Boreal

FAREWELL POSTINGS

A God-free Death and Children Under Siege

January 23, 2025

Lucette declined her ordained cousin’s offer to give her the last rites.

“Faith,” Mark Twain said, “is believing in something that you know to be untrue.” Even with the end just moments away Lucette did not seek comfort in what was for her, a lie. She did not need it. The last words she wanted to hear were from the man who loved her and not from a believer in the sadist in the sky responsible for her discomfort. 

I doubt if a person’s right to a God-free death will ever be denied, but then again, I never expected during my lifetime to see the obliteration, in English-Canada, of a long-standing right to a God-free education.

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 and completely obliterated it on its behalf (see Chapter “Getting the Kids Hooked on the Irrational”, Fade to Black – Triumph of the Irrational, Boreal Book) by refusing to hear an appeal from Weber Academy against a lower court ruling that required all schools to provide “a space to pray.”

It can only get worse! Allah will not listen to a believer’s prayer, not only if they do not  perform the prayer choreography perfectly, but also if they have not performed wudu, i.e., ritual washing of feet, hands, forearms, ears, nose and hair beforehand.

The Supreme Court’s calamitous refusal to even hear arguments in defence of a God-free education means non-Muslim students, outside the province of Québec, may not be safe from the bombardment of the word of God even in school washrooms where believers must declare, prior to wudu, that what they are about to do is In the Name of God the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful, and upon completion make a declaration of faith that accentuates 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 in whatever space Muhammad’s prayer choreography is performed as the marketing genius intended.

It is also only a matter of time before a school in English-Canada, for a health reasons, as was done in Québec, enforces a no wudu in school washrooms and finds itself before a judge for interfering with the performance of prayers, for in Islam, you cannot have one without the other.

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 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.

Supreme Court of Canada will hear legal challenge on Quebec secularism law (Bill 21) CBC Jan. 23, 2025

Having made a mockery of the secular public school system in English Canada, the Supreme Court of Canada will now attempt to do the same to Québec's secular public school system. Bill 21 prohibits public officials in position of authority, such as judges, police officers and teachers, from flaunting their religious affiliation while on the job. Teachers, in particular, who insist on wearing ostentatious religious attire in front of a captive audience of children, are in a position to do irreparable harm to future generations.

CHILDREN UNDER SIEGE

(From Teach Your Children Well - The Future as a Truism and a Cliché, Boreal Books)

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. The public non-denominational school system in Canada 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.

Any study beside that of the Quran is a distraction, except the Hadiths and jurisprudence in the religion. Knowledge is what He [Muhammad] narrated to us, and anything other than that is the whispering of the Satan. Al-Qaeda.

The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge. Stephen Hawking, 1942-2018

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 for the alleged creator of everything insist are immutable truths.

The followers of these ancient questionable transmitters of revealed truths, those of the Prophet Muhammad being the most vocal, have successfully attacked the Achilles’ heel of the public school system: its openness to any subject of enquiry.

Most, if not all, religions would like nothing better than to transform classrooms into centres of religious indoctrination instead of education. Provincial governments across Canada appear more and more willing to support these faith-based initiatives that seek to eliminate a child’s last refuge from the incessant bombardment of the word of God: the public school system.

The secular public school system, in the main, teaches children and young people to think for themselves. The private faith-based system teaches children and young people 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 to follow egotistical instructions as to what we must do to gain access to a purported Paradise in the sky contained in competing texts of questionable authenticity communicated by the self-proclaimed creator of a narrowly-focused universe to flesh-and-blood favourites thousands of years ago?

If we cannot find our way to a time when most of us are willing to admit that, at the very least, we are not sure (italics his) God wrote some of our books, then we need only to count the days to Armageddon—because God has given us many more reasons to kill one another than to turn the other cheek.

Sam Harris, The End of Faith - Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, W. W. Norton & Company, 2004, p. 35.

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.

It has cost countless lives over hundreds of years to wrestle the freedoms and liberty we now enjoy from tyrants of both the secular and religious kind. Will these hard-won rights to make our own informed, reasoned choices now be carelessly cast aside within a few generations because religion wants to market its dogma to a captive audience of children.

Organized religion is not unlike a modern corporation that wants to successfully market a product. Just like modern business leaders, from sneaker salesmen to 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 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), religion wants back in, spurred on by a burgeoning Faith that will not take “no” for an answer and whose apparel is literally an article of faith, an advertisement for their preference for revealed truths, as opposed to those discovered through scientific inquiry and supported by empirical evidence that they want to parade in front children who, because of their age, cannot help but look up to them and ask questions.

Bill 21 does away with 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 their religion before they know any better. You cannot be an advocate of one and an opponent of the other. In any event, passive classroom proselytisers cannot avoid becoming the active kind when they are inevitably asked by naturally curious children why they don't show their hair, not to mention their face.

(From Remembering Uzza – If Islam Was Explained to Me in a Pub, Boreal Books)

Archie: When a god, if you believe it was a god, with a religion to sell chose a salesman to get it done, He obviously knew what He was doing.

Uzza: Muhammad was not a salesman; he was a merchant!

Archie: Same diff!

Uzza: It was this inspired choice of a person who knew how to take advantage of humanity’s cupidity and fears that ensured Islam would be the success that it is today. Muhammad, before he discovered that he had been chosen to speak on God’s behalf and implement His agenda, was a merchant, a very successful merchant. He and his Mentor understood advertising before advertising as we know it was understood. They understood how you create brand loyalty and how you get your brand out there; from using women as the equivalent of billboards to houses of worship as imposing monuments to the awesomeness of your brand, visible from almost anywhere.

Bob: By billboards, you mean by the way they dress?

Uzza: Yes.

Archie: They even allowed these billboards in schools. Teachers are role models. My daughter the other day came home from school and asked if she could wear a mask like one of her teachers because good girls cover their face and hair in public.

Bob: NO THEY DON’T!