Here’s your Canadian Atheist Weekly Update for to .
It’s a pretty slim Update this week, because most news outlets mostly focused on “top stories of 2019” types of articles. Plus, everyone was on holiday and/or partying, so there wasn’t really a lot of news.
Anywho, here’s the Update:
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[] Will Ottawa ever do the right thing, and call out discrimination in Quebec?
Ouch, Urback is pulling no punches in this editorial calling out Ottawa’s cowardice for their continued silence on Québec’s Bill 21.
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[] Hundreds of accused clergy left off church’s sex abuse lists
This entire investigation seems to be US-based, but there’s no reason to think a Canadian investigation won’t turn up similar results. I doubt this new information will surprise any of our readers. Still, the numbers are staggering. Let me do a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation: Of the dioceses that have released lists, ~5,300 predators have been named… but the AP investigation found ~900 more that weren’t named for various technicalities (see the article for the ridiculous excuses). (Note that AP found an additional 400 names connected to dioceses that haven’t released a list yet, which means in total they turned up ~1,300 predators that the Church hasn’t named that we know about.) That means that the lists released account for only ~85% of predators… so far as we can determine. That’s what, a B grade? For naming pedophile predators. Not great. Honestly, it’s truly amazing just how terrible the Catholic Church has been at dealing with this problem. It’s not even like this is a situation where it’s hard to know what the right thing to do is – if they really wanted to show moral leadership, there are some very obvious things they could do. The fact that each new news story about the scandal shows them flubbing it at every turn is no longer funny… at this point, it’s just fucking depressing.
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[] One-in-Five Canadians Currently Pay Attention to Astrology
This isn’t great news, but at the same time, it’s hard to take the results too seriously. First, the numbers aren’t that bad: the number who definitely do not believe in astrology (36%) – not even including “probably do not believe” – is the same as everyone who believes, both “definitely” (13%) and “probably” (23%). The situation is the same, and even more so for the mediumship, clairvoyance, and haunted house questions. Second, even if 36% of Canadians believe astrology is real, turns out only 20% of them actually pay any attention to it. So it’s probably the case that most of that 23% that “probably” believes in astrology… doesn’t really believe… but they just don’t care enough to put the mental energy into thinking it through to reject it, and they want to be “open-minded” about it. The fact that most of the “believers” are young makes that hypothesis even more plausible – they just haven’t been arsed to care about it, because they have too many other things on their minds.
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