Brights News Feed

Dr Evan Harris MP (Lib Dem), Frank Dobson MP (Lab) and David Wilshire MP (Con) have tabled an amendment that would effectively abolish Britain’s archaic blasphemy law. The vote is tomorrow.

From New Humanist:

A letter published in today’s Daily Telegraph makes the case for repealing the law: “As the Law Commission acknowledged in 1985, when it recommended repeal, it is uncertain in scope, but lack of intention is no defence, and the law is unlimited in penalty.

This, together with its chilling effect on free expression and its discriminatory impact, leaves it in clear breach of human rights law. In the end, no one is likely to be convicted under it.”

The letter is signed by a host of honorary associates and distinguished supporters of the Rationalist Association, the BHA and the NSS, including Richard Dawkins, RA President Jonathan Miller, philosopher and regular New Humanist contributor AC Grayling, historian David Starkey and author Philip Pullman. It’s even been signed by former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey, with the letter pointing out that “the Church of England no longer opposes its abolition on principle”.

The NSS point their members and subscribers to www.theyworkforyou.com where you can write to your MP in support of the amendment. The BHA have a specific “Write to your MP” page with a pre-set message about the law. Don’t delay! MPs will vote on the amendment as early as tomorrow.

As a special Christmas treat the Brights News Feed has, with ironically Easter-like symbolism, spontaneously risen from the dead.

Despite for a while receiving a growing amount of traffic, the editor withdrew from regular posting almost by accident, and other contributors with similarly busy lives have also failed to satiate your news hunger.

BrightsOnline.net will be undergoing an overhaul in the next few months aimed at making regular management easier for editors, as well as providing more routes for collaboration and contribution from all visitors.

In the meantime, in lieu of a season greet from BrightsOnline.net, here are two thoughtful mid-winter messages, both aimed at the widespread “demonology” which regards secularists as rabidly anti-Christmas, a major theme in the British press this year.

• The President’s Mid-Winter Message — Terry Sanderson, President of the National Secular Society (UK)
• Sorry to disappoint, but it’s nonsense to suggest we want to ban Christmas — Polly Toynbee, President of the British Humanist Association

Links to “mid-winter” messages from other secularist figures from anywhere in the world would be welcome (use the comments below).

The British government today released a “joint statement” (PDF) with a number of religious groups, essentially touting the view that “faith schools” are a social good and heralding yet further expansion of their presence in state-funded schooling.

This is despite a two-thirds public majority who think that no religiously-affiliated schools should receive any state funding (BBC), and despite last year’s DfES-commissioned report — “Faith Primary Schools: Better Schools or Better Pupils?” (LSE) — which concluded that there was “clear positive selection of pupils into faith schools on the basis of observable characteristics that are favourable to education”. These “observable characteristics” account for the results disparity which the government still continues to use as an excuse for furthering the faith school agenda, even though their own DfES-commissioned report shows that these successes are down to nothing but social selection, so effectively the better results of faith schools are just a measure of how much the local population is skewed in its favour by covert selection and so-called “pushy” parents.

The British Humanist Association condemned today’s report as a “disgrace” (press release).

Read the rest of this entry »

In October 2000 a Pakistani, Dr Younus Sheikh, was arrested on the charge of “blasphemy” and he was later found guilty and sentenced to death. He had been an active humanist and campaigner, and only after a concerted effort on behalf of humanist and other NGOs and rights groups was he finally freed in 2004, after three years spent mostly in solitary confinement.

This week, another man who by coincidence is also named Younus Sheikh — a writer who has criticized Islam — has been found guilty of “blasphemy” and sentenced to life in prison. And once again, the media outrage is limited — at this moment there are just two related news stories on Google, one from Pakistani newspaper The News, and the other from the UK’s National Secular Society.

Read the rest of this entry »

With one eye on trigger-happy western nations, a Lebanese group of intellectuals have questioned the uniquely confessionalist Lebanese political system — in which power is proportionally distributed amongst representatives of different religious groups — in favor of a secular, humanist code.

The Lebanese Daily Star carries the following (via).
Read the rest of this entry »

The IHEU’s former President, Roy Brown, has made a series of criticisms against the Human Rights Council to which he is now the IHEU’s representative at the UN.

Even in his worst nightmares former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan could hardly have dreamed when he called for the replacement of the failing Commission for Human Rights by a new Human Rights Council, that he was driving the first nail into the coffin of human rights at the United Nations (Roy Brown reports from Geneva). The last nail was hammered home on Tuesday 19 June 2007 when, after a year of often heated debate, the Council adopted without a vote a new set of procedures that will permanently limit its ability to deal effectively with human rights violations. […]

The root cause of the problem in the Council is the geographical distribution of its membership. The African and Asian states have an in-built majority. Whilst this can be justified by the number of states and the populations involved, it enables a group of states, euphemistically called the “like-minded” group, to control the Council. Sadly, these states, as diverse as China, India, Pakistan and Cuba, are like-minded only in their determination to shield one another from accusations of human rights abuse.

See “A Catastrophe for Human Rights“. Also see last week’s “Is the Council of Europe really impartial on religion?” and today’s “Council of Europe rejects report calling creationism “dangerous” and a “threat to human rights“.

As announced yesterday, the Humanist Society of Scotland has used Darwin Day to launch Humanist Thought for the Day, at www.ThinkHumanist.org (RSS). To start things off, A. C. Grayling talks about the Paradox of Tolerance. The HSS will be encouraging humanists from around the world to voice their own “thoughts for the day”. To that end you can get in touch with them, or subscribe to receive the podcasts by email, here.

As announced in the most recent Bulletin from “Brights Central”, a collaboration at the official Brights Forums have designed and produced a naturalistically themed calendar for 2007, from which profits go to the Brights Net. You can purchase the first ever Brights calendar here. (It’s only February, and maybe it will have souvenir value!) A 2008 calendar is also in the planning.

But what to do this year?

Read the rest of this entry »

The House of Lords in the UK has today upheld new gay rights legislation, in the face of a challenge led by Lord Morrow, by a majority of 199 to 68. The Sexual Orientation Regulations Act came into force on 1st January in Northern Ireland, and will now apply across the country from April. The Act extends protection against prejudice already applicable on the basis of sex, race, age and religion, to sexual orientation. It will be illegal, for example, to deny a job or a hotel room to someone on the basis that they are gay.

Some religious groups and commentators have complained that the legislation represents a curtailment of religious freedom. Morrow summarised the criticism as saying that Christians “cannot and must not be forced to actively condone and promote sexual practices which the Bible teaches are wrong.” There were demonstrations by hundreds of religious activists outside parliament. Gay rights advocates have pointed out that discrimination on the basis of religion has been outlawed by similar law since 1998.

Update — 11th Jan: There’s a very cautious welcome of this news from the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association.

Comedian Stewart Lee discusses the popular interpretation of comic pieces like Borat, Little Britain, and The Office, in today’s Guardian: “Guilt-free pleasures“. He argues that such output is pervasively misrepresented, citing comments such as “Borat raises an index finger to political correctness and all its exponents”. In reality, he says:

There’s a vast difference between the casual, inadvertent offence prevalent in my childhood and the choices made today by performers and writers of my generation, operating in a post-PC world, where they are aware of the power and meaning of the taboos they choose to break. […] I am a great fan of political correctness, even though, as one of the writers of Jerry Springer the Opera, I was routinely praised for apparently attacking it[…]

Read the rest of this entry »