Canada Free Press, Jul 26/07

The article below was pulled the editor of the Canadian Free press (a practicing Catholic) but it is really good and worth having out there. It is honest and so hard-hitting. To bad the Canadian Free press pulled it. But by the magic of the Internet it is revived! Great work Mr. Reid!!

God, religion, punishment

Throwing bad policy after bad policy

By Gary Reid

Thursday, July 26, 2007

What do these things have in common?

The earth is but 6,000 years old and Noah took pairs of dinosaurs on board the Ark along with other animals. God is punishing the United Kingdom with floods because Britons tolerate homosexuality. God punished the United States the same way for the same reason through Hurricane Katrina. God commands you to kill your children if they talk back to you. God commands you to kill unbelievers. The Catholic Church is the one true church.

If you are a rationale person, you would have to say that the commonality in all these religious contentions is that they are simply rubbish.

Yet, more than 30 million Americans who call themselves Evangelical Christians buy into the 6,000 year-old earth belief and teach this to their children (rent the HBO-produced video, You have a friend in God, to see this in action).

The British Anglican Bishops, who apparently have greater insight into the mind of God, recently revealed the true reason for floods. However, they failed to explain God’s promise to Noah not to use floods again whenever he decided the human herd needed culling. And with respect to Katrina, we all remember the exhortations of the late Reverend Gerry Falwell on this subject.

Deuteronomy, the fifth book of Moses, and, lest we forget, the holy word of God, informs Jews of proper child rearing techniques (beating and killing). Apparently, given the three millennia survival of Judaism, Jews thought God was just kidding, or simply didn’t understand teenagers, and decided to skip over that chapter and opt for common sense.

Unfortunately, we have become all too familiar with that other book of divinely-inspired homicide, the Koran, and its prescription for the disposition of unbelievers. Finally, Pope Benedict, as unbiased an observer of religiosity as one could find, recently ticked off the world’s Protestants by reasserting the primacy of the Catholic Church.

That last one is a bit more thorny than the others because each of the faiths, and all of their sects, claim to be the one true religion. They can’t all be right.

Generally, we consider religion to be a private matter and in their homes or in the confines of their churches, mosques, tabernacles, gospel halls, kingdom halls, synagogues and temples, if these religious folks want to cling to these strange beliefs, who cares? It is only when they spill into the outside world through attempts at censorship and outright murder that we start to ask ourselves do we really need pay such deference to religions as we seem to?

I raise this in the context of the unwise election platform of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party. Its leader, John Tory, claims that by funding faith-based schools we will be inviting into the mainstream some 53,000 students now being privately taught in the beliefs of their faiths. He makes it sound as if Ontario’s public policy has excluded them.

They have always been welcome in the public school system and they are outside of it because their parents decided to separate them so that they will not be contaminated by the teaching of other knowledge that does not square with the holy books (try squaring the book of Darwin with the book of Genesis).

What Tory does not highlight is the thousands of additional students whose parents will place them in faith-based schools once public funding becomes available. It’s not just 53,000 students.

Tory recently announced his intention of hiring former premier, Bill Davis, to study the implications of funding faith-based schools. Some have condemned this move, pointing out that Davis is the person responsible for getting us into this problem by providing full funding for a Catholic school system. It has been likened to hiring the fox to reorganize the chickens.

I hope Davis never gets the appointment, because the PCs deserve to lose the election on this issue. However, I would hope, if it does come to pass, Davis will have had sufficient time to reflect on the damage he inflicted in Ontario, that he will have the courage to face the fact he did the wrong thing, and the fortitude to correct his mistake by recommending one public system, uncontaminated by any particular religious dogma.

Davis used to say, puckishly, that he was just a B student in law school. So was I, as a matter of fact. But this B student is left wondering why Davis, and now Tory, did not or do not try to square the book of education with the book of religion. Education is all about opening young minds to the possibilities in the wonders of knowledge yet to be discovered. Religion is dedicated to closing off such enquiry and shunning new knowledge that conflicts with religious convention.

Why should the public be asked to fund the closing of young minds? Why would that be in the public interest?

---

Gary Reid is a freelance writer and a public affairs consultant.

