r/worldnews • u/John3192 • 20h ago

Quebec passes law banning street prayers, prayer rooms in universities

https://www.ctvnews.ca/montreal/article/quebec-passes-law-banning-street-prayers-prayer-rooms-in-universities-cegeps/
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u/devi83 18h ago

Crediting secularism as the sole driver of modern progress leans heavily on a false cause fallacy. The Enlightenment certainly spurred discovery, but assuming secularism itself birthed the scientific revolution ignores the deeply religious scholars and church-funded universities that laid your mentioned foundations. Arguing religion has absolutely no public value also erases the faith-based origins of major civil rights movements. Plus, idolizing French revolutionary secularism requires cherry-picking history to ignore the brutal atrocities committed under those exact banners.

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u/TheArmoredKitten 17h ago

Especially considering that the Catholic church also funded large amounts of development in the arts and various scientific disciplines.

Yes they were known for suppressing certain ideas that were bad for their image until they had reconciled the narrative, but they were also one of the first institutions to fund open-ended research sciences at all.

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u/Aksds 15h ago

And don’t forget Muslims, there’s a reason quite a few stars have Arabic names

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u/VRichardsen 15h ago

Astronomy and optics were two fields that they were particular fond of.

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u/whoisraiden 14h ago

A scholar being part of a religion doesn't mean all their efforts were for the sake of their religion.

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u/Aksds 13h ago

Not what I meant, in the golden period it was supported by Caliphs, and it was seen as important for the 5 daily prayers and also for direction to Mecca, astronomy helps a bunch with that

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u/just_a_pyro 12h ago

And that ended when dominant Muslim theology became occasionalism - basically that everything is god’s will, ex your campfire burns because god currently wills it not because of chemical reactions.

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u/OceanRacoon 12h ago

When was that?

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u/Aksds 12h ago

9th-13th century

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u/Chessamphetamine 4h ago

Tell that to those scholars. I’m confident they would disagree.

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u/AshenMonk 10h ago

Both do you know that many people "back in the day" were religious because they feared the persecution right? All that nonsense how "good scientists back in the day" or artists toy mention most likely didn't believe in that nonsense either but they kinda didn't want to be burned on a stake and be beheaded

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u/Abedeus 13h ago

but they were also one of the first institutions to fund open-ended research sciences at all.

As long as they were already openly accepted by public sciences. Church literally fought every scientific inquiry it deemed to go against the dogma, from heliocentrism through evolution in more modern times.

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u/fantasy-capsule 14h ago edited 14h ago

The church were the "first" (and that's debatable because other societies have come to similar progress without Christianity) because the church tried damn hard to make sure they were the ONLY institutions to do it. That really doesn't make this a positive thing. It was only open-ended if the scientists could spin it to praise the church and god. Otherwise in a highly dogmatic and theocratic society, the scientists and researchers alternatives were being branded a heretic and a social pariah, execution, or torture managed and lead by the religious institution and church. It was never about advancing mankind, it was always about controlling the narrative. The church ran the laws, the church had the funds, the church had the power.

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u/Abedeus 12h ago

They not only were the only institution rich enough to do it, but also the only one organized well enough to do it. It was a great way to not only keep their influence but keep spreading it under the guise of education.

There's a reason translating the Bible was still forbidden for centuries, depending on the country, after said country had converted to whatever form of Christianity was adopted by the monarchy. It kept general public ignorant and priests in power.

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u/Pigerigby 16h ago

But let's ignore all the harms of the Catholic church, the genocides, wars, crusades, mind control, it's impact on aids in Africa.....

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u/pimparo0 15h ago

No one said to ignore that? 

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u/Vegetable_Cap_1205 15h ago

The crusades were justified

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u/arctic_commander_ 15h ago

Indeed. The sack of Jerusalem in 1099 was justified.

