May 10
22
Secular fundamentalists want to suppress all other public religion
Secular humanists appear to be as exclusivist and fundamentalist as the religions they despise. Humanists are quickly becoming the leading enemies of pluralism and tolerance. Authentic Christians, though they don’t tolerate the perversion embraced by many humanists, remain the more tolerant and charitable members of Canadian society. Excerpts from two illustrative articles appear below:
The Montreal Gazette – May 20, 2010
Secularists perceive a threat: Beware the return of religious practices, says organizer of three-day conference
By Marian Scott
Quebecers fought hard to free themselves from the Roman Catholic Church’s control during the Quiet Revolution and they must prevent newcomers from imposing religious values here again, speakers said last night at the start of a three-day conference on secularism. “We must not let other religious groups bring back religious practices,” said conference organizer Djemila Benhabib, co-founder of the Collectif citoyen pour l’égalité et la laïcité (CCIEL). “The rights of women, children and homosexuals are threatened by the demands of reasonable accommodation,” Benhabib told an audience of about 225 at the Bibliothèque Nationale.
The journalist is the author of Ma vie à contre-Coran, a critique of Islamic fundamentalism. She fled Algeria in the 1990s under a death threat. Her group is part of a diverse coalition of feminists, Quebec nationalists, defenders of gay rights and anti-immigration activists calling on the government to ban all religious symbols and teachings from the public sphere. Quebec’s Conseil du statut de la femme helped pay for the conference along with the French consulate. The movement also has support from public-sector unions and media personalities including columnists Marie-Claire Lortie of La Presse and Richard Martineau of the Journal de Montréal, who moderated panels at the conference. In March, 100 intellectuals signed a manifesto calling for Quebec to adopt a charter of secularism that would ban all vestiges of religion from the public sphere.
Read the complete article here.
Winnipeg Free Press – May 15, 2010
Early Christians’ love for others helped spread the faith
By John Longhurst
… What Petroski has done for commonplace items like forks and pencils, Rodney Stark has done for the history of Christianity. In his landmark book, The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal, Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force, Stark shows how the church came to be – how it grew from a ragtag band of 12 disciples after the death of Jesus to more than six million believers in just a couple of hundred years. For Stark, director of the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, the growth of the early church can be explained by how Christians responded to the world around them. Key factors that contributed to its dramatic rise included the way it treated women, the love and care the early Christians showed for others and the way early Christians lived by higher ethical and moral standards than the surrounding culture.
In a 2000 interview, reprinted on Christianity.ca, Stark elaborated on his thesis. The church, he said, was attractive to non-believers because it made the ancient world “a lot more bearable… what Christians did was take care of each other. Christians loved one another, and when they got sick they took care of each other. Someone brought you soup. You can do an enormous amount to relieve those miseries if you look after each other.” When plagues struck, the early Christians extended the same care for others, staying in the cities to care for the sick and dying. According to Stark, the way Christians selflessly cared for the sick left a powerful impression on their neighbours.
The new faith was also was very attractive for women – a vulnerable group in the Roman world at that time. “Abortion was a huge killer of women in this period, but Christian women were spared that,” he stated, noting infanticide was also a terrible problem. “We’ve unearthed sewers clogged with the bones of newborn girls. But Christians prohibited this.” Christian women also had “tremendous advantages compared to the women next door,” he said, adding that non-Christian girls could be married as young as 11, but Christian girls could wait until the age of 18. As a result, “a disproportionate number of the early Christians were women,” he said.
Read the complete article here.