There is a trend lately, almost like a last-ditch stand it is so wobbly, to define secularism as just another religion. In fact Margaret Somerville's latest Edmonton Journal column characterizes humanism, science and even sports, "especially c
The obvious logical fallacy here is that if beliefs, life-styles, entertainment, world-views, everything constitutes religion, then there is no such thing as religion.
But we all know that isn't true. We all know there are such things as religions and secularism is not one of them. Religion has arrogated (shades of arrogant?) for itself the entire realm of ethics and morality: it does not want to debate issues because it knows the moral truths beforehand, by divine revelation or fiat-by-prelate claiming divine authority. A great many harms have been enabled by such ideas proliferating under the authoritarian regimes of kings and popes.
Democracy has been an offset to this arbitrary power but democracy does not oppose itself to morals and ethics: it has a different version of what constitutes them.
A recent Gazette letter writer referred to safe abortion as 'baby-killing,' a highly biased characterization as no one could possibly mistake an early-stage fetus for a baby. Like-minded people, including Somerville are not impressed with the other side of the argument: the painful deaths of women in the millions who cannot bear the burden of more children and resort to primitive methods, or who simply die at a later stage of pregnancy.
The Catholic Cardinal Marc Ouellet has just recently presented his view that abortion is not justified even when pregnancy is the result of rape. Besides the obvious injustice and aesthetic repugnance, this view endorses a kind of slavery because the father of a child who is not married to the mother has rights in Canadian law — even if he contributes nothing to its rearing. Therefore, the mother, the rapist and the child could be forever tied together in an endless version of hell, the rapist claiming, of course, that the charge of rape was false. So religion and secularism present different moral and ethical standards, but the latter allows for discussion of relative harm and the former would like to pretend that there is the practical possibility of absolute good in the real world and that religion has the formula — endless examples to the contrary notwithstanding.
Somerville's explicit objective in this case is to discredit Marci McDonald's book, the Armageddon Factor, which reports on the degree of surreptitious infiltration of right-wing religionists and evangelicals into the Harper government and their connections and power. This is surely something Canadians have the right to know.
Doris Wrench Eisler, St. Albert
