Religion continues to cause disruption in ‘Trojan Horse’ schools

By National Secular Society

A school placed in special measures following the Birmingham ‘Trojan Horse’ affair has received 100 letters from parents requesting that their children be withdrawn from collective worship, it has emerged.

The revelation came in a report from Ofsted following a special measures monitoring inspection of Oldknow Academy – one of the schools involved in the ‘Trojan Horse’ scandal.

Nothing in the report suggests why the requests have been made, and the school itself has not revealed why. However, according to the report “plans have been started to ensure that assemblies and personal, social and health education (PSHE) create opportunities to foster an appreciation of, and respect for, different faiths and cultures”. It is believed that some parents are opposed to these new measures.

Two weeks ago, police had to be called to another school, after a head teacher was confronted by a group of parents who objected to elements of the PSHE syllabus.

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Genes Will Survive Even If Most Humans Do Not

Photo: Mopic / Alamy

By Donald A Collins

In our July 23, 2014 lunch at our home with the Darwinist/atheist, Richard Dawkins, and his colleague, Robyn Blumner, Executive Director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, my wife, Sally and I of course discussed many subjects, but perhaps the most illuminating for me was to refer to his long gestating book, “The Selfish Gene” which he initially joked about as “my best seller”, long before it became a real best seller which it did in 1976.

Just for clarity’s sake in that book, Dawkins describes our genes thusly: “The genes are the immortals….(they) have an expectation of life that must be measured not in decades but in thousands and millions of years.

“In sexually reproducing species, the individual is too large and too temporary a genetic unit to qualify as a significant unit of natural selection. The group of individuals is an even larger unit. Genetically speaking, individuals and groups are like clouds in the sky or dust storms in the desert. They are temporary aggregations or federations.” He notes such populations can last a long while but any “population is not a discrete enough entity to be a unit of natural selection, not stable and unitary enough to be “selected” in preference of another population”.

In this seminal volume, he makes the case for the survival of genes, not specific creatures, which of course include humans. In the process, he attacks prior theories of evolution which say that evolution always seeks to produce better results, better creatures!

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The Subpoena Saga: Houston Officials’ Misstep Feeds Religious Right Persecution Complex

By Rob Boston

Last week, a story began circulating in the media about five conservative churches that were subpoenaed in Houston and ordered to turn over any sermons they had delivered about gay rights (along with a lot of other material).

Religious Right groups went ballistic. It often turns out in cases like this that what’s really going is less horrifying than the far right would have you believe. In this case, it turns out they actually had a point.

Some background: Houston officials in May passed an ordinance protecting LGBT rights. The Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO) is controversial in part because it gives transgender individuals the right to use the restroom of their choice in public buildings and businesses. (Religious entities are exempt.)

Conservative Christians don’t like HERO and are seeking to overturn it via a ballot referendum. To get the matter on the ballot, opponents had to collect about 16,000 signatures. They collected 50,000, but there were problems with many of them. A huge number of signatures were rejected, and the measure failed to qualify for the city ballot.

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The God Who Wasn't There

Former fundamentalist Christian Brian Flemming places the core concepts of his former religion under the microscope in a documentary that attempts to do for religion what Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me did for the fast-food industry. In his bold quest to seek answers to the difficult questions that few are willing to pose,

Flemming is joined by Deconstructing Jesus author Robert M. Price, renowned historian Richard Carrier, and The End of Faith author Sam Harris. From the ignorance of many contemporary Christians as to the origin of their religion to the striking similarities between Jesus Christ and the deities worshipped by ancient pagan cults and the Christian obsession with blood and violence, this faith-shaking documentary explores the many mysteries of the Christian faith as never before.

This documentary argues the "mythicist" case in the historical Jesus debate. This position says that Jesus of Nazareth wasn't a real person but a fiction based on Jewish scriptures and mystery religions of the Roman Empire. It doesn't make sense to talk about a "real" Jesus -- there wasn't any.

 

Ape To Man - Evolution Documentary

Scientists from the mid-nineteenth century have searched for the fossil remains of the "missing link" in evolution - the half-man, half-ape that would explain where mankind came from. But over the last century and a half, it has been the idea of what a missing link is that has evolved. The history of this scientific quest - peopled with fanatics, frauds, amateurs, professionals, the lucky, the unlucky, the unfairly neglected and the undeservedly praised - is the subject of this documentary. Reenactments depict scientists making their discoveries and then stretch back hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years to depict the typical lives of our human and human-like ancestors. Interviews with leading scientists fill in the details.

