Cumbria Humanist Group

Stop Press!

This page will contain updates of Campaigns and Issues in the news, with links to media coverage.

(See also Links page to access websites of national and local newspapers, magazines and journals, as well as radio and TV. These will give contact details for various publications and other media, and we urge you to contribute as humanists and challenge the extreme views and attitudes of the religious fundamentalists.)

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Keep up to Date.
We urge you to sign up for the regular email newsletters from the British Humanist Association and the National Secular Society. Both of these highlight relevant political and cultural issues across the world media.

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Lobby your MP.
A very useful website is They Work for You which gives full details of all Members of Parliament, including contact details and voting history, and offers a very straightforward means of contacting your MP about issues - such as the challenge to the blasphemy law on 9 January 2008. At a meeting last week one of our Group, Roy Pomfret, urged members to lobby their MP on issues such as this and surprised us with the information that when an MP has just nine letters from constituents on the same subject they feel obliged to act. (Presumably they couldn't all be from the same address? Somebody did actually ask me that a few days later!)

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26 August 2010.     (NEW)

On the Radio 4 Today programme this morning:  “The religious beliefs of doctors strongly influence the decisions they make when people are close to death, according to research published in the Journal of Medical Ethics. Professor of medical sociology Clive Seale and cross bench peer Baroness Finlay debate whether patients should take an interest in their doctor's religious beliefs.”  (Listen here.)

A significant point, ‘Baroness’ Ilora Finlay is a physician and Professor of Palliative Care Medicine at Cardiff University Medical School – something they failed to mention!   When are we going to sort out the second chamber? 

 
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16 August 2010.     (NEW)

Beyond Belief  is a BBC Radio 4 programme that isn’t usually on my ’Must Listen To’ list, but this week it was entitled “A Secular Meaning to Life”  and discussed the basis and meaning of a life without religious reference. (You can listen via the link above.) Fergus Stokes is a member of Lancashire Secular Humanists.

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14 June 2010.    

 "Death and Dying : a Humanist Perspective".  We were invited again by the hospice tutor, Jenny Lowe, to speak at the training day at St John’s Hospice, Lancaster on 9 June (see entry for 10 June 2009 below), on “Looking at Death and Dying from Different Religious and Cultural Perspectives”. It was a good day, with a number of familiar speakers, although the Hindu and Buddhist were not the same as last year and spoke from very different perspectives.  Brian Scroggie and I spoke last again, to offer ‘compare and contrast’ opportunity!   I focused on general background and Brian on his clinical experience. Last year, several of the speakers had PowerPoint presentations and these were very useful in conveying their ideas: we had just spoken with no visual aids. So this year we went prepared with a broad-based presentation on humanism and its values. You can see this here, in PDF format, by clicking on the title at the start of this paragraph. Jenny said that in due course she would upload all the presentations to the hospice website. 

CHG member and former journalist Mike Bird has a blog on the website of North Cumbrian newspaper the News & Star.  He emailed me earlier about his recent blog entries including one about the recent tragedy in West Cumbria.  Thank you Mike,

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26 April 2010.    

Sarah Wykes’ inspirational talk last week (report on Documents page) led me do dig deeper (sorry!). My first source for information on such matters is usually New Internationalist magazine and by coincidence this month's issue focuses on the topic of tar sands oil extractions. Further information from the Office of Climate Change (The Nicholas Stern Review), Greenpeace, Heinrich Böll Stiftung (the Green Political Foundation), and the usual Guardian and BBC. And again we urge you to sign the petition at Fair Pensions.

27 April.  Just had an email from Sarah, thanking us for inviting her to speak and including a link to a related article on the Financial Times site.

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16 April 2010.    

The British Chiropractic Association has finally dropped its libel case against Simon Singh: comment from Ben Goldacre in today’s Guardian, as well as interviews on the BBC News and Today programme. 

There is still a need for serious libel reform legislation, to protect the rational voice, scientific and non-religious. A court of law is not the place for challenging scientific evidence: that is the role of peer-reviewed research publications. 


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2 April 2010.  

This week’s New Statesman is a special issue, looking at faith, science and what we believe today. 

Also good news for those of us who supported Simon Singh in his defence of the libel action brought by the British Chiropractic Association, reported in the Guardian  and on the BBC News website.  We emailed members in February asking them to sign the petition. 

Ben Goldacre had similar problems when he challenged homeopathy in his Bad Science column.

