Greetings heathens, zealots, web denizens and the rest of you!

I’m not sure why I keep reading Holy Post from our friend competitors at the National Post as it always leaves me venting. It’s probably pathological. Like when you keep rolling your tongue over a canker. Don’t look at me like that, you know you do it too!

Often, there are proclamation this religion blog that range from the silly to the burning stupid. Today’s offering from Charles Lewis borders on that flaming attack on the brain. His thesis: secular society is a whinny, complaining bunch of malcontents who cannot take responsibility for what they do. Why, he says, the Governor of the Bank of Canada warned Canadians not to carry so much personal debt. That is just common sense, and the governor shouldn’t have to tell Canadians that. If only Canadians were a more religious bunch, why then the Bank of Canada won’t have to waste it’s breath.

That is the sort of rationale that pretty much only convincing after taking a combination to the head from Manny Pacquiao. So the Bank of Canada trying to get Canadians to think about their finances is the result of an irreligious country? Perhaps public health statements about eating right or getting a flu vaccine falls into that category too? It’s common sense. Why should any of them tell us anything? All we need to do is talk to our local priest, says Mr. Lewis, go to confession and get some tough love and we’d actually take responsibility for ourselves.

It’s utter nonsense.

First, our public institutions are secular while the citizens practice a kaleidoscope of religion. Most Canadians are religious in one form or another, fact that disarms Mr. Lewis’ rant right from the start.

The separation of church and state is what makes a western democracy work. That is what secularism is. It’s not an “anti-religion” idea, its a political notion that makes our governments and other institutions work.  There is a reason we don’t give clerics political power. Thomas Jefferson put it best when he said that “History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government.”

Lewis appears to take secularism to mean “religion is bad and must be destroyed.” It actually means the government is not in the religion business and religion is not in the government business. It’s secularism that protects the freedom of religious practice, not religion itself. Religious institutions are by their very nature exclusive, making exclusive claims upon truth. At their cores, Muslims and Catholics, for instance, cannot both be right. Two faiths linked by history make competing claims about the nature of reality.  To say nothing of unrelated religious claims by Buddhists or Hindus. What secular politics says is “We don’t care. Believe what you want.  We’ll protect your right to believe what you want. You just don’t get any political authority to impose your views on anyone else.”

I mean, look at those countries where religion is authority. Look at say, Muslim dictatorships. Now, Mr. Lewis tells us that “freedom comes from an obedience to greater truths” – why which he means religious truths, the only ones that matter to him. Well in those countries where obedience to religious truths is what runs society, we have honor killings, no civil liberties,  no real rights for women, no freedom of the press, no freedom of assembly. History has shown again and again when religion is given the big stick, freedom dies. Unless one subscribes to Mr. Lewis’ redefinition of freedom. Then oppression itself becomes “freedom.”

His statement also implies that without religion, one can have no greater truths to aspire to. This is plainly poppycock. Ideals like the right of people to decide their own fates, to choose their government, to marry whom the wish, to speak and write about subjects they choose without being censored, to live my life as I choose so long as it does no harm to others…these are manifestly NOT religious ideas. They do not come to us from a catechism or fatwa. The are instead the hard won philosophical and political ideas that begin in ancient Greece, finding modern expression during the Enlightenment and continue to be refined today. These are the high and worthy ideals that Lewis sneers at because, presumably, they do not contain nor require a belief in a god or submit to the authority of a cleric.

These ideas demand personal responsibility. When you step into the voting booth, or write a blog, or run for political office, or don’t, you are exercising that responsibility. That is what freedom is. That is what it means. It is all of us, collectively doing that, that decides and defines what society does. Your own personal choices may or may not be informed by religion. That is up to you. That is what freedom is.

He makes fairly unsubstantiated claims to demonstrate his thesis. He seems to believe, on the basis of no data (remember facts matter. Evidence matters) that people spend their days in their basements surfing porn online (why their basements I wonder? People cannot watch porn from, say, a second floor home office?) and blame sex and violence on TV for their subterranean porn habits. If only they went to see a priest who would tell them not to watch those shows, people would not watch porn and take responsibility for themselves, Lewis says.

Lets put aside for the moment the irony of Lewis saying the Bank of Canada discussing the implications of person debt with citizens is bad but a priest telling what is good and bad behavior  is good, let us ask upon what does Lewis base this lovely little anecdote? Can he produce studies that show basement dwelling porn addicted Morlocks blame network television for their online habits? If I were a betting man I would say no. This is but a sad caricature, a mongrel creation of Lewis’ own imagination that has nothing to do with, well, anything.

There is also something worth nothing about Lewis’ belief that the secularist will blame “amorphous entities” for their own behavior. A god is not an amorphous entity? Not to vent about it, but Christianity for instance is the very avoidance of responsibility. It’s core tenant is that a man was executed in the most horrible manner – a manner so horrible (as Christopher Hitchens often points out) that you would be duty bound to stop it if you could have – that absolves you for your wrong doing. That is not personal responsibility. That is very definition of scape-goating. It is placing responsibility for your wrong doing upon the shoulders of another.

One final thought – Lewis suggests that turning to the Catholic church, among other religions, to get some personality responsibility is a way to go. This is an institution that has for decades avoided responsibility over it’s own conduct when its priests rape children. While children were made and are being made, victims of crime, the church talks not about responsibility and justice but about salvation and sin – all the while shuffling sex abusers around, warning priests not to talk to police and generally trying to cover it’s own backside. Only recently the Pope declared the Catholic priest sex abuse scandal is the fault of fictional secularists from the 1970s (with a bit of nod to Catholics who fell in line with these non-religious folks) who declared that pedophilia was fine and dandy. If that is not a textbook case of avoiding responsibility, I don’t know what is. Maybe Mr. Lewis ought to think a little harder before he holds up his paragons of personal responsibility.