Worse today nonsense

One thing that bothers me and nags at me to respond is the claim that things in the past were better. There is almost nothing about the past that was better than it is today. There are only two things that may have been better: the tax rate (and that's recent past) and your health and love. I assume people say such silly things because when you "look back" you tend to see yourself in better shape, in more passionate love and in less quarrels with your family and friends. But to project this onto the past is absolutely bonkers.

What I am raving about is when people make claims that society is crumbling, or crime/war/etc wasn't this bad in the past. So lets think about that for a minute. A few millenia ago, most people did not last to see their 5th birthday and if they did would not live much past 40! These people lived very hard lives without "weekends" or vacations and often rationing food. In some ancient cultures there was some justice but nothing of note until the Magna Carta (which is still not the case some societies today). The idea of a fulfilling relationship was also non-existent even for many of the wealthy. To top it off, these people were powerless to help their dying children because they lacked the basic knowledge of medicine.

Therefore when someone claims (like many new agers) that these people had hidden knowledge we lack what can you do but laugh. These poor people could not save their children from dying from a simple infection. I cannot imagine a single person from the past who would not trade places with any of us (1st world countries of course) since we live in more luxury and safety than even the kings of old.

Then there are the people who claim that the more immediate past was better. This is either self-delusion or they miss religion's dominance. The latter I can at least sympathize with since as more people become educated and taught to think they are not likely to be convinced about
"ancient wisdom". But if this is what they miss they should simply state it instead of statements about the crime rate. Which brings me to the deluded bunch. Our crime rate is at an all time low and keeps going down to the point that we need to look at national or international news to hear about the extraordinary crimes. The world is richer (although the gap is worse since some countries still toil in ancient type conditions) and safer than it has even been. There are less mass wars (which claim many more lives than current conflicts) and less international hostility.

It's too bad people don't realize the fantastic times we live in thanks to science and reason, they are really missing out.

The Iraq war: a lesson for scientists and smart people

Evnen with far superior man/fire power and the intention to overthrow a brutal dictator the US lost the war, but won the battle. Most agree this is because they did not win the "hearts and minds" of th population. This is a good analogy for the evolution propaganda (it's not a debate, if you believe it is go directly to school, do not pass go) since although we have the very best army of facts and evidence it doesn't guarantee victory. Unfortunately we are pitted against a clever amorphous insurgency of irrational dogma that is appealing to some who lack proper education or simply desire power for themselves over others. Because these ideas and perpetrators can hide in the amongst the population we must battle them tactfully to win them over for all our sakes. In my opinion this requires outreach. We must go into the trenches and weed out these ideas and expose "righteous" claims as false, harmful and simply a power play. Many people's view changes when they realize their child's life could be endangered by such ideas.

As an example for the science (not Iraq part), the belief in creationism implies that vaccines are useless since it is god's will to give the virus and that no virus can evolve to jump the species barrier. Also many drugs are made by evolving bacteria to manufacture the drug. Most people are not religious enough to stake their child's life on their superstitions and so see a doctor not priest or imam when they get sick. Not teaching evolution needlessly delays progress on cures due to the social and economic problems that our society incurs, but to win the hearts and minds we must build and understanding and relationship with them to win them over.

What the bleep are people thinking!?!

For a CFI event I watched What the bleep do we know in order to give smart non-scientists tools to debate the pseudoscience of this type. But I had no idea a "movie" could be that painful.It wasn't so much that the acting was poor and the dialog unnatural, but the intermix of "experts" and story was cinematic garbage and very irritating. It was very hard to watch. I get get some pointers about how to make nonsense sound reasonable (which I use when I take a more outragous position than the person I'm debating with, like they say there is a god and so I claim there are 3.1415 gods :-)

The movie debunks itself and to make it more authentic it should have cation when people where talking advertising their book since the whole thing was really an 1:45 minute infomercial about pseudoscience books (except for David Albert who is a really intelligent guy and who's book Quantum Mechanics and Experience is really a very good science read). If these people could really change reality why would they still be crackpots on an infomercial? Why wouldn't they just prove what they can do and walk on water or crack 128-bit encryption. The funniest disprove of the whole thing was if someone could will things, by shear belief, to happen wouldn't
Iraq be a stable democracy (maybe th quantum effects get washed away by a nearby crucifix).

While the whole things is a shell of truth over a hard core of lies plenty of people buy it. I guess the appropriate saying is: "A fool and his money are soon parted."