This article was originally published on April 17, 2008.
I’ve had just about enough of funding the religious school system. By the religious school system, of course, I mean the secular humanist one known as “public” that seeks to impose its views on people of other religious faiths. Don’t get me wrong here; it’s not that I’m against religion, it’s just that if parents want their children to be raised as atheists who worship at the shrine of moral relativism and receive the sacrament of materialism they should really stop asking me and my comrades to pay the bill.
I refer satirically, of course, to October’s Ontario election and the way in which an entirely modest proposal to allow Christian, Muslim, Jewish and other people of faith to direct their taxes to their own schools was rejected as being “segregation” and “divisive’. It really was a denial of education choice as well as a nasty example of organized bigotry.
Taxes are ours and we have a right to decide what happens to them. This already happens with Roman Catholics and other religious groups are merely asking for the same. Be warned, however, that the Separate system is moribund largely due to such funding. Roman Catholic schools in Ontario routinely turn out kids who know next to nothing about their faith and have received an education little different from that of the atheistic system.
And atheistic is what it is. Goodness me, the ignorance of some on this subject is almost laughable. History and reality teach you that nothing is neutral and that even lack of religion is itself a religion.
The public system was originally Protestant, with a strong ethos of Christian ethics. With the decline of mainline Protestantism and the post-1960s attack of education by liberalism, the public schools became, ironically, much more religious. But the faith they now taught was lack of belief, dismissal of God, abandonment of universal truth.
What can be heard from some critics is that people can be religious in their spare time. Be religious at home or on Sunday or in your place of worship. Rather like being good only at home or on Sunday or in your place of worship.
True faith informs everything someone does, from rising in the morning to sleeping at night. Only someone who has no understanding of genuine belief would say that religion is a private matter. Private is precisely what it is not. If it is only private if it is not religion at all.
Odd too that people who go on so much about the right to choose and tolerance of others seem determined to prevent religious minorities from being allowed to have control over their own money when it comes to education.
Actually, it’s just about being Canadian. As good Canadians, we people of faith have no objection to atheists having their own schools. Please be as fair, and as Canadian, to us – because it would be dreadful if people outside the country mistook Ontarians and their government for a bunch of bigots.
Join friends of Michael Coren at Facebook. His website is www.michaelcoren.com.
