Majority of Canadians Think Religion Does More Harm Than Good

The study also found only 29 per cent of Catholics said their religion was important to their political thinking

A new poll suggests more Canadians than ever believe religion does more harm than good, but even the pollsters disagree on what the numbers mean for the future of faith in the country.

Ipsos Public Affairs surveyed 1,001 Canadians online from March 20 to 23 and the results suggest more Canadians are moving away from formal religions.

About 51 percent of respondents agreed that “religion does more harm in the world than good.” That’s a seven-point increase from a similar survey in 2011.

“A couple of points of shift is not a big deal because that’s all in margin of error, but when we have changes of seven points in six years … that’s a significant shift,” said Sean Simpson, vice president of Ipsos Public Affairs.

Simpson told The Catholic Register, a Canadian Catholic weekly, that in a technological age where information is so easily accessed, Canadians have a “higher sensitivity” to news of religious radicals committing acts of violence and terrorism.

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice ? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule, indeed, extends with more or less force to every species of free government. Who that is a sincere friend to it can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric? — Washington’s Farewell Address

Thank you so much, conservatism_IS_compassion, for posting the link to Frank Turek's excellent essay, "Atheists Steal Rights From God." In it, he writes:

...[Y]ou don't have to appeal to God to write laws, but you do have to appeal to God if you want to ground them in anything other than human opinion. Otherwise, your "rights" are mere preferences that can be voted out of existence at the ballot box or at the whim of an activist judge or dictator.

This should be obvious to any person who has taken the time and trouble to reason this issue through. But atheists seem to refuse this understanding. Nonetheless, they can't simultaneously deny God and justify any sort of objective moral order.

And yet they can still speak of "rights," of good and bad. Yet they hold that good and bad are merely expressions of human preferences, opinions. (Maybe even Darwinian evolution.) They have nothing to base their preferences and opinions on. These are expressions of human will (and would-be power). Reason has nothing to do with it.

Which brings us to polls. It seems we live and die according to "scientific" polling nowadays. Yet the fact remains no matter how "scientific" the poll methodology is, still a poll is a survey of opinion, not of "science." And one man's opinion is just as good (or bad) as any other man's. So what does a poll really tell you? What actual predictive power does it have? It seems to me all a poll is, is a sampling of public emotion, a "snapshot" of surveyed peoples' beliefs at a given moment, frozen in time.

To me, a "scientific" poll is the modern-day version of reading tea leaves, or inspecting the entrails of a sacrificial animal, or casting I Ching sticks, in order to discern future events....

Plus polls can be rigged to produce desired outcomes. Much of this depends on the way the poll question is asked. This Canadian poll is an excellent example of same. First off, "religion" is not defined. So people will read their own definition into the poll question. So how can we say all poll respondents are replying to the same question?

Then again, this was an on-line poll. Participation in such polls is entirely self-selected. Who are these people?

Speaking as a Christian, if I saw a poll like this online, I'd laugh and move on. The poll question is so stupid (to me) I wouldn't bother to respond to it. But someone with a real ax to grind against God probably wouldn't resist the opportunity to weigh in.

One doesn't need a poll to discern that Canada is rapidly becoming a thoroughly secularized society. One needs only notice the evidence -- accelerating loss of God-given individual liberty in Canada; for instance, erosions of freedom of speech (hate crime laws)....

One last thing -- it seems nowadays people of left progressive persuasion are convinced that reality can be transformed by changing the way we speak of it. The power of magical words! The typical form this takes is to lie about reality, on the assumption that if you repeat a lie often enough, sooner or later people come to believe it is truth. But the truth of reality is not changed by this procedure. The result is the widening gap between the actual state of the world as reflected by reason and the state of sanity of the human mind.

One last thing -- it seems nowadays people of left progressive persuasion are convinced that reality can be transformed by changing the way we speak of it. The power of magical words!

That is exactly what is taking place. As a pastoral counselor and family consultant, I studied "narrative therapy" and became acquainted with its philosophical base, constructionism. The bottom line with both is that "reality is the story you tell" and it is not some objective truth that can be studied. (In counseling, it actually is valid to understand how a couple sees the history of their relationship and the "story/narrative" they tell about it.)

One hears often about the power of the narrative being told in politics, of changing narratives, and of creating narratives. Same base on all of it.

As wikipedia explains it:

"In social constructionist terms, "taken-for-granted realities" are cultivated from "interactions between and among social agents;" furthermore, reality is not some objective truth "waiting to be uncovered through positivist scientific inquiry."[4] Rather, there can be "multiple realities that compete for truth and legitimacy."[4] Social constructionism understands the "fundamental role of language and communication" and this understanding has "contributed to the linguistic turn" and more recently the "turn to discourse theory."[4][5] The majority of social constructionists abide by the belief that "language does not mirror reality; rather, it constitutes [creates] it."[4]

Just for the fun of it, let’s parse the wikipedia entry on “social constructivism” [i.e., abuse of language in the service of inversion of reality]:

"In social constructionist terms, "taken-for-granted realities" are cultivated from "interactions between and among social agents;"

Wiki gives a nod to “taken-for-granted realities,” thereby denoting them as having real empirical existence. But wiki is silent about how they can be humanly observed realities and why they are taken for granted. Then they toss in a total abstraction, the “social agent.” What on earth is that? It seems the term conceals more than it reveals. I mean, it’s possible to classify mothers, fathers, pastors and priests, policemen, politicians, academics, etc., etc., and Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Fidel Castro, Idi Amin, etc., etc., as members of the “social agent” category. To me, the above passage is total drivel -- unless it is understood as an invitation to expunge, erase all moral distinctions; e.g., as between mothers and Hitler.

Idle question: Do “social agents” have to be human?

…[F]urthermore, reality is not some objective truth "waiting to be uncovered through positivist scientific inquiry. "Rather, there can be "multiple realities that compete for truth and legitimacy."

This would be news to Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, et al. It is the very inversion of the fundamental insight and motivation of the physical sciences, the continuous fundamental premise of scientific inquiry from its historical inception in the ancient world. So now wiki comes along, and spreads a rumor about multiple realities competing for truth and legitimacy – on whose say-so? On what evidence? If there are “multiple realities,” how many of them do such bloviators live in, such that they can compare them in order to establish which one of them is legitimate? By what objective standard or criterion do they use to establish this legitimacy?

Social constructionism understands the "fundamental role of language and communication" and this understanding has "contributed to the linguistic turn" and more recently the "turn to discourse theory.” The majority of social constructionists abide by the belief that "language does not mirror reality; rather, it constitutes [creates] it."

Again, it seems to me the social constructionists are trying to invert/subvert, not only reality, but language as well. Historically, words have had stable meanings over time. If they did not, human communication would be impossible. In human languages, words always have external referrents: E.g., the word “dog” describes a particular type of biological being. This relation of word and object is how we know a word validly “means” what it says. But above words, language itself has certain logical properties or “rules of the road” – its syntax – which guides us in structuring our thoughts.

To allow words and language itself to become the playthings of influential “agents of change” -- nihilistic abstractionists with a will-to-power – is to advance the speedy reconstruction of the Tower of Babel. Which signifies the total breakdown of civil society and the descent into personal and social chaos.

Or theologically speaking, a descent into Hell.

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