Athée Canadien
Crommunist
Ian Cromwell was born in Vancouver, and has spent half his life living in Ontario. Ian's academic background is in health care and epidemiology, with a master's degree in epidemiology from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. Currently living and working in Vancouver, Ian spends his off-work time volunteering with the Centre for Inquiry and as a member of the Vancouver Secular Party. Additionally, Ian is a musician and blogger, and has been known to bust a dance move on an occasional basis.
Homepage: http://crommunist.wordpress.com
Posts by Crommunist
The religion that cried “wolf”
Jan 25th
Okay, this is just getting ridiculous now. Those of you that know me best from my work decrying racist attitudes and unraveling the code of “politely” racist statements know that I have a fairly well-developed radar for bigotry. I am not one to shrink from making the call, even in those circumstances where the room is against me and I am forced to explain myself in excruciating detail. Racism is a serious problem, and I think we should be devoting more time and attention to it, not less.
If you’ve been involved in discussions of race-based (or really, any other kind of) bigotry, it’s a good chance that you’ve been accused at some point of being “the real racist”. The argument goes something like this: if everyone just acted like race wasn’t important, it would all of a sudden cease to be a factor. I will not bother detailing the number of reasons why this position is stupid - it’s the Wile E. Coyote school of debate:
However, the ubiquity and regularity of this completely facetious line of “reasoning” has left folks like me, who deal in racism on a regular basis, with a particular sensitivity about bogus “racism” calls. There’s nothing that undermines your completely legitimate argument faster than someone saying “yeah but soandso said the same thing, and ze was full of crap!” Then you have to waste time and precious consonants explaining the many ways in which your situation is not the same as theirs.
Which is why stories like this make me mad: More >
Grasping at the funnest straws ever!
Dec 5th
I absolutely loved the first Austin Powers movie. I thought it was a brilliant piece of parody – the fact that it spawned not only the two godawful sequels and inspired a generation of people to start describing things as “shagadelic” are lamentable, but all in all I loved the movie. It’s hard to pick an absolute favourite moment from that movie, but a recent news item kind of reminded me of one particular scene. The story:
In increasingly secular Canada, how do you bring people to God? “Through parking and bathrooms,” says Scott Weatherford, lead pastor of Calgary’s First Alliance Church. He’s only half joking. On Sundays, the evangelical church’s 1,350-spot parking lot is overflowing. The $25.7-million, six-year-old campus feels more like a convention centre than a cathedral. Weekend services are high-tech, multimedia spectacles. The church provides free fair-trade coffee, with cup holders in every one of the 1,704 seats in the sanctuary. Whether it’s the caffeine, the big-screen monitors or the rock band, no one appeared to be drifting off when Mr. Weatherford, equipped with a wireless microphone and an iPad, took the stage at a recent weekend service.
The scene:
Dr. Evil – “I’m with it, I’m hip”
(Canadian Atheist’s server doesn’t like embedded videos, so you’ll have to click through)
I just love how blatant the sucking up is. “What do kids like? Let’s get some of that hippity hop music in here, and some of those Justone Beavers people keep talking about! I don’t care what they are, get fifty of them! And a bouncy castle!” It’s like watching your 60 year-old uncle try skateboarding for the first time to try and impress his midlife crisis girlfriend, or catching your mom shopping at Sirens – embarrassing and a little creepy. More >
Trudeau is “bad Catholic”, Del Mastro is just bad
Nov 7th
It’s rare that a conversation about religion enters the halls of federal Parliament, at least insofar as the beliefs of our MPs are concerned. We don’t, for example, see members of Parliament standing up and demanding re-affirmations that we keep “God keep our land glorious and free” as part of the national anthem. We’ve got more important things to do – like rush through crappy and ineffective legislation. But my sniping at Darth Harper aside, we don’t really spend a lot of time and energy discussing religious matters at that level. It’s that fact that made this story particularly interesting:
Liberal MP Justin Trudeau says he is upset and offended by a Tory MP who publicly questioned his adherence to the Catholic faith and his suitability to speak to students at a Catholic school. Dean Del Mastro, the parliamentary secretary to the Prime Minister, said on Facebook last month that it was “outrageous” the Catholic school board in Peterborough, Ont. had invited Trudeau to speak for a second time in three years.
“If they are looking for a truly great speaker, who also happens to be Catholic, perhaps they might invite [Immigration] Minister Jason Kenney,” Mr. Del Mastro wrote on Oct. 12. “Are there any tenets of the Catholic faith that Justin supports?”
Let’s hope there are very few. Maybe only the generic ones that are common to all religions (or is to too much to ask that Trudeau also thinks that faith is a bad idea too?).
Trudeau’s response was telling as well: More >
Get a job!
