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?

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