Here’s your Canadian Atheist Weekly Update for to .
![[A screen capture from the Jim Egan “Heritage Minute”, showing footage from the 1995 Toronto Pride Parade, with a shot of Jim Egan and John Nesbit from behind, riding high in a convertible in the parade with cheering crowds on either side. Egan and Nesbits arms are raised, and they are holding hands.]](https://www.canadianatheist.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/jim-egan-and-john-nesbit-at-1995-toronto-pride-parade.jpg)
Jim Egan and John Nesbit at the 1995 Toronto Pride Parade (still from the Jim Egan Heritage Minute).
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[] Sex ed changes will only harm children
This is a surprisingly direct tongue-lashing at the “social conservatives” who want to scrap Ontario’s progressive sex-ed curriculum. It notes, rather pointedly, that Roman Catholic conservatives are among the most outspoken opponents of teaching kids things that would have protected them from Roman Catholic sexual predators. The most astonishing thing about this piece, though, is that it was written by Michael Coren… once one of the most ardent proponents of Roman Catholicism.
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[] Education of Muslim women is limited by economic conditions, not religion
This isn’t really a new finding, but this new study’s confirmation comes from much better data. Religion is no friend to education, and in fact it thrives on ignorance. But it turns out that it’s not necessarily true that religion itself causes ignorance. Rather, both ignorance and religiosity thrive in poor economic conditions. This lends support to the argument that fighting ignorance doesn’t mean fighting religion… what we should be fighting is poverty.
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[] What if every vote in Ontario had counted this year?
I’m a fan of Wilf Day’s blog; what he does after every election of note across Canada is crunch the numbers to determine what the outcome would be if our electoral system wasn’t broken – that is, what the election results would be if everyone’s vote actually counted. By his reckoning, if Ontario’s election were fair, we would have a minortyPC government.
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[] A Heritage Minute with a difference − the first on struggle for LGBTQ rights
I’ve always been a fan of Heritage Minutes – I know, “what Canadian isn’t?” – but most of them don’t really have much of a personal impact because they’re usually about things from long before my time. This one is cool, not just for being the first LGBTQ Heritage Minute, but for being about something in the very near past – it’s a little bit of history that we’re living, and making, right now.
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[] The Age Gap in Religion Around the World
Anyone who’s followed this site for some time and seen any of its survey/poll breakdowns knows that it’s a general truism that younger people are more irreligious and more progressive. This very detailed Pew report is about just that, writ globally. The trend holds worldwide – in fact, there are only six countries in the entire world where this isn’t true by every measure the study makes: Armenia, Chad, Georgia, Ghana, Liberia, and Rwanda.
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[] Neo-Nazis Can Be Deradicalized and Make Amends
Usually when we talk about deradicalization on this site, we’re talking about Muslim radicals. They are a huge problem, obviously, but within Canada, the much larger problem numerically is white supremacy. There have been a slew of major leaders of Canada’s neo-Nazi movement unmasked in the last few weeks – just another one was outed this week – thanks to the work of the just-barely-over-a-month-old Canadian Anti-Hate Network. But what happens next? This piece discusses that.
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It amuses me that they literally invented a labour category called “religious workers” out of thin air, and thought no one would call them out on it. In Québec.
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[] A win for equality – Supreme Court rejects TWU law school
The big news this week was the Supreme Court’s decision on the Trinity Western University law school discrimination cases. With the news less than a day old as of this writing, expect a lot more analysis in upcoming weeks. But here we get a take from one of the intervenors in the case, the British Columbia Humanist Association.
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