I helped out at the Vaisakhi Day celebrations with the Tarksheel Society yesterday. It was an invaluable experience. By noon we had over 100 visitors, and there were many others who gave us the thumbs up on their way by.

I asked one of my co-volunteers and he confirmed that Vaisakhi is more of a Punjabi cultural festival than a Sikh one.

Either way there was lots of good and free food, colourful costumes and wonderful folks to talk to.

During the 2015 federal election, Canada Revenue Agency published an advisory telling charities to censor partisan comments on their website, blogs and social media.

This follows the string of audits of charities' political activities since 2012. While further audits have been cancelled, active audits are still ongoing and the sector-wide chill remains in effect.

At this week's Sunday meeting in Vancouver, BCHA Executive Director Ian Bushfield will elaborate on how these symptoms are part of a system that silences Canada's civil society, including the BC Humanist Association, and how the government could instead encourage free debate.

Natural and legal rights are two types of rights. Legal rights are those bestowed onto a person by a given legal system. (i.e., rights that can be modified, repealed, and restrained by human laws). Natural rights are those not contingent upon the laws, customs, or beliefs of any particular culture or government, and therefore universal and inalienable (i.e., rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws)              Wikipedia

The confusion between these two types of rights, and the propensity of states, religious institutions, employers, philosophers and a host of other social and political entities to deliberately impose their own system of rights, makes it necessary for me to reclaim what could never be taken from me in the first place, and which I can never even give away: my Natural Rights.

Then, to consider the picture in full, I must accept the responsibilities which come with those rights, if I want to live my life with purpose.

There's an implicit irony in any declaration of Universal Natural Rights. For what is a right accept the liberty to choose one thing or course of action over another? And what is a Universal Natural Right accept one that is inalienable and applicable in any circumstance? The irony in those two statements is the conclusion that the only thing I cannot choose is to give up is my Natural Rights. They can be bludgeoned senseless, starved to death, choked to the point of unconsciousness, or – more often – forgotten in the grind of daily routine, but they cannot be given or taken away.

As for the responsibilities that make Natural Rights cohesive, directed and – if we so choose – contributory, they can and often are shunned, a failure of will that more-often-than-not renders proclamations of Natural Rights mere bravado.

Society at large – any social grouping – abhors any assertion of Natural Rights. Social groupings always have tyrannical underpinnings: you either obey the rules of the group, or you are punished, even outcast for your transgressions. This insistence on obedience is necessary, otherwise collective cohesion and action become impossible. Where we go too far is insisting that the rules must be obeyed without question – that the group has the 'moral' or 'religious' or other authority to impose its will not only on our actions, but on our very thoughts.

It is time, I believe, to moderate those demands for obedience. There will be many occasions when I have to moderate my expression of Natural Rights in order to work for the common good. In fact, most of my waking hours will be spent adapting to a collective purpose. But I am not surrendering my Natural Rights in those instances; I am setting them aside because I believe my own interests can best be advanced by adapting to a common set of rules designed to achieve a social or collective end.

Of course the group can impose its will if my expression of Natural Rights is perceived to be a threat to them or myself. No-one passes through life without having the will of a social group imposed upon him or her. Indeed, so immersed are we in the impositions of bodily function, family and community from the day we are born, that we rarely even arrive at the point where we are conscious of our Natural Rights. More likely we quickly come to consider our expressions of Natural Rights to be outbursts and tantrums or thick-headedness at best; hardened criminal activity or treason at worst.

I would hazard to guess that before the 19th Century the vast majority would have considered any inkling of Natural Rights an absurd fantasy to be atoned for rather than embraced. None of that diminishes the importance of Natural Rights at this point in our historical evolution. My belief is that Natural Rights have been an underlying possibility we are only now in a position to experience and express – that we are at that place in time where consciousness must consider the full expression of Natural Rights as necessary for humanity, for living spirit, to advance in the world.

Dangerous and frivolous as the expression of Natural Rights seems to the status quo, it will be the jostling and harmonizing of billions of individual wills that unleashes the full human potential. We may not get a chance to realize that level of freedom. The technological and social revolutions that have made the full expression of Natural Rights a possibility rather than a hopelessly abstract theory are also capable of clamping down and stifling free expression, and there are tyrants ever-ready to turn those powers against us.

That is why the Humanist movement is important to me. There are many unconnected strands in this essay, the most important being: How is 'moral' or 'collective' action possible in a world where Natural Rights are enshrined? That will have to be a topic for another entry.

Upcoming Ideas: Who am I? / Nothing out of Nothing – so every thing’s always been / The four aspects of living spirit: Physical, Emotional, Intellectual, Spiritual / Morality, Ethics and Natural Rights / Ego: The necessary illusion / Just because or jest because / I think, therefore I spam / Who do I pray to (Take 2) / Killing gods is no laughing matter.

The new draft bill to allow physician-assisted dying in Canada will likely be made public later this week. However, a source told The Canadian Press that the draft bill will not give patients the right to make advance requests for assisted dying.

