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.

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 »

Abdullah Gul has been elected to the Turkish presidency by parliament today.

His candidacy provoked military threats and mass secular protest back in April. He has said that he will not contravene the country’s secular constitution, and he has won kudos in Europe during negotiations for Turkey’s EU membership, but secular opposition and many secularist campaigners remain unconvinced that the new President Gul will not use his powers of veto in the direction of an Islamist agenda.

Only time will tell…

(See Guardian, Al Jazeera.)

In a possible indication that this PledgeBank pledge (reported previously) has proved highly successful, it is reported today that The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins is the most popular holiday read for the UK’s Labour party MPs this summer. The popular tract is also in second place for the Liberal Democrats (ahead even of Harry Potter!) and second place overall.

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“.

Amid heightened, “critical” level terror alerts across the UK, the Daily Mail (which the Brights News Feed does not necessarily condone as a good source of objective news) today carries an article (“I was a fanatic, I know their thinking”) with a self-proclaimed “former extremist recruiter”, Hassan Butt.

I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy.

By blaming the Government for our actions, those who pushed this “Blair’s bombs” line did our propaganda work for us.

More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.

Read the rest of this entry »

The government has responded to a faith schools petition on the Downing Street website. The petition read:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to ban within government-funded schools the promotion or practice of any particular faith or religion. […] Faith-based or sect schools encourage and propagate divisions within our society. Schools should be places where our children are taught to think about the world around them and come to their own conclusions. In short, they should be taught, not only about the profusion of religions and faiths but also about how moral and socially responsible lives can be led without them; rather than, at a time before they have sufficiently developed critical faculties, being indoctrinated.

The government response follows below.

Read the rest of this entry »

According to the press release:

A British branch of a new Europe-wide phenomenon is to be launched on Thursday 21 June in London. The Council of ex-Muslims of Britain is building on the stunning success of other branches already operating in Germany, Finland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. The British Humanist Association and National Secular Society are sponsoring the launch and support the new organisation.

The Council will provide a voice for those labelled Muslim but who have renounced religion and do not want to be identified by religion.

• Read the manifesto at Maryam Namazie’s blog
• The website (still under construction at the time of writing) is www.ex-muslim.org.uk
• Also see AC Grayling back on Comment is Free
• Islamophobia Watch have already dismissed the organization on the basis of one comment made on Maryam Namazie’s blog