1. Ben Stein Vs. Sputtering Atheists

Comment #164995 by OneNationUnderThor on April 20, 2008 at 11:16 pm

Wow. I completely took this for satire.

It's just bizarre. I'm speechless...

2. For the glory of God

Comment #88645 by OneNationUnderThor on November 18, 2007 at 8:59 am

I got my numbers from the Stats Canada 2001 census (the last time they did religion--they'll do it again in 2011) look them up yourself: www.statcan.ca -> by subject -> society and community -> religion. It may be that Quebec is least religious, but when asked to identify what religion they are they respond Catholic.

Cerberus is right when he talks about people being "culturally" a religion, but actually completely non-religious. In Quebec, it is probably more to do with maintaining their cultural identity than any sort of god (they are very sensitive about that there--edit: cultural identity not god). One of the newer 2005 polls that I could find was the Ipsos-Reid that talked about how important god/religion was, and Quebec probably did very well on this (from our perspective), but so did BC. Hopefully the 2011 comprehensive census will show the kind of progress we are making.

So it is entirely possible that although fewer people identity with a religion in a place like Alberta, the ones who do are more likely to be hardcore fundamentalists.

It is probably best to look at the progress that has been made in Canada (newest numbers show actual church attendance at 17-18%). The important thing in Canada is to normalize non-belief to the point where those who say "I am not religious and don't go to church, but I still belief in some vague, magical, spiritual higher power" can just leave off the second half of that sentence.

3. For the glory of God

Comment #88572 by OneNationUnderThor on November 17, 2007 at 10:42 pm

I'm sorry, but I have to correct the misstatements about western Canada being more religious. It simply isn't true. The newest numbers from Stats Canada for religion (2001) aren't hard to find.

The overall percentage for "no religion" in Canada is 16.2. The western provinces are Manitoba at 18.3%, Saskatchewan at 15.4%, Alberta at 23.1%, and the wonderfully liberal British Columbia comes in at 35.1%. All of them above average except for Saskatchewan. Ontario is 16.0% and Quebec is 5.6%.