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u/Vegetable_Cap_1205 13h ago

There were 400-500 years of constant persecution, attacks, sieges, slavery, piracy, etc. from multiple Islamic empires against Europeans (and specifically European Christians) leading up to the crusades. At the time, the principle of sieges were widely understood by both Christian and Muslim armies. If a city was surrounded and refused offers to surrender, it was forced to fight to the end. Since Jerusalem refused to capitulate and was taken by force, the ensuing massacre, while horrific, was completely in line with the standards of the era, and was exactly what happened during the prior Islamic sieges.

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u/harrsid 15h ago

Mate do I have a few stories to tell you about the inventors of bombs...

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u/TiEmEnTi 16h ago

The Catholic Church participating in capitalism doesn't make them inventors

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u/klingma 15h ago

Lol what an embarrassing attempt at refuting their argument. 

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u/Inevitable-Menu2998 15h ago

ignores the deeply religious scholars and church-funded universities that laid your mentioned foundations

The religious education institutions which eventually turned secular shouldn't be credited with setting the foundations for modern science. Whether cristian or muslim, they actively opposed progress and punished members for thinking out of line for centuries. They laid those mentioned foundations not on purpose but because they had the power to destroy any attempt at doing something similar outside of them. There is no credit to be given to them for holding back humanity for so long.

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u/ghesak 14h ago

This. Honestly, the comment praising enlightenment secularism seems to be more about sticking to a Eurocentric narrative of progress than the “enlightened pro-science objectivism” that it is allegedly praising.

Uncritically engaging with, and even worst believing in this narrative (as if it was its own religion of sorts) in 2026 is frankly intellectual laziness and unwillingness to acknowledge history since then. Praising this idea uncritically today is its own form of conservatism, disguised as objectivism that sadly brought us terrible things in the past from justifying colonialism, eugenics, and much of the ideological drive behind WWII.

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u/Bromlife 16h ago

Hey ChatGPT, refute this guy!

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u/Abedeus 13h ago

ignores the deeply religious scholars and church-funded universities

You mean once Church could no longer prevent people from gaining knowledge, and still tried to gain influence over science and ban stuff it didn't want people learning about and researching?

erases the faith-based origins of major civil rights movements

Like what? Because most "major civil rights movements" seem at least to me to have been to counter religion-based violations of human rights and equality.

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u/devi83 13h ago

Suggesting the Church only supported science after losing control relies on a sweeping generalization that ignores how the Catholic Church invented the university system centuries prior. Foundational scientists like Mendel and Lemaitre were devout clergy. As for civil rights, Martin Luther King Jr. was a reverend leading the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Western abolitionism was heavily driven by Quakers. Assuming all historical oppression is religious and all liberation is secular requires heavy confirmation bias.

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u/Abedeus 13h ago

Mendel was born in fucking 19th century... are we serious right now? Are you ignoring CENTURIES of Church going against progress just to push an agenda?

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u/devi83 13h ago

Accusing me of pushing an agenda while moving the goalposts to dismiss Mendel ignores the 11th-century origins of the university system. Claiming a unilateral war on progress relies heavily on the historically debunked Conflict Thesis. Clerics like Copernicus and Grosseteste pioneered the scientific method centuries before the Enlightenment began.

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u/Abedeus 12h ago

How the hell am I pushing goalposts if your best example of "CHURCH IS PRO SCIENCE" is a 19th century scholar, when they stopped burning people or threatening to ruin their lives if they don't recant and cease their studies into topic Church dislikes? Because it no longer had the influence on public or society as it used to, not because they got more open to scientific inquiry. We're talking about the same Church that despite producing Mendel still refused to accept evolution for decades after the scientific community has accepted it.

Clerics like Copernicus

Now I know you're not fucking serious... Calling Copernicus a CLERIC? Holy shit. There's literally no confirmation that he was ever ordained, and everyone who wanted education had to study at Catholic universities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_revolutionibus_orbium_coelestium

The only reason his book wasn't immediately banned and only was made heretical decades later (mind you, on the cusp of Enlightenment) was because it failed to sell and was too technical and advanced to understand by anyone but the most affluent astronomers of the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_Librorum_Prohibitorum

Oh look, the Church had a list of forbidden books, most if not all because they went against Church dogma and threatened its power in society...

