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Battling the bigots on-line By Sabitri Gosh KINGSTON, ONT. -- Until last February, ReligiousTolerance.org was ranked the top religious site on the Internet by HitBox.com. Then along came SikhNet. "I know, replaced by a Sikh site," says Bruce Robinson, Web master of the now No. 2 religious site. "It's great, isn't it?" He's neither being cheeky nor turning the other cheek. After all, he and his three fellow volunteers in Kingston, Ont., have spent the past five years pleading for understanding of faiths like Sikhism. But they do more than plead. In more than 1,000 essays, with new ones appearing almost every day, they present the good, the bad and the ugly of religion, hand out their "Burning Times Award" to public figures who exemplify religious intolerance and, perhaps most daringly, attempt to give all perspectives on controversial issues ranging from the Harry Potter books ("charming stories or demonic plot?") to the Vatican's latest statement on religious pluralism. Their site has attracted both astonishing traffic -- lately averaging six million hits a month -- and heated controversy. So far they have received more than 3,000 negative e-mails, a typical one stating: "Get your facts straight. Please seriously consider your souls and conscience." Others call the site hypocritical, a few say that the authors will "rot in hell," and they've even had the occasional death threat. Robinson writes a polite reply to each and every e-mail -- which, he says with a grin, "may well infuriate them even more." It seems an unlikely choice for a retirement hobby, but that's how the site began for the 64-year-old former electronics engineer, whose passions are model railroads and the comparative study of religions. Watching newscasts of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, he says he thought to himself, "What this world needs is more religious tolerance. We don't need religious unity: I think it's dandy the way it is. But what we do need is to get along better. So what I would do was create this little Web site with descriptions of all the different religions and talk about what the different religions are." As the "little" site grew larger, he recruited three friends -- one atheist, one Christian and one Wiccan -- to help him out. "We're sort of the ultimate interfaith group," says Robinson, an agnostic. "Theologically we agree on very little but we all value religious tolerance and religious diversity." Officially called the Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance, they have long sought non-profit status but have been held up, explains Robinson, because "in order to fit into the religion slot, you have to teach the existence of a God." That same unslottable quality has caused them no end of problems
on-line. The filtering program CyberPatrol briefly banned the site because
of an essay on satanic ritual abuse, while a Christian anticult group
noted disapprovingly that the Cult Awareness Network -- now run by the
Church of Scientology -- often points callers to its URL. ReligiousTolerance.org recounts the history of Christian and Jewish beliefs about abortion, presents "ethical views on abortion that are neither pro-choice or pro-life," and points out that "many pro-life individuals and groups blame the violence [against abortion providers] on groups which are quite separate from the pro-life movement -- people who have little regard for human life." "There are a lot of pro-life and pro-choice Web sites," says Robinson, "but they're generally low on accuracy and high on slinging mud at the other side. We use the term that the group itself uses: We don't use the term anti-choice, or pro-death, or anti-abortion. We try to show there are more than two positions. We also try to show that people, no matter what their eventual position, have arrived at it through honest, agonizing analysis and thought." And they're onto something, says University of Virginia sociology professor Jeffrey K. Hadden, who considers the site a Canadian treasure. "By acknowledging there are always at least two sides to every issue, it may get people to hang around and read what persons in the other camp have to say." Hadden thinks the proof of the site's avowed fairness lies in its popularity. "If only one side were presented, persons who did not agree with that position would go away and not come back." Canadian writer Ralph Milton, who co-authored the guide Get Me to the Church Online, is more skeptical. "Journalistic objectivity is an oxymoron, especially when it is applied to matters of religion. So in claiming that, the site authors are a bit naive. It is possible to be fair, however, and as far as I can tell, they are doing that." What he does take issue with is what he calls "the mistake of defining a denomination by its official dogma or teachings." "The site is fine for those who think religious convictions are a matter of intellectual convictions," remarks Milton, a practising United Church member. "For the rest of us, it's like reading a cookbook or a dietician's nutritional analysis when you're hungry. It may be very informative and useful, but it's not what food -- or religion -- is about." Robinson accepts such criticism with equanimity. "All I can say is that we do the best we can." The page he is most proud of, he states, is the one on religious tolerance. "It shows that tolerance is good, but it's really very inadequate. Just tolerating a person is not much. But the next step is to be interested in what other people are believing, to maybe compare their beliefs with your beliefs and maybe learn more about your beliefs from theirs. And finally to where we'd actually value religious diversity as a positive thing." On Earth as it is on-line. Source: The Globe and Mail October 30, 2000, Monday.
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