Boreal

FADE TO BLACK

Triumph of the Irrational

Getting the Kids Hooked on the Irrational

Teach your children well

Children are our future

Teach them well and let them lead the way

Greatest Love of All by Whitney Houston

Lyrics by Michael Masser and Linda Creed

It is both a truism and a cliché that children are the future, and that future will be shaped in the classroom whether that classroom is a madrassa in Pakistan or a god-free public school like you find in the West.

The Western non-denominational school system is both the strength and the Achilles’ heel of our democratic collective. The strength can be found in schools where children are still taught that the human journey is a journey in the pursuit of knowledge through scientific inquiry and critical thinking; each generation responsible for taking that additional step in the direction of an elusive, ultimate truth which, if ever discovered, would mean the end of the human journey as we know it.

The empirical pursuit of knowledge about our universe and our place in it, a gift from the Greeks of antiquity rediscovered during the Renaissance and the period known as the Enlightenment, is facing a serious challenge from those who believe that this wrong-headed pursuit ended thousands of years ago when the shaper of the universe himself revealed all we need to know about everything to a favoured few.

They would have us now simply sit back and wait for the promised reward of a make-believe afterlife for our uncritical acceptance of what these self-proclaimed mouthpieces of the alleged creator of everything insist are immutable truths.

Of the followers of these ancient questionable transmitters of revealed truths, those of the Prophet Muhammad have been the most uncompromising in attacking the Achilles’ heel of the public school system: its openness to any subject of enquiry. Most religions, Islam being the most insistent, would like nothing better than to transform classrooms into centres of religious indoctrination.

Organized religion is not unlike a modern corporation that wants to successfully market a product. Just like modern business leaders, from the hamburger to the sugared water peddlers, religious leaders know that the best time to get the consumer to buy into their message, their product, is to get them hooked on their brand while that consumer is still a child, or an adolescent in an environment that will make them more receptive, indeed captive, to their advertising.

The secular public school system, in the main, teaches children and young people to think for themselves. Religious schools teach students to let a god do much of their thinking for them.

Can democracy, let alone humanity, survive generations raised to blindly accept specious conclusions as to the meaning of life and the need to worship and obey an invisible fickle friend in the sky who communicates through favoured human intermediaries?

If children are not exposed to and learn to appreciate the values inherent in a secular, democratic society free from religion’s nefarious influence, then religion will return with a vengeance and all we be lost, and that is what is happening in large parts of Canada. 

The American and French Revolutions brought some measure of protection for children from adults wishing to bring their conflicting religious ideologies into the classroom by banning most religious instruction in public schools.

After more than a hundred years of relative calm in Western classrooms, with a focus on learning and the development of critical thought (religion’s nemesis), Islam wants back in and will not take “no” for an answer, and weak governments like Canada, who can’t say no to a bully, are happy to let them compromise what good men and women died for.

One of the ways Islam seeks to reach children during their formative years is by insisting that teachers who believe in revealed truths, as opposed to those discovered through scientific inquiry and supported by empirical evidence, be allowed to advertise their preference for the proof-free kind to those who, because of their age, cannot help but look up to them and trust them.

The argument whereby mere exposure to certain ideas does not lead to coercion, since the individual is capable of critically judging such ideas, is undoubtedly true in the case of adults, but much less so in the case of young children. That these ideas are presented to the children in the public school inevitably makes the children think that the school approves [of] them.

José Woehrling, Law Professor, University of Montréal

France passed a law, in the face of mainly Muslim opposition, forbidding conspicuous religious symbols (Islamic scarves, Jewish skull caps, Sikh turbans, large Christian crosses, etc.) in public classrooms. The French-Speaking province of Québec, to the consternation of English-Canada which has no such prohibition, passed a similar law, Bill 21 - An Act respecting the laicity of the State.