The UN human rights committee's criticism of England's libel laws 2008, stated that "The law of libel has served to discourage critical media reporting on matters of serious public interest, adversely affecting the ability of scholars and journalists to publish their work." And obviously any such restraint on rational, evidence-based (including a lack thereof) free speech has heavy implications for the non-religious voice. 
 

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10  February 2010.   

The poor old BBC is taking a battering from all directions!     “BBC accused over a lack of religious broadcasts.”   Admittedly it could do with a shake-up at the moment, and a lot more financial accountability, but I’m not sure about the priorities of either the BHA and NSS or the Church of England’s General Synod?

On the Today programme this morning the BBC’s Aaqil Ahmed and the General Synod’s Nigel Holmes were interviewed by Jim Naughtie.  As Jim suggests (and as I’ve said before – many times!), there is significant coverage on television within the broader cultural context of history, philosophy, science, drama, current affairs and so on. “A History of Christianity” and David Dimbleby’s “Seven Ages Of Britain” in current output, last year’s massive Darwin coverage, Jonathan Miller’s Brief History of Disbelief in 2004, all come within this spectrum, encompassing the range of religious beliefs as well as humanism and secularism. Similarly on Radio 3  and Radio 4,  The Essay, Night Waves, In Our Time, Thinking Allowed, and many more, all play a similar role. So the narrow focus on church services and anachronistic programme slots such as Thought for the Day, (which seems to torment BHA and latterly NSS so much!), becomes insignificant. (More on BBC Commissioning website.) 

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4 February 2010.    

In today’s Independent : “Secular society upset by Judge Cherie decision”.  Cherie Booth / Blair puts her foot in it, offering a suspended sentence on the grounds that the offender is a ‘religious man’.   The Guardian's Andrew Brown offers his perspective, and on Radio 4's PM AC Grayling and Ann Atkins  do likewise.

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2 February 2010.    

Terry Pratchett delivered the 34th Richard Dimbleby Lecture on “Shaking Hands with Death” on BBC1 last night, ably assisted by his friend and fellow campaigner Tony Robinson. Terry has been open about his situation since he was diagnosed with early onset Altzheimer’s a couple of years ago at the age of 59, and he now campaigns for Dignity in Dying and a change in the law on assisted suicide.    For me the most moving line was “ If I knew that I could die, then I could live.”

The  lecture is reproduced in part in today’s Guardian G2 section, and also features on the Leader page's In Praise of . . .  and the website’s Comment is Free section.  

On the same subject of assisted dying, the Observer on Sunday featured a debate, with participants including Mary Warnock, Ilora Finlay (Professor of Palliative Medicine at Cardiff), Debbie Purdie and Evan Harris.

And also . . .  There is a lot in the media today (BBC News, Guardian  and so on) about the Pope's challenges to the UK's Equality Bill.  Why he thinks he has a right to interfere in state legislation is beyond me. And what is his 'natural law' that denies human rights and equality?  Many objections are being voiced!

The NSS is planning a protest at his visit to the UK in September. The visit is apparently is to be state-funded at the cost of around £20M to the British tax-payers! We ask you please to sign the petition against this state-funded visit.   (Almost 3000 have signed this petition just today - so that indicates the strength of opposition.)

 
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16 January 2010.        “Chastity or safe sex for Cumbria’s young?” an article in today's News & Star, our local daily in north Cumbria.   Pam McGowan, who wrote the article, phoned me yesterday and asked for comments.    I gave her links to several articles I’d read on the Guardian Education website, including one by the BHA’s Andrew Copson (see 28 April 2009 entry below) and expressed general views on the subject  (having checked with Iain first – obviously!  And had his approval!)  I was particularly appalled by the organisation’s website Chastity.com  and said so. And Pam quotes me on this. The article has a double page spread in the print edition, including a large and somewhat tacky picture!

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27 December 2009.    Reports on the websites of the News and Star on 21st December and Cumberland News on Christmas Eve (but not in either print edition) that sixth-formers at Nelson Thomlinson School in Wigton  had been refused the right to opt out of the school carol service. I have not commented on behalf of CHG as Paul Pettinger and David Pollock had beaten us to it and there is nothing further to add. (I’m afraid I was otherwise engaged over the holidays.)

As David says, Section 55 of the Education and Inspections Act 2006 enables all sixth form pupils in England to withdraw from acts of religious worship, independently and without parental consent.  The school had an excellent Ofsted report in 2006  although it has had a change of head since then.

