Weekly Update: 23-Feb-2019 to 1-Mar-2019

Here’s your Canadian Atheist Weekly Update for 23-Feb-2019 to 1-Mar-2019.

• [19-Feb-2019] Côte Saint-Luc says it won’t enforce religious symbol ban

  I imagine we’re going to see a lot more of these declarations in the coming weeks.

• [21-Feb-2019] Islam after Salman

  This is an absolutely fascinating postmortem on both The Satanic Verses, the controversy it inflamed, and how that was connected to the nature of Islam in the late 1980s and today.

• [21-Feb-2019] Latest revelations hint at shocking global scope of Catholic Church sex abuse scandal

  The biggest story this past week was the 4-day summit held at the Vatican to discuss what to do about the child sex abuse problem the Church has. Where to even begin? If you followed the story on most mainstream media outlets, you might have walked away with the impression that the affair didn’t really produce any meaningful changes, but otherwise went well, with the Pope soundly – even if only symbolically – denouncing child rape. Only… that’s not actually what happened. Even before the summit started, Pope Frank was calling people who criticized the Church for its handling of the sex abuse scandals friends of the Devil. Then came admissions that evidence of rapes had been deliberately destroyed, and that the attendees at the summit didn’t even have a fucking clue if there were still active predators among their staff. Ah, but don’t worry, because several of the attendees have said that if you just give the rapists another chance, they’re model priests… sometimes. And then there were whole swaths of the Catholic world insisting the whole rape thing isn’t really a thing, that it’s just an American and European problem. The bishops mostly didn’t bother to talk to actual victims most of the time, including flat-out ignoring residential schools survivors (still)… which may actually a blessing in disguise, because despite being mostly overlooked, some nuns who were victims of priestly rape did get on the speaking list … only to have their feminism mocked by the Pope as sexism in a skirt. And coincidentally, while all this was going on, one of Pope Frank’s top advisors was being convicted of child rape in Australia. And here’s the kicker; here’s the thing that if you haven’t already blown a gasket in rage and disgust at the Catholic Church, here’s what’s really going to do it. What was the final conclusion of this “historic” summit on the problem of child rape in Catholic Church? It’s all the gays’ fault.

• [25-Feb-2019] Toronto man guilty of rare charge of advocating genocide through Twitter and emails

  For all the hand-wringing some people do about hate speech laws and how they supposedly suppress “free speech”, there was not a peep from them about this very rare, actual hate speech law conviction.

• [26-Feb-2019] B.C. government to boost immunization strategy for measles

  Something good might come out of the Vancouver measles outbreak after all. Had this registry existed before, it might have prevented the outbreak completely, because it didn’t start with an anti-vaxxer, but rather with someone who was ignorant and confused about whether his kids had been vaccinated.

• [27-Feb-2019] Anti-vaccination billboards in Toronto being removed, company says

  Vaccine Choice Canada claims not to be anti-vaxxers… but it took me three seconds to sic Google on their site and prove otherwise.

• [28-Feb-2019] Ex-Hasidic couple’s battle with Quebec government over education to go to trial

  Wonderful news! I was really hoping this case would make it to the courts. That’s still no guarantee that it will go our way, but it is cause for hope. What’s been going on is that the Québec government has really handled these shitty “schools” with kid gloves, often letting them continue to teach nothing of any value on the condition that the kids get an actual education through supplemental homeschooling. Even that doesn’t always happen though.

• [1-Mar-2019] Foreign aid doctors want Canada to stop sending homeopaths to Honduras

  When this story first broke a week ago, there were cries of disbelief in skeptic circles. How could Canada seriously spend tens of thousands of dollars to peddle homeopathy off in Honduras? Now Vik Adhopia has followed-up on the story, and it turns out that Global Affairs Canada has defended their actions. They point to WHO bullshit about integrating “alternative medicine” … but they ignore the fact that WHO also straight-up said that homeopathy should not be used for infectious diseases… which is exactly what it’s being used for in Honduras. Global Affairs insists this is the only homeopathic project they’re funding… colour me skeptical.

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