Almost immediately the English media and Muslim associations made the now ubiquitous accusation of racism, that the Bill disproportionately affected visible minorities. It does not, of course! Christians in general and Catholics in particular, if they ignored their scriptures’ admonition to give Caesar his due, would be the most affected.

Matthew 22:21 Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's.

This phrase defines the relationship between Christianity and the State as two separate jurisdictions. Islam makes no such distinction. Islam will not acknowledge Caesar’s role except as a subservient in the management of human affairs.

33:36 It is not up to any believer, man or woman, when Allah and His Messenger have passed a judgement, to have any choice in their affairs. Whoever disobeys Allah and His Messenger have gone astray in a manifest manner. 

The accusation of racism, whenever there is an attempt to limit Islam’s influence, is designed to obscure the fact that the fight that is being waged everywhere a separation of Church and State still exists, if only tenuously, is about Islam having a God-given right to be omnipresent and the State powerless to intervene. Those who refuse to grant Caesar his due would have you believe that it is a matter of human rights. It isn’t! It is a matter of jurisdiction.

If we are to have any hope of impeding the triumph of the irrational, it is imperative that we stop the passive proselytising to a captive, receptive audience of school children in an ostensibly secular learning environment. Both passive and active pedagogical proselytisers seek the same outcome: getting the kids hooked on religion before they know any better. You cannot be an advocate of one and an opponent of the other.

Passive classroom proselytisers cannot avoid becoming the active kind when they are inevitably asked, for example, by naturally curious children why they don't show their hair, not to mention their face.

The Battering Ram

Supreme Court reaffirms religious liberty in Canada (but not Quebec) Court upholds the right of Muslim students to pray at Calgary private school National Post, March 28, 2024

This was after two Muslim students deliberately enrolled in a private nondenominational school then appealed the school’s decision to stand by its Charter and not make an exception for the uber religion and provide them with “a space to pray.”

61:9 It is He Who sent His Messenger forth with the guidance and the religion of truth, to make it triumph over every religion.

Islam had only been moderately successful in English-Canada—Toronto area schools mostly—in using prayers as a battering ram to breach the wall that used to exist between Church and State in Canada’s public school system until the Supreme Court of Canada stepped in with its superior powers and completely obliterated it on its behalf.

The Supreme Court ruled that, not only public schools boards must bow to the demands of a religion that does not recognize the separation of Church and State, but private nondenominational schools as well. It interpreted the Canadian Charter of Rights’ guarantee of freedom of religion as being preponderant to any other rights, even what many people believed was a right to be free from religion that the ostensibly secular public school system made possible.

With its far-reaching decision, the Court not only betrayed the wishes of a majority of Canadians but of a significant minority of Muslim Canadians as well. In a 2016 Environics' Survey of Muslims in Canada, 25 percent said NO when asked “Should Muslims in Canada have the right to pray in public schools?”

The Court’s ruling means that religion can be omnipresent and there is nothing the State can do about it. The ruling is a tremendous victory for Islam.

You should be able to make out the all caps threat "RESPECT EXISTANCE OR EXPECT RESISTANCE" on the back of the garment of the woman in the foreground. The Arabic is assumed to make the same threat, and not contain any deliberate typos.

There are three overriding conditions which mandate active resistance on the part of believers. The most worrisome and intimidating for the Western World is the third prerequisite.

1. To defend your community or nation from aggressors.

2. To liberate people living under oppressive regimes.

3. To remove any government that will not allow the free practice of Islam within its borders.

Threats in English-Canada are no longer necessary as all provinces, except the province of Québec, have agreed not only to allow believers to interrupt their studies to pray but also to provide them with the space to do so as required by the Supreme Court decision.

In rendering its decision, the Court not only completely abandoned the 25% of Muslims who did not want prayers in school, but the vast majority of Canadians, including immigrants who worried about Islam’s intrusion where it had no business. The people in the following photograph demonstrating against having their schools transformed into madrassas were accused of racism; an accusation that Islam usually reserves for people with light complexions

.