Personally I could substitute the word 'concert' for 'service' and just listen to the music - as with the King's College festival. After all, to take a broader cultural perspective, most of the best music, from plain chant, Tallis, Vivaldi, Bach, Handel et al through to jazz and blues, has its origins somewhere in church history and mythology, to say nothing of funding!    Ah well . . .

May 2010 be good to you all.

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19 December 2009.    From the Guardian website, video of Terry Pratchett on "Religion" in response to a question from a member of his young audience.  

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20 November 2009.   The Atheist Billboard Campaign. “Don’t label me!”  In the last two weeks of November 2009, billboards at four locations in the UK will display some of the labels routinely applied to children that imply beliefs, such as 'Catholic', 'Protestant', 'Muslim', 'Hindu' or 'Sikh', together with labels that people would never apply to young children such as 'Marxist', 'Anarchist', 'Socialist', 'Libertarian' or 'Humanist' .

This follows on the Atheist Bus Campaign  (see October 2008 entry below).

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12 August 2009.   Newsnight on BBC2 is beginning a series looking back on the first decade of the twenty first century.  The first of these  "What have the noughties done for God?" was broadcast on Monday 10 August 2009. 

To quote . . . "The Noughties has been a controversial decade for religion. With secularism on the rise, churches closing down and religion finding itself increasingly at odds with artistic expression, atheists have seized the chance to promote their message of a godless universe."   The BBC seems to make the increasingly common error of equating secularism with atheism, both here and on similar contexts.       

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10 June 2009.   End of Life Care: A Humanist Perspective.   Cumbria Humanist Group was invited to contribute the Humanist viewpoint to a training day at St John’s Hospice, Lancaster on “Looking at death and dying from different religious and cultural perspectives”.

Speakers represented a range of faith perspectives – Christian, Jewish, Moslem, Quaker, Buddhist, Hindu – and we spoke last. I had deliberately requested this to give us a ‘compare and contrast’ opportunity!

All the speakers defined the essential beliefs of their faith, with their views on the nature of life and death. While all believed in an immortal ‘soul’, to Buddhists and Hindus this was not the personal spirit of the monotheistic faiths, but more an unidentified continuing life force. We stressed that we had no belief in a divine creator, an immortal soul, or life after death. For us death was the final act of life and the end of life, the one life we have. Brian Scroggie related his clinical experience as a GP in end of life care and Chris Haine spoke of planning and conducting a Humanist funeral, and the involvement of the dying person and those around them. (Chris had stepped in at the last minute to replace Ian Breach. Heart-felt thanks to Chris and ‘get well soon’ to Ian!) The Humanist funeral is a celebration of the life rather than a stage on the journey to an after-life.

There was strong focus throughout on ritual, especially with the Moslem and (traditional) Jewish emphasis on the treatment of the body at and after the time of death, as well as the funeral rites. The Jewish speaker also mentioned the stages of formal mourning an the community’s commitment to supporting the bereaved during this time. With the exception of the Quaker representative – and so often we identify common values with the Friends – I did feel that on balance most emphasis was on the ‘faith activities’ rather than personal and emotional support for the dying person and their loved ones, which presumably was the purpose of the training day for palliative care staff. 

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29 April 2009.   An interview on Radio Four’s Today programme this morning had  Professor Ken Miller talking to John Humphrys about the so-called ‘Intelligent Design’ business. (I make no comment other than to identify with rationalism and reiterate my commitment to ‘common values’! )   

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28 April 2009.   An article by the BHA's Andrew Copson on the Guardian's website today:  "Unbiased sex education is a child's right. Allowing faith schools to skew the curriculum in order to argue against homosexuality and sex before marriage is a mistake."  It wasn't in the print paper, but this was:  an article by Polly Curtis, The Guardian's Education editor, on the same issue.   

And also - An article in Friday's Cumberland News (24 April) "Cumbrian Scout leader launches fight to change religion rules. A senior Cumbrian Scout leader has launched a national campaign for rules which prevent those without religious beliefs joining the organisation to be scrapped. Colin Partington of Harker, near Carlisle, believes the current system is outdated and is stopping new young leaders from signing up."   I have contacted Colin and he's going to keep in touch with us about this.  Both the BHA and the NSS have been involved in this campaign nationally.   

