The Sixth Estate

The latest census is out and for one reason or another, one of the several numbers upon which media attention has been fixated are the religion figures. This sort of ties into my new series on science, evolution, and the future of humanity, but actually it’s a separate question which I probably would have written about anyways. So I hope you’ll forgive the digression.

Anyhow, the headline figure is that the number of Canadians who stated on the census that they were non-religious has increased from a small portion (16%) to a slightly less small portion (24%). What one is to make of this, it’s hard to say. The Globe & Mail has printed two articles on the subject, one titled “Canadians Losing Their Religion” and the other “Religion in Canada is Changing, But It’s Not Being Abandoned.” There’s also been the perennial gag about Jedi Knights, a subject which holds absolutely no interest to me except to say that it’s nice to see how many people approach the census with as much cavalier disdain as the Conservative government does.

But the thing that intrigues me about the religion figure isn’t that it’s shrunk. It’s that the figure is so high. About 75% of Canadians espoused a religion on the 2011 census. Almost all of them stated that they were Christian. It’s certainly true that those describing themselves as having “no religion” is increasing, but the vast majority of Canadians continue to say they are religious, Christian in point of fact. Next time you’re out in public (or at work), pick 13 people out of the crowd. Over the past 10 years, on average, 1 of those people abandoned their religion. All of this is simply to say that when the media prints statements like “we’re losing our religion,” they’re making statements that are really only valid for a very small minority of Canadians.

It does raise an obvious question, though: where exactly is all this religion?

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I just about fell off my chair when the Globe & Mail’s Tuesday editorial actually suggested that a suitable first task for newly minted Religious Freedom Ambassador Bennett would be an inspection tour of Tibet:

Sending the freshly minted ambassador would surely anger China, a major Canadian trading partner. But if the Harper government’s much-touted initiative on religious freedom is to have credibility, it should accept this challenge.

Without even touching the fact that the Harper government has obviously lost whatever interest it once had in challenging the totalitarian dictatorship in Beijing, this proposal betrays a startling amount of ignorance about how diplomacy works. Contrary to the dreamy imaginings of the people who supported the creation of this office, Canada’s Religious Freedoms Ambassador can’t just wander the globe at will, stirring up trouble.

The notion that an ambassador would visit a country against its will in order to inspect its internal affairs is asinine. What’s even worse is that the “Religious Freedom Ambassador” isn’t actually an ambassador in the technical sense. He’s not accredited to China, or anywhere else. For all intents and purposes, he’s just a private citizen with a fancy badge until China says otherwise.

This discussion is also an entirely moot point. Shortly after it published this editorial, the Globe dazzled its readers with up-to-the-minute news that the Chinese government has told our actual ambassador in Beijing that he is not allowed to visit Tibet. If our actual ambassador to China isn’t allowed to visit Tibet, it’s a safe bet that our fake ambassador won’t be allowed to either.

I have to say, the childish credulity of the professionally faithful is kind of amazing. We all knew that the Harper government was creating the Religious Freedoms Office because his religious base would love it. I don’t think until this week that I realized how truly silly they are, how willing to accept even the most piddling and pointless of scraps from the master’s table. To wit: Catholic priest turned National Post columnist Raymond de Souza and Christian TV personality and occasional Globe & Mail columnist Lorna Dueck, who on previous occasions has claimed that God intervenes in court cases.

(He does not, however, intervene to prevent the crimes from being committed in the first place, which in my humble opinion would be rather more helpful.)

Anyways, this new office can be easily refuted. We don’t have offices to promote any of the other Constitutional freedoms. The new “ambassador” won’t have any power to prevent religious atrocities. It’s a safe bet the Canadian government would never jeopardize any real economic interest, for instance, in order to prove a point about freedom of religion. Yet Dueck happily lists several recent persecutions of religious people as though Canada’s new Religious Freedom Ambassador, if he were already on the job, would have instantly hopped on a military jet and flown off to rescue the people involved. This is at best an office which will be long on talk and short on substance. You know, like church.