A Muslim student of the school where the protest was held, with the fawning approval of his mother writing  in Canada's newspaper of record, made the same accusation, that it’s white people who object to prayers in schools and should they complain, they will be violently dealt with by non-white students. Is Islam trying to start a race war? It’s in the last paragraph.

Why police now attend my son’s Muslim prayer space at school by Shirren Ahmed, Globe and Mail, Apr. 26, 2017

My eldest son is in Grade 11 and attends Jummah at his high school (Peel school district). On Fridays, he gets up early, showers and wears clean clothes, usually jeans and a shirt that does not require ironing. Some weeks he is the khateeb, the person who delivers the sermon (or khutbah). He loves it and I am happy he has an opportunity to practice his faith in a safe space…

I never thought these Friday rituals would become a trigger for self-proclaimed secularists and I certainly never expected that Jummah would become a reason to manipulate and terrorize children…

When I wondered aloud if he’d consider not going to Jummah, he paused for a nanosecond before snorting at my suggestion.

“Stop going to Jummah? Seriously?

Nah.” “Mama,” he said, looking me square in the eyes, “if a guy came to our Jummah and started spewing hate and being violent, he would literally have 300 brown and black kids jump at him.”

South Asian children, brown kids, are the majority at the school in question and the most visible and vocal protestors against the attack on the secular public school system were undoubtedly their parents or relations. Of course, their demands that the school remain secular were ignored, not being practitioners of a religion with a tradition of violence when its demands are not met.

Another school board that chose to ignore the wishes of the majority to placate an intolerant, vocal growing minority was the Toronto School board, Canada’s largest.

Toronto’s Valley Park Middle School transformed the student cafeteria into the equivalent of a mosque for the purpose of Friday services. Only males are allowed to preach and lead the reward seekers in prayer, unless it's an all-female assembly and a member of the superior gender is not available.

In the Islamic world women's unequal status is affirmed every day during prayers. With the Supreme Court's decision, expect more of the following degrading spectacles in public and private schools across English-Canada.

In the photograph, boys are in the front. In the back, separated by benches, are girls, and still further back are girls who are not praying, for there is no point, it's their time of the month. Allah will not listen to females who are menstruating and expects them to be kept as far away as possible from those worshipping his Almightiness.

 Non-Muslim students can be expected to be drawn to that demeaning spectacle next door by the choreography and the loud worship and preaching. Parents worry about what their children will pick up on the street; they should not have to worry what they may pick up at school.

Not to be overlooked is the significance of the Friday prayers and sermon. I will let Uzza, of Remembering Uzza fame, explain.

Uzza: By accommodating prayers and Friday worship within the secular school system, the West made a mockery of a secular education. Everyone who attended was exposed to the bombardment of the word of God and to the Islamist’s credo that any study besides that of the Koran and the sayings and example of Muhammad is doing what the devil wants us to do.

Archie: That’s enough to convince me − that, and the angels as beheaders − that Islam has it backwards. Either devils are the good guys or, if you believe in the nonsense of what you call revealed truths, the Koran is the work of the Devil to make angels and all that is good, bad.

Gerry: Timothy Findley made more or less the same argument in Not Wanted on the Voyage, about the devils and their leader Lucifer being the good guys who lost the battle with the bad guys, Yahweh’s angels, which is why there is so much misery in the world. He died an old celebrated author. But I doubt you will live to a ripe old age, Archie, if you say the same thing about the Koran having it backwards.

Archie: I know. The people at Charlie Hebdo never went that far and look what happened to them. Findley was lucky to live at a time before freedom of expression had to be god-friendly “or else.”

Bob: Don’t you mean Satan-friendly?

Archie: Shut up!

Uzza: It does not matter, Archie. What matters is that the believers not only succeeded in getting governments to enforce, to use your expression, “god-friendly freedom of expression,” but to make everywhere welcoming of God including what had previously been a god-free zone, the secular public school. In doing so, it downgraded reason in favour of dogma, thereby making its eventual triumph over reason a foregone conclusion.

