This Is a Good Sign

Apparently Ted Byfield has decided that he doesn't like Stelmach's reworking of the royalty scheme.

Given Mr. Byfield's illogical arguments on so many other topics, it probably means that Stelmach actually took a step in the right direction.

Sez Ted:

He has turned Albertans against the industry that has made them prosper and has made their province great.

How else can you interpret his new royalty regime, imposed without negotiation on the province's central economic engine?

I've said this before - governing is about a lot more than just money. It's about people, and the interests of the people. The oil patch has had a great deal of say to date in the royalty arrangments in this province, and has slowly and steadily wormed into the minds of people like Mr. Byfield that it would be a "Bad Thing"(™) to touch anything to do with the oil patch.

What has been made clear is that the free lunch of profits at the oil trough is over. Remember, those resources belong to all of us, not the oil companies per se. They may sulk for a while; and a few may well stomp off in a huff and move their focus elsewhere in the world. It's not a bad thing - slowing down Alberta's economy right now would be good from several standpoints - like trying to hire staff for smaller businesses.

If the oil sits in the ground a bit longer, what's the big deal? It stays, and the odds are that the prices will go up on the resource as supplies begin to run out. So, from an investor/taxpayer perspective looking a little more than next quarter down the road, I have to ask myself just what we lose? Not much. Get it out today at today's prices and a higher royalty fee, we win. Leave in the ground for a while and get it out at higher prices due to reduced availability, and we still win.

Unless the world's need for oil drops dramatically in the next few decades, we come out ahead either way.

Somehow, I think I'll put a little more stock in what Peter Lougheed comes up with over what Byfield tries to pass off as wisdom.

Ted Byfield Takes a Swing at Reality

Occasionally, Ted Byfield comes astonishingly close to reality, and then veers away from it at breakneck speeds.

This week, we find Ted musing about the "collapse of church" in Canada:

Where Canada was, if anything, more loyal to its churches in the first half of the 20th century, it now lags far behind, and church attendance in the U.S. is considerably more than double the Canadian average.

Ted thinks he's found quite the treasure trove of insight:

Mark A. Noll, the historian of American religion most distinguished for his celebrated book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, (the scandal being too many Evangelicals don't use the gray matter God gave them, and many think it wrong to even try) confesses himself mystified of late by a country called Canada.

"What Happened to Christian Canada?" he asks, and that's the title of his little booklet published this year by Regent College Publishing in Vancouver.

Amusingly, in the criticism applied to Evangelical faith in the United States lies the germ of reality that Ted then does his level best to ignore:

too many Evangelicals don't use the gray matter God gave them

He then goes on to try and lay the blame at the feet of political leaders past (and now dead):

In Quebec, he finds an explanation in the rise of Catholic Action, a movement that gained great momentum after the Second World War and recruited platoons of talented young people -- like Pierre Trudeau, Marc Lalonde and Gerard Pelletier.
...
The United Church, created in the 1920s by the union of the Methodists, Congregationalists and most Presbyterians, sought to combine the socialistic reforms of the social gospel with the spiritual message of evangelicalism. This had much the same result. When the government itself legislated the social gospel, the church was left with no message at all.

But all this is an inadequate summation of a brief but very observant analysis of Canada's religious collapse.

Or, perhaps there is an even simpler explanation. Canadians started looking critically at what had been wrought in the name of "the church"(™). One need look no further than the Quiet Revolution in Quebec - born of the policies of Maurice Duplessis and the unreasonable degree of power the Catholic Church held during that time.

The other point that Byfield misses (or chooses to ignore) is that as Canada's education system flourished, individuals found it less necessary to be outwardly religious. That isn't to say that carrying faith ceased, but rather the need to attend church services diminished.

One can draw discrete parallels between the Reagan administration dismantling public education in the 1980s and the rise of evangelical christianity. This comes as little surprise - evangelical christianity does not encourage critical thought - it demands obedience. In general, the less educated the population, the more willingly they will follow strict edicts from religious leaders.

Intriguingly, the HarperCon$ have also taken a series of moves that devalue and weaken Canada's educational infrastructure.

Ted Byfield: Quick! - Into The Time Machine!

Reading Ted Byfield is usually a good way to find out just how thoroughly irrational people can be - and his latest tirade is no exception.

According Byfield, most Canadians are being "disenfranchised" by legal rulings of one sort or another that conflict with their religion:

Therefore our opinions as to what should and should not go into the law will be religiously grounded opinions, because that's the only source of authority we know.
...
Probably 90% of the country is being disfranchised.

There's a couple of points that must be made, and that Byfield clearly fails to understand. Freedom of religion is an individual freedom. The Charter speaks of individual rights and freedoms as part of the contract between the Canadian Government and its individual citizens. Ted has no more right to impose his religion upon me than I do mine upon him. Why should his religious views drive the creation or tone of law in Canada? (and, given the oh-so-lovely things that have been done in the name of Christianity at one time or another, I question the moral authority of that faith to dictate anything to me ... but that's my opinion)

Most of Byfield's argument boils down to "but even laws derive from some moral authority - and for most people that authority is religious".

