Ryan Moore, News Editor
Illustration by Christopher Lai, Comics and Graphics Editor
Despite the rhetoric from religious apologists across the pasture, freedom of religion also means freedom from religion, not to mention the freedom of inquiry which disproves the extraordinary propositions to which the religious are accustomed to presenting as fact-based.
And suffice it to say, while extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, it nonetheless proves frustrating to engage with people who refuse the most basic rules of engagement, who, when given evidence to dispel their myths, choose to not only hold onto their myths, but attempt to convince others these myths are true in the form of “advocacy” or “awareness” campaigns. It’s a clever form of proselytizing which deceptively uses loopholes like the finest business and media ethics professors.
I sit here in the Excalibur office on the fourth floor of the Abrahamic Unity Centre, also known as the Student Centre, which is soon to receive a 64 per cent increase in multi-faith space when the new building is ready. I watch a man postering outside. It seems every week he has a new poster to share. This week, it’s not just Noah’s Ark, it’s dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark.
This claim exhibits a number of problems, and interestingly, puts me in a frustrating position. No longer can I simply dismiss the flood story as a myth or parable at best, but now I must say that dinosaurs were not on Noah’s Ark, as if I am somehow conceding Noah’s Ark really happened to begin with.
During the time when the story of Noah was written (not The Land Before Time), people simply had no understanding of the world to the level we understand the world now. Imagine the kind of world we would live in if we held medicine and engineering to the same standards or subservience to tradition as we do with religion.
And despite Israeli archeologists failing to find a shred of evidence to prove the existence of Moses was nothing more than an editorial decision, or the Exodus of the Old Testament happened, the power of institutions and the passage of time continue leading people to believe these myths stand apart from the Norse gods such as Odin and Thor, who were nonetheless slain by Christian crusaders who colonized the hearts and minds of Scandinavians.
Still, a huge part of the population who engage in supernatural shenanigans, in one way or another, place the beginning of human life 2,500 years after the Sumerians and Babylonians were brewing wine and beer, essentially refuting the progress of 2,000 years of scientific inquiry.
Is there not humility in the acknowledgment that the universe has no interest in our existence? I can’t help but suspect a sense of arrogance in claiming a divine supernatural entity has a plan for each individual, before, during, or after the moment of conception. When I think about the universe about how big it is and how I am not important to it, just as you are not important to it despite the titles and labels you seek to hold, I find a sense of serenity and all trivial nonsense fades into the oblivion, along with all our myths, only one god further.
I have been to a mosque and enjoyed the experience. However, at the time, I was invited and gladly accepted. They have an excellent library. I am not given this choice when walking to Scott Library means journeying through Dawah. In case you have not clued in, I do not hold proselytizing in the highest regard. In a university where so much credence is given to facts, what can be proven and not proven, we for some reason “turn the other cheek” when the religious attempt to gain a foothold in the realms of education and secular politics.
Does your awareness campaign provide platforms to allow all perspectives and denominations of your faith? Or have you assumed to hold authority on what the meaning of what your faith is? Who decides which interpretation is “correct?” I’d argue, the only practicable solution is to privilege none by promoting none.
And while these claims are beyond fantastical, they still demand that others hold the burden of proof, as if willfully ignorant to the fact that it has always been their burden, and burden still. Where does this kind of privilege exist in any other field?
Please, lift this fog.
