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Letter: Keep religion and government separate

“After I read the letter by Mike Bugyi and I was irked for several reasons”
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After I read the letter by Mike Bugyi and I was irked for several reasons because religious freedom does not mean religion gets to meddle in the making of our laws.

For one Canada is not a Christian country, it is a pluralistic society that is founded on laws not based on scripture.

Only theocracies are based on God which, for the record, no matter which faith we are talking about, was created by men in their own image.

It is only our secular laws that separate us from orthodox Muslim countries.

Where the Taliban are now in defending their literal belief in the truth of scripture in The Koran, is exactly where Western civilization was when the church dominated everything in society.

As for his argument that what do we lose if we live for God, whether he is real or not, that is known as Pascal’s Wager and has been debunked ever since it was presented by its author.

Do you not think that faith should be more than a crap-shoot? Playing the odds? If there was a God, do you not think he would see into the believer’s heart and reject someone who only professes belief on the oft chance he or she might get a reward?

Where did all our human rights come from? They certainly didn’t come from the pulpits.

They came from contrarians willing to push back at the churches that preached against women’s rights, even the rights of women to vote, to own property, to be more than legal chattel which they were until a group of women from Alberta in the late 1930s finally overturned the old ideas based on scripture.

We would still have slavery, which is condoned in the Old and New Testaments, if not for those who saw that it was morally wrong to treat any humans that way.

We would still be burning people at the stake for saying the Earth went around the sun when the Bible clearly states the sun goes around the earth.

The last thing Canada needs is to revert to those days when godly people waving their bibles and citing scripture could intimate society — human progress lost for 1,000 years thanks to people who trusted scripture over any views that did not conform to what men, in the ignorance of the ages in which they lived, wrote.

I, for one, never want to see us backslide towards the Middle Ages.

But do enjoy the annual pagan picnic next month as no matter how much comfort your faith brings you it all boils down to it being Santa Claus for adults.

Robert T. Rock

Mission