The Election

Tomorrow is the Canadian Election and it will be very disappointing and disturbing if we end up electing an Alliance\Conservative government.
When George Bush Sr. coined the phrase Compassionate Conservatism it was because he had to. The guiding principle behind conservatism is resist change to protect self-interest before all else usually for the ruling class, the dominant culture, the dominant race, or the dominant religion. With liberalism we normal don’t have to add the adjective though conservatives quite often like to add the phrase Bleeding Hearts. Which I find odd, especially from Christian conservatives, since I spent all of my time in Sunday watched over by this large frightening, almost 3D, painting of Jesus with an exposed glowing bleeding heart.
If we elect an Alliance\Conservative government it won’t belong before they start ripping apart our government run social programs to follow George Bush’s Faith Based Social Programs. And as in the US where religious organizations need to apply for government grants to run these programs and where Muslin and Jews groups have applied so far only the Christian groups have received any of the money and lots of it.
Also the chances are as in the US officials will be placed in all of the government departments with money to grant to over see that the money goes to those groups the Administration approves of. Something like the political officers the old USSR use to place in all branches of their government.

A Canadian Atheist

This will be my first posting and since I’m new to this please be patient as I find my blogging feet and my blogging voice, bloody blogging right.

Most of my life I watched as the world around me seems to be progressing socially and politically towards more openness, tolerance, and equality becoming more humane. There were lots of wars and conflicts all around but I always held on to sense of hope because no matter what we always seemed to progressing bit by bit ever so slowly. Now in the last couple of decades with the rise of fundamentalism in all the major religions there appears to be a huge movement to stop the world and turn back time.
I can’t see any anything hopeful or positive about this movement it’s a political, social, and spiritual dead end. Sometimes it feels live the whole world has gone out and joined a cult.

In our usual mild Canadian way this movement is expressed through the rise of the Reform/Alliance/ Conservative party with its imported American Christian Fundamentalist values and principles.

Since the days of Preston Manning I’ve always thought of them as the Christian Taliban and what worries me now about them in this election is not the policies they want to talk about but those things they won’t talk about. Steven Harper I’ve read at one time described himself as a Libertarian (a political philosophy for narcissist and sociopaths).
The Conservatives would like to present themselves a kinder gentler centre conservative party but a Libertarian is to a centre conservative as a Stalinist is to a member of the Liberal party.

As Canadian I miss the Old Progressive Conservatives where else in the world could you have a party called the Progressive Conservatives but Canada.

But then maybe I’m wrong but I don’t think so.