But I don’t think anyone needs me to repeat the tired arguments about the pointlessness of this office. Instead I want to tangle something a little bit more fundamental, which is the fact that the legion of conservative Christians who have suddenly re-discovered their libertarian streak don’t actually believe in freedom of religion either. Not, at least, as de Souza defines it here:

Religious liberty is the first liberty… If a person is not free before God,… then there is no basis for his freedom before the state, and his property and other rights are of little avail. The state that claims the right to interpose itself between man and God is by definition a totalitarian state, even if should be a softer sort of totalitarianism, at least at first.

Let’s suppose — to take a story that in this context isn’t entirely random — that you believe God has told you to hold a human sacrifice to prove your loyalty to him. At this sacrifice, moreover, the victim won’t just be some unfortunate passerby you swipe off the street: it will be your son. Now, I don’t think de Souza or anybody else thinks that in this situation it would actually be wrong, let alone “totalitarian” for “the state” to “interpose itself” by arresting you and locking you away in jail.

I don’t imagine de Souza would find it totalitarian if we arrested people for practicing infant genital mutilation, either. Nor do I imagine that he, Dueck, or anyone else of their persuasion are troubled by the possibility that the new Religious Freedoms Ambassador will condemn, let’s say, the Saudis for arresting someone on the charge of converting to Christianity (to use one of Dueck’s examples), even though doing so would be our state “interposing itself” between the Saudi officials and their God.

We can continue with this list of examples as long as we like, but I’ll just skip to the main point: none of us actually support freedom of religion as a “first right” from which all other rights derive. At best freedom of religion is a derivative right — because we have freedom of conscience and freedom of speech, that means we must be free to believe things about the divine and to speak about those beliefs. The religious have it exactly backwards here: religious freedom flows from our other basic human rights, not the other way around.

Which is why the skeptical among us wonder why there’s an Ambassador for Religious Freedom and not an Ambassador for Freedom of Conscience, an Ambassador for Freedom of Expression, or even, for that matter, an Ambassador for Democracy.

Interestingly, the same Muslim legal interpretation which leads to the jailing of Christians in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere is also the basis of jailing and/or executing atheists. But that doesn’t seem to concern any of the religious who are so excited about the new office, and I don’t imagine it will concern the new ambassador as much, either. It’s not nearly as worrying when the Egyptians jail someone for refusing to believe in any God as it is when they jail someone for believing in the Christian God, is it?

So, the pope is retiring. Even in Canada, which is hardly a Catholic country, this apparently ranks right up there with the fact that Harper’s select senators are pilfering the public purse. Which is a story I’ll return to tomorrow. But today the press and, more importantly, the government media page are devoted to glowing retrospectives on Benedict XVI, so Sixth Estate will be, too.

On that note, I’m seriously starting to wonder who writes editorials at the Globe & Mail. Are they just incredibly dense, or is this a joke to them? Honestly, how does anyone who pays the slightest bit of attention to world affairs — and we must assume that professional journalists do — write in all seriousness that Benedict XVI “established reasonably solid reforms to prevent… sexual abuse of children,” that he has applied “real freshness” to the role of the Catholic church in the 21st century, and that he has “contributed much to the world as a writer, philosopher, and theologian”?

He has done nothing of the kind, nor could he be expected to. Benedict XVI’s tenure as a pope was a failure, as was his predecessor’s, and as his successor’s likely will be.

It was a failure because Benedict XVI combined the worst reactionary instincts of Catholic dogma with the worst of religion’s routine anti-science bias to make an incredible proclamation that a “contraception mentality” would do even greater damage to African nations, and other human societies, than HIV/AIDS.

It was a failure because he continued to adhere to one of the church’s silliest superstitions of all, the myth that people are made saints because they have performed documented miracles. Benedict anointed two Canadian saints: a long-dead Mohawk woman and a Quebecois faith healer. Kateri Tekakwitha was officially canonized on the grounds that a few years ago an American boy was cured of a life-threatening infection by means of some combination of antibiotics and intercessory prayers to Kateri’s spirit — which is sort of like saying that I quenched my thirst with a combination of water and air. Anyways, Kateri was made a saint, and so was Brother Andre, and the Canadian government fell all over itself in a humiliating display of gratitude. The Catholic Church continues to make a respectable income selling ostensibly magical fluids at Andre’s old site of business in Montreal.

