A rchive Date
[ 22-07-2006 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[http://www.torontosun.com/News/Columnists/Coren_Michael/2006/07/22/1696857.html
Spare us from the God-haters
By MICHAEL COREN
Sat, July 22, 2006
In West Virginia local activists are trying to remove a picture of Jesus that has hung on the wall of a local school for many years. Various so-called civil liberties groups claim that such a portrait is an infringement of basic human rights.
Elsewhere in the United States assorted opponents of organized religion have been fighting for decades to ban prayer in schools, to force teachers to take down copies of The Ten Commandments from classrooms and to eliminate all mentions of God from public halls and meeting places.
In Canada, in a small town in Ontario, an organized group used ropes, a chain and a large vehicle to rip a cross from a war memorial outside the local legion hall. It was the second time this had taken place. There are constant efforts to ban prayer from political chambers and under Liberal rule, of course, the very idea of faith in public life was anathema.
The irony of the Canadian opposition is that it tends to come from people who are on the left of the political spectrum, who are invariably opposed to most things American. Yet the very idea of the separation of church and state has never been part of the Canadian approach to politics and is quintessentially American. Even south of the border, however, the idea has been either misunderstood or purposely misinterpreted.
It was never intended to protect the state from the church but the very opposite. The state church, Anglicanism, had persecuted evangelical and Catholic believers in Britain and thus the overwhelmingly Christian founders of the United States wanted to guarantee that the same errors were not repeated.
They saw the state as being fundamentally Christian, with a constitution based on the laws of God. It is that constitution that militant atheists are now trying to exploit to attack the very foundations upon which it was conceived.
Certain basics should be observed in all this. First, the people who are working so hard to reject Christianity are generally not people of other religions but people of no religion at all. Seldom if ever do observant Jews, Muslims, Hindus or anybody else bemoan the influence of Christianity.
What pluralism has never understood is that different strands of religious enthusiasm tend to unite rather than divide people. It is the complete absence of belief that smashes the culture into broken pieces of what is otherwise a quite beautiful stained glass window.
Second, the God-haters have yet to give any plausible examples of how the mingling of church and state actually harm society, culture and people.
In schools, for example, where the war is particularly intense, we seem to almost encourage children to dress as miniature hookers or pimps. Violence, drug use, sexual promiscuity and academic failure are colossal problems.
If it can be shown that prayers or commandments or a belief in a higher power are bringing on all these problems then perhaps there is an argument to remove them. But all of the evidence shows that the more religious the school and the student, the less likely the chance of anti-social behavior, criminal activity and, well, sheer stupidity.
This is not some courageous war by freethinkers against the establishment but a spiteful campaign to impose a failure to believe on the mass of North American people, irrespective of what they want and how much damage it may do. Selfishness in the guise of nobility. So sad.
You can e-mail Michael Coren through his website, http://www.michaelcoren.com
Have a letter for the editor? E-mail it to editor@tor.sunpub.com
 World Fact Book (CIA]
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