Beyond Ridiculous

Intellectual dishonesty at the very heart of push to "secularize" U of A convocation ceremony

On Monday, October 27th, the University of Alberta General Faculties Council held a special meeting regarding recent demands by a number of U of A-affiliated atheists to remove the a reference to God from the U of A's convocation ceremony.

In the convocation speech, graduates are directed to use their degrees "for the glory of God and the honour of your country."

The line has endured for 100 years since the University's establishment. Now, in the University's centenary year, a small group of atheists wants to purge the line from the speech. This group insists that they're doing so in the name of secularism, rationalism, and diversity.

The truth is very different.

Sadly, there's very little rational thought at the core of this campaign, and more than their fair share of intellectual dishonesty.

“I would feel unwelcome at the current convocation ceremonies,” complained Ian Bushfield, the president of the University of Alberta Atheists and Agnostics. “By charging me to use my degree to the glory of God, I feel that my belief system, which does not include beliefs in any form of deity, is being ignored by this University’s administration.”

“If the argument for tradition is to be held over all rational discourse, then this University shall never achieve its goal of becoming a top 20 university by 2020,” Bushfield insisted.

Which is a rather bizarre claim. If a passing reference to God in a convocation speech is enough to be a millstone around the University's neck in terms of University rankings, then there is something severely wrong with those rankings.

Of course, Bushfield's rhetoric barely holds a candle to that of John Crookshanks, a political science student who is also working to push the UAAA's agenda.

“This is a public, non-creedal university with a diverse, multicultural student, faculty, and staff community, and so appeals to the will of the religious majority are misleading. They, like many others, believe that for the University to be arbiter of what is the correct faith for all students is completely inappropriate,” added Crookshanks.

Readers may cue rolling eyes at their leisure. After all, a ceremonial charge falls significantly short of instructing graduates on what their religion should be. For Crooksthank, however, the irrational ravings only get better.

“This is a public university, whose mission statements, goals, and even the 'Dare to Deliver' plan have no religious mandate. Convocation then is neither the place nor the time to invoke any one religion to the exclusion of all others,” he continued.

Of course, Bushfield may want to rethink that last claim. After all, the God reference in the convocation speech doesn't merely apply to one religion. Considering that Christians, Jews and Muslims all worship the same god -- merely disagreeing on the subject of Messiahs and prophecy -- this god charge actually refers to no less than three separate religions. Adding Sikhism, this can easily be expanded to four religions when one considers the ambiguity of the God reference in the speech.

For Crookshank, however, a clear strategy is at play here: there is no secrets that Christians have, increasingly, become politically vulnerable. A broad portion of Canadian society, recognizing that Christians still remain the majority in Canada, don't consider it politically incorrect to attack Christians.

Crookshank's particular attitude seems very self-explanatory: it's OK to screw with religious people so long as it looks as if you're only screwing with Christians.

Sadly, the reality underlying the issue is very different. Crookshank's use of the notion of the U of A being a public University as a rationale for this campaign is also a little more than alarming.

As Benjamin Barber notes, while individual religious beliefs very much are a largely private matter, religion itself is actually a public good. The vast majority of places of worship remain public places. To try and displace religion from the public sphere into the private sphere, individuals like Busfhield, Crookshank and their compatriots would compromise the ability of religious believers to congregate in communities of belief.

Not to mention that it's impossible to believe that the University of Alberta Atheists and Agnostics,whose membership numbers 180 members -- accounting for nearly the entirety of the 189 signatures on their petition -- are merely doing this in the name of secularism.

Rather, they're doing it in the name of atheism. As such, all their petition would really accomplish is displacing no less than three other religions from the convocation speech in favour of their own religion -- atheism -- by default.

That's an odd definition of "inclusiveness".

...It's OK When We Do It

Over at the Canadian Cynic Temple of Sycophantic Group Think, there's no question that they really, really hate "freepers".

Unless, of course, it's them doing the freeping. Then, it's all hunky dory.

This time, the idea actually isn't theirs. In fact, it actually turns out to be the brainchild of "EZ" PZ Myers.

The entire affair revolves around Ian Bushfield and the University of Alberta's Atheists and Agnostics' Associations' demands that references to God be removed from the U of A convocation ceremony.

The Edmonton Sun offered up a poll asking readers whether or not they agreed.

As it turns out, things were not going the way Myers, Cynic and their ilk would have hoped. In fact, before Myers chose to intercede in the poll, 67% of those who had answered preferred to keep references to God in the ceremony.

"Will that have changed when I wake up in the morning, I wonder…?" Myers asked, seemingly hypothetically. Considering that the title of his post was "Canadian Poll to Crash", he had to have known full well that his flock of mindless sheep were going to do precisely that.

In the end, the Myers'-inflated poll result produced a 91% margin of victory for himself and his atheist sheep.

Unsurprisingly, Cynic feels quite triumphant over this result. Of course, it this had been, oh say... the Canadian Blog Awards, they would have whined to high heaven.

Fortunately, the Edmonton Sun poll in question is and remains entirely meaningless. The defeat incurred by Cynic and his coterie of mindless douchebags when they failed to deliver the Galloping Beaver a blog award (via freeping) is certainly much less so -- it represents a wholesale rejection of Cynic's imagined influence in the Canadian blogosphere.

Still, Cynic and his cronies at the Groupthink Temple simply wouldn't feel like themselves if they weren't proving themselves to be the utter apex of intellectual dishonesty, cowardice and hypocrisy in the Canadian blogosphere.

There's something very special about becoming everything one claims to hate -- something that generally only the most intractable ideologues can fail to appreciate.