Editor: People rushing to the defence of Trinity Western University and its proposed law school are saying that their Christian beliefs are more important than the rights of others, without ever being able to show why those human rights which they wish to deny in any way impact their own lives. They say that discrimination is fine when done to the other guy. They back bullying, when it’s the Christian thing to do.
Religious freedom doesn`t give anyone the right to tell other people what to do. This is especially true, when such beliefs were created by men in an ignorant time when the earth was flat and illnesses and mental disorders were the result of demons and/or the sins of the parents.
That was a time when women were mere chattels, to be bought and sold, even by their fathers, for the right price. A husband, discovering his bride was not a virgin on her wedding night, was ordered by holy writ to take his bride back to her father’s doorstep, where she was to be stoned to death.
It is time to reconsider the privileged place of any religion in modern society when it violates basic human rights, such as TWU has attempted to do. At a minimum, its tax-free status should be eliminated.
I`m not threatened if gays want to be married, as it does not harm traditional marriages in any way, shape, or form. If a woman wants to control her fertility, then it is her right to do so, without pro-life activists interfering in that right.
As a secular humanist, I don’t care what you think your Bible may or may not say. For all intents and purposes, much of what is contained in the Bible could be seen as hate literature, if we were brutally honest about it.
With its dogmatic and literalist beliefs, the religious right is pure poison to any modern society when it seeks to interfere in the affairs that belong to the state. Beliefs are what you have when you don’t know anything: a better description of Christian fundamentalism I can’t imagine.
Robert T. Rock,
Mission