Yukon highest % of "no religion" in Canada

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God isn’t dead in the Yukon, but he isn’t in peak condition.

The Yukon has Canada’s highest population of atheists and agnostics, making it the country’s most secular jurisdiction.

More than 11,000 Yukoners (37.4 per cent of the population) say they have “no religion,” according to Statistics Canada.

Canada-wide, the “no religion,” group only constitutes 16 per cent.

....

“In the Yukon, the missionary and church work shifted from First Nations to newcomers during and after the Gold Rush,” wrote Yukon historian Ken Coates in an e-mail to the News.

More than 100 years later, aboriginal communities have largely kept the faith.

But among non-aboriginals, church attendance has plummeted.

The Yukon’s lack of worship may simply be a lack of First Nations.

Only one quarter of the Yukon population is aboriginal.

The Northwest Territories, on the other hand, counts just over 50 per cent of its population as First Nations.

NWT’s “no religion” group is only 17 per cent.

At 85 per cent, Nunavut holds Canada’s highest percentage of First Nations.

They also hold the country’s lowest population of atheists and agnostics (only six per cent).



...

Over in Alaska, the situation is similar.

The ultra-religious neo-conservatism of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin may have painted the 49th state as a God-fearing Mecca, but the average Alaskan stopped thumping the Bible long ago.

Only 22 per cent of Alaskans regularly attend church services - one of the lowest in the United States, according to a study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

A further 31 per cent of Alaskans consider religion “not too important.”

In comments to the Anchorage Daily News, Evangelical Lutheran Bishop Michael Keys attributed mass-secularization to the state’s fierce individualism.

37% seems kind of low. I had no idea Canada was so religious. Also why is it a shame, how is it negatively affecting their lives? I would say it's a shame you're an atheist because it makes you a condescending narcissist. or am i getting the cause and effect back to front?

It's ashame because it shows that "gunpoint ministries" work and that "rice Christians" remain permanent over the ages.

By the way, I'd like to say that you display the vicious hypocrisy of supposed "good (i.e. Fundie) Christians". Whine and whine about "atheists converting people" and then insinuate narcissism. Its funny that in your other thread you speak of how people generalizing on the basis of bad religious experiences are "a lot like racists" yet you yourself made that whole thread on the basis of generalizations on atheists.

Could we please desist from personal attacks?

Attack the statement/opinion/belief not the person.

Its funny that in your other thread you speak of how people generalizing on the basis of bad religious experiences are "a lot like racists" yet you yourself made that whole thread on the basis of generalizations on atheists.

I would say it's a shame you're an atheist because it makes you a condescending narcissist.

The fact is that genocide has been made against the population of Native Americans, and Christian faith WAS forced on them, usually by forced conversion.

The War of 1812 marked a turning point from the policy of Native-American assimilation and partial retention of native land to the policy of outright removal of native tribes to the West of the Mississippi. The forced removal or tribes also resulted in a total relinquishment of traditional native land. After many largely unsuccessful attempts to convince the five relatively prosperous and assimilated tribes of the Southeast (Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Creek) to voluntarily move westward, the federal government acquiesced to state pressure and passed the Indian Removal Act of 1830. It offered a trade of land in the East for land in the West. The particularly coercive aspect of the act was that those who refused the exchange would no longer be protected under federal law and would be subject to hostile state regulation. The removal policies of the federal government resulted in the humanitarian disaster referred to by the Cherokee as the Trail of Tears.

Approximately four thousand Cherokee perished on this forced walk to western lands. Removal, however, was a larger policy than this one famed act. It occurred both before and after 1830 and represented the belief that American Indians were not capable of existing with nor desired to coexist with white settlers. There were conflicting motivations behind the policy. For some, it was a thinly veiled method of evicting Native Americans from land that was desired by white settlers. For others, it was based on the belief that Native Americans were members of an inferior civilization that could not survive in the civilized world and therefore needed to be removed for their own sake. Either way, some scholars reference the federal removal policy as a genocidal act due to the death and proprietary loss incurred to Native Americans as well as the destruction of their traditional way of life.

A second and particularly destructive policy was that of assimilation. Behind assimilation policies lies the desire to remove all that is "Indian" from the Native Americans. A particularly poignant historical example of how this policy was also tied to the continued desire for more land is the General Allotment Act of 1887 (the Dawes Act). This act terminated communal land holdings on the reservations and redistributed land to individual Native Americans by a trust system. After twenty-five years, they would own the land individually and become U.S. citizens. Any "surplus" land would be taken for sale to settlers. It was an attempt to assimilate Native-American traditions of communal land holdings to the Euro-American system of private ownership. Thereby, it was thought, Native Americans would join mainstream society and, at the same time, require less land. This act had disastrous effects on traditional Native-American life and reduced their land holdings by two-thirds.

