Our March newsletter is now available – [click here to download it]( http://www.suffolkhands.org.uk/files/1/2010 SH&S News March.pdf “March 2010 newsletter”) (pdf) Click here for help with pdf files.

Thanks to Catherine Bennett, I’ve learned a new ‘ology – eschatology, literally the study of the last. So, if there’s an eschatology, there must be eschatologists, right? Gosh, they must be fun in the pub. “Oh, hello, what do you do?” “I study the end of the world.” Pause. “Really? How does that happen?” “Well, the dead could be resurrected, or the Devil could be set free, or adultery and fornication will be performed in the open, or …” “Where’s my drink?

Sinad O’Connor, the Irish Catholic singer-songwriter, has reacted angrily to the news that the Bishop of Ferns, Denis Brennan, has asked parishioners to help pay the compensation claimed by the church’s abuse victims. Apparently, he was “asking for help to fulfil a God-given responsibility. O’Connor wrote to the Irish Independent: How long do they expect us to restrain ourselves? We have put up with this bull dung for hundreds of years.

If you’ve been following the campaign to stop the funding for homeopathy on the NHS, and the mass overdose outside branches of Boots, you’ll be delighted to hear that Parliament’s Science and Technology Select Committee, after hearing all the evidence, has called for the complete withdrawal of NHS funding and official licencing of homeopathy. Peter Fisher, director of the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital, told the committee that the remedies’ efficacy depended on how you shook them (Note: shaken, not stirred):

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The BHA is appealing for its supporters to use an Internet tool to send a message to the 26 bishops who sit in the House of Lords: Time for a reformed second chamber! Click here to go to the BHA site.

RE teacher Mr Thingummybob got our mailing last September, suggesting that they might not have included humanism and secular world views in RE yet, as they’re supposed to – I helped to devise a new syllabus that was introduced in September 2007. As Year 10 don’t do any RE, though they’re supposed to, he has a cunning plan; ask me and a bunch religious speakers in for a morning for a RE “carousel”, where we each talk to four of six groups for 50 minutes at a time.

Commissioned for the online music festival Geek Pop, a hip-hop anthem for rationalists and atheists. We like.

As the Catholic church has to find millions to pay compensation to victims of clergy abuse, the excuses being trotted out by the hierarchy are staggeringly creative. Archbishop of Westminster the Most Rev Vincent Nichols, leader of the Catholics in England and Wales, told the BBC’s Newsnight programme, “The level of abuse in the Church is actually quite small in terms of the overall levels of abuse in any country.” Now Pope Benedict, in his pastoral letter to Irish Catholics, blames the abuse on “the creeping influence of liberal, secular society for weakening resolve against it.

In a not-too-shocking turn of events in 2008, a tantric guru failed to kill Sanal Edamaruku of the Indian Rationalist Association on live television using only his mystical powers. Edamaraku challenged the guru to demonstrate his powers on him after hearing the guru’s boasts of being able to kill a man in three minutes using only black magic. The guru obliged. TV ratings went through the roof as India waited to see what would happen.