Time to end tax breaks for religious groups

This essay was published in the August 27, 2021 edition of the Winnipeg Free Press. A version of it also appears in the September 2021 issue of the Centre for Inquiry Canada's Critical Links newsletter.

Time to end tax breaks for religious groups

It might surprise Canadians to learn that many of our laws and regulations were not made in Canada, but were inherited from England and France. What the Canada Revenue Agency considers a charity comes from a decision by the British House of Lords in the late 1800s, itself based on the preamble of the 1601 Statute of Charitable Uses (also known as The Statute of Elizabeth).

To be a registered charity in Canada, you can either perform charitable acts (such as alleviating poverty or educating people) or you can "advance religion." It is long past time for Canadian rules to be made in Canada, and updated on a time scale that is not measured in centuries.

This may seem small potatoes, but the numbers are quite large. Canada treats religious organizations differently, and consistently preferentially, compared with other non-profit institutions. Of Canada’s 86,000 charities, more than one-third (32,000) exist to advance religion. Over 90 per cent of these are Christian organizations. Religious charities write tax receipts worth more than $3.5 billion every year, which has helped them accumulate net assets exceeding $38 billion.

The largest public subsidy of religion comes from the Ontario government, which continues to fully fund the separate (Catholic) school system through Grade 12. Such an arrangement has been condemned as discriminatory by the United Nations. Ontario spends approximately $10 billion per year on Catholic schools, and would save $1.5 billion annually if it followed the examples of Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador, which merged their sectarian school boards into a single publicly funded secular school system.

British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Quebec provide subsidies (40-60 per cent) to religious schools that meet certain provincial criteria. Manitoba (under its Fair Funding Agreement) provides private religious schools with half the funding per student that public schools receive.

The list goes on. Religious charities — groups whose primary purpose is not to feed the hungry or increase literacy, but to advance religion — receive more than $1 billion every year in direct subsidies from the three levels of government in Canada. And there is a housing tax deduction available only to members of the clergy, which costs the federal government (and benefits houses of worship) more than $100 million annually.

It is true, of course, that some religious groups do good works. It is also evident from reading the headlines over the past several weeks that religious institutions have been responsible for horrific acts of inhumanity. Given their mixed record, it is not clear whether religious organizations are good or bad for society overall.

Let those that conduct genuine good works continue to enjoy charitable status. Those called to their faith by a strong desire to help others in need will continue to do so. Those organizations that exist to advance religion — that is, to proselytize or fund denominational efforts — are perfectly legitimate entities, but are not charitable and should not reap the benefits of being considered so.

Research has shown that societies benefit when religion is neither supported nor suppressed. Just about every socio-economic indicator is positive where governments are neutral in matters of religion: from GDP per capita and life expectancy (high) to poverty and crime rates (low). This is true both across countries and within them.

It is also time to remove the property-tax exemption for houses of worship. Advancement of religion should no longer be sufficient to gain charitable status. Ontario, Alberta, and Saskatchewan should have a single publicly funded school system for each official language. Provinces that fund private religious schools, even in part, should cease doing so.

The clergy residence deduction should be eliminated. These subsidies amount to a massive transfer of wealth from the non-religious to the religious. Canada should treat all its citizens equally, regardless of their philosophical worldview, but does not do so.

Government should fund only those groups performing objectively good works, not those with the nebulous aim of advancing religion. Not only would adopting a neutral stance toward religious organizations provide over $7 billion every year for debt-laden governments (or nearly $200 per Canadian), but it would move Canada closer to the ideal of government steering clear of matters of faith.

Nations where religion dictates government policies are theocracies. Countries where the government runs faith-based groups do not have freedom of religion. Let us keep church and state separate, maximize freedom for believers and non-believers alike, and create the conditions for all Canadians to thrive.

Leslie Rosenblood is the secular chair of the Centre for Inquiry Canada, a not-for-profit organization advocating for a secular society based on reason, science, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values.

Are there good reasons for faith?

Ross Douthat published an essay in the New York Times on August 15, 2021, entitled "A Guide to Finding Faith". I was hoping to read a well-argued piece that would give someone who does not think faith in the supernatural is warranted something to think about, perhaps providing cause for me to reconsider some of my own beliefs. 

