Harper’s Office of Religious Freedom: Worth It?

Sometimes you have to wonder where the Conservatives find the money to afford their new initiatives while they preach austerity. The Conservatives are now making a Religious Freedom Office within Foreign Affairs at the expense of tax payers.

Canada is a secular state which means that it neither supports or enforces any religion, so why should we get involved with religious disputes across the world? We have an economy that is shrinking and a bureaucracy that is growing, why add more expenditures, particularly for an office that is redundant in Canadian affairs and one that while not religiously inclined is indirectly, the promotion of religion.

The office would protect and support religious minorities, the same ones that have been wreaking havoc world wide:

• United States: Conservative Catholics and Evangelicals look for a Republican candidate to bring them back to power so they can move forward with an agenda of capital punishment, to applaud the possibility of the death of a man without health insurance and to condemn homosexual American troops.
• Middle East and immigrant communities in Western Europe: Sunni and Shiite Muslims united in embracing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic document aimed to propagate a Jewish conspiracy to rule the world.
• Israel: Jews united to ensure that the Palestinian people never get rights – Harper’s government is continuously siding with these people rather than trying to find peaceful resolve.
  • A group of ultra-orthodox Jewish men harassed an 8-year-old girl on her way to an Orthodox-owned all-girls Jewish school by spitting on her and calling her a “whore.” The girl remained terrified for days that this would happen again. These same ultra-orthodox Jews share many sacred tenants with the Taliban and Iranian ayatollahs.
• Iraq: Minority Sunnis and majority Shia Muslims send suicide bombers to each others’ communities on a daily basis. They aren’t always against each other, another part of the time, they are teaming up against Kurds, Sunni Muslims who aren’t Arabs.
• Nigeria: A minority Islamist sect known as Boko Haram celebrate Christmas by bombing Christian celebrations and gatherings and act as gangsters who attack anyone that isn’t in their sect. Politicians in Nigeria use these extremists of all sides that live in Nigeria to make political gains.
• Canada: The Jewish Defense League openly joins British racists in their attacks against Muslims. European  racists and Conservative Christians and Evangelicals in Canada have found new hatred against Muslims and became supporters of Israel whom they expect to convert or perish when the next Messiah comes, which they expect is late April.

Source: The Globe and Mail

The Office of Religious Freedoms will have a lot of support from the tyrannous religious minorities of the world. Apart from the wars, the violence, the prejudice, what has religion given us and why should we be defending it? Why should we be interfering with how other nations manage their beliefs?

Don’t you think it is bad enough that your tax money goes to the maintenance and operations of churches? We are the 21st century and frankly, those who do believe and want to believe should be able to fund their beliefs without societal input.

This principle should as well apply to this new Office of Religious Freedom which comes in days of austerity. Your choice: healthcare, education, and pensions or religion, wars, and prisons.