Today is Human Rights Day. Tomorrow we’ll be hosting a celebration at the university, with guests including the Mayor of Ipswich, focussing on Article 19 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Click here for more information. Today, the International Humanist and Ethical Union has issued a report on worldwide discrimination against the non-religious. It details those countries where freedom of speech is impossible because it is considered a crime to criticise religion, or even to be non-religious or to adopt the wrong religion.

Margaret Nelson will be on Terry Baxters’s programme with a local clergyman at 8.05am on Wednesday 12th December to talk about the results of the census, published today. Fewer people are claiming to be Christian and more have identified themselves as atheist. How will this affect the Church’s claim to keep 26 bishops in the House of Lords, especially since none of them will be women, and how will it affect its arguments about same-sex marriage?

A Humanist contribution to a Celebration of the Declaration of Human Rights at University Campus Suffolk, Ipswich, 11th December 2012, organised by the local UN Association. Suffolk Humanists & Secularists hosted the event and chose Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

As we celebrate our 21st anniversary, the group’s secretary Denis Johnston, Suffolk SACRE member and SIFRE board member, will be interviewed by Rob Dunger on BBC Radio Suffolk this Sunday at 7.05am. Either set your alarm or listen again later in the day. A SACRE is a Standing Advisory Council for Religious Education – every local education authority has one. See our latest newsletter for Denis’s report. SIFRE is the Suffolk Inter-Faith Resource.

Physicist, author, and broadcaster Jim Al-Khalili has been appointed the British Humanist Association’s new President from January 2013, when he’ll take over from Polly Toynbee. To read about him, click here to go to the BHA website.

The Suffolk Humanist Group was formed in December 1991, so we’re 21 this year. A bunch of us celebrated with a tea party in Hadleigh, Suffolk, today, where members old and new met and reminisced. Thanks to Sue Hewlett for organising the lovely buffet. The cake was lovely – sorry if you missed it, but it’s all gone.

Image courtesy of Stifyn Emrys on Facebook. Click here to read about humanisn at Christmas/Yuletide/Midwinter.

Contrary to what Christian leaders have been claiming for a long time, the “real meaning of Christmas” isn’t their nativity story. A midwinter festival has been celebrated in the Northern Hemisphere for thousands of years (it’s pre-Christian in origin). The Romans had a festival called Saturnalia, which the BBC website details – Did the Romans invent Christmas? The answer is, no, they didn’t; the early church high-jacked the Roman festival of Saturnalia, when it became clear that no one