Thanks to a bowl-shaped piece of foil, and a special rejigging of my TV’s cable line, we now have up to six channels, instead of the previous 1 or 2. One of the new channels we get is TVO, channel 18.
Last night we were flipping through channels and caught an episode of “The Agenda” with Steve Paikin. The show comprised of a mutli-faith panel discussing the role of religion in Canada, it’s advances and declines, and the ways it can and should connect with people. Since Ana and I are both students of religion, we were both quite interested in this topic and in the multi-faith panel that had been assembled. We noted a few comments:
Ana suggested it was unfair that the panel included three Christians speakers (Catholic, Anglican, United) and only one of each of the other faiths represented (Judaism, Sikhism, Islam, Buddhism). I responded saying that the ration was fair given the actual numbers of adherents of Christianity compared to the other faiths in Ontario, but that the three Christian speakers chosen, were all high church, liturgical folk. Most of the growth of Christianity in Ontario (and there is a clear showing of growth according to StatsCan) is within the evangelical churches, none of which were represented in the panel. Any number of factors may have contributed to this, but it was a shame there was no evangelical representation on this panel.
This may be a semantics issue, or my own personal beef, but I wasn’t a fan of when peolpe would begin their point with “In Buddhism …” or “Islam teaches”. My point is that we know what faith they are representing, and that we don’t need to be reminded with every sentence. Also, it comes off sounding like a sales pitch, and while I appreciate our right to proselytize our faith, a televised inter-faith dialogue is not the appropriate avenue to do that. The rabbi was particularly guilty of that.
The final question was, “Can your faith co-exist with secular society?” Having some experience as a guest on a television talk show, I acknowledge that the questions you’re given ahead of time, and thus have prepared an answer for, don’t always match up with the questions you’re asked on the air. Still, as an audience member, I expect the question asked to be answered. Some gave examples of how their faith had grown in all parts of the world, which to me isn’t coexisting, it’s taking over. Others talked about how meaningful their religion was to people. One of the Christian guests talked about how society had always been secular. There were a few good answers, but I was disappointed with how the show ended.
March 28th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
I bet no one told Mr. Paikin to RTFM
I was actually looking forward to the Five Days of Faith series, unfortunately, I’m busy most nights this week.
As for the question “Can your faith co-exist with secular society?â€, I would be interested in your answer.
To me, it depends on the semantics of the question, particularly the word ’secular’, but also ‘faith’. (To me, both are basically irreligious, i.e. indifferent to religion.) However, the term ‘co-exist’ is what throws me: the fact that right now these religions exist along side secular society in our world means the answer is obviously ‘yes’.