Friday, February 27, 2015

A Religious Rant



Rant in Three… Two… One…

Listen,

I’ve about had it up to my blessed eye holes over this nonsensical Muslim bashing that we’re seeing from Steve Harper on down to the morons people populating the comments sections of every freaking article on Islam.

The one that set me off is the idiot judge in Quebec who threw a woman’s case out of her court because she was wearing a hijab.  She wasn’t suing someone nor was she charged with a crime.  She just wanted to get her car out of jail.

He son had been caught (illegally) driving the car without a valid licence.  The police had impounded her car.  I have no issues with that.  My issue is this piece of work told the woman she could not be in their court with a hijab on because the court is a secular place.

Just to get her car back.

Now tell me, do you think if someone was wearing a yarmulke or a turban for religious reasons this judge would have told them to take off their hat?  Maybe her honour should call Steve Harper and warn him about the guy in the second row of the House of Commons who has the temerity to wear that blue thing on his head.

After all, this is Canada.  The House of Commons is a secular place, well isn’t it?

Maybe I’m way off base here, but a secular society doesn’t mean you can’t live your religion, you just can’t jam it down my throat.  It means we don’t base our laws on some book written hundreds or thousands of years ago by someone who had a mystic vision or maybe just gathered up a bunch of legends and said this is the word of Diety.  Simple, no?

We’re also supposed to have Freedom of Religion or Freedom from Religion (whatever floats your boat) but that seems to be changing too.

What this means is neither the Queen nor Steve nor anyone else gets to tell you or me what religion we have to belong to, and they can’t tell us what religion we can’t belong too.  That part still seems to be working, at least for the most part, but now it’s turning into you can still have your religion, but only if you do it our way!

When people first started to come to North America, a lot of them were trying to get away from people who told them they were doing religion wrong.  People are still coming here for the very same reason.  And what does Steve and Jason and Chris say?  You’re doing religion wrong!

Isn’t that what’s happening in Iraq right now?  ISIS isn’t running amok killing everyone, just the ones who do religion wrong.  ISIS is religious bigotry on steroids, the same religious bigotry that we get from Steve Harper’s minions.

Think about it.

Look, if it is so all fired important to see the faces of people taking the citizenship oath, wouldn’t it be a lot simpler to have a woman judge with an all woman staff to handle these events?  We wouldn’t need many, a few teams that would go out every few months or when the need arises to welcome the new Canadians into our citizenry. 

I almost use “our family” there, but Steve has gone and tainted that too.

And as for the judge in Quebec who doesn’t like hijabs?  She’s as bad as the rest.  She claims that his court room is secular, but I’ll wager there’s a Bible sitting on the corner of her desk.  It isn’t all that long ago we had to change the rules to allow atheists the ability to promise to tell the truth because they wouldn’t swear on a Bible.

I’m no Biblical scholar, but I have read the stories.  Remember when Jesus told the story about the Samaritan? From that story, I’d say that Jesus wouldn’t have stopped the Samaritan from getting into heaven.  He’d probably welcome that Samaritan with open arms.

Why do I mention this?  Well you see the Samaritans were a lot like the Jews at that time… But they did religion wrong.

The way I figure it, when we shuffle off this mortal coil, the first question at the Pearly Gates will not be which book did you follow or whether your house of worship had pews or mats.  The first questions will be were you kind to strangers?  Did you help your neighbours?

And I think that Steve, and Jason, and Chris, and the Quebec judge are not going to have comfortable eternities.

End rant.

Peace.

BC