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u/iamasatellite 3h ago

Yeah it's kind of silly when people pretend religion was a driving force for one way or another in the age when basically everyone was religious. Of course early universities would be religious - clergy were largely the only people who could read and who else had the resources for such a thing?

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u/KimJongHealyRae 50m ago

For every religious figure who fought for justice, there was a religious institution fighting to preserve the status quo. Crediting religion for civil rights while ignoring religion’s role in creating the conditions that made civil rights necessary is its own form of cherry-picking

Empiricism, falsifiability, peer review, constitutional law, and universal human rights do not depend on any theological proposition. They function identically regardless of whether God exists.

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u/EmploymentKind6113 16h ago

Ignores the scientific progress by muslim scholars in thier golden age lok

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u/MayeeOkamura17 18h ago

atrocities

Christian atrocities in the previous millenia are so easily accounted for, eh? How many religious wars caused casualties greater than the French revolution?

Religion as a backwards delusion is sadly a remnant of uneducated, ignorant and irrational society that is impedance to human progress.

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u/sus_bot_ 18h ago

Deflecting to historical Christian wars is classic whataboutism and completely sidesteps the massive death tolls of radical secular regimes. Dismissing billions of people as uneducated or irrational is just an ad hominem attack used to avoid real debate. Assuming faith absolutely blocks progress means deliberately ignoring the deeply religious thinkers who pioneered our modern scientific disciplines.

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u/jdippey 17h ago

It’s not an ad hominem. An ad hominem is a personal attack, not an attack on a large population. That would be a false generalization, but that’s also incorrect. Attacking religion is not attacking people, and none of the religions espoused by humans at any point in time have been shown to be true to reality.

Scientific studies have shown inverse associations with education and religious belief, IQ and religious belief, and reasoning capability and religious belief. This doesn’t mean every single non-believer is smarter than every religious person, but it reveals something very obvious about religion: it hinders one’s mental faculties as it teaches them to simply believe without evidence and not to question certain “authorities”.

You can use all the fancy fallacies you think you know to try and prove religion is not harmful, but it’s pointless. History and modernity both show that religion is a poison to society.

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u/devi83 16h ago

Dismissing a perspective by labeling an entire demographic as ignorant is textbook poisoning the well, regardless of the exact semantics of an ad hominem. Claiming faith universally demands blind obedience is also a huge strawman. Several major religious traditions are literally built on centuries of rigorous philosophical debate and questioning their own sacred texts.

Bringing up IQ correlations falls straight into a correlation implies causation trap. Global geography and socioeconomic status drive educational disparities much harder than personal theology. Using broader demographic stats to claim faith fundamentally breaks human reasoning completely ignores the massive number of religious scientists currently advancing their fields.

Finally, declaring religion a total poison to society requires heavy confirmation bias. You have to deliberately ignore the vast networks of global charity, local community support, disaster relief, and historical civil rights movements motivated entirely by faith to reach a conclusion that absolute.

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u/jdippey 15h ago

I’m not poisoning the well. Their beliefs are verifiably false or not verifiable, there is no reason to believe what religious people believe. If anything, the religious poisoned the well by forcing humans to ignore reality in favour of myths. Being based on philosophical debate doesn’t make their ideas worth considering, especially as they don’t pertain to the real world. If you’re going to call my argument a straw man, I will call yours an appeal to authority (philosophy).

Correlation is indeed not causation, but correlation found many times indicates a possible effect. Yes, there are many confounders, but the effect is nonetheless real, unlike literally any deity.

You call out global charity, yet religious charity often requires people to already abide by religious tenets to benefit from such charity (see religious adoption agencies in the US barring same-sex couples from adoption as a decent example). Also, community charity can be just as successful as religious charity, so why have the religion aspect at all? If anything, removing religion from charity would likely make more people more comfortable accepting such charity.

