Follow-up on "A Poke at ‘eye’ With a Sharp Stick"

The letters to the editor page in this week’s eye in response to last week’s editorial (which I wrote about here) are pretty good. My favourites:

Whatever possessed eye’s editorial board to vomit such venom against

the Catholic Church? (“This is not a democracy,” Editorial, Apr. 28.) Is it

now open season on Catholics, or is this the first in a series denigrating the

world’s major religions?

So eye

does not believe in transubstantiation and the assumption of Mary. So

what? What happened to good old-fashioned manners, whereby we respect

the religious beliefs of others rather than pour scorn on them?

You

then ridicule the Church’s position on human sexuality — in

particular, birth control and condoms. While not defending the Church

on this, I think eye is hardly the credible critic. What is eye’s

contribution to enlightened human sexuality? Take a voyeuristic peep at

your nine pages of so-called adult-only graphic and in-colour girlie

classified ads aiding and abetting prostitution and the degrading of

women as sex objects for sale.

Please spare us any more of your bad manners, chutzpah, irony and hypocrisy!

— G. Lee

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In your editorial regarding Catholicism, you left out a fourth option: dissent, stay Catholic and fight for change.

— Christina M. Babcock

In

the end, I suspect — having been on the editorial board of a student

paper myself (and really, eye is a student paper writ large and backed

by Torstar) — that the eye editorial board will simply let out a

collective self-satisfied huff and go about their merry way, as will

some of those who write in either to support to decry their position.

Based on the comments to my entry on the matter, the intent of the editorial purported by this entry in the eye blog and my eternal

optimism, I hope that it at least got some people thinking about the

role religion plays in some people’s lives.

I’ll leave you with the words of the Dalai Lama from his April 25th, 2004 presentation (I attended, and my notes are here) at SkyDome — er, make that Rogers Centre — here in Accordion City. He talked about his take on the meaning of the word secular:

Not rejection of religion, but respect all religion and respect non-believer.

Peace out, y’all.