We have argued - along with many of you in your own words - that physicians should honour a patient's request when that request is made freely and explicitly in advance.

This isn't just a theoretical threat but one that could drastically reduce the right for those facing a diagnosis of dementia to choose an assisted death.

Please use Dying With Dignity Canada's updated email-an-MP tool to send a letter to your Member of Parliament asking them to protect our right to choose.

The heckler in the classic film Miracle on 34th Street calls Kris Kringle “a big, fat fake.” In court his defence lawyer argues that if the American people can believe in God – for “In God We Trust” figures in their national anthem and coins – without any proof, then they can also believe in Santa Claus.

Judging by all the white-bearded and red-suited men in shopping malls at Christmas, it appears that Americans now believe in more than one Santa Claus, just as there are those who believe in more than one god, like the Hindus of India or the Shinto Buddhists of Japan. But from the time of the Babylonian deity Marduk, the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten, the Israelite god Yahweh and the Zoroastrian spirit Ahura Mazda, there has been the notion of only one god, bringing us ever closer to the true, round figure.

Last month, news broke that Canadian Plasma Resources (CPR) is looking to expand its private plasma collection services to British Columbia. CPR, who currently operate a clinic in Saskatoon, gives $25 to each plasma donor.

As Humanists who value reason and compassion, we have a duty to explore the ethical issues surrounding issues in the public debate.

Last week, we made headlines for challenging the distribution of religious materials in Abbotsford schools. We will continue to push for secular schools and against religious privilege in our government institutions.

But another part of our mission, and the broader Humanist worldview, is to provide a positive alternative to religion.

That's why, I'm excited to announce our first Humanist Officiant Training seminar, coming up on May 7. This seminar is a step toward fulfilling our mission of providing meaningful ceremonies at significant times of life, such as marriages and deaths.

If you're interested in becoming one of our first officiants, please get in touch with me.

We're only three months into 2016 and there have already been nearly 100 terrorist attacks around the world.

The most infamous ones in the past week were in Brussels and Lahore, India, claiming the lives of over 100 people.

Yet even in the aftermath of these atrocities, there is reason for hope. Chris Cocking's article, which I republished on our blog last week, explores the outpouring of empathy, compassion and altruism that often follow these incidents.

For me, this is where the hope of Humanism lies: rejecting fear and lending a helping hand to another human being.

Another reason to be hopeful is that despite these recent attacks, we have good evidence to suggest that global violence is continuing to decline.

One of our members is interested in studying the status of minority religious and ethnic groups in Muslim majority countries. I've pasted the proposal below and if you're interested in helping out, simply email me at [email protected] and I'll put you in touch.

The work can be done by anyone with an internet connection and there's no requirement that you be a professional academic. The goal is to get this information out there so we can have more informed discussions.

The first clue to answering the question ‘Who am I?’ is the question itself. Of all the species on the planet, we are possibly the only one that asks who and what we are, the puzzles at the heart of art, history, sociology, psychology and philosophy.

So let’s put the question into context, before we attempt an answer. When we ask who we are, the question implies a distinction between our selves and the world we inhabit. In a word, we have become intellectually self-conscious.

I love my dog Sophie. There’s no question she’s self-conscious. But I’m pretty sure her level of self-consciousness is in the physical and emotional dimensions (I’ll talk more about those terms when I post my thoughts on The Four Aspects of Living Being) – she’s aware of herself in response to stimuli and events in the world around her, but not as a being that needs any more definition than her responses offer. Her now is much more reactive than mine.

That doesn’t make me any better than Sophie, or either of us any less essential to the unfolding consciousness of the world, it just puts us at different vantage points.

How about the ‘lowly’ earth worm, or house fly? I don’t know what kind of consciousness they might be experiencing and expressing, but suspect strongly they live in a purely physical mode, responding to sensations that either attract or repel.

Again, there is no inherent superiority implied in this observation – earthworms and houseflies are as important to the biological ‘order of things’ as human beings. It’s just that we have different things to experience and express.

So when I ask ‘Who am I?’ it seems to me that at least part of the answer is ‘I am a creature who is intellectually self-conscious’: I want to define a dimension of my self – and by extension, my fellows – in intellectual terms, that is in terms that are theoretical, philosophical and scientific, and which can be expanded and explored.

Not only that, but by further extension, I want to define other living entities, and place myself in a hierarchy of evolved consciousness… that’s where our special role emerges, and where many of our troubles begin as we try to sort things out.

The problem with the question ‘Who am I’ is it has almost always been asked in terms of what separates me from other species, and even from other members of my own species. The hierarchical structure of most religions and the authoritarian style of most states up to recent times is a direct result of this mental framework. Increasingly, I believe, people are coming to realize it’s more important to ask what connects us to all other life forms, and hopefully that perspective-shift is taking place in time to save us from ourselves.

So who am I?

To resort to metaphor: I am a cell in the cerebral cortex of world consciousness – a being awakened to astounding new discoveries; and to concepts of infinity and eternity that will forever make my world-view tantalizingly incomplete.