Sep 12
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ChristianGovernance eletter – September 8, 2012
Evangelical Fellowship of Canada president Bruce Clemenger’s latest Faith Today column (Sept./Oct.), had an annoying headline: “Faith and Public Debate: Should faith-based arguments be excluded from public debates.” If you have been reading our analysis, you know that this is an absurd non-question because there’s no such thing as a non-faith-based argument. Mr. Clemenger says he was recently asked this question by a journalist. Obviously what was meant was traditional religion (like Christian or Muslim) arguments as opposed to reason-based arguments. You know, the kind that humanists and atheists come up with. This question itself is, therefore, extremely biased, locking the Christian respondent into a marginalizing position if he accepts the premise of the question, and attempts to answer it as given. Most Christians will do this because they don’t see the bias. That’s because they don’t have a worldview framework for processing ideas. Mr. Clemenger writes about the question: “It’s a good one.” No, it’s not. It’s a biased question. It is itself a faith-based question and, as such, it’s an anti-Christian question, framed to make Humanism look like a superior basis for Canada’s public policy and ethics. (There were some comments I liked and some I didn’t like in Mr. Clemenger’s column, but this is the only point I want to address here.)