Le 25 octobre 2014. Le droit et la religion: orthopraxie et orthodoxie.

Message adressé au Prof. Margaret Somerville,

de la faculté de droit de l'université McGill

"Concerning the gods, I have no means of knowing whether they exist or not or of what sort they may be, because of the obscurity of the subject, and the brevity of human life."

- Protagoras

 "After Jesus Christ we have no need of speculation, after the Gospel no need of research."

 - Tertullian

 Dear Professor Somerville,

This is, in part, in response to your op-ed published in "The Ottawa Citizen" of August 22, 2013, about the Charter of Quebec values planned by the government of Quebec.

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/opinion/op-ed/Quebec+bans+religion+from+public+square/8821970/story.html

In my humble view, there is currently no restriction of religious expression in the Quebec agora.

You opine that religion would be excluded from the public square by the Charter. That seems inaccurate: unless you have read some small print that I have not yet seen, it would only provide for the exclusion of ostentatious religious signs from the civil service, nothing more, nothing less.

As to the desirability of that kind of more limited prohibition (incidentally accepted by the European Court of Human Rights), I believe that my piece addresses the issue.

You make one interesting point: "For millennia, people have viewed faith as integral to being human". Well, indeed, unscientific mythology, and superstitions (like human sacrifices), have prospered throughout the ages, in many forms. That being said, the statistical reality is that there is a correlation between the advancement of science (and education…) and the erosion of religious practice.

In ancient Greece (and in Rome, at least until the creation of the Empire), by and large, beliefs, creeds and myths were quite varied and coexisted peacefully and were by no means static ("cross-borrowing" was quite common). Furthermore, no single doctrine was officially sanctioned by the state. There was no Inquisition in those days for the simple reason that the notion of heresy was unknown.

Unfortunately, that changed, radically, with the advent of Christianity, and subsequently with Islam, each of which claims to have a monopoly of truth and teach -less overtly nowadays- that infidel miscreants are destined to burn forever in the afterlife. (I am not excessively impressed by the ambiguous and conflicting signals emanating from the Vatican since 1965…). I refer you to the two articles by Jean-François Revel, appended hereto, where he explains (especially in the latter one) that a "tolerant Christianity" is essentially an oxymoron.

Judaism offers a fascinating perspective : strictly speaking, it does not impose a duty to believe in a personal God, or to accept as historical truth the supra-natural events narrated by the Bible (see Maimonides about that); last, but not least, the Hereafter is not a central concern. Live for the present and obey the commandments; that is sufficient. Even better, non-Jews have no obligation to become Jews to be "saved" (whatever that means): to be a "good person", on earth, is enough. In modern parlance, just be a good citizen : observe the law of the land and you don't need to "believe" in anything at all. That is in sharp contradistinction to the Gospels which are, in substance, anti-semitic tracts (Islam is also anti-semitic, but, quantitatively, the Coran itself is a compilation of legal rules).

As you remember from Donoghue v. Stevenson, "The rule that you are to love your neighbour becomes in law, you must not injure your neighbour". 2000 years ago, Hillel thus defined his own religion to a Gentile : “Do not do unto others that which you hate done unto yourself – that is the entire Torah. The rest is commentary, go and study it.” If that simple injunction had been better heeded, mankind might have been spared many unfortunate metaphysical cul-de-sacs…

Is Judaism a "religion" in the conventional sense of the word? More of a legal system, I should say (that point seems to have been missed by Richard Dawkins in "The God delusion"). Buddhism qualifies more as a philosophy than a "religion". Generally speaking, it would appear that no wars of religion have plagued the Far East. 

To conclude, be assured that I (like the current Quebec government) unreservedly stand for "religious" freedom and expression, even in the traditional sense : devout Muslims and Christians have, and will retain, every right to threaten me, in private and in the public square, with eternal damnation if I reject their doctrines and their fairy tales.

(Forgive me, Professor Somerville, for I have sinned: I remain slightly sceptical as to the 72 virgins - however cheerful that prospect might be - and I still fear that stoups are a health hazard; as a consolation prize, I hereby give the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints carte blanche to baptize my dead ancestors).

All of that is fine as long as they refrain from giving me hell on this planet.

Yours truly,

LP