I'll grant Byfield this much - most of the moral framework that our laws are set in has its roots in Judeo-Christian traditions. What Byfield forgets, or chooses to ignore, is that he is talking about scriptures that range in age between 1500 and 4000 years old, and reflect social and legal attitudes of those eras. (The dramatic differences between the Old Testament and New Testament reflect shifting societal attitudes and values) Surely in the last 1500 years or so we've had enough change to the face of society (and knowledge) that we might recognize that the "moral framework" that was codified so long ago is gradually unravelling, like a much loved, but well-worn rug.

Of course, most of Byfield's real argument is pure assertion, with a healthy dose of distortion thrown in for good measure. (It's almost like he spent his time researching his stories at Lifesite)

A teacher has been fired for daring to criticize -- not in school but in public debate -- certain sexual practices not long ago regarded as criminal.

Oh? Lessee, I'm going guess that Byfield's referring to homosexuality. Which was decriminalized some forty years ago - people born then are reaching their middle years today - real recent. As for the teacher who was fired, I can't even find references to a story like that on Lifesite - one would have to presume that the story has a grain of truth, but since he doesn't cite anything verifiable, it's assertion.

Books have been forced into school libraries over the objections of parents and school boards.

Christian schools have been forbidden to prohibit activity they regard as perverted at school dances.

Newspapers have been prosecuted for running biblical verses denouncing certain sexual practices.

If such despotism does not constitute a prohibition of "the free exercise of religion," it's hard to imagine what would.

More argument by assertion. Byfield fails to cite a single tangible case that can be examined - which leads me to suspect that what he's really beaking off about are relatively minor cases where some bible beater got their knickers in a twist over something small, and went screaming to the media about it.

We believe we should behave fairly, honestly, truthfully because the Bible or the Church or the Qur'an or our pastor or priest tells us so.

Therefore our opinions as to what should and should not go into the law will be religiously grounded opinions, because that's the only source of authority we know.

Finally, we come to the crux of the matter. Byfield simply cannot imagine that we might be able to derive our own sense of "right and wrong" without referring to something that was supposedly, but unverifably divinely inspired. It seems far more probable that scripture was a human construct in the first place, just as the laws of Hammurabi were (in fact big tracts of Old Testament legalisms sound decidedly similar to his laws.)

As much as the fundies like to accuse more secular people of being "amoral" (or worse) because of a lack of explicit tie to some concrete moral framework, they fail to recognize that their own "moral framework" is extremely relativistic as well - but it merely happens to be relative to the era in which the scriptures they believe so fervently in were written. Society ultimately codifies its morality relative to the times in which it exists. There are some universal truths, but then again, some supposed truths turn out to be amazingly false. It wasn't so long ago (using Byfield's rubber ruler of time) that being left-handed meant you were marked by the devil.

[Update 14:00]
Speaking of imposing one's religion upon others, we have some loon trying to censor the public library.

An aside - it also occurs to me that Byfield would be among those who scream the loudest if someone were to demand that he adopt the moral sensibilities of a different faith...
[/Update]

The Problem Is Not With Religion...

It's the most vocal advocates for a religion that become the problem.

I was reading Ted Byfield's columns for June in the Calgary Sun this morning, and I realized that the reason that "religion" becomes problematic is not the religion itself, but rather those who believe that they have some "perfect" understanding what 'it all means'(tm).

In today's column, we find Ted bemoaning the sorry state of things in Canada:

Our governments, businesses and people all "punch below their weight." Comparing us with other developed nations, it noted "too often we trail the pack." We are "unwilling to take risks."
...
In the bad old days, we boasted, Atlantic fishermen, for example, had to toil three or four months at sea, then work desperately for the remaining eight or nine to eke out a living from such land as they possessed. Now they do what fishing they can and bask serenely for the rest of the year on E.I. Such things, we were taught to regard as an astonishing advance in the national character.

Well, maybe what's advancing is our decrepitude and it's by no means confined to Atlantic Canada.
...
Where "unwanted pregnancies" were a fact of life visited upon most couples, we now have easy birth control, and if it fails we have abortion.

Where marriage was once something we had to make work whether we enjoyed it or not, it is now something that can be set aside and tried again with a new partner, often a series of new partners.

Sex, once inhibited by a host of taboos, some of them enforced by the Criminal Code, is now acceptable in almost any variety whatever, and any questioning or criticizing some of the varieties shall be branded "hate," and punished with jail, "intolerance" being the only sin left in our moral code.

...

Where we used to get paid for working, we now expect pay for existing, and where we used to believe in God, we now believe in Tylenol.

