ONTARIO CONSULTANTS ON RELIGIOUS TOLERANCE

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

Members

Web site

Controversy

Criticism

References

External links

Members

Five volunteers make up the group. They identify themselves as "two Unitarians (one Agnostic and one 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.

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 information available on ReligiousTolerance.org has been cited and used by the ''Toronto Star'', CBS News, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. A search on Amazon reveals that 79 books are known to contain citations to this web site. ^[6] A search on Ranking.com shows that the web site has a web traffic rank of 8,130 and 115,912 incoming links^[7]
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 the middle of 2007, the web site contained about 3,815 essays and received about 1.5 million visitors a month.^[8]

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.
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 some governments, such as Saudi Arabia.^[9]
Some controversy concerning the site 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 Special Affairs for the Church of Scientology Toronto.^[10][11][12] On one page where Robinson is listed as the author,^[13] most of the text is identical with a Church of Scientology site.^[14] These articles focus less on controversial topics than the site's treatments of other faiths, such as the Mormon church and its denominations. For example, the Religioustolerance.org section on Mormonism contains numerous entries about controversial events in Mormon church history and doctrine such as the Mountain Meadows Massacre and Blood Atonement.^[15] However the Scientology entries contain no mention of controversial elements such as Operation Snow White, the Fair Game policy, the Xenu story or the debate over Narconon materials in public schools.^[16] In addition, the site is currently blocking the Internet Archive Wayback Machine from showing previous versions of the Scientology pages.^[17]
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".^[18] It 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 follows: "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."

Criticism

Critics of ReligiousTolerance.org often argue that the site's team of writers is unbalanced by including two secularists and one Neopagan along with followers of two older religions. However, the website's staff argues that the secularists assure a neutral, balanced treatment of all religions, with minimal bias towards any. The group suggests that their Atheist, Agnostic, and Wiccan 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.^[19]
The Apologetics Index classifies ReligiousTolerance.org as "pluralistic" and views it as biased against the inherent exclusivism of Christianity.^[20]
: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 these beliefs of Apologetics Index.^[21] The staff responds that "pluralistic" is not a useful term, because it has multiple meanings. Their website is pluralistic in that it acknowledges the fact that many dozens of religions and over 1,000 Christian faith groups do exist in North America. But it is not pluralistic in the other sense of the word -- that all religions are true and valid. It criticizes destructive faith groups whose beliefs and practices have led to the deaths of their members. They also criticize the actions of faith groups that harm people, limit their personal freedoms or restrict their personal development. Their site does discuss the findings of academic researchers into new religious movements (referred to as "cult-apologists" by Apologetics Index), and does describe past criminal activity by a few groups in the counter-cult movement. They note that the new Cult Awareness Network (CAN) does not list ReligiousTolerance.org among its list of ''helpful list of factual religious sites''. ^[22]

References

1. http://www.religioustolerance.org/purpose.htm#start
2. http://www.religioustolerance.org/purpose1.htm#who
3. http://www.religioustolerance.org/credentials.htm
4. http://www.religioustolerance.org/attack.htm
5. http://www.religioustolerance.org/correct.htm
6. http://www.amazon.com
7. http://www.ranking.com
8. http://www.religioustolerance.org/stats.htm
9. http://www.religioustolerance.org/award.htm
10. ''The Church of Scientology International European Public Affairs and Human Rights Office'' lists Al Buttnor on its contacts page
11. The Buffalo News: ''Breaking In, Breaking Out''
12. Church of Scientology International: ''Church of Scientology International Announces World-wide Human Rights Hero Contest''
13. Resolution of religious Intolerance towards the Church of Scientology B.A. Robinson
14. The Growth of Scientology throughout Europe European Office for Public Affairs and Human Rights
15. http://www.religioustolerance.org/lds.htm
16. http://www.religioustolerance.org/scientol.htm
17. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine does not return any results for ReligiousTolerance.org after September 2006 ★ class=wikiexternal target=_blank>/http://www.religioustolerance.org/
18. http://www.religioustolerance.org/tomek25.htm
19. http://www.religioustolerance.org/purpose1.htm#crit
20. http://www.apologeticsindex.org/o00.html#ocrt
21. http://www.religioustolerance.org/ccmcrit.htm
22. http://www.cultawarenessnetwork.org/dbase/clippings/relsites.htm

External links

★ ReligiousTolerance.org