The history of religious schools in Alberta is not one of open debate. These decisions have been made behind closed doors between government officials and religious leaders -- no public participation welcome. The most recent example was a secret document uncovered by the media in December 2007, showing that the government planned to increase funding for private religious schools...

Parents who believe that the first cowboy saddled up a triceratops have more choice as their children can attend either a faith school or a public school. On the other hand, Christians who accept evolution, non-believers, and followers of other faiths can enrol their children only in a public school. Every teaching position in a Christian school means one more fundamentalist teacher, and another teacher is out of a job...

When the Catholic school started up in Canmore in 2001, they had to share Lawrence Grassi Middle School with the public school board. The Catholic board tried to build a wall in the school and a fence in the playground to stop their children from mixing with the public school kids. Only the diligence of public school officials stopped this.

It is a great bit, and hats off to the Edmonton Journal for publishing it!

Oh, you can read the whole thing here: "Gov't surrendered choice to religious schools" or here: "Gov't surrendered choice to religious schools", so there's no excuse not to.

The Centre for Inquiry is an international group that promotes critical thought, teaching of science and the promotion of secular values. They also have a discussion forum. The Alberta chapter does not have its own site yet, but the University of Alberta Atheists and Agnostics group is affiliated with them.

I have had a number of email exchanges with Scott, and exchanged a few digital epistles with Justin Trottier, CFI Ontario's executive director.

At our atheists' meeting on Sunday, I'm going to suggest that if we make a formal organization, we affiliate ourselves with CFI, and see if we can get a series of film-screening, lectures, etc. going on around town and at the university.

No doubt there will be letters in response to Scott's article!

Local Creationists Stage Slanted Religious Debate Weekend

The recent War of the Worldviews event on religion was little more than a deviously mislabeled 2-day long endorsement of Christian literalism and sanctioned bigotry toward everyone else. This event was slanted to favour Christian literalism seemingly wherever possible, while attempting to keep up the appearance of semi-neutrality. It was run by Christian literalists, hosted at a Catholic school, and employed Christian moderators. The question-answer sessions did not allow people to question speakers directly, but required that questions be submitted to Christian literalist event organizer, Paul MacGregor, who freely admitted that the purpose of the event was to spread the word of Christ, and he would select which questions got asked and, more importantly, which didn’t.

The bias didn’t end there. Each of the non-Christian groups were subject to extensive bigotry, primarily from Christian literalist debater Dave Hunt. In terms of outright slander, Hunt ruthlessly lashed into Islam and Hinduism, accusing both of genuine evil. The bias against the humanists/atheists commenced before the debates even began. The event organizers attempted to revoke their earlier promise to the humanists for a table on which to present their pamphlets. Prior to getting a table, a humanist who was handing out pamphlets was ordered to stop as only organizations with tables could do so. The next day a Christian literalist who did not have a table was not only passing out pamphlets, but also forcing his pamphlets onto people and spreading them across the humanists’ table (they eventually got one). The organizers let all of this happen, even after the humanist who was ordered not to hand out pamphlets brought it to their attention. In addition to the bias against the humanists on the part of the organizers and Dave Hunt, there was the second-class treatment by many of the Christian attendees onto this group. Given the treatment received both from the organizers and many of the Christian attendees, a few humanists on hand claimed that they felt that the main reason they were invited was to serve as entertainment for the Christian organizers and attendees. So put off by the treatment that they received, the humanist organizations and many of the humanist attendees left the event well in advance of its conclusion. There was some solace, however, as a number of Christian attendees made a point of expressing their disappointment in the conduct of many of their fellows.

A brief comment is order regarding the pulling out of the evolution debate with Creationist Frank Sherwin. It is not uncommon practice for evolutionists to decline debates with Creationists on evolution. There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, it gives Creationism an undeserved air of scientific credibility and creates the illusion that there is actually a genuine scientific debate taking place. Secondly, the Creationists are not interested in having a scientific debate. Regardless of the counterarguments they hear on Monday, they continue to make the same points on Tuesday. They are not engaging in scientific debate. They are pushing their cultural-political agenda to expand Conservative Christianity. Hence, they deliberately misrepresent evolutionary biology, paint a picture of a dogmatic scientific community and victimization of Christian literalists, and act as if the scientists who oppose them are militant atheists. They ignore the fact that numerous church organizations (most notably the Catholic Church), the majority of religious scientists (most notably Francis Collins, evangelical Christian and director of the Human Genome Project), and the American court system are unified in the science-based conviction that evolution is real, and that Intelligent Design/Creationism are dishonest anti-scientific attempts to inject Conservative Christianity into the public education and political systems. They also fail to acknowledge that the only supporters of ID/Creationism are religious literalists. If evolution is so weak and ID/Creationism so strong, where are the atheists, agnostics and religious moderates standing up for ID/Creationism and opposing the supposed dogma of “Darwinism”?

Justin Trottier, Director of the Centre For Inquiry Ontario explains why the CFI declined to participate in the evolution debate: “The Centre for Inquiry Ontario, which was proud to supply Dr. Di Carlo as an atheist representative, declined the evolution debate for a very simple reason. Debates between ID/Creationism and evolution are political, religious or sociological debates – not scientific. They are a clash of world views, not a clash of rival science theories. What the debate ought to focus on is whether ID is science, since over 99% of biologists say it is not. By appropriating for themselves the title of science and demanding a “science debate”, the debate organizers attempted to win at the start on the very central issue that ought to be the focus of the debate. CFI was not prepared to hand them their victory by walking in the door.”