Oct 31st
Are you a blogger? Do you have a unique or non-redundant insight into issues related to atheism and freethought (hint: most of you are Canadian, so that’s something)? Can you produce interesting and compelling content on a regular basis? Then Hemant Mehta (the Friendly Atheist) might have an offer for you:
Me: Been writing here for a while and would love to introduce another voice or two to the interwebs…
You: A reader of this site who has a lot to say about religion/atheism/babies/etc, knows how to say it effectively, and would like to become a contributor on this site.
What’s in it for you?
The change to write for a large readership of awesome people.
Plenty of flexibility in what you talk about.
Money. Nothing crazy, but you would get paid. (Trust me, you don’t want to do this for the money. It won’t be worth it. But if you have a lot to say and think getting paid would just be a cool bonus, fantastic. In fact if you ask me about the money at all, I’m going to delete your email automatically.)
Who am I looking for?
Honestly, it’d be great to have a female voice on the site… or a student… or an expert in the law, or politics, or medicine, or the “atheist community at large”… or voices we don’t normally hear from in the blogosphere. But I’m more interested in how you write and what interests you than trying to fill a particular demographic. (Maybe that means I ask more than one of you to join.) So don’t let the beginning of this paragraph scare you away.
Speaking from experience, getting an offer like this takes your game up several notches and gets you exposed to perspectives and ideas that you might not have considered before. It’s also a giddy little thrill when your traffic increases.
Follow the link for what the application process looks like!
I hate your god
Oct 6th
I haven’t really believed in any theistic concept of a god for many years now. It took me a while to admit that I was ‘an atheist’, but I was one in fact long before I was one in name. It wasn’t until I rounded that corner that I began to really think of the implications of theistic belief. Before that happened, I fully participated in the ‘pick and choose’ attitude that I now find so galling in others – taking the bits of the articles of faith without fully thinking them through.
Now that the wool has been fully removed, however, I will not hesitate to lambaste believers in the same way I wish someone had lambasted me when I took the easy duck-out routes from having to deal with the full implications of the god I believed in. An all-powerful being that sees human suffering, suffering that it created itself, and does nothing to intervene – or does intervene but only in the most inconsequential ways – is a monster. To call your god “love” is a complete betrayal of everything virtuous and honest in that emotion. This grotesque perversion is on display no more obviously than in the headline of this story: More >
Can churches be resurrected?
Sep 22nd
As confirmed an anti-theist as I am, and as desirous as I am for a day in which religious organizations are redundant and fade into the stuff of history, I am not so blinded by my partisanship that I would deny the fact that churches do engage in positive pro-social activities. In fact, I find my cup of irritation overflowing whenever any apologist for religion (theist or otherwise) points this fact out to me, as though it was a response to what I actually am criticizing. It shows that, despite their ever-present calls for ‘tolerance’ and ‘understanding’, they are simply not listening to what the other side of the debate is saying.
It is a fact that religious organizations can count charity and social services among their many assorted activities. There is evidence to suggest that religious people are, in fact, more likely to contribute to charitable activities than atheists (although when the church itself counts as a charity, I question the true magnitude of this difference). Most religious adherents are good people who care about their fellow human beings just as you or I do. While I may question the validity of their motivation (‘because YahwAlladdha says so’ is a lousy reason to do anything, positive or negative), I will not deny the fact that homeless people, poor people at home and abroad, people undergoing family crisis, and people looking for existential guidance often receive help from churches, mosques, synagogues, and other religious institutions.
Facing declining attendance and influence, churches are undergoing their own existential crisis. What is the role of a franchise that is considered antiquated at best, and harmful at its worst? What will become of those that rely on religious organizations for aid? Is there a future for organized religion?
Dithering over diddling – British Columbia vs. Texas
Aug 11th
There was an interesting opinion article in the Vancouver Sun a few days ago after a Texas court sentenced Warren Jeffs (Trigger warning for written descriptions of child rape):
Laid bare in a Texas courtroom this week was the ugly, disturbing truth about the institutionalized pedophilia practised by polygamous leader Warren Jeffs and supported, tacitly if not overtly, by his 10,000 followers in the United States and Bountiful, B.C. Unlike British Columbia which has long failed to protect children as it dithered over whether religious freedom justifies polygamy, Texas aggressively pursued complaints about child rape and forced marriage within the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
Jeffs – the FLDS prophet – was convicted Thursday of child sexual assault and aggravated child sexual assault of a 12-year-old and a 14-year-old. He was the eighth FLDS member to be convicted in Texas since a 2008 raid on the church’s compound.
The article isn’t remarkable so much for its writing, but for the really important question it raises: how on Earth can claims for ‘freedom of religion’ even momentarily slow the mechanism of justice for those who would rape a child? Haven’t we failed as a society when we allow ourselves to get sidetracked in esoteric debates over whether the contents of your head license you to commit one of humanity’s most heinous crimes? Shouldn’t we also put on trial the law enforcement officials in Bountiful and the rest of the country who knew about what was going on and yet did not act? Members of the surrounding community that did business with the people of Bountiful and did not intervene? What about the municipal and provincial governments?
