Canadian Atheist
Athée Canadien
Food for thought
Nov 14th
Food writer Corey Mintz hosts a dinner party with a crew of GSA activists. Guests included activists Leanne Iskander and Casy Oraa, journalists Andrea Houston and Johnathan Goldsbie, and CCLA lawyer Noa Mendelsohn Aviv.
Once everyone has some food in their bellies, they try to explain to me how this type of discrimination is allowed in Canada, in the 21st century.
“These schools are answering to the bishops,” rasps Aviv, her voice lost to a cold. “The Ministry’s in there somewhere.” That would be the Ministry of Education, which sets policy that is supposed to be followed by all Ontario schools. “It seems fairly clear that there was an unwritten ban across the province. Unfortunately for them and fortunate enough for us, that they went so far as to ban it on paper.”
Halton Catholic District School Board chair Alice Anne LeMay went further, explaining that they would also not allow Nazi groups. She later apologized.
The provincial government took no action.“They’re abdicating their responsibility,” says an emphatic Oraa. Everything he says is emphatic. “Because they’ve created this policy, specifically the one for GSAs.”
A partial transcript of the evening is posted here. It’s a good introduction for anyone not familiar with the GSA issue and separate school funding. The only cringe-worthy omission was when Andrea mentions that the CCLA and Queer Ontario have been in the fight against Catholic school funding since ‘the beginning’ when they’ve really only been at it for the last year. Atheist groups, like CFI, have been involved for years, and independent groups like CRIPE and Education Equality Ontario have been around for decades.
Vote for Canadian Atheist in the 2011 Canadian Blog Awards
Nov 13th
Last year we were honoured to take the top prize in Religion and Philosophy Canadian Blog Awards.
Voting has opened now for the 2011 awards and you can vote for this site in the following categories:
My own blog Terahertz is also nominated for Best Political Blog.
Voting closes at midnight on December 24th. I think you only get to vote once per IP address (I could be wrong, if so post in the comments).
Get out there and vote!
Good stuff from the tubes
Nov 12th
First, a tribute to Christopher Hitchens… speaks for itself. Go Hitch!
And the full PBS documentary on the Dover trial. Just watched it, it is pretty thorough, with lots of evolutiony goodness.
A grain of Sault
Nov 10th
While I’m always disappointed to hear people taking creationism/intelligent design seriously, it does represent an opportunity to challenge ignorance masquerading as open-mindedness.
A biophysicist and controversial proponent of intelligent design will speak at Algoma University next week.
Kirk Durston, a Canadian academic who heads a Christian group called the New Scholars Society, will present a pair of lectures Tuesday.
So if you’re in the Sault next week, and you have the time, there will be a question period… hopefully someone will ask some good questions.
CFI Canada announces coming changes
Nov 9th
This was just announced by newly-appointed CFI National Director Derek Pert:
Dear stakeholder, supporter, volunteer,
We have finished the relocation of our national head office in Toronto, and our efforts are now being fully directed to bringing some great new improvements.
Several weeks ago, our Board of Directors asked me to assemble and lead a representative team of stakeholders to work with an expert consulting firm, the intent being:
- To clarify and streamline our brand — what people think of us — making it easier for potential volunteers and donors to identify us as an organization they want to support
- To guide national and branch management in making effective and coordinated programming, activism, and messaging decisions, based on focused goals and long term vision
The Brand Team consisted of myself and seven others: two branch leaders Seanna Watson (Ottawa) and Jamie Williams (Vancouver); two activism leaders, Michael Kruse (Committee for the Advancement of Scientific Skepticism) and Greg Oliver (Canadian Secular Alliance); one board member, Kevin Smith (also leader of Living Without Religion in Toronto); and two exemplary, long-term volunteers, Ed Archer (Toronto) and Judy Chau (Toronto). The team worked very hard under excellent guidance and now our Board of Directors is currently reviewing and refining the proposal.
As a sneak preview, here are some of the exciting results and benefits we hope to realize in the months ahead:
- More tightly coordinated national activism and advocacy committees to educate professional and regulatory bodies about the benefits of critical thinking
- A new team of specialized spokespersons, making us the premier source for critical thinking viewpoints in the media
- New ways of engaging potential donors, with the help of a recently created Advancement Committee within the Board of Directors
- Bigger guest-speaker events featuring popular figures like James Randi
- More active volunteer recruitment at our monthly social events such as Cafe Skeptique
- The Extraordinary Claims campaign, to be launched in 2012, will be better supported by our new and clarified branding
- More opportunity for supporters to meet our Directors and other team members, and learn how their contributions are making a difference
These goals are ambitious. However, they are possible given the new leadership which our Board of Directors and I aim to provide, and the skill, talent and energy of key supporters like yourself.
We look forward to working toward these goals over the following months and ask for your continued patience while we enter this next phase of growth for the organization.
Thank you again,
Derek Pert
It’s not clear yet what this means to volunteers on the ground or the community programming that CFI Canada has established across Canada. We’ve already seen one discussion group break from CFI.
It will be interesting to see how this branding initiative gets implemented. There are definitely advantages to taking a small group and doing things behind closed doors, but CFI is playing a risky game by keeping many of its volunteers and attendees in the dark.
