Mr. Minister of Education,
Allow me to ask you that, when you decided to replace the “Ethics and religious culture” course with that of “Culture and citizenship of Quebec”, what type of culture are you referring to? Do you really think you can ignore the intrinsic culture of a people by denying its beliefs of religious origin?
How can we approach the foundations of Quebec society without addressing its religious beliefs of Judeo-Christian origin, its mores and customs, and the traditions associated with it? The values you want to implement, namely: respect, freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, the rights, freedoms and responsibilities of everyone are relevant in themselves, but they emanate from a certain religious belief that we have received as an inheritance and from which we cannot dissociate ourselves.
Reject all that is religious
There is presently a certain tendency, or rather a definite tendency, to reject everything that is religious. A few years ago, religious education courses were removed from our schools to replace them with ethics and religious culture courses, and now we are trying to eliminate the term religious from our culture. Can we really exclude the culture of religions, at least from its origins? Can we exclude religions from a society, when the two “Culture and Religion” bear witness to who we are.
At the risk of contradicting you, Mr. Roberge, dogma is not a mistake in itself. The mistake is to want to replace the existing dogma by another dogma without reference which is called “dogma of relativism” and which can promote individualism and anarchy, at the expense of common values and practices.
Yes, everyone is entitled to their opinion, but are all opinions the same, even those that lack logical reasoning and consistency? Isn’t it contradictory to want to promote freedom of expression while censoring religious education and stifling religious knowledge in small doses?
We should ask ourselves whether Quebec is ready to gradually shed its beliefs, its sure values, its mores and customs, and its traditions based on its Judeo-Christian origins and wipe out its history for centuries in the name of secularism and neutrality? Unless it is intentional to want to give another image of Quebec and to reconstruct an image based on a variety of “I think that and I know that”, on a vision of political significance, while thinking in this way to solve the existing problems, because we did not know how to settle them at the base.
Respect for beliefs
True secularism and neutrality are not the rejection of everything religious, on the contrary it is respect for the diversity of men’s beliefs and the need to unite them to ensure their coexistence, by establishing common rules aimed at the general interest.
When it comes to dialogue and critical thinking, you are absolutely right. They should indeed be part of any basic training for an individual, but why should one replace one course with another instead of juxtaposing them?
Wanting to remove religious culture from schools is, in my humble opinion, a mistake in itself, because whatever our religion, our origins, our beliefs, man will always seek a meaning in the life he leads and will always question himself. on “where am I from and where am I going?” And no individual, program, state, or country can stop it.
Monique Khouzam Gendron, Manager and professional librarian