Canadian Press
September 19, 2007
TORONTO — The first thing that catches your eye as you walk in the door is the T-shirts hanging on the wall.
For a few dollars, you can own a black one with “Heretic” emblazoned in white on the front, or a white one sporting the word Darwin etched in black inside a fish-like container.
Reason, science and the freedom to question obviously are top dog at the Centre for Inquiry Ontario.
Not far from the T-shirts is the reception desk with a donation box. Visitors are urged to donate $5 to the evening’s affair, an inquiry into “Iran: Prospects for Secular Democracy.”
Or you can immerse yourself in the swirl of ideas at the meeting hall where those who don’t believe in God come to exchange views by buying a membership – $20 for students, $60 for other individuals.
Growing numbers of people are doing so, says Justin Trottier, 24, president of the Toronto-area branch of the Centre for Inquiry, which has its headquarters in Amherst near Buffalo, N.Y.
When the Toronto centre opened in March this year, 20 people joined, Mr. Trottier says. “Now we’re up to about 120.”
When it comes to e-mail, “we have a list of about 1,400 people. That’s grown from about a third of that,” he says.
The centre acts as an umbrella for a host of groups promoting atheism, humanism, secularism, science, reason, free inquiry and planetary ethics.
So why all the interest? Mr. Trottier says several books published recently such as Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’ God is not Great, have brought a lot of people out of the closet.
“There have been very fruitful discussions resulting from the books on the best strategies to employ in terms of atheist PR and what the goals of the movement ought to be,” he says.
Mary Ann Beavis, who teaches theology at St. Thomas More College at the University of Saskatchewan, attributes the heightened interest to a number of influences.
“The rise of fundamentalism, especially Muslim and Christian, has made some people suspicious of any religion – especially those who don’t know much about religion,” she says.
Sexual abuse scandals and cover-ups in the Roman Catholic and other churches have led “to cynicism about the motives and integrity of religious leaders.”
Then, she says, there is the unpopularity of the war in Iraq and U.S. President George W. Bush, “who is highly influenced by evangelical/fundamentalist constituencies.”
At its root, Ms. Beavis says, atheism is a religious philosophy in that it takes a position on the existence of God – “religion is a hot media commodity, ergo so is its rejection….
“Militant atheism is also sensational and gets a rise out of people, since most Canadians are theists of one kind or another.”
Statistics Canada’s 2001 census showed that 16.2 per cent of Canadians categorized themselves as atheists, agnostics, humanists or no religion, up from 12.3 per cent in 1991 and 7.4 per cent in 1981.
But “that 16 per cent includes a lot of people who are not necessarily atheist,” sociologist and pollster Reginald Bibby says.
Mr. Bibby, who has been tracking Canadian religious and societal trends for 30 years, says the number of self-proclaimed atheists has remained steady for decades.
In his most recent study, completed in 2005 and titled Nevers, Nones and Nots, he says 7 per cent of respondents identified themselves as atheists, unchanged from a similar study in 1975.
The survey involved a weighted sample of 1,600 people and had an accuracy level of plus or minus three percentage points 19 times out of 20.
As for the number of atheists, “it’s fair to say they’re a relatively rare species, 2.1 million … in reality we’ve got over 28 million Canadians who are theists,” says Mr. Bibby, who teaches at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta.
Atheists, meanwhile, come from a broad spectrum of ages and all walks of life. An exhibit at the Centre for Inquiry Ontario includes pinups of David Cronenberg, June Callwood, Pierre Berton and Donald Sutherland.