Ah - the usual pattern of Byfield's arguments emerges. After all, if we only remained in the god-fearing era that he idealizes (and never actually existed), all in our world would be perfect.

The blind rigidity of this ideal is reflected in one of Ted's earlier columns in the month:

Meanwhile, Calgary Catholics are no doubt becoming aware their own bishop, Fred Henry, was first in Canada to make media waves by calling the attention of his flock to what the church in fact teaches. When he ruled that ex-Prime Minister Joe Clark, who calls himself a Catholic though he favours abortion rights and gay marriage, would no longer be welcome to speak in Calgary's Catholic schools, Bishop Henry was branded as backward, as "living in the past."

It now appears he was actually, if anything, on the leading edge -- living, so to speak, in the future.

Not that Bishop Fred has ever let his decisions be governed by whether they'll be considered behind the times or ahead of them.

He knows God doesn't change, and neither do the essential principles of morality. And in times of alarming impermanence, it is this "eternal changelessness" that attracts people, young and old, to the Christian faith.

Saying the Christianity is "eternal" and "changeless" is possibly among the most ridiculous statement that anyone could ever make. Over the centuries, the face of Christianity has shifted and changed dramatically. From a nascent faith that adopted and absorbed "pagan" rituals as it encountered them, it became the faith which brought us the astoundingly irrational Malleus Maleficarum used to guide the "inquisition" that hunted practitioners of "witchcraft", and in more recent years has become a deeply fractured faith, split by fundamentalists and a plethora of different sects which all interpret scripture differently.

But, when you believe you have achieved perfection, there is little reason to look beyond what you have and know, is there? When someone proposes that perhaps Scripture is more mythological in form than factual, it's easy to reject the proposal, giving us sorry attempts to debunk science with pseudo-science. It becomes easier to reject and ignore new information that contradicts what is now comfortable and familiar.

Intellectual calcification that comes from blind obedience to any one faith gives room for groups like this to arise, out of fear that change will bring about the inevitable collapse of all that is "good" in the world. Of course, it never does - catastrophic collapse of a civilization is rare - even Rome didn't "collapse", so much as it crumbled gradually, and new things arose in its place. The British Empire didn't collapse, it likewise fell apart over a period of time, creating new opportunities and new realities in its place. Such is the nature of change.

Religion has long fought the notion of science, or more particularly, rationalism. Why? Because in its purest form, rationalism is anathema to faith. Rationalists tend to ask "why?" or "why not?" a lot, and religion - at least the Ted Byfield variety of it - doesn't respond well to such questions. Byfield and his ilk seek absolutes, and are all too happy to say "because" as a response to fundamental "why" kind of questions - an answer that makes those who are engaged by, and interested in, the world around them uncomfortable - leading them to go seeking answers elsewhere.

The last couple of centuries have rocked faith at its core. Social prohibitions described in scripture centuries ago have slowly dissolved because they are no longer necessary, or because new understandings have emerged that make those rules irrelevant. People like Ted Byfield live in fear - not fear of the unknown, but fear of the loss of all that they think they know. The unknown becomes the bogeyman - something awful that nobody has every quite seen, and yet change will inevitably result in. Sad, really.

Ted Byfield: Being Nice is a Bad Thing

I've always considered Ted Byfield to be a basically unpleasant sort of person. His writing has an irritating tendency to come off as sneering, Alberta Report (and its various spawn) engaged primarily in the politics of spitefulness. His attitudes are echoed by Ezra Levant, Ted Morton and Stephen Harper - not exactly a crowd I hold in high esteem.

In the Sun publications, Ted Byfield's latest column decries the notion of being nice.

Sez Ted:

"Niceness," in other words, is not the same as "goodness."

You could make a point of being "nice" to somebody, while bilking him of every nickel he possessed.

In the classic straw-man argument style that the right-wingnut crowd so often relies upon, Ted puts forward a completely invalid set of suppositions, and then knocks it down with this:

By contrast, the guy who told you that you drank too much last night and made an ass of yourself certainly wasn't being nice to you.

But maybe he was being good to you, by telling you exactly what you needed to hear.

In fact, niceness could be a mask for wickedness.

Coming from a man who has argued for the death penalty, going to war in Iraq and vehemently against civil rights for people, I think Ted needs to re-examine his lexicon.

Someone who creates a facade of being "nice" about something and then does something malicious is _NOT_ being nice - they are being, politely, shysters.

However, Ted Byfield doesn't see this. Instead, he argues that being a generally miserable, unpleasant person towards others is in fact "doing others a favour" - and coming from the conservative side of the spectrum as he does, this shouldn't come as a surprise. It strikes me that as Dana over at The Galloping Beaver observes, there is an underlying nastiness in today's "conservative" world that few have come to fully appreciate.

Ted Byfield railing against "niceness" only serves to underscore that suspicion.