Religion

Meet Cristina Rad

May 14th

The Friendly Atheist posted this Christina Rad video; Jerry Coyne reposted it, and I’m posting it here for your enjoyment. My favourite line comes around 3:58 when Rad discusses the fact that people make assumptions about atheists just because they are atheists, “but that’s their own damn fault.”

Kudos to President Obama

May 10th

Posted by Jason in Christianity

14 comments

I have always said that if you’re riling up conservative Christians then you must be doing something right. So I applaud US President Barack Obama for his brave announcement in favour of legalizing gay marriage. Finally a president has spoken up about the last legal form of discrimination in the US. A form of discrimination only considered acceptable because it is based around a faith. Again this issue shines a light on how forgiving people can be over hate and ignorance if that hate and ignorance are faith based. It sickens me frankly and I believe hate and ignorance based on faith is considerably worse than hate and ignorance based on simple stupidity.

Politically it may have been suicide considering that now the conservative Christian right has something to rage against – progress, love, kindness, and equality. The religious reaction is interesting though because it has come in two forms – anger and excitement. Obviously no conservative Christian is going to be happy about gay marriage as it would go against everything their antiquated belief system stands for. But at the same time they certainly want this issue front and center as it is the kind of social issue that gets their people politically motivated – again to fight against all forms of progress.

I guess we know now what the 2012 Presidential election will center around and I for one am happy about it. This issue needs to be put to bed and the inevitable (and morally correct) decision needs to be made. It’s time that everyone truly does get treated equally and given equal rights under the law in the USA even if they don’t under Christianity.

It’s a beautiful day in the neighbourhood

May 9th

Posted by Zak in Religion

6 comments

University of Toronto biology professor Larry Moran has new neighbours.

The Dean knows me. She is well aware of the fact that I’m a prominent defender of evolution in the war against creationism. She also knows that I am an atheist who doesn’t shy away from the the conflict between science and atheism. She probably doesn’t know that I’m a strong supporter of the Centre for Inquiry and adviser to the University of Toronto Secular Alliance.

I put posters and banners on the wall outside my door advertising atheist events and I often post articles promoting evolution over creationism and science over religion.1 I’ll be putting up even more posters in the near future since the Faculty of Medicine has decided to send me the very people who need to hear my message.

What can you do with neighbours like this? Have some fun? Bite your tongue and get along? Multifaith centres are always dominated by Muslims so the place should only be busy on Fridays (although Muslims who lobby universities to pay for their space are the types who need to pray five times a day which could get disrupting).

Larry will plaster his doorways with opposing arguments which is probably the best solution although I’d ramp up the passive aggressiveness and fill my entire wall with Extraordinary Claims posters so my new neighbours would get the point. Maybe a giant sign that says ‘KEEP RELIGION OUT OF SCHOOLS, PLEASE’.

multi-faith

Is God Just Another Human?

May 9th

Posted by Jason in Christianity

Scientists have often wondered if the brain has a specific area for dealing with the spiritual or with “god”. Well, a Danish neurologist, Uffe Schjodt, and his team have found that talking to god (or praying), as far as our brain activity is concerned, is no different than talking to our friends and family.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) Schjodt found that the areas of the brain that activate during prayer were the same ones that activate while talking to other humans.

A couple things from Schjodt’s article stood out to me:

The brain did not evolve to communicate with invisible supernatural beings.

and

Praying, it seems, is subserved by the basic processing of our biologically evolved dispositions like other complex cultural phenomena, in this case the evolved human capacity for social cognition.

Schjodt’s article is a good read and written in a way that even us with no brain for science can understand. I find the idea that our brain processes talking to God as it does talking to other humans pretty logical and I believe it supports the belief that God is a human creation.

CBC journalist Richard Handler has a good article on Schjodt’s findings.

Jesus and his father, Hitler

May 8th

Posted by Joe in Christianity

3 comments

Freedom of expression can be a dangerous thing.