But most of all, Benedict’s time in office was a failure because he took no steps to reverse the Catholic Church’s morally repugnant claim that men enjoy a divinely appointed right to occupy positions of religious authority that are banned to women.  The fact that the largest religious organization in the world, and in world history, continues in the 21st century to preach that men and women are unequal by divine right is a scandal of enormous proportions.

Fortunately, it hardly matters, because the Catholic Church’s influence is declining by the day, which is yet another thing that Benedict XVI’s far-right reign did nothing to prevent.

Every December, the government of Canada has two main functions. First, they spend an as-yet-unknown amount of taxpayer dollars granting a CF-18 fighter escort to Santa Claus, just in case some Al Qaeda sympathizers are lurking in the Barren Grounds with Stinger missiles. (A couple of years ago, Minister Jason Kenney even held a ceremony to reaffirm Santa’s Canadian citizenship, which was a blatantly illegal and seditious act on the part of Mr. Kenney, given that he was very well aware at the time that Santa did not have a Canadian citizenship card to begin with. (It wasn’t Kenney’s last fraudulent citizenship ceremony, either, and the latter one really was an attempt at deception.)

The second job is to issue a statement celebrating Christmas. Two such statements are issued: one from Stephen Harper stressing Canada’s economic performance (just to remind us that he’s an insufferably narrow-minded git) and another from Jason Kenney stressing the religious dimensions of the occasion. It’s the latter one I’ve always found particularly troubling. I have no problem with the government marking the holiday season. But exactly how much is too much when it comes to official proclamations on religious subjects from the government? Is officially proclaiming Christian theological claims to be historical facts too far for the government of a secular country?

Following the spiritual preparation and reflection of Advent, and nine months after the Incarnation, this holiday commemorates the long-awaited birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, the city of David.

Every year, Christmas unites families, friends, communities and cultures in hope and prayer for peace on Earth, and in celebration of the birth of a child whom the prophet Isaiah called the “Prince of Peace.”

In just two sentences, our dear Immigration Minister, who in reality is a jumped-up Catholic anti-abortion activist and (for God knows what reason) publicly self-proclaimed virgin, manages to establish as the official policy of the Canadian government all of the following: the composition of the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus, the actual birth of Jesus (not as easy to prove as you might think), the fact that it occurred in Bethlehem (ditto) to a virgin (also ditto), and the prophetic status of Isaiah, who, the Canadian government would have us believe, correctly predicted the birth of Christ centuries before it happened.

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Sooner or later, after any incident in which a large number of people die, a preacher who thinks he has some sort of grand insight into human nature advances something like the following claim: evil events are happening because liberals have turned their backs on God. Sometimes God is the perpetrator of the action (in the case of natural disasters), other times it’s the liberals themselves who facilitate the violence (when it’s a massacre).

Usually this claptrap is peddled by a third-rate far-right-wing club like Fox News. This time, sad to say, it’s the Globe & Mail, which, on the subject of gun violence, could apparently do no worse than to consult a rabbi:

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The Gideons have a strange knack for inciting controversy, and they’ve done it again. Ontario pundits are in a tizzy over a new human rights case filed by an atheist couple whose main purpose seems to be to get religious handouts, like Gideon Bibles, banned from schools. Actually the case is asking whether atheist pamphlets should be given the same standing as religious ones, but since school boards have banned the atheist ones and permitted the religious ones…

Anyhow, I knew it was going to come down to this eventually. Christina Blizzard, writing in the Toronto Sun, complains of “intolerance” and persecution by evil multiculturalist leftists. Namely, she feels that there’s a great deal of hypocrisy in a policy that allows Muslims to hold sex-segregated prayers in school lunchrooms — where “girls sit behind the boys and girls who are menstruating sit behind everyone” — while the Christian Bible, an “ageless work of literature that contains messages like ‘Blessed are the peacemakers,’” are banned from schools.

Ah, yes. I’ve heard this before. The Bible is a wonderful trove of morals and stories and love and beauty and blah blah blah. Note, in particular, the suggestion that Muslim prayers should be discouraged on the grounds that they are sexist, and Bibles do no harm because they preach good moral lessons. I would like, on that note, to present today’s readings from Holy Scriptures.

