Bill C38, a law that simply makes the civil union (marriage) of two consenting adults of the same gender legal, does not contain any clauses or even implications that religions are compelled to perform same-sex marriages. The Liberal government that passed the legislation had the Supreme Court of Canada review the law and verify this before it ever got to the House of Commons let alone became law.

What C38 does is allow same-sex partners to attain legal status as a married couple, a status that carries with it several spousal rights under the law – survivor pension benefits, income splitting for tax purposes, assumed power of attorney for medical treatment, property rights – that are really important in life’s rocky moments. It does not confer the right to any kind of moral blessing from anyone. Churches are free to bless such marriages or not just as they have been free to bless or refuse to bless marriages for other reasons (mixed-faith marriages, for example).

Abortions are certainly more fraught with emotion and ethical dilemma than allowing people whose genetic makeup makes them homosexual to marry. However, the person intimately involved with the decision definitely needs moral and emotional support that matches individual needs, not judgement based on some dogmatic religious rule. If that person does not accept abortion as an option no-one is going to charge her with not having an abortion. Anyone who withholds emotional or medical support for that person is definitely wrong, but that has to do with basic human ethics, not any law. In short, if someone chooses to follow the doctrine of a given church and refuse an abortion, that is a legitimate choice. However, for religions to claim that they should be able to impose their dogma on society is to claim that they have a monopoly on everyone else’s morals.

In short, giving some people legal permission to make their own ethical decisions does not prevent religious people from making their own decisions. At worst, it prevents them from trying to impose their ethics on others.

Of course the religious attitude that laws and people outside their religion should be forced to follow their dogma is a clear indication of the arrogance that religions have. For thousands of years various religions in various parts of the world have meddled in the affairs of mankind with decidedly mixed results. Under their hegemony, mankind has lurched from crusades to violent jihads, and from pogroms to inquisitions all in the name of preserving the right of a few bigoted men to force others to accept their dogmas.

In an open society like Canada’s, the right to make one’s own decisions must be protected and the laws of the land must provide the means to make those decisions. Those who choose to follow religious dogmas are free to do so. Indeed, their right to do so is protected under the law. No right to impose religious dogmas on others is protected by any law, nor should it be.

My favourite of these is the overcompensation that happens when these ratheists actually encounter an atheist. “I am [insert religion], but I don’t really go to church much,” is a statement intended to assuage their guilt at their irrational attitude. And, yes, apparently they all have best friends who are atheists.

A survey of University of British Columbia students, a sample of a group one would consider to be intelligent and reasonably well-educated, revealed that trust in atheists was rated below that of rapists. Setting aside the raw logic that one can trust true rapists to do what they do and that atheists are freethinkers and therefore a bit unpredictable, this is a very serious condemnation. I feel that the most defensible explanation for this is the constant cultural pressure these young people feel to belong to some religious organization.

I was lucky enough to move to another town to go to University at about the time that I realized that I had no shred of belief or positive connection with the religion my parents adhered to. The village I moved from was so small that the churches shared eavetroughs, and family secrets were really village secrets. The happy results were that I saved my parents a good explanation effort and they simply acknowledged that they had suspected my disbelief for some time.

Other people of my generation were not so lucky and at least one of them had a serious break up with parents (and their steadies) as a result of announcing their atheism either before of after they left for university. Some of them even remarked that their parents rarely went to church anyway.

I have no trouble understanding that the UBC students are in the same pickle. Even on an anonymous survey, people tend to hedge their bets. Maybe they trust pollsters less than atheists!

People who wish to fit into their societies, particularly in small towns, are really unable to move away from the norm simply because their social circles are small enough already and the effect is compounded by the heightened need on the part of all the members to preserve the social circle. People who buck the norm are thrown out of the tribe with varying degrees of subtlety. Their children certainly pick up on this and, at the very least, discover that it takes an effort to move away from that norm.

While overt racism was not common in the village I lived in (about 15% of the students in the high school were black) religious delineations were. While the villagers worked together closely on a number of charity and community projects, they did not see any reason to combine their various Christian churches (some with only a handful of members). Instead, they reinforced the separate churches by making sure to attend the fund-raisers of the smaller congregations. Religious tolerance, was part of their social structure and removing the need for tolerance would have been an assault on that structure.

Frankly, I think people have a given religion for the same reason that people own bulldogs: their ancestors had one.

Certainly, the leaders of these churches agreed on one thing – atheists would lead their flock away from them into whatever variation of hell was in their liturgy and certainly away from their collection plates. They still operate the same way, although the patina of inter faith councils and religious co-operation (wagons in a circle, perhaps) is a cover for exclusion of atheists. As an active member of two Humanist organizations that are regularly excluded from these groups, I can tell you that the exclusion is not the result of oversight. The key, though, is that the participants are convinced that they are being inclusive.

All religions discriminate against people who don’t follow their set of beliefs (hairsplitting about morality being the only common belief), but our society has nudged them into begrudgingly tolerating each other. Of course, they love to make a great show of this and the tolerance does not include atheists.

The simple act of excluding atheists is an act of discrimination against them. The fact that is such an act is acceptable, even desirable to faith groups, indicates an intention to discriminate. If the same people formed a group that intentionally excluded any race or any religion, they would be called to task immediately. Atheists, however, seem to be the last group against whom it is almost universally acceptable to discriminate.

A church in BC had to be taken to the human rights tribunal there to be taught that posting a sign saying, “Humanism is the New Evil” violated someone’s human rights. A church in downtown Toronto posted a sign that said, “Atheists are Fools.” Can you imagine the outcry that would occur if they had simply substituted the name of a religion for the “Humanist” or “Atheist?”

We atheists must start calling these people on this nonsense. There is no co-relation between atheism and evil by any acceptable social definition. Atheists are good without god(s). We need to make the statement clearly and with conviction. Survey says, “Too many intelligent people are letting social pressure push aside their intelligence.

The problem with their argument is that the basic idea that the proposer of an hypothesis is solely responsible for proof is based on a reasonable expectation of finding the evidence through empirical testing. I suppose the unicorns at the South Pole would fit that criterion since we could (and some have) travel to the South Pole and confirm their (non)-existence. This requirement breaks down if there is no way to construct an empirical test for the hypothesis. In other words, to claim that the lack of evidence for the existence of god(s) is evidence for the non-existence of god is flawed because there is no way to test the hypothesis – the atheist’s statement can only be proven by default if there is a way to default.

The late Carl Sagan was right, then, to say that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. At least he was right in cases where it is impossible (theists have had many millennia to work on this) to set up an empirical experiment.

What this means, of course, is that in scientific terms the question remains unanswered and unanswerable.

I would remind everyone that Agnosticism is not a body of knowledge, but a philosophy about how knowledge is obtained. For an Agnostic this means that empirical evidence is the only way to attain knowledge. When an empirical test is not available, then knowledge can not be gained or affirmed. Agnostics may very well be post-modern atheists since they do not believe in god(s), or anything else for that matter. But, absence of evidence is still not evidence of absence when a reasonable expectation of empirical testing is not possible.