Gerry: Whitney Houston said it best in song: “Teach your children well and let them lead the way.” But we didn’t do that, did we, teach them well?

Uzza: From an Islamist's point of view, we did very well!

...

Bob: Prayers are prayers. Big deal!

Uzza: In Islam they are a big deal for the believers and should be an even bigger deal for unbelievers, for the prayers are mainly about them. Prayers in Islam involve repeating verses from the Koran, including the verses that reek of hatred for unbelievers and which appear on almost every page of what is a short holy book, by holy book standards, at about 1/10 the size in words of the Bible. You are about to be smothered by a religion that tolerates no equal and you do not even know the significance of its most basic rituals: the daily prayers and the Friday sermon.

Bob: Sorry I asked.

Gerry: What about the sermon?

Uzza: The sermon can be in whatever language and is subject to laws regarding hate speech, if you dare to bring it up.

Gerry: At least that part everyone can understand.

Uzza: Not always. Remember the Alamo?

Bob: Uzza, you've had too much to drink.

Uzza: “Remember the Alamo” was a way of reminding people about why they should hate the Mexicans during Texas' fight for independence from Mexico. It meant something to those who understood what the cry was all about and nothing to those who knew nothing about the famous battle.

Gerry: [getting Uzza's drift] But the believers won the battle of Badr?

Uzza: It does not matter. If I say "Remember Badr" or even more evocative battles to come where Jews and Christians are the targets, I am telling, reminding those who know their Koran who they should hate and who they must subdue, if not behead, when the opportunity arises and they are at their mercy.

...

Gerry: How do you stop the Friday school sermon preachers from using expressions whose message of hate and invitation to murder in Allah’s Cause is so cleverly camouflaged?

Uzza: [raising her voice] EASY! DON'T ALLOW RELIGION IN SCHOOLS!

Archie: A bit late for that, isn't it?

Uzza: A secular education free from the bombardment of the word of God was our only hope of undoing the damage done at home. Instead, we made sure the damage was permanent.

Archie: How?

Uzza: The Friday sermon can be a source of diabolic inspiration and a confidence booster for those in the know, but it is Islamic prayers in schools that do the most damage by reinforcing a child’s confidence in the revealed truths he or she read or mouthed under the not-always-gentle tutelage of his or her mother. Revealed truths are reason’s opposite; they cannot coexist. One must triumph over the other. By allowing prayers in schools supposedly dedicated to teaching children to think for themselves, we facilitated the triumph of dogma over reason.

The Supreme Court’s calamitous prayer decision means non-Muslim students, outside the province of Québec, may not be safe from the bombardment of the word of God in school washroom where believers will shout the required In the Name of God the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful before starting their wudu session and ending it with a declaration about their faith and their separateness.

I testify that there is no god but Allah, and I also testify that Muhammad is His servant and messenger.

O Allah, make me among those who seek repentance and make me among those who purify themselves.

Believers are also bound to be asked by the perplexed why they are washing their feet in the sink, blowing water out of their nose, cleaning out their ears, etc., only to be lectured about god and worship. It will also become the subject of conversation outside the lavatory and outside whatever room Muhammad’s prayer choreography is performed as the marketing genius intended.

Should anyone object to performing wudu in washrooms in schools, expect the next demand to be the right for believers to wash their feet and hair, clean their nostrils and ear canal etc. in school sinks before prayer or to be provided with the type of wudu facilities found in mosques which "typically consists of an open square washroom with a drain in the middle and taps on each side of the room"^Wiki.

This of course will not be a problem in Québec schools. In 2006, a human rights complaint was filed with the Québec Human Rights Commission (Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse) asking the Commission to find fault with the School of Engineering of the University of Quebec (l'École de technologie supérieure) for denying Muslims the right to wash their feet in the school's washroom sinks, and that signs prohibiting such activities were a slight against Muslims.

