Living Together with Disagreement: Pluralism, the Secular, and the Fair Treatment of Beliefs in Canada Today
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Canadian approach to a pluralistic society has frequently overlooked the important role religion plays in the lives of its citizens. This paper argues that the current Canadian approach to religious pluralism too often attempts to impose a single, unitary construct of nonreligious social norms. Secularism, as a movement, cannot be neutral with respect to religion – the exclusion of religion from the public square threatens to undermine a key component of many citizens’ identities, their freedom of religion. This paper, building upon earlier work of the author, argues for a definition of “secular” that keeps religion and the state jurisdictionally separated, but that does not preclude cooperation and mutual understanding between these two spheres. Canadian society, in common with all properly liberal and open constitutional societies, must grow to accept and tolerate disagreements about differing beliefs. The ultimate goal of this new approach is to create a modus vivendi, a society in which individual and communal differences are accepted and embraced rather than one in which law and politics are viewed as building towards forced “agreement” or “convergence.” Also discussed is the idea of sexual dogma which the author suggests should be treated like religious dogma in which no one view of sexual conduct or sexual orientation should be accorded official public support in a plural society.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.062 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".