I do appreciate that they made the Brand Team public. They will likely receive criticism for having only two women and one person from outside Ontario.
Interesting times indeed.
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 >
Reasonable Women Vancouver branches out
Nov 6th
Edited: I made a couple errors in my original post. I’ve edited it accordingly below.
First off, I want to say that am posting this because I think it’s important news about the secular community in Vancouver. I really want to avoid hearsay, rumours, and any other gossip, especially directed at any of the groups involved. Everyone involved in this situation is still friends (as far as I know).
A couple months ago, CFI Vancouver created a discussion group for secular women in Vancouver. Their goal was to provide a safe place for women in skepticism to gather and talk.
Whether or not you agree with segregated meetups is irrelevant to this story.
Yesterday the organizer of the group, tentatively called Reasonable Women (RW) Vancouver, posted this to her Facebook page:
Reasonable Women:
We are no longer affiliated with CFI Canada, as of today. This changes some things for us when it come to financial support, organization of future events, recruitment of new members, etc. I think this is both a small set back and a great opportunity to help us redefine our goals, aims and procedures. As I stated at our previous meeting, we need to create something like a board of directors or a committee to help us manage Reasonable Women better. I would be in favour of an egalitarian, vote-based system, where all members participate.
I’m not sure the exact specifics that precipitated this change, but I think it had to do with a desire for greater autonomy for RW.
CFI has always had a corporate top-down structure. This helped it expand quickly, since a national strategy can be implemented, but it can be less responsive to local concerns. While CFI Vancouver has recently been very effective at promoting local community initiatives (with a number of successful meetups and events), those initiatives still fall within CFI’s branding and are expected to conform to the national vision. This can obviously lead to conflicts among freethinkers who each have their own goals and visions. The herding cats analogy comes quickly to mind.
While schisms like this can leave hurt feelings and frustrations, this may be a case where each group is better off focussing on their own goals. In some cases it makes sense for skeptics, humanists, atheists, etc. to pool our resources and work together, but in other cases it may be better to stick with what we’re each passionate about and try to not compete with one another.
There is also the chance that RW Vancouver can seek out support from other sources, or alternatively they can build their own membership base.
Alberta Schools: More religious than secular
Nov 3rd
Sometimes newspaper journalists can still do their jobs really well and show up us mere amateur bloggers.
Paula Simons’ piece in the Edmonton Journal last week is one of those examples. In it she investigates the policies of the various school boards across Alberta to see whether Luke Fevin’s experience in Sturgeon was the exception or the rule.
The Journal reviewed the policies and procedures of nearly all the 31 school boards that are members of the Public School Boards Association of Alberta.
Six of the school divisions encourage or support religious exercises that could include the Lord’s Prayer. Thirteen allow it with various restrictions, such as making sure students can opt out. Another five school boards impose strict restrictions on prayer in public schools or prohibit it completely. The Rocky View schools policy that says opening exercises “shall not include the recitation of any religious prayer.”
Policies and procedures related to religious exercises and instruction could not be found online for the remaining school divisions or they were unclear.
It’s good to hear the school division I attended, Rocky View, is one of the few expressly secular school boards. But we do have a province, where in 2011 nineteen different public school divisions allow the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, and that’s not counting every single publicly-funded Catholic board. Compare that to the five that understand the need for a secular education.
The article also points out the difficulty of non-Christian minorities in any rural school district in opposing prayers. They face hatred, ostracism, and all out bigotry. Simons also discusses the lack of political will to deal with the issue. What’s most concerning is that the organization with the best chance of changing this policy, the Public School Board Association of Alberta, is trying to wipe its hands of the issue, allowing local majorities to force their religious viewpoints on their entire community:
The Public School Boards Association of Alberta has no official policy on school prayer, said association president Patty Dittrick. However, the association does support the legal right of local public school boards to offer religious exercises, she said.
“We would say that these kinds of decisions are best made by local boards in response to the wishes of the local community,” Dittrick said.
This issue isn’t limited to Alberta, as the laws in Saskatchewan are nearly identical. Even in Manitoba school prayer is still coming up.
Coyne v. Haught
Nov 3rd
Debates are always such fun, but sometimes people get their noses out of joint and it ends badly. This is what seems to have occurred between Jerry Coyne and John Haught
First there was the debate. Then after the debate, Haught refused to let the video of the debate be released. Coyne made a stink about this, and this led to public outrage. Now the video has been released. Haught says he agreed to the filming, but not to releasing it on the internet, and he accuses Coyne of ad hominem attacks.
While I don’t agree with Coyne’s position (I’m a happy accommodater and I think Coyne oversimplifies not only theology but also science’s reliance on falsification) I’m also somewhat at a loss to explain what set Haught off.
It may be that he views Coyne’s directness and bluntness as improper somehow, but after viewing the debate my only assessment is that both seem to be by numbers, with their arguments.
Ho hum, tempest in a teacup… what do you think?
A Shorter Education…
Nov 2nd
It still bothers me that modern areas of the world can be so culturally behind the times. Shorter University in Georgia is forcing over 200 employees to sign a “Personal Lifestyle Statement” that rejects drug use, premarital sex, and homosexuality. This is apparently within the confines of the legal system (for now) because the university is not publicly funded. Employees who chose not to sign the statement could risk losing their job. More >
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