A minor point
Aug 3rd
It never fails to baffle me when people jump on the ‘attack secularists’ bandwagon with such gusto. I usually just assume that whoever is making this argument doesn’t really understand what secularism is. At its simplest, secularism means that laws will be completely neutral to the religious beliefs of those who seek legal remedy. It does not mean that hordes of secularist zealots are going to go around smashing manger scenes on people’s front lawns, or that people will have to have secret church in the basement of their local Darwin Temple, and yet that seems to be the recurring myth that gets tossed around.
We are a bit spoiled here in Canada, where our biggest religious/secular fights have to do with stuff like whether or not Sikhs are allowed to carry kirpans into court. We’re lucky not to live in a religious-majority country (at least in the political sense), where our church/state skirmishes are usually small and don’t result in major harm. We are lucky, indeed, that we don’t live in Indonesia:
An Indonesian court sent a “chilling message” Thursday by giving Muslim extremists light sentences for a vicious mob attack in which three sect members died, rights activists said. Twelve people stood trial but none faced murder charges in what human rights campaigners said was a travesty of justice in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country. The sentences ranged from between three and six months’ jail — less than prosecutors had sought and well below the maximum penalty of 12 years.
Anyone who thinks that this is me trying to make a Dawkins-style “Dear Muslimah” point about Canadian problems not being worth discussion is profoundly mistaken. Those that know me well know that I am game for pretty much any fight that I get get my blog-teeth into. I am not trying to minimize the problems that we have here, nor am I really seeking to ‘put them into perspective’. There are a lot of things to care about, and if we start ‘triaging’ the suffering of our fellow creatures, we’ll be so paralyzed with bickering that nothing will get done. There are, however, two points that I am trying to make with this news item.
Famine, Stability, Foreign Policy, and Canada’s Response
Jul 21st
This post will be somewhat out of character for me, since it’s more about politics and humanitarianism than about religion and the fun abuses associated with that. I am sticking my neck out a bit here, since this isn’t my strong suit. Please do not interpret that as a plea for clemency – I am hoping that those of you with a better grasp on international affairs will point out my errors.
There is currently a famine happening in Somalia. The word ‘famine’, like the word ‘epidemic’, has a very specific meaning:
Famine: regional failure of food production or supply, sufficient to cause a marked increase in disease and mortality due to severe lack of nutrition and necessitating emergency intervention, usually at an international level.
Note that it does not simply mean widespread hunger – Somalia (and indeed, many parts of Africa) have been experiencing that for decades now. I am intentionally avoiding talking about why that is here, but stop me in a hallway or something and ask me if you’re curious – I have a nice long rant saved up (long story short: the fault doesn’t lie in Africa). Famine means not only an inability to access food, but the complete failure of the mechanisms by which food is obtained and distributed. It is a guarantee of future hunger, with no immediate apparent domestic remedy. The World Health Organization does not throw this term around lightly, because it is an absolute disaster when it happens.
It is happening, right now, in Somalia.
When there was a disaster in Japan, the international community rallied and provided aid and support. When there was a disaster in Haiti, there was a strong response from the rest of the world. When there was a disaster in Indonesia, we rallied the troops to provide assistance.
When there is a disaster in Somalia, the response from the world has been, collectively, ‘meh’:
As humanitarian organizations ramp up relief efforts in the Horn of Africa, Canadian charities say more help is needed — fast. But they add that Canadians aren’t opening their wallets to donate to the cause. The region is experiencing its worst drought in 60 years. The United Nations says tens of thousands of people have already died in Somalia from causes related to malnutrition and more than 10.7 million people in East Africa have been affected. The Canadian government has contributed about $22 million in humanitarian assistance to the region this year, but the UN says at least $300 million is needed in the next two months to stop the spread of famine.
The slaughter of the religious
Jul 18th
Before I start this post, I’d like to apologize for my long absence. I have been traveling for work, and have struggled to find time for the other parts of my life. I am now back from my trip and my head is back in the game.
I caught this item in the news, and thought you’d all find it interesting:
A bill which would ban halal and kosher slaughter methods has passed through the Dutch parliament, despite opposition from Muslim and Jewish groups who say a ban would impinge on their religious freedoms. The bill, which was passed overwhelmingly by parliamentarians on Wednesday, still has to pass through the Dutch senate, which is unlikely before the summer recess.
The Dutch cabinet said on Monday that the law may be unenforceable in its current form due to the ambiguity of a last-minute amendment that says religious slaughter licenses can be granted if they can “prove” that it does not cause animals more pain than stunning.
There are a couple of pieces of context that are really important in understanding this news item. The first is that there has been of late a sizable anti-immigrant swing in the halls of power in Europe, and the Netherlands is no exception. The values of secular tolerance are being eroded by the rising tide of xenophobia, though to be fair not all of it is entirely unjustified. Europe seems to be particularly ill-prepared for the rapid social change that has happened over the past few decades, and as a result they are precariously close to seeing social revolt rather than gradual evolution.
(More after the jump)
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