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15 April 2009.   A  BBC Radio Cumbria programme, asking “Are we losing our religion?”   was broadcast over the Easter weekend. I had a phone call from producer Graham Moss last November, asking if I would be interviewed for a programme he was putting together on the role of religion in Cumbrian life. After discussing it with Iain Paterson and George O’Hara I agreed. I met Graham, he recorded about twenty minutes and my interview in the programme is just over six minutes, about half way through the programme. You can hear it via the website link above.        

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8 April 2009.  NHS Funding Hospital Chaplains.    The NHS appears to be paying around £40 million a year for hospital chaplains, a situation challenged by the National Secular Society. The Today programme on BBC Radio Four this morning featured an interview with Terry Sanderson of the NSS and a hospital chaplain.  We have been discussing this within the CHG committee recently, with the intent of pursuing the funding issue locally, not just hospital chaplaincies but also public sector funding of church-provided 'social services'. I would have thought that local 'clergy' (in the widest sense) should see hospital visiting as part of their pastoral care role and establish some sort of voluntary rota? Or if a patient is an active member of a 'church' (mosque, synagogue or . . . ) their regular 'cleric' and fellow members would maintain contact during a hospital stay. This is not, and nor should it be funded as, clinical care.   When the NHS charges patients for radio, television and telephone services, and their friends and family for car parking when they visit, surely we need to start asking some serious questions about priorities.

So if you have any related information please contact us and maybe we can start to build up a case for challenging the local spending of our taxes, both national and local, on such services.

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6 February 2009.  Say No to Sharia Law.    The One Law for All campaign opposes the establishment of Sharia Councils and Arbitration Tribunals. It is supported by a number of high profile BHA and NSS members, including Anthony Grayling and Richard Dawkins, and a leading figure is Maryam Namazie who was once based at BHA but is now concentrating on this campaign. She has considerable personal experience of these problems and I gather that she has even received death threats on account of her work. So we urge you look at the website and sign the petition to support this - please. 

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14 January 2009.   Darwin's Bicentenary  falls on 12 February and this year he has a very high profile throughout the media.   This BBC Darwin website has links to radio and television programmes as well as to other related sites such as the Open University.

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6 January 2009.  A Happy New Year!       

Faith Schools.  Interesting piece in today’s Guardian Education section on the subject, especially so as it refers to Marcus de Sautoy who takes over from Richard Dawkins as Oxford’s Simonyi professor of the public understanding of science. It raises the question of 'religion or culture?' in a ‘faith’ school, specifically a Jewish primary school, from the perspective of atheist parents. See also the response from Peter Wilby, former New Statesman editor and education correspondent, and readers’ comments on both articles. Consider these views in the context of the BHA’s anti-faith schools campaign, about which we will be hearing at our September meeting. 

Also – the Atheist Bus Campaign launch and new BHA website. Still the same address but serious revamp, thanks to Bob Churchill (who visited us last March). Looks good. 

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23 December 2008.   Polly Toynbee's Christmas Message in today's Guardian, and the comments in response on the Guardian website.  The usual suspects, both for and against . . .   Rowan Williams is advocating disestablishment of the Church of England.  Good.    (When I was small - many decades ago - it was claimed that 'antidisestablishmentarianism' was the longest word in the English language.  With 28 letters? I doubt it.  C)    

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20 December 2008.  Bernard Crick, (1929 – 2008) died yesterday.  Political scientist and Vice-president of the BHA, although this was not mentioned in the obituaries in the mainstream press, including The Scotsman, The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph. As adviser to David Blunkett he was influential in founding Citizenship as a generic subject in schools and thus in the religious education debate. His best known books include “In Defence of Politics” (1962) and “Essays on Citizenship” (2000), as well as his biography of George Orwell, all of which adorn my bookshelves.    

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24 November 2008.   On this morning's Radio Four Today programme,  “At a Cambridge University lecture this week Dr Justin Barrett will argue it is the natural default position of children to believe in God. This challenges the view of some atheists that religion is learned through family indoctrination. Dr Barrett, from the Institute for Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University, discusses whether religion or atheism is learned with (atheist) scientist and writer Professor Lewis Wolpert.”   (One could add that small children also go for Father Christmas and fairies – but on the whole we grow out of it! Same mechanism, I suspect. C)     

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22 October 2008.    The Atheist Bus Campaign!  To challenge the advertising of religious 'products' such as the Alpha Course and similar, Ariane Sherine proposed on the Guardian website Comment is Free yesterday that we have such a campaign for atheism.  And the response has been overwhelming, as this article in today's Guardian explains.  The campaign fund is being managed by the BHA.  To donate and to view the campaign progress, click here.   

