Two months ago, the new school year began. For a substantial and growing number of Scottish parents this raised a difficult and continuing challenge. They are the Scots who are non-religious and who are now one Scot in three, according to the Scottish Annual Household Survey (2005). Their children return, in many instances, to a school environment where religion, often largely Christian, predominates, where religious and moral education is a fixed element in the curriculum and where religious observation is…

The General Registrar Office of Scotland has just released its statistics on marriage in Scotland in 2007 and they make interesting reading.

While marriage overall, and religious marriage in particular, continues to decline, the number of marriages conducted by the Humanist Society of Scotland (HSS) has risen dramatically for the third year running.

In 2007, the HSS conducted 710 legal marriages, 285 more than the 2006 total of 434. This represents an annual rise of 64%,…

Two stars are born.  HSS members Clare Marsh and Derek Young are the headline acts on the latest podcast from the Institute of Humanist Studies and American Humanist Association, Humanist Network News, recorded at the recent World Humanist Congress in Washington DC.  The podcast can be downloaded from this webpage.  Needless to say, they get top billing and their "segment" lasts for much of the first 15 minutes of the programme, followed by…

Before the turn of the year I decided that this would be the Summer issue of Humanitie’s “Education Issue”. We would just have launched our own Humanism in Education campaign, founded on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, that “affirms the right of all children to an education that respects both their own cultural values and those of others”, and I thought that Alex Salmond would jump at…

June Edmunds, of Cambridge University's Centre for Development Studies, said: "The findings show that the young Muslims best equipped to lead radical opposition to western society are also among the least inclined to do so. "Although a minority have extreme…

A MATRON subjected two girls, one as young as nine, to violent and sexual abuse in a Church of Scotland children's home, a court has heard, writes Loudon Temple in The Scotsman

So why are so many prominent Western media reluctant to call the perpetrators terrorists? Why did Jon Snow, one of Britain's most respected TV journalists, use the word "practitioners" when referring to the Mumbai terrorists? Was he perhaps confusing them…

At an employment tribunal the Avon branch of Relate conceded a wrongful dismissal claim by Gary McFarlane, who had said it was against his religious beliefs to offer psycho-sexual therapy (PST) to same sex couples, reports The Independent

A leading Catholic cleric has launched a fierce attack on Disney, claiming it has corrupted children and encouraged greed, writes Jonathan Wynne-Jones, Religious Affairs Correspondent of The Daily Telegraph

The US Army and Navy have both hired experts in the ethics of building machines to prevent the creation of an amoral Terminator-style killing machine that murders indiscriminately, reports The Daily Telegraph