Diary Sept. 26

Flying to Newfoundland tomorrow evening. Kind locals have offered to put me up for four nights sparing me the prospect of 'The City Hostel'. Terradactyls under the sheets? And, yes, it's Ramadan, a month during which followers of the Koran are abjured, among other things, to put down their weapons.

Did a long interview with Dalhousie Radio on Sunday evening. One very good question was how would I propose to go about 'suppressing' Islam - considering that the suppression of Christianity took five hundred years and involved a series of wars. I would answer (we ran out of time in the show) suggesting that there is the carrot and the stick. The carrot is the womderful way of life which we offer here in Canada, I would offer this as the prize providing that self-described Muslims will accept Islam-Light (Islam as a purely private business - no public involvement in government, law, education or science). The stick will be that we be very firm in future that NO religion will be allowed to get into the public sphere. That means, of course, convincing the Supreme Court that there isn't and never has been religious freedom in Canada and that accordingly we can require all religious activity to be reserved for private spaces - the home and the temple, church or whatever. We enforce the rule that religion is a private good, a public evil.

I would also warn Canadians that if we fail and some religion or other is allowed to become dominant in the political sphere then we can expect the appearance of a Fascist government, a government which would suppress that religion by brutal means. Mind you, I would also expect any theocracy to be just as brutal. Best to face the problem when it is still manageable.

Interesting Ideas program this eveing on CBC! Three Muslims (Imams?) from Toronto were asked what they thought of evolution and none accepted it in a straight-forward scientific fashion. Two rejected it outright.

Dawkins' program the other night (later discussed by Avi Lewis) was a total disaster: Dawkins tried to argue for science on the basis that it has better evidence and better explanations. Big mistake. The clear advantage of science over religion is that science predicts and religion fails to predict. Prediction, of course, is the basis for all medical and other technological advances. Dawkins looked confused and baffled while the religious presented themselves as enthusiastic - and principled.

Religion, of course, claims to offer a moral basis for living while science consciously rejects that role for itself - so religion wins that one too in Dawkin's approach. The alternative he should have offered was not science but a system of rules based on our preferences. Because the simple alternative to religion-based morality is to develop our own rules for living based upon the preferences of the people affected by the rules. Not exactly quantum mechanics, but it was missing from the program. We do it all the time in the Canadian Parliament. Now, you might well find that many of the rules promoted by Christians or Muslims would pass the preference test, but the test has to be run for us to know.

Dawkins missed an historic opportunity.