 

Sex was invented by a 385million-year-old fish from Scotland

Two armoured-plated fish living in a lake in what is now Scotland hundreds of millions of years ago were the first vertebrates to ever have sexual intercourse. The extinct prehistoric fish in question is Microbrachius dicki, a 3in long placoderm and a very early ancestor of humans.

Australian scientists, publishing their findings in the Nature journal, revealed that not much has changed in the last 385million years: in order to transfer sperm, males had grooved L-shaped claspers held in place by small paired bones on females. “Placoderms were once thought to be a dead-end group with no live relatives, but recent studies show that our own evolution is deeply rooted in placoderms, and that many of the features we have, such as jaws, teeth and paired limbs, first originated with this group of fishes,” said Professor John Long, of Flinders University, Adelaide. “Now, we reveal they gave us the intimate act of sexual intercourse as well.”

Freethinkers take on religious far-right at secularism conference in Tower Hill

By Adam Barnett

Freethinkers from around the world gathered in Tower Hill for a secularism conference supported by famous atheist Richard Dawkins.

The two day conference on the weekend hosted speakers from Europe, the Middle East, Africa, South Asia and America at the Tower Hotel in the shadow of Tower Bridge.

A spokesman for the hotel said they received several emails and phone calls of a “serious nature” over the event that saw police attend the venue, but it went ahead without incident.

It was convened by British-Iranian feminist Maryam Namazie and Algerian sociologist Marieme Helie Lucas, with funding from the Richard Dawkins Foundation, to discuss the global struggle against the religious far-right.

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Prehistoric Paintings in Indonesia May Be Oldest Cave Art Ever

Credit: Kinez Riza

By Megan Gannon

Paintings of miniature buffalos, warty pigs and human hands covering the walls and ceilings of caves in Indonesia could be among the oldest examples of cave art in the world, a new study finds.

The paintings — some of which might be more than 40,000 years old — challenge Europe’s standing as the birthplace of prehistoric art.

“It was previously thought that Western Europe was the centerpiece of a ‘symbolic explosion’ in early human artistic activity, such as cave painting and other forms of image making, including figurative art, around 40,000 years ago,” said study leader Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist and geochemist at Australia’s Griffith University. “However, our findings show that cave art was made at opposite ends of the Pleistocene Eurasian world at about the same time, suggesting these practices have deeper origins — perhaps in Africa before our species left this continent and spread across the globe.”

Sulawesi caves

The paintings were found in the karst caves of Sulawesi, an island just east of Borneo with four long peninsulas that radiate like flower petals. Archaeologists have known about the cave art for decades. They’ve also found shellfish, animal bones, pigment-stained stone tools and even ochre “crayons” inside these caverns.

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Call to secularise NHS chaplaincy services

By National Secular Society

Secularists have criticised new draft NHS England chaplaincy guidelines for failing to adequately recognise the needs of patients who do not identify with a religious faith.

NHS England is consulting on new chaplaincy guidelines intended to update and improve the provision of chaplaincy and spiritual care across the NHS. The guidance includes an explicit recognition of the need to provide guidance “for the care of patients and service users who do not identify with a religious faith”.

However, in a joint submission to an NHS England consultation, the National Secular Society and the Secular Medical Forum criticised the guidelines for being too focussed on religious care rather than providing an inclusive service that benefits all patients and NHS staff.

Chaplaincy services are funded from NHS budgets. Despite purporting to provide ‘spiritual care’ to all, the role is only open to individuals who can obtain satisfactory recommendation and authorisation by their faith community.

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Chimpanzees develop cultures in the wild like humans

By Sarah Knapton

Chimpanzees develop cultures in the wild which distinguish them from other groups, scientists have found.

A community of Sonso chimpanzees living in Uganda’s Budongo Forest was filmed using crushed leaves and moss to collect water.

During six days of continuous observation, zoologists discovered that the group left their leaf-sponges at their watering hole and picked them up the following day – in the same way a human leaves a cup near a sink.

The Alpha Male ‘Nick’ was also seen to use moss to collect water, and the new technique was quickly adopted by many of the chimpanzees.

Mother with womb transplant says risk paid off

AP Photo/The Lancet

By Maria Cheng

For the world’s first baby born to a woman with a transplanted womb – a medical first – only a victorious name would do.

Which is why his parents named him “Vincent,” meaning “to conquer,” according to his mother.

The 36-year-old Swedish mother learned she had no womb when she was 15 and was devastated, she said Saturday in an interview with The Associated Press.

“I was terribly sad when doctors told me I would never carry my own child,” said the woman, who asked not to be identified.

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