Instead, his essay shows the intellectual bankruptcy of the arguments for God. It does a reasonable job (with notable omissions) of summarizing some of the arguments against faith; it then proceeds to an extended exercise of two common logical fallacies: God of the Gaps and special pleading. 

Douthat's argument rests on three main pillars: 

• "The world in which you found yourself had the appearance of a created thing"; 
• "your consciousness also seemed to stand outside it, with a peculiar sense of immaterial objectivity, an almost God’s-eye view"; and 
• "baseline feelings of oneness and universal love to strange happenings at the threshold of death to encounters with beings that human beings might label (gods and demons, ghosts and faeries)". 

None of these place one's faith on a solid foundation. 

The first two points are far more convincingly explained with evidence for evolutionary theory.  Douthat is correct that the world seems designed (or "created") - but this is because evolution, over the course of billions of years, has blindly selected for highly efficient and interdependent ecosystems. But life is no more designed by a Creator than the sun revolves around the Earth (which is also superficially plausible, and was previously commonly believed to be the case). 

Humans evolved to be able to create "what if" scenarios - placing ourselves in imaginary situations to predict what consequences would ensue. But we hardly have a "God's-eye view" - our imaginations, in addition to engaging in flights of fancy, are subject to all sorts of cognitive and perceptual errors. Douthat proposes that the mere fact of the universe being comprehensible is proof - or at least a strong indicator of - the God hypothesis. He does not provide any alternative explanations, such as properly perceiving the world we live in would help our ancestors survive, and was therefore selected for. This is why scientific discoveries at the scale of humans are generally intuitive, but learning about cosmology or quantum mechanics is challenging for most people.  

Douthat's third argument in favour of faith rests on the assumption that in the moments before death - when some crucial portion of the body is failing catastrophically - people have a special insight into the nature of the universe that we are generally blind to. Douthat's contention  - that these phenomena point to the existence of an anthropomorphic Deity - is indeed possible, but he does not provide a shred of evidence for it (nor, to my knowledge, does any exist). That people's brains might tend to fail in broadly similar ways, and thus they report similar near-death experiences, does not warrant a mention in his piece.

The "hard problem of consciousness" and the multiverse hypothesis are indeed open questions in science. This stuff is complicated, Douthat argues, while the God hypothesis is simple - so isn't the materialist view less "reasonable" and "parsimonious"?  He leaves the answer hanging (Douthat is clever or at least experienced in this type of argument), because an honest appraisal would not go his way. This is a misapplication of Occam's Razor, which states "entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity". Yes, "God did it" has the virtue of being easy to understand, but it requires assuming, without evidence, the existence of a omnipotent being existing outside time and space. A more honest and humble approach to the hard problem of consciousness would be, "We don't fully understand this phenomenon. Let's work together and try to figure it out." Instead, Douthat is implying that God of the Gaps - God exists where we lack understanding - is  a reasonable argument in favour of belief. 

The rest of Douthat's essay is extended exercise in special pleading - many people still believe, or have weird or unexplained desires - and therefore God. It is, in my opinion, very weak. 

There are also some howlers - including "the strange fittedness of our universe to human life" - that can only resonate with those ignorant of the universe or are incredibly myopic in their perspective. The universe is an incredibly hostile place for humans. In the entire cosmos - consisting of over 3,200 observed or inferred planets in our galaxy of at least 100 billion stars, itself only one of billions of galaxies - we know of only one place that can support human life. This is hardly a "strange fittedness". We might yet discover a second planet where we could live, but that simply makes planets capable of supporting human life incredibly rare instead of unique to Earth.

At least Douthat is mostly honest in his conclusion. Even if one grants all his arguments, they go no further than Deism. His essay says nothing about which faith might be true. He glosses over the many contradictory claims of various religions. He's right that unbelief should address (on a philosophical level) constructing a moral framework, "practices and demands [...] and metaphysical complexities". He is completely wrong that atheists whisper, "at least you don’t have to spend time thinking about that." That is a pure straw man attack on non-believers. 

If this is the best the Theists have to offer, we can expect the continued decline of participation in active religious life in the US and elsewhere. I hope that the waning of influence of religious institutions will soon follow.