 comments represented a desire to violate a proposed policy of their own school board.

When asked by local blogger Daveberta about the comments, Chubb argued the views were those of the parents and that

My position now, as it was then, is that you cannot legislate belief. I am a firm advocate for freedom of speech and conscience. I staunchly defend those who are discriminated against in any way.

Perhaps Chubb was just doing his job but the argument that “some” students should not be sent to some schools offered by the Public School District only highlights the discriminatory nature of permitting faith-based schools within a public system.

Edmonton voters, it’s up to you to push for a secular school board. Get informed and vote wisely.

The Charter of Quebec Values is creating a huge, perhaps irreparable rift in the province’s women’s movement. For feminists, there is no halfway position over the proposed ban on religious symbols worn by public employees.

On one side are those for whom the Muslim hijab (or any kind of religious headscarf) is anathema because it’s seen as a symbol of female submission. On the other side are those who believe that wearing a headscarf is a woman’s personal choice and that the law will victimize Muslim women in particular by excluding them from a large sector of the labour market.

It’s similar to the concept of defending even that freedom of speech which we disagree with. I don’t agree with the choice* to wear a hijab but it is not my place to tear it from a woman’s head.

*A tricky concept in this discussion but where free choice is restricted we should target those coercing, not the coerced (don’t blame the victim).