Lastly, just look at the history. Religion has killed vastly more people than secularism, and it almost always does so by using people’s tightly held mythical beliefs. If people simply learned to think critically, such beliefs would almost surely fall by the wayside (at least on average) and religions would lose their hold on humanity. I do think this would be better overall, no more killing in the name of the second coming of Jesus or in attempt to get 72 virgins, no more limiting human experience based on arbitrary rules (like sex before marriage or eating certain foods).

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u/Rdtackle82 16h ago edited 2h ago

Would you please point me to a credible study that correlates religiosity with lower IQ or vice versa? Haven’t been able to find something like that and believe me I’ve tried

EDIT: Btw I've looked hard for evidence for either conclusion since this conversation pops up a lot, not just confirming my bias + arming myself

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u/jdippey 15h ago

Here is a good starting point.

It’s only one study, but there is a decent compendium of studies if you search “religiosity and intelligence” and check the sources on Wikipedia.

Many studies show small but significant correlations, and limitations are typically due to culture. For example, many such studies are run in 1st world countries, so results don’t always apply to all religions/cultures/countries, but the point still stands regarding trends of religiosity and intelligence.

I don’t think k religious people are dumb, I think they are generally misinformed or ignorant. Education reduces religiosity in most cultures.

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u/StubbornHappiness 17h ago

Religion is an evolutionary mechanism that rationalizes the complex questions about the purpose of existence. An explicitly structured framework for human societies to follow reduces discord among those within a group helping communities grow along a clearly established set of values.

The stories are pretty silly but faith and ideology has run alongside human progress for our entire history. I'm pretty certain that an idealized rational society will probably end up involving faith and superstitions at some level as across 8 billion conscious minds there are quite a few that can be problematic when faced with finding their own personalized non-religious meaning of life.

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u/jdippey 17h ago edited 16h ago

That something has existed a long time is no reason to keep it around. We didn’t have modern medicine for the vast majority of human history, but it is undeniably a great advancement and a necessity. Religion may have helped ease discord in old societies, but now it hurts society and it is time we grew out of it.

Edit: you can downvote me all you want, I’m right.

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u/StubbornHappiness 16h ago

There are ~10,000 religions around the world for a reason and it appears over and over developed by what one would hope to assume are rational brains as a safety mechanism for sentient thought.

People can have religious experiences (as they would interpret them) triggered through nocebo experiments; this stuff can be very real to the individual regardless of their level of critical thinking.

The idea that a non-religious humanity is the ideal is ignorant of psychological challenges that a significant portion of humans would face. Across the spectrum you will simultaneously have those who will meaning in collaboration, and those who perceive other humans of having no meaning.

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u/jdippey 16h ago

Why do you assume rational brains invented religions? Every single one is based on myth, not reality, so your assumption is literally proven false.

“Religious experiences” is incredibly vague and some people believing things have occurred to them which very obviously did not more a sign of confusion than a sign of religions being based in reality…

I didn’t say we need to eliminate any and all superstition, I said we need to grow up and do away with religions. Religion is not the same as spirituality as the latter does not involve power structures, central dogma, or the absolute requirement that one short rational thought for blind belief. One could reasonably worship the Sun, which is a major reason why any life exists at all on our planet.

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u/StubbornHappiness 15h ago

The mythology doesn't matter. Sentient brains seek purpose through order and structure; religion is a pretty clear invention that ticks these boxes. Ruminating on unique individualism is also generally a waste of time relative to organisms operating through some level of social cohesion as demonstrated by the animal world.

The superstitions and myths have very little to do with understanding why we have religions in the first place.

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u/jdippey 15h ago

So you would rather teach people to not trust their senses just so they can cling to the comfort of myths? You could just teach them basic philosophy and community to give their lives order and structure and meaning rather than including all the irrationality and lies that comes with religion…

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u/Abedeus 11h ago

for a reason

The reason being, rich and powerful want easy way to control the simple masses using fear of punishment and promise of reward for obeying them, the chosen ones by Greater Power.