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The Church of Atheism may have sensed that the Charter/Saguenay part of its case might not have a hope in hell, so to speak, and so the design of the Church’s application for a tax exemption used the strategy of treating its interpretation of “Atheism” as a religion, rather than the absence or rejection of religion. The “Church” propounds the worship of “mainstream science” and claims to possess a “Ten Commandments of Energy” which were “created by a wise human being who consists of pure, invisible Energy and has acknowledged Energy’s existence.”

(Acknowledging the existence of energy? As Carlyle supposedly said when he heard Margaret Fuller’s remark “I accept the Universe”: “Gad! She’d better!”)

Photo by Sue Ogrocki/AP

The Federal Court was no more impressed by any of this than you are. Yet even here there was some point-scoring by the Church: Revenue Canada had demanded evidence that the CoA believes “in a higher unseen power such as a God, Supreme Being, or entity,” and the Court had to admit (when presented with the awkward example of Buddhism) that these items are not necessarily a part of any religion. All that is left of the test for a religious tax exemption is that applicants hold to “a particular and comprehensive system of doctrine and observances.”

That seems like a standard that philosophical materialists could meet pretty easily; it is hard to know how Revenue Canada, given the logic of this ruling, could turn away a tax-exempt Church of Karl Marx. (I know, I know, we have those already and they’re called universities, very droll …) But the real question is the Charter question: whether it is possible for atheists to receive a tax exemption for some sodality that preached and advocated atheism, as the Roman church does the sacraments, but that did not pretend to be a church and did not cook up a phoney decalogue to hornswoggle Mr. Taxman. If this is not to be possible, atheists might at least receive a proper explanation for it.

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