25 October.  The campaign has had massive coverage throughout the media, Including an article by Joan Bakewell in yesterday's Times, a question on Have I Got News For You? and an interview with Richard Dawkins in today's Guardian.  Donations have now topped £100,000 - not bad for an original target of £5.500!

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14 September 2008.      Creationism - again!   Apart from the question of how the Royal Society – probably the world’s most prestigious scientific body – came to appoint an ordained Anglican minister as its director of education . . . ?   And now Michael Reiss – for it is he – is advocating the teaching of creationism in school science classes.  Nobel Laureates Harry Kroto and Richard Roberts are among those Fellows of the RS who are seriously angry and calling for his dismissal. This has been widely covered over the last few days but Robin McKie (co-author with Walter Bodmer of “The Book of Man : The Quest to Discover our Genetic Heritage”) has an excellent article in today’s Observer.    

18 September 2008. Update.   Michael Reiss has resigned from his post and it’s claimed that his views had been misrepresented in the media. The Guardian website has an article by Reiss himself, and two by Adam Rutherford, an online editor of science journal Nature, on 12 and 17 September, both largely supportive of Reiss.   The BBC News website also covers the story.  So you decide - were his views misrepresented . . .  ?   But let’s leave the last word to AC Grayling, again writing on the Guardian site.   

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1 September 2008.   Accord is a coalition of Humanist, secular and faith groups, launched earlier this year to challenge the privileges of state-funded, faith-based schools.  Accord, together with academics, writers and politicians, is now opposing new rules which allow schools to include religion in selection criteria for appointing staff, and the campaign has received wide publicity over this weekend, including The Guardian and the BBC News.    

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21 August 2008.   AC Grayling, philosopher and Humanist, writes in today's Guardian about the prospect of an atheist prime minister.  I wish I could share his optimism on this one!  

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20 June 2008.   Published in the Cumberland & Westmorland Herald on 14 June, a letter from one of our members, Tim Strevens, challenging a local campaign to preserve failing churches and pointing out the historical role of the church in maintaining social oppression.   

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25 May 2008.    Thought for The Week : A major Humanist concern over the years has been the BBC’s refusal to include non-religious speakers on its Thought for the Day slot on the Radio 4 Today programme. This again strikes me as an attempt to jump on the religions’ bandwagon when we should be driving our own. Look, for example, at Radio 4’s A Point of View (R4, 9.50 p.m. Friday, 9.50 a.m. Sunday): this ten minute programme (TFTD is two minutes) with contributors such as Lisa Jardine, Clive James and Lucy Kellaway, offers intelligent, secular comment and analysis (cf. TFTD !) of a range of cultural and ethical issues.

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17 May 2008.   Andrew Copson, BHA Director of Education, wrote the Face to Faith column in today’s Guardian, applauding the news that Humanism is now to be include in the syllabus for religious studies at GCSE.

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15 May 2008.  Einstein. Amusing article in Tuesday’s Guardian. In the past, Einstein’s attitude to religion has seemed somewhat ambivalent. (“Science without religion is lame: religion without science is blind.”) But the recent discovery of a letter to the philosopher Eric Gutkind would seem to place him firmly on the side of science. “The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses . . . “ and “ . . . religion is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions.”

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3 May 2008.   There were two letters replying to ours in this week's Cumberland News, one from a local vicar. Yes, we are responding. (Click here to see the letters and our response.) In our reply we cite the Report of the Guardian/ICM Religion Survey, published in December 2006, which gives entirely opposite figures to those quoted by the vicar from the 2001 census. (Yes – the one with the Jedi ! )
9 May 2008. Our response wasn't published in today's Cumberland News, but as we have Anne Pickles of Cumbrian Newspapers as our speaker at next week's meeting, we are letting things lie for the moment! 

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25 April 2008.  Last week’s Cumberland News published a letter from a group of Christian church leaders in Carlisle attacking the racism of the BNP and urging readers to use their vote to defeat this: it’s rather disturbing to see how many BNP candidates are standing in next week’s local elections in Carlisle. We didn’t see why the Christians should claim the prerogative on the morality of this issue, so we responded as the Cumbria Humanist Group. Circulating a draft letter by email brought responses from a number of members so that our letter was submitted with 25 members’ ‘signatures’ on it. And we were very pleased to see that it was published – almost word for word – in today’s Cumberland News, which also contained the report of our last meeting (see Documents page), again word for word as submitted. 

