Click here for a map showing Ipswich car parks (pdf).

Mayor Councillor John Le Grys (who’s an agnostic) has chosen the theme of social inclusion for this years’s Celebration of Community that will launch Inter-Faith Week 2011. He’s being helped by Suffolk Inter-Faith Resource (SIFRE). It will take place in the Council Chamber at the Town Hall, where humanist celebrant Margaret Nelson will act as MC and one of our members will sing with the multi-faith choir. Everyone is welcome.

They’ll be at the Brewery Tap again, upstairs this time – details to be announced.

Here’s our latest newsletter – [click here to download it](http://www.suffolkhands.org.uk/files/1/SH&S News Nov 2011.pdf “SH&S News Nov 2011”) (pdf). It contains detailed maps and directions to our new meetings venue at University Campus Suffolk, so keep it for future reference if you’re planning to come. There’s also a blog post from Ghana, details of the Mayor of Ipswich’s Celebration of Community, and our programme for the next few months.

It’s Operation Christmas Child time again, when well-meaning people are encouraging their children to fill shoe boxes with gifts for needy children overseas. But Operation Christmas Child, run by the evangelical American organisation Samaritan’s Purse, has a destructive agenda. Please don’t support them. Click here to read about “Mad Missionaries and Toxic Gifts”. The BHA has some suggestions for alternatives to Samaritan’s Purse – <a title=“BHA - alternatives to Samaritan’s

Today is Armistice Day. This is an extract from a recent humanist funeral ceremony; a poem chosen by a daughter for her father, who’d served in North Africa and Italy. George Fraser Gallie wrote a number of poems whilst serving in Italy and North Africa with the Royal Engineers around 1943, when he was twenty-one. Theyve recently been discovered amongst his papers by his son. This is one Rocca San Giovanni

From comments that have been made recently in online discussions and at meetings, it seems that some members and supporters don’t fully understand how the ceremonies that we provide relate to humanism in general. Someone wrote, “They’re just about making money”. This is my blog about death and funerals. It might help anyone who doesn’t understand why we do what we do, and it isn’t about making money; our fees have to cover all our expenses, as we’re not salaried like clergy.

Recommend watching full screen. Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael Knig on Vimeo.

Did you know that New Humanist magazine has an online newsletter? Click here to sign up. The latest edition features articles about Atheist still being a dirty word in US politics, an atheist soldier’s thoughts on attending religious memorials to the fallen, the myth of Christian Europe, and a podcast. You can follow them on Twitter at @NewHumanist.

The kids from Outnumbered tie the vicar in knots (not literally, obviously).

Let us read and let us dance – two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.

We’ve had emails from parents whose children want to join the Guides or Scouts, but have been shocked to find that they’re expected to make a promise to “love God”. Letters and emails to the association have failed, so far, to achieve any sort of compromise. Now, after persistent campaigning by the National Secular Society and the British Humanist Association, Girl Guides may no longer have to pledge to “love God” as part of their Guide promise.

This is a letter in this week’s National Secular Society e-news: We have a 4 year old son who has just started attending our local non-denominational community School. Last week, along with the rest of his year-group he was presented with an illustrated children’s Bible. We were given the option to opt-out of this but did not exercise this because we didn’t want our son to feel excluded and trusted the school that the book would be age-appropriate.