Harry's Place

According to this report, a humanist felt he had been unfairly blocked from a committee discussing how faith was taught in schools:
A council spokesman said: “Sacre is a committee to advise the county council on religious education and collective worship.
“In line with most Sacres across the country there is no Humanist representative on Sacre.
Yet these [...]

Soldiers, not surprisingly given the nature of their job, are the focus of many traumatic news stories.  Sometimes they are perpetrators – as with Abu Ghraib. or this horrific attack on civilians in Afghanistan. Often of course they and their families are victims.
In the context of these life-and-death concerns, it seems a bit incongruous that injured [...]

When I first read that a documentary, ‘Jerusalem: An Archaeological Mystery Story’, questioning some aspects of Jewish history, in particular the issue of Jewish exile from Jerusalem in 70AD, had been dropped from the BBC schedules at the last minute, I was reminded of the controversy surrounding Tom Holland’s Islam: the Untold Story.
According to a report [...]

After being charged by the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government of Egypt with insulting President Mohamed Morsi and Islam (the charges were dropped thanks to publicity from Jon Stewart and others), TV political satirist Bassem Youssef was not intimidated:

While I am generally skeptical of comparisons to Nazi Germany, in the case of Egypt’s MB there is a [...]

The pianist and composer, a vocal opponent of Turkey’s Prime Minister Erdogan, has been given a suspended 10 month jail term for his ‘blasphemous’ comments on Twitter.
In one message he retweeted a verse from a poem by Omar Khayyám in which the 11th-century Persian poet attacks pious hypocrisy: “You say rivers of wine flow in [...]

This is a cr0ss-post by Paul Canning

NOTE: I wrote about this subject in a story which failed to be published last year, and am publishing it now as a new IHEU report is gaining media attention that focuses entirely on Muslim countries.

In 1988 in Sydney I attended a protest which I’ve never forgotten. It was [...]

Like one of Tom Stoppard’s characters, I am all for a free press. It is mainly newspapers and media outlets which I cannot abide; in particular the way in which their owners and employees have been able to circumvent or plain disregard existing laws which less powerful individuals would expect to be enforced with alacrity [...]

Joan Smith begins her Independent piece on Leveson by observing that we may not all have the same definition of ‘freedom’.
We all believe in a free press, don’t we? But if I’ve learnt anything over the course of the Leveson inquiry, it’s that it means different things to different people. 
Freedom is certainly a contested concept.  [...]

This is a guest post by Fiyaz Mughal
For some, March 14th is a clarion call against religious fundamentalism as the International Day of Action to Defend Apostates & Blasphemers. For others, it may be a day in which to attack faiths themselves as being doctrines that demand loyalty for a deity or deities which science can [...]

I was interested to read that France’s interior ministry was (apparently) attempting to shut down a website which draws attention to allegations of violence and discrimination by the French police against Muslims, citing defamation as the reason behind this step. A Press TV report is the main source for this story, but here is a link [...]