I often get in trouble myself, I tend to be critical of everything. I like pulling apart ideas, and while many people often gleefully do this, when it comes to what the other guy(~~girl~~gal:) believes, it’s often less appreciated when you’re on the receiving end. See, the thing is, when people are personally(emotionally) invested in something, they tend to see any criticism as an attack. So they defend, rather than discuss. I do this too of course, its a very human thing.

I got invited to join a demonstration promoting Gay-Straight high-school groups, it’s happening in Toronto this weekend. And I support this, largely because although I’m not gay and not in high-school, having spent a few years in a public, and fairly secular, high-school, I know that even when religion is not on the table, ‘gay’ is a pretty powerful word. It’s the kind of word young men get into physical confrontations over.

And when I say it is powerful, I mean, in two distinct ways. When I was in school, ‘gay’ was the worst thing they could call you. It was a hate-filled word and in many contexts,(online gaming comes to mind) it still very much is, powerful in that sense. Homosexuals have also embraced the word, much like I’m happy to accept labels like atheist, accommodationalist, and postmodernist, in open defiance of the negative ways these words get used.

I’m not saying they are equivalent… More >

“Catholic Education Week 2012 — More equal than others since 1841″

May 7th

Posted by Veronica in Activism

2 comments

This message, in honour of Catholic Education Week 2012, was posted on the OneSchoolSystem.org blog and on CFI’s Facebook page:

Happy Catholic Education Week 2012 (May 6-11)! God bless you premier McGuinty, Tim Hudak, and Andrea Horwath for upholding the Catholic faith above all others before and under Ontario law. You uphold Catholic school funding in the face of fiscal austerity in health care and education. You uphold this funding in the face of wage freezes for public sector employees.

Ontarians can wait a little longer for essential medical services, go without them altogether, or pay for them themselves — if they have the means. Hospital expansions and renovations can wait. Communities with both a half empty public and a half empty Catholic school can close one or the other and ship half their kids elsewhere to go to school, rather than combining the two student bodies into the best of the two buildings. School maintenance backlogs, already on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars in some school boards, can grow for a few more years yet before the schools actually start to fall down. Doctors, nurses, teachers, and other public sector employees can handle a few years of wage freezes or sub-inflation increases. Our cities can learn to do more with less.

The important thing here — the really important thing — is that all Ontario taxpayers continue to fund the promulgation of Catholic religious beliefs to the 80-90% of Catholic families who use Catholic schools but do not go to Church. God bless all of our Members of Provincial Parliament for setting proper priorities and for ignoring the majority wish to move to a single public school system for each official language. That takes a truly breathtaking combination of callousness, insensitivity, and political cowardice. In Ontario, we are fortunate to have politicians with all of these qualities in spades.

A Gift from Ontario Taxpayers

May 6th

Posted by Veronica in Catholicism

6 comments

The Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto has acknowledged Ontario taxpayers’ gift to Catholic schools:

We have a precious gift with publicly funded Catholic schools in our province that provide us an opportunity to weave the thread of faith through the halls and classroom of schools throughout Ontario.

Ontario taxpayers will be thrilled to know that they are paying for a travelling cross:

The Toronto Catholic District School Board is ushering in the new school year with a celebration to launch “The Year of Witness”, the third year of the Board’s three-year pastoral plan focusing on Word, Worship and Witness.

For the year of Witness, the students at Neil McNeil Catholic Secondary School have created a travelling cross, which will journey across the school system throughout the year, with each school having an opportunity to spend a day with the cross.

Separating the Wheat from the Chaff

May 6th

Posted by Veronica in Christianity

According to the Edmonton Journal,

Students at Sturgeon Heights Public School in St. Albert will gather in separate classrooms starting next fall where some will recite the Lord’s Prayer and others won’t, school officials have decided.

Hemant Mehta’s post, “Canadian School’s Solution to Daily Prayer: Just Put Non-Christians in a Separate Classroom,” discusses this controversial decision by the Sturgeon School Board in Alberta thoroughly.

Gay In The Bible

May 4th

Posted by Joe in Christianity

3 comments

This is a video by a gay christian called Mathew Vines. He argues, based on scripture that the Bible does not consider loving gay relationships to be evil. It’s quite compelling.