To read a collection of humanist reviews of the War of the Worldviews event, go to http://theframeproblem.wordpress.com.

Ron Brown

Ajax, ON

Justin Trottier

Director, Centre for Inquiry Ontario

Toronto, ON

This article has been endorsed by:

The Centre for Inquiry Ontario (http://www.cfiontario.org)

The Canadian Secular Alliance (http://www.secularalliance.ca)

The Clarington Durham Region Humanists (http://www.cdrh.humanists.ca)

Terry writes:

My Fellow Humanists and Freethinkers:

I would like to address our community on the events that transpired at the debates on the 23^rd.

Friday night I went to speak to the event organizer on behalf of the CFI to find out what the situation was with our setting up. From my understanding, we (the CFI) were supposed to be given a table on which we could promote ourselves; however, this did not happen - we were informed that we would have to pay $150 if we wanted a table or bring our own. From my understanding (and perhaps Justin can clarify here) we were to be given a table at no charge.

On the Friday I started to give out flyers (after asking if I could do so), but after 20 minutes I was stopped and told I could not hand out flyers without a table. I asked if I could move elsewhere, but I was told the only way I could give out flyers was if I had a table. This was a fair request (even if prior permission had be granted), for I was the only one handing out flyers and everyone else did have tables.

The debate for Friday night was appalling. Mr. Hunt proceed to systematically ad-hom attack the Hindu religion: demonizing Kali (A goddess representation of the Hindu god-force) implying she was evil and was a deceiver because she wears skulls (representations of ego), and is often portrayed with snakes; and stated that the Gurus promote self-worship. The moderator, Micheal Coren did nothing about these blatant ad-hom attacks.

The debates for that night as well as Saturday consisted of mainly what appeared to be Dave Hunt supporters (but the only evidence I have is overhearing several people saying that they were from his church) - who were there to (seemingly) support him rather than listen with an open mind. Please keep in mind this is a subjective observation with no empirical support.

Dr. DiCarlo put forth (in my opinion) an outstanding argument, but Dave Hunt did not respond to his arguments at all, he could not stay on topic constantly digressing into ‘proof' of creationism rather than offering data for god's existence. At one point he even spoke about Israel. I felt like I was at more of sermon then a debate. For those of you not there, I think Dr. DiCarlo got the best line of the night: when asked what he thinks god would say if he dies and it turns out there is a god; to this, he responded "Welcome home dude! Congratulations, you used your brain instead of being a SHEEP".

After the debate is when the trouble started. Our table was immediately swamped with fundamentalists whose only goal was to argue with us, not debate or find out information but argue. I have great respect for Dr. DiCarlo's , Mark's, and Justin's patience in dealing with these people. After some time a person approached the table and began with methodically argue with everyone who approached our table and distribute creationist pamphlets (and littering our table with them). With my experience distributing flyers without a table last night in mind, I got the event organizer. I explained to him that last night I was not allowed to distribute flyers without a table, and this man is standing here distributing pamphlets without a table and being nuisance. He said that I was standing infront of people, but I reminded him that I offered to move. To this he replied "as far as I'm concerned it's his business cards". I had to take a walk after that. Justin suggested we take off a get some coffee.

I think it's interesting to note that if you look up the domain registration information (through WHOIS) on decideforyourself.net you will find that it is registered to Thomas Fairfull whose email is hosted on fairfull.com which states that they are a foundation formed to "support Christian beliefs and values around the world starting in our own back yard", and "win lost souls for the kingdom of god" (there is also some nonsense about a Christian Zionist alliance). I think it's a bit of a contradiction to advertise "free thinking" and "decide for yourself" when you so blatantly promote the opposite.

Just a little extra. If you look back at the archive for fairfull.com (http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://fairfull.com/) it appears that the domain has been home to a number of different businesses including "hydrogen power" (under Dynamic Fuel Systems) and weight loss suplements(under unicity networks). But an investigation into all this is beyond the scope of this letter.

I know that many of us feel animosity about the debate. I know I personally feel like we were deceived into coming to provide ‘entertainment' for the Christians. As we were packing up a person from the documentary filming beside us came up to apologize (quite profusely I might add) about how his fellow Christians treated us. Justin said "I've never seen anything like this in my life". I guess I'm still in shock.

It is very important for us to recognize that we did gain from this. We handed out quite a few flyers and pamphlets , and many people were exposed to Free-Thinking that hadn't even known about it before. We stood up, with our little table with the shaky leg and said "Hey! Here's something different! Just take a look!" And in the end, it brought a smile to my face to see Free-Thinkers, Atheists, and Humanists from all walks of life sit down at a little Tim Horton's in a suburb outside Toronto and share their minds. I don't think I could be a Free-Thinker without the CDRH and people like them.

Love, Peace and Freedom to you all

-Terry Price

Terry {dot] price (at} gmail [dot) com

Note: I have edited my original review, correcting my slight misreporting of the pamphlet issue. I had written that he was said that he couldn't hand out pamphlets, not that he was denied this option because he did not have a table.