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…

Families who don’t believe in God failed by education, Humanists say 

By Andrew Denholm, Education Correspondent, The Herald, 23.04.08

Families who don't believe in God are being failed by Scotland's education system, it was claimed yesterday.

The Humanist Society of Scotland (HSS) warned that both lessons and events such as assemblies in non-denominational schools were largely directed at those who had a Christian faith.

This Saturday, the society will launch an education campaign, founded on the UN…

The Gifford Lecture Series 2008
Date: Tuesday, April 15 2008
Time: 18:00
Venue: Sir Charles Wilson Lecture Theatre, University Avenue, Glasgow University
Category: Public Lectures
Speaker: Professor David Fergusson
David Fergusson, Professor of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh, will present the Gifford Lecture Series 2008.
 
Founded in 1887 by the bequest of Lord Gifford, the annual Gifford Lecture Series was established to promote, advance and diffuse the study of Natural Theology in the widest sense of that term.…

IHEU has responded to claims that the “Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam” is “not an alternative” to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but “complementary” to it. In a written statement to the UN Human Rights Council, IHEU opposed any resolution that seeks to limit the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration. The official UN publication of the statement is available for download at the IHEU site

Britain's first Muslim minister has attacked the growing culture of hostility against Muslims in the United Kingdom, saying that many feel targeted like "the Jews of Europe", writes Cahal Milmo, Chief Reporter of The Independent

We're never going to dismantle faith schools. We can argue against their expansion, but to argue for their disassembly is wilful. Instead, we could take all that energy and find a nice godless primary to invest it in, argues Read more...

The world of spiritualism is embroiled in a bitter dispute after the British head of the International Spiritualist Federation was jailed for raping girls and young women while giving them naked energy massages. Mervyn Wright, who claimed to be acting…

Suspicion of the Muslim community has found its way into mainstream society – and nobody seems to care. By Peter Oborne in The Independent

On the eve of the General Synod and the Lambeth Conference, the sleeping giant of evangelical and orthodox Anglicanism has been awoken by liberal agitation and Rowan Williams’s failed leadership. The church is damaged beyond repair, writes THEO…

John Gray, the author of Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia and former professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics gave a lecture on the New Atheism: podcast available on The Times…