The complainants were particularly indignant about the pictogram on the left showing a pair of feet in a sink which reads (my translation): "Washing of feet in sinks is prohibited." The director of the school gave the following reason for authorizing the solidly anchored sign:

“Employees and students had complained that the bathrooms were a mess after the ritual washing of feet before prayer. I even had to intervene to stop someone from washing his feet in the sink, he already had one foot in the sink … posters that requested that the room be kept clean routinely disappeared which is why I authorised a plaque with the pictogram to be screwed to the wall.”

The school argued that the interdiction against washing your feet in a public sink was a question of health (hygiene) and safety and the Commission agreed. The Commission not only agreed that washing one’s feet in a public washroom sink was a health issue, but that the pictogram made this clear to even those who could not read French or were illiterate and was not meant to discriminate against any group. A rare example of the rational imposing its will on the irrational.

Unlike his fellow judges, the Hon Mahmud Jamal, a Muslim, had to know the repercussions of this momentous decision, yet he did not recuse himself or offer a dissenting opinion that would have reasserted the separation of Church and State. Does not bode well for future challenges to the authority of an ostensibly secular state.

Islam’s assault on a strictly secular secondary and college level public education is not where the greatest danger lies. So far, Islamists have not demanded that children in primary schools be allowed to perform the understandably complicated choreography of the prayers.

Islamist have, however, started using the prayer battering ram to assert what it believes is its God-given right to perform its prayer play anywhere it bloody well pleases; at a public train station for example. 

Via Rail is apologizing after a video surfaced online of a Muslim man being told he couldn't pray inside the Ottawa train station, but the National Council of Canadian Muslims says an apology isn't enough.

CBC March 22, 2023.

The whole thing appears to have been a setup. Expect the Supreme Court to agree with the wielders of the battering ram, and to do to the public space what it did to the public school system by completing what they started.

A Cautionary Tale

Before the province of Québec decided to pass legislation to limit Islam’s influence on students of all ages, it tried another tack that proved disastrous to the intellectual development of critical thinking among students. An Act respecting the laicity of the State could be considered an attempt by the government of François Legault to curtail the damage done by a previous government that reintroduced, in 2008, the teaching of religion in the public school system.

Almost a decade after the introduction of a mandatory religious study course in the primary and secondary grades, alarms were raised about its deleterious impact on students' intellectual development. La face cachée du cours Éthique et culture religieuse (The Hidden Face of the Ethics and Religious Culture Course – my translation) brought together academics and others who have firsthand experience of the impact of indoctrinating teens and pre-teens under the guise of teaching tolerance of other religions and cultures.

François Doyon, a college professor of philosophy, writes about the “deplorable effects” of a course in which “ignorance is disguised as tolerance [and] we teach to believe without proof and act without thinking.” The professor goes on to explain that the children raised on the new curriculum think very differently than their predecessors, not caring, when they get to college (i.e., CEGEP), to debate what their faith or the faith of another might deny.

Daniel Baril points to the “educational materials” used as contributing factors: “twenty manuals or so which elevate religiousness at the expense of non-belief, atheism, humanism, a life without religion which are not mentioned anywhere.” He worries about what this means for the future of a secular school system, and rightly so.

Sylvie Midavaine argues that such courses are “Trojan horses meant to facilitate the takeover of the secular by the religious.” She makes another comparison similar to one I made when the program was first introduced: that the ultimate goal is selling religion to a captive audience.

Of the fifteen contributors to La face cachée du cours Éthique et culture religieuse, André Gagné, a religious scholar at Concordia, makes the most alarming observation about how such a program makes children more susceptible to radicalisation.

It is only by teaching children to question the validity of scriptures that we protect them from being influenced by fundamentalist doctrines. It is precisely the lack of critical thinking (when it comes to scriptures) which leads to radicalism.