Two months ago, the new school year began. For a substantial and growing number of Scottish parents this raised a difficult and continuing challenge. They are the Scots who are non-religious and who are now one Scot in three, according to the Scottish Annual Household Survey (2005). Their children return, in many instances, to a school environment where religion, often largely Christian, predominates, where religious and moral education is a fixed element in the curriculum and where religious observation is…

The General Registrar Office of Scotland has just released its statistics on marriage in Scotland in 2007 and they make interesting reading.

While marriage overall, and religious marriage in particular, continues to decline, the number of marriages conducted by the Humanist Society of Scotland (HSS) has risen dramatically for the third year running.

In 2007, the HSS conducted 710 legal marriages, 285 more than the 2006 total of 434. This represents an annual rise of 64%,…

Two stars are born.  HSS members Clare Marsh and Derek Young are the headline acts on the latest podcast from the Institute of Humanist Studies and American Humanist Association, Humanist Network News, recorded at the recent World Humanist Congress in Washington DC.  The podcast can be downloaded from this webpage.  Needless to say, they get top billing and their "segment" lasts for much of the first 15 minutes of the programme, followed by…

Before the turn of the year I decided that this would be the Summer issue of Humanitie’s “Education Issue”. We would just have launched our own Humanism in Education campaign, founded on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, that “affirms the right of all children to an education that respects both their own cultural values and those of others”, and I thought that Alex Salmond would jump at…

The weapon was a water bottle containing battery acid; the result was at least one girl blinded and two others permanently disfigured. Their only crime was attending school.   The Guardian

From solving problems to flashes of inspiration, scientists are beginning to unravel the creative powerhouse that is the mind at night.   The Times

Five 'Reverends' were amongst the names in a list of BNP members posted on the internet, as well as a number of other people listed as having associations with churches, or being 'Christians'.    Ekklesia

Bishop Crispian Hollis of Portsmouth has been criticised for praising president-elect Barack Obama on his diocesan website.   The Catholic Herald

PRISON chiefs are defying an official report and serving halal meat to an entire young offenders institute to avoid upsetting a handful of Muslim inmates.   Daily Express

A government computer system intended to improve the handling of child abuse cases has led to social workers having to spend more than 100 hours for every case filling out forms, cutting the time they have to make visits.   Read more...