An essential website for Humanists - Darwin Online.  It's been there for some time but there was a major development last week when Darwin’s private papers were added to the website.

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22 April 2008.   "Look Away Now" (BBC Radio 4 on Wednesday at 6.30 pm) a new sport / comedy series, hosted by Garry Richardson of the Today programme, last week (16 April) included some hilarious bible-mocking! I’ve split this into three sections as they featured in the show. (See Quotes and Misquotes! page for links to audio.)

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23 March 2008.   From the BBC news website, on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill,  about which the senior Catholic clergy are getting into a terrible tizz! (And one suspects that they don’t even have a single O level Biology – or equivalent! – between the lot of them?) This is not about the creation of ‘monstrous hybrids’ combining human and animal DNA, but merely involves the use of an animal ovum cell casing as a vessel for human DNA, to produce functional embryos and stem cells without the need for scarce human ova. The imposition of a three line whip seems to be fuelling the non-debate, but Gordon does seem to be giving in on that one. ( What's this really all about? UK Big Pharma v US Big Pharma?? Cynic? Moi?)

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2 March 2008.  This week.   Today's Observer has the main headline "Religious schools show bias for rich" and presents evidence that the selection processes of the faith-based schools are exacerbating social division within state education. 

Also in the Observer, Nick Cohen's article on fundamentalism  shows that despite recent attempts to abolish the anachronistic blasphemy laws, things seem to be getting worse rather than better, while George Monbiot in the Guardian last Tuesday challenged the catholic church’s role in the increasing rate of abortion, to say nothing of its impact on the spread of HIV/AIDS worldwide.

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14 February 2008. For years now Humanists and Secularists have criticised the BBC for excluding our speakers from their Thought for the Day slot on the Radio 4's Today Programme.  One of our members had an email from a colleague in the Humanist Society of Scotland telling her about a new podcast Thought for the World to be broadcast over the next few weeks with speakers such as A C Grayling and Arthur Smith.

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7 February 2008.   Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury and not usually regarded as a raving right-winger by the standards of Anglican fundamentalism, has today launched new controversy by advocating the recognition of Sharia law within the British legal system.
A real cynic (moi??) might wonder at the hidden agenda of the Anglican church in raising this now?
And there I was, believing that something called The Enlightenment occurred during the eighteenth century, and we are are now in the twenty first century, and I've always believed that we move forwards and not backwards . . . or have I been asleep and missed something?
(See coverage on BBC News and the Guardian, and the Links page gives access to a wide range of media who will also be reporting this 'hot' issue.)
This can only be good as a recruitment incentive for the Humanist and Secular organisations, so we should be seizing the opportunity to react. Write in, phone in . . . whatever it takes!

Both the BHA and NSS were quick off the mark in responding to this. Hanne Stinson, BHA Chief Executive has been on BBC News, and Andrew Copson, Education & Public Affairs Officer, now has a blog up on the Guardian’s “Comment is Free”  site. If you’d like to add your voice to the debate do visit the site .

This whole issue has probably been something of a storm in a teacup: Williams was essentially talking about arbitration on domestic matters such as marriage and divorce rather than a parallel system within civil law, but even here there are conflicts of human rights. Marriage and divorce both have legal status with major socio-economic implications and should be separate from any religious authority. Sharia is essentially patriarchal, with a high level of gender inequality, and it encompasses polygamy which is illegal in European civil law. Surely any true case for equality can only be made within a secular civil legal system, where the religious arbitration councils have no formal recognition.
Apart from everything else, this all shows how important it is to revive the Harris case for removing the bishops from the House of Lords (or Second Chamber of Parliament . . . ?).

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1 February 2008.  In November 2007 the BHA published the document "Quality And Equality: Human Rights, Public Services And Religious Organisations", stating " If religious organisations are to be included in the supply and delivery of such public services, we believe the Government must take steps to address the problems that will inevitably arise."

AND NOW . . . as they used to say in exams - "Compare and Contrast" !

From NSS Newsline of 1 February, a report of a speech made in the House of Lords by Graham Dow, Bishop of Carlisle. (Frightening!!)   Read the full speech here.

The National Secular Society is campaigning for total exclusion of 'all faith groups' from service provision.

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email : info@cumbria-humanists.org.uk