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Why exactly this is news I can’t imagine, because it’s been brewing for years now. It was brewing when I was living in Ontario — and I’m not anymore. But anyways, as you’ve no doubt heard by now, the Catholic Church is enraged that the provincial government is putting strings on the education money it receives in that province. Specifically, that like all other schools, Catholic schools must allow students to form so-called “gay-straight alliance” clubs if they wish, and use those clubs to reduce bullying of gay students.

The conservative media is up in arms, naturally. The Sun chain says this amounts to the bullying of the church! So does the resident Catholic priest at the National Post. Michael Coren’s rant is typical, involving a bizarre diatribe about “gay organizations” — which I assume are organizations attracted to other organizations of the same gender — and then wandering off into some strange musings about lesbians: “in some schools it is even a fashion statement to come out, and silly girls regard having a gay friend as the ultimate fashion accessory.” Yes, well.

My real point, and I’m sure many of my readers will be surprised to hear me say this, is that the Catholic Church is right. They should not be forced to practice equality if that’s not what they want. If they don’t want gay-straight alliances in their government-funded schools, they should be allowed to ban them. However, in exchange, they must tell their students that they are not allowed to have gay-straight alliances because the Catholic Church believes that homosexuality is a disgusting sin, just like using a condom or birth control pills (you know, for all that sex that I’m sure the Catholic high school students totally aren’t having). And they must tell their students that there are other schools in the province, secular schools, where gay students are treated better. In short, they can be just as discriminating as they want, as long as they’re explicit about it.

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As I trawled through the nation’s op-ed pages for my ongoing Media Bias project, I came across a true gem that’s making the rounds of its smaller community papers, a column so inane that apparently the big boys at the Toronto Sun wouldn’t touch it:

Science has Death Knell for Skeptics

by Tom Harpur

This article is an astonishing piece of hokey, superstitious claptrap. Let’s start with Harpur himself: paradoxically, an Anglican priest who believes that Jesus Christ was a myth cooked up by the early church. But apparently that doesn’t stop him from believing all manner of other nonsense, and dressing it up as “science,” for whatever good that will do him.

The gist of the article is that science has proved the existence of a soul. By “science,” Harpur doesn’t actually mean scientists. He musters all of two supposed scientists to support his position. The first is a Montreal psychologist (Harpur says “neurosurgeon”) named Mario Beauregard, whose work on the subject is technically philosophy of science, not science, and in any case amounts to a creationist-style tantrum that because science can’t currently explain every aspect of the functioning of the brain, therefore the parts science doesn’t understand — conveniently labelled with the magic word “quantum,” which is a synonym for God — must be spiritual.

And the second… well, the second is Ervin Laszlo, whom he introduces as a “Nobel Prize nominee.” Nobel Peace Prize, he should have said, and Laszlo isn’t a scientist either. Apparently he has a degree from the Sorbonne, but most of his collection of letters, if not all of them, are honourary degrees. The fact that Laszlo claims consciousness “persists” after death in the form of a “hologram” which goes on to possess “autonomous existence” after death apparently appeals to Harpur. I’m not clear what makes it “science” or why, as a skeptic, I should be persuaded to believe in this sort of preposterous hocus-pocus.

After all, everyone knows that souls don’t exist in the form of holograms. They exist in the form of avatars, which levitate from the body after death and go on to enjoy immortality in a quantum field. And that, dear readers, is pure science.

Following hard on the heels of the Prime Minister’s ridiculous endorsement of the crank claim that a long-dead Mohawk woman holds the key to curing flesh-eating disease (but only sometimes), the Globe & Mail has printed a column by Robert Joustra of the Cardus institute, a Christian right think tank, called “Beware the Secular Atheocracy.”

The article is an excellent piece of pretzel logic, and I see no reason to critique it, because I see absolutely no reason whatsoever to bother with an intellectual refutation of a representative of an organization whose statement of purpose contains the following claim:

Drawing on more than 2000 years of Christian social thought, we work to enrich and challenge public debate.

Well, we’re off to a mathematically challenged start there, aren’t we?