Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance

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The Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance (OCRT) is a group in Ontario, Canada, formed with the stated purpose of promoting religious tolerance and providing the public with information about various religions. To accomplish these goals, they maintain a website, ReligiousTolerance.org^[1], and give lectures. The group is based in Kingston, Ontario.

Contents 1 Members 2 Web site 3 Controversy 3.1 Scientology connection 4 Criticism 5 References 6 External links

[edit] Members

Five volunteers make up the group. They identify themselves as "two Unitarians (one agnostic and the other an atheist), one Wiccan, one liberal but unaffiliated Christian, and a Zen Buddhist."^[2] They are supported by a part-time office assistant. They outline their goals as follows:

We are not theologians or religious innovators; we are simply reporters on religion, spirituality, and ethics. We do not create or promote new religious beliefs. Rather, we explain all of the points of view which others teach on topics as varied as abortion access, equal rights for homosexuals, heaven and hell, God, Satan, and hundreds of other social and religious topics.^[3]

Bruce A. Robinson, the agnostic of the group, is the founder and coordinator of the OCRT, and the primary author at ReligiousTolerance.org. Robinson is a graduate of the University of Toronto, with a BaSc degree in Engineering Physics. He worked for a large multi-national chemical company for thirty-eight years before early retirement. His professional interests were in the development of electronic instrumentation, and involved extensive writing of technical manuals.

The group receives its main funding from donations, banner ads, commissions from Amazon.com, and donations from authors wishing to reprint material from the site.

[edit] Web site

The group started ReligiousTolerance.org in 1995 to counter what they perceive as a proliferation of misinformation about various religions and a lack of religious tolerance on the World wide web. The site contains essays on a variety of topics related to world religions, morality, spirituality, religious intolerance, and new religious movements. The group states that they attempt to write accurate, impartial, and balanced essays^[4], that reference reliable sources. The site keeps a record of notable errors and corrections on an errata page.^[5] Robinson writes the vast majority of these essays.

The Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance designed their site for a North American audience. Though the group is based in Canada, they make a conscious effort to follow American spelling.

By 2008-APR, the web site contained 4,304 essays and received about 1.5 million visitors a month.^[6]

[edit] Controversy

ReligiousTolerance.org addresses controversial subjects such as homosexuality, persecution, and abortion. The site attempts to discuss all sides of these issues and how they relate to various faiths. It is a relatively large website, consisting of over 4,200 essays. During the week ending 2008-12-08, about a half million visitors downloaded almost two million essays. It has been online since early 1995. ^[7]

A number of web rating groups, such as CleanNet and CyberPatrol, once banned the site for its controversial subject matter. These bans have since been lifted. The site remains banned by at least one government, Saudi Arabia.^[8]

The site is currently blocking the internet archive Wayback Machine from showing previous versions of pages. The Wayback Machine, for a time, did not return any results for religioustolerance.org after September 2006. As of September 2007, access to OCRT website snapshots has been blocked on the Wayback Machine.^[9]

In 2006 the Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance decided to "bend the rules" and make an exception to their overall policy of providing information about various religions in a neutral and tolerant way. They presented an argumentative essay donated by Vladimir Tomek titled "Changing Holy Books, In Order to Modify Beliefs and Alter Behaviors".^[10] The report argues from a progressivist viewpoint for the alteration of holy texts. For example the Bible could be altered by downplaying or ignoring those biblical passages that justify genocide; oppression of women; human slavery; execution of Witches, homosexuals and religious minorities; physically abusing children, etc. Their argument is explained at the top of the essay: "To break the spiral of violence and intolerance in the world, we need to eliminate the sanctification of wrong attitudes and evil deeds which are contained in our 'sacred texts.'" The essay argues against fundamentalism, concentrating on Christian fundamentalism. The authors explain their reasons for singling out Christianity and the Bible: "We will primarily cite Christian examples here because it is the main religion in North America, which is our main service area." They acknowledge the essay's potential for sparking controversy, writing that they "realize that believers who regard their holy text as God's word might interpret this essay as an attack on their beliefs." They caution, "If you are easily distressed, we recommend that you not read this essay. Alternately, you may wish to submit your own rebuttal in the form of an essay for our visitors' essay section."^[10]

[edit] Scientology connection

Some controversy concerning OCRT is related to its presentation of the Church of Scientology. Al Buttnor is listed as author or co-author of almost all the site's articles on Scientology. Buttnor is the Director of Public Affairs and Human Rights for the Church of Scientology Toronto.^[11] On one page where Robinson is listed as the author,^[12] most of the text is identical with an official Church of Scientology site.^[13]

Many other articles on the OCRT website focus on controversial topics that are often not available on official denominational web sites. For example, the section on Mormonism contains numerous entries about controversial events in Mormon church history and doctrine such as the Mountain Meadows massacre and Blood Atonement.^[14] The Scientology section does contain information on recent Scientology-related issues in the media, but contains no references to past controversial topics such as Operation Snow White, the Fair Game policy, the Xenu story or the debate over Narconon materials in public schools.^[15]

[edit] Criticism

The group suggests that their atheist, agnostic, and Wiccan authors are particularly well qualified to discuss religious tolerance and intolerance because their religious beliefs are, and have been, the focus of a great deal of intolerance in North America.^[16]

The Apologetics Index (an organization which describes itself as "an online Christian ministry with a two-fold purpose: (1) to provide Christians with apologetics research resources on cults, sects, other religious movements, doctrines and practices, and (2) to help non-Christians find relevant information on the same subjects) characterizes ReligiousTolerance.org as "pluralistic" and unbalanced.^[17]

“

Unfortunately, while you'll find an extensive collection of documented, cross-referenced information, many articles are not as balanced as advertised. The site promotes pluralism, and has a decidedly dim view of the anti-cult and counter-cult movements. It prefers to believe cult-apologists, and promotes many of their arguments. In public and private messages, staff and supporters of the Scientology-backed CAN, refer people to the site rather than their own

”

The ReligiousTolerance.org staff has written an essay countering the Apologetics Index.^[18]

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• ReligiousTolerance.org