Yet another assimilation policy was the forced removal of Native-American children from their parental homes to boarding schools for "civilized" education. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 established an involuntary boarding-school system where children were typically forbidden to speak their native language and were stripped of all outward native characteristics. The Carlisle Indian Industrial School was one of these schools and incorporated an "outing system" whereby children were placed with white families in order to learn American customs and values. While having the good intention to provide education to Native-American children, this system of indoctrination was also aimed at "killing the Indian and saving the man" (Glauner, 2002, p. 10) as Richard Pratt of the Carlisle School said. In the twenty-first century, this policy would be considered both a potential violation of the UN Genocide Convention's prohibition on transferring children from one group to another, and a blatant intention to cleanse the Indian population of their native language and cultural values through the re-education of their children.

A clearer example of a federal genocidal act against Native Americans was the involuntary sterilization of approximately seventy thousand Native-American women. The federally funded Indian Health Services carried out these sterilizations between 1930 and the mid-1970s. They were often done without informed consent, covertly, or under a fraudulent diagnosis of medical necessity. This directly contravenes the UN Genocide Convention. Destroying a group's ability to reproduce is an obvious and crude method of ensuring the inability of the group's survival.

Whether government actions such as the Trail of Tears and assimilation policies qualify as genocidal acts or as crimes against humanity continues to be a subject of much disagreement and debate. The UN Genocide Convention requires that a state actor have "intent to destroy" a group to satisfy the definition of genocide. As previously outlined, many of the actions taken by the federal, state, and colonial governments fell short of actual intent to destroy the Native Americans. Scholars Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn maintain that the closest cases are the massacres at Sand Creek and of the Yuki of Round Valley (a modern example would be the sterilization programs). In both instances, government officials played key roles in facilitating the purposeful killing of Native Americans. The circumstances under which the United States committed genocide against Native Americans tended to be when other methods failed to clear a path to settlement, or other notions of progress. "Ethnocide was the principal United States policy toward American Indians in the nineteenth century . . . the federal government stood ready to engage in genocide as a means of coercing tribes when they resisted ethnocide or resorted to armed resistance" (Chalk and Jonassohn, 1990, p. 203).

On September 8, 2000, the head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) formally apologized for the agency's participation in the "ethnic cleansing" of Western tribes. From the forced relocation and assimilation of the "sauvage" to the white man's way of life to the forced sterilization of Native Americans, the BIA set out to "destroy all things Indian." Through the exploration of the United States' Federal Indian policy, it is evident that this policy intended to "destroy, in whole or in part," the Native American population. The extreme disparity in the number of Native American people living within the United States' borders at the time Columbus arrived, approximately ten million compared to the approximate 2.4 million Indians and Eskimos alive in the United States today, is but one factor that illustrates the success of the government's plan of "Manifest Destiny."

No longer can we remain indifferent and justify these acts of genocide committed by the United States government, its agencies, and its personnel against Native Americans as a result of colonization or the need to establish a prosperous union. Instead, the United States government, its agencies, and those involved with carrying out the measures designed to inflict genocidal acts against the Native American population must be held in violation of customary international law, as well as conventional international law, as proscribed in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Genocide Convention).

They are equally "stupid" as all the people across the globe who follow the religion of their parents.

The analogies with Alaska of all places are quite interesting (although, given Alaska borders the Yukon, perhaps it shouldn't be that surprising). I really find the high rates of religiosity among the First Nations in Canada quite sad, as (quite like former African slaves in the USA) it was a religion rammed down their throats in a brutalizing way and it seems to have stuck.

I would say it's a shame you're an atheist because it makes you a condescending narcissist. or am i getting the cause and effect back to front?

If you follow a religion because somebody else does. Then you don't understand the religion and you don't really follow it. So in my eyes there is no such thing as somebody who "believes" in a religion because their parents do, only those who say they believe but don't really. If they actually believe then their parents had as much to do with their belief as google maps has to do with me getting laid because they showed me the way to the brothel.

why is that bad (i really don't know because i don't know what "gunpoint ministries" and "rice Christians" are)

For anyone interested a documentary on the state of Native Americans now:

http://vimeo.com/21074930

(Documentary is in English with Romanian subtitles)

And a book: A little matter of genocide

"Rice Christians" refers to the phenomena of impoverished individuals in China "converting" to Christianity in order to gain food (rice) that wasn't in great supply after the (Western induced, Christian missionary supported) Opium Wars.