Monday, February 25, 2013

What religion do we protect today?

Over the past weekend or so, I took some flak in my questioning of a need for an Office of Religious Freedom, a recently christened office of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade of the Government of Canada, in my last post on this weblog from many close friends, compatriots and acquaintances abroad. Yet once more I explain that my wonderment does not begin at the creation of an office that was established to monitor religious oppression and protect freedom of religion internationally, nor that Canadian Tory Prime Minister Stephen Harper actually kept an election promise in complete entirety, no my query and worry is that, while being foreign ambassadors for the faithful overseas, we continue to pay no mind nor matter to our domestic leadership in publicly funded secularism, the religion of the faithless. Perhaps we need to take the road back to our civil liberties, in order to protect our national securities, on this issue. I understand the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, I also understand its Sections 2 of freedoms of religion, thought, belief, expression and association, understand too Section 7's right to life, liberty and security of the person with Section 15's equal treatment before and under the law and equal protection and benefit of the law without discrimination. Altogether, if the government does not want to back any religion, being that of the faithful and of the faithless, why not take back its public funding of any religious act, thus privatizing faith, for those with or without?

More plainly is to understand that those organizations of the faithful, not faithless, started this government of a dominion from sea to sea, its centres of education and health care being schools and hospitals, when the government welcomed their intervention, invention and investment to create the country we have today.

So why do we forget here and then, only to embrace there and now, I think part of it has been our societal statement on and of faith, where imposition of a certain morality has become an irritant to a certain lifestyle in a day when a certain value set has changed for the supposed better. Only those found in, without censure, stamped with approval by the government can be the only kind given preferential taxpaid protection and treatment. Even when those organizations of the faithful, not faithless, which helped start those various social institutions at the beginning of this Dominion's young life, remain true to their original societal statement on and of faith and raison d'etre, government now refuse to fund those who funded it and its own and leave it outside in cold, to grow old and die a death they historically do not deserve. It would be this scenario, which has been oft too many times seen in society, that I speak of for example, which allows me to wonder just where and when is this privatization of religion going to happen, because as of today religion is still being public funded and protected by the people's purse. The $5,000,000. Canadian question is what religion do we protect today?