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).

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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 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.

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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).
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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.

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The New York Times reports a worrying trend in Federal money given directly to religious groups. The article comments: “because the First Amendment prohibits direct government financing of religious activities, earmarks that steer money to religious groups pose constitutional risks. Indeed, several faith-based earmarks were successfully challenged as unconstitutional long after Congress approved them.”

A New York Times analysis shows that the number of earmarks for religious organizations, while small compared with the overall number, have increased sharply in recent years. From 1989 to January 2007, Congress approved almost 900 earmarks for religious groups, totaling more than $318 million, with more than half of them granted in the Congressional session that included the 2004 presidential election. By contrast, the same analysis showed fewer than 60 earmarks for faith-based groups in the Congressional session that covered 1997 and 1998.

More here: “Religious Groups Reap Federal Aid for Pet Projects“.

Around 700,000 Turkish secularists rallied in the streets of Istanbul yesterday, campaigning against Islamist presidential candidate Abdullah Gul. Gul is the presidential candidate of the ruling party, has deeply Islamist political roots, and the protestors to not believe the pro-Western “makeover” that he has undergone, nor his assertions that if elected he would stand by the country’s secular constituion. The opposition are challenging the constitutional legitimacy of the presidential election process, which sees parliament electing the president, rather than a peoples’ vote. The secular protesters are making the same demand, as well as coming out against the army. The army have already hinted (or threatend) the possibility of a military coup if Gul is elected by parliament, a move which has not generally been to the protesters’ liking and has caused Turkish stocks to plummet.

(See The Guardian UK)

Americans United for Separation of Church and State announced yesterday (release) that — following a decade long debate and a lawsuit — the Department of Veterans Affairs had finally settled with them. Americans United said: “The litigation charged that denying a pentacle to deceased Wiccan service personnel, while granting religious symbols to those of other traditions, violated the U.S. Constitution.” The Veterans Affairs department has agreed to add the neo-pagan pentacle to the list of 38 other symbols which it already approves for engraving on the memorial markers of deceased service members.

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The automatic rights of a certain number of Anglican bishops to sit in the British House of Lords was seriously undermined last week, by comments from the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, which displayed a dazzling lack of human insight. His speech is proudly displayed on the Diocese website. How do we know that, deep down, everyone is religious? This is how:

Twenty-seven years ago I was chaplain to a young offenders remand centre, Latchmere House. Every inmate was asked to declare his religious affiliation, and four young men were registered as having no religion. One Sunday, all the inmates were offered the chance to go to worship.

The four young men with no religion declined the offer, while their fellow inmates on the A wing took up the offer. The prison officer, not wanting the four men to remain locked up in their cells, asked them to clean the toilets on the wing. The following Sunday, our four non-religious young men took up the offer to go to worship. The prison officer was puzzled why they had opted in this week. “Why are you going to chapel?” he asked. The four replied, “Sir, we didn’t like the ‘No Religion’ place of worship”. Crudely as they put it, those four young men were saying in their naivety that we are all essentially religious.

So, not only does the bishop fail to understand why someone would rather sit in a quiet room than scrub a prison bog, but he passes without remark the notion that non-religious inmates should be given undesirable chores. Indeed, it sounds as if he did not object in any way to this policy at the time.

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