PRETTY SAFE HERE, I THINK

            As if the residents of the province of Saskatchewan didn’t have reason enough to love our rectangular shaped province the outbreak of more terrorist attacks in Paris, France, on Friday November the 13^th may have solidified that love. Well, maybe you don’t “love” the province but I would dare say that you would be hard-pressed to find a safer place on the planet to live.

One could Google exactly where the safest place on Earth would be but because there seem to be so few people, including our own fellow Canadian citizens, who know where Sask-at-chee-wan is it’s unlikely that the province of Saskatchewan  would be in the top ten, or even on the radar for that matter. What’s more unlikely is a terrorist strike here…but, then again, you never know, do you? Anonymity can be a good thing sometimes, though, don’t you think?

            I’m certain that if one were to spend hours upon hours upon hours of reading and researching and reading some more and researching and interviewing and digesting the motives and actions of some fanatical zealots who seem to have morphed from Al Qaeda to ISIS but still continue their murderous terrorist actions one could ascertain how these types of people believe they are performing “religious acts”. Hmmm… “religious acts?” It’s a head scratcher to me, I’ll tell you.

            Then again, if you were to read one of the definitions of “religion” in the English Oxford dictionary, (“The freedom to manifest religion or belief in worship, observance, practice and teaching encompassing a broad range of acts.”), you might stretch the argument to include suicide bombings and innocent civilian murders and online decapitations etc as religious events but, as mentioned, it’s more than a bit of a stretch. At least to this humble scribe it is.

            A 700 word, or thereabouts, essay on page four of a weekly newspaper can hardly do justice to the deep theological discussions that would be required to fully digest the advantages and disadvantages of organized religion, so I will not attempt it here. Suffice to say, though, that it is not only the followers of the Quran who have killed for religious reasons. Please do not misinterpret the above statement as condoning murderous or violent actions for religions’ sake. I do not. Ever.

            Saskatchewan can be a cold, hard place to live in for many weeks of the year and I don’t think I’m alone when sometimes I wonder why our forefathers decided that this was the place to stop and put down their roots, it must have been a nice June or September or something, but the one common theme amongst the pioneers of the prairies was that they were looking for a better place to live and by all accounts, I think they found it.

            “There is nothing more important than a good, safe, secure home,”- Rosalynn Carter (1927-).