One of the most discordant debates in Russian society is playing out in public schools like those in this city not far from Moscow, where the other day a teacher named Irina Donshina set aside her textbooks, strode before her second graders and, as if speaking from a pulpit, posed a simple question: “Whom should we learn to do good from?” “From God!” the children said. Welcome or Not, Orthodoxy Is Back in Russia’s Public Schools – New York Times.

The head of the Catholic Church in Mozambique has told the BBC he believes some European-made condoms are infected with HIV deliberately. Maputo Archbishop Francisco Chimoio claimed some anti-retroviral drugs were also infected “in order to finish quickly the African people”. BBC NEWS | World | Africa | Shock at archbishop condom claim. Makes you wonder if you need to fail an intelligence test to become a Catholic archbishop.

Leading a class in prayer can be tricky if you are an atheist. Tim*, 24, has found it one of the many challenges of being a non-believer working at a Roman Catholic school in west London. He does not think his colleagues know that he is an atheist it did not come up at the interview and he is only in his first year of working as a science teacher.

After a number of requests from teaching unions and civic bodies, including the Christian think-tank Ekklesia and the British Humanist Association, the UK Department of Children, Schools, and Families has issued guidance for teachers uncertain whether and how to discuss creationism – which is rejected by both scientists and theologians as lacking factual and theoretical value. A statement on Teachernet, a government website, states that “Creationism and intelligent design are not part of the National Curriculum for science” and describes “intelligent design” as “a creationist belief” that “is sometimes erroneously advanced as scientific theory but has no underpinning scientific principles or explanations supporting it and it is not accepted by the international scientific community.

While the military are shooting and gassing monks and civilians in Rangoon, here in Cambodia the picture is somewhat different. All appears to be well, the monks are cheerful, and no-one is protesting or getting shot. Cambodia has a motto – Nation, Religion, King – and yet no-one seems to get that worked up about it. The King’s face adorns every shop wall, and most places also have a small shrine, but get talking to the average Khmer and Religion or King will be the last thing they mention, certainly to an outsider.

One of the world’s most respected Deobandi scholars believes that aggressive military jihad should be waged by Muslims “to establish the supremacy of Islam” worldwide. Justice Muhammad Taqi Usmani argues that Muslims should live peacefully in countries such as Britain, where they have the freedom to practise Islam, only until they gain enough power to engage in battle. His views explode the myth that the creed of offensive, expansionist jihad represents a distortion of traditional Islamic thinking.

A headteacher who tried to reduce the influence of religion inside the classroom by creating the country’s first secular state school had his plans blocked by senior government officials who called it a ‘political impossibility’. Secular school barred by Whitehall | UK News | The Observer. Ed Balls MP is minister for schools. You can email him about this lunacy. Tags: Ed+Balls+MP, Secular+education, Schools

When Nicholas Pandolfi of local radio SGR fm wrote a piece about his ‘proxy atheism’ recently in the Ipswich Advertiser, he provoked letters of protest from local Christians. Some people agreed with his sentiments, including Suffolk Humanists’ members who supplied me with cuttings (we don’t get the Advertiser in our neck of the woods). Nicholas wrote, I SHOULD like to ‘out’ myself. My name is Nicholas Pandolfi and I am a ‘proxy atheist’; a clumsy title at best and one that leaves me perched painfully on the fence between Faith and No Faith.

So the schools secretary, Ed Balls, and faith group leaders have formed a partnership endorsing faith schools as a force to improve social cohesion in England. This gasp-inducing statement is on a par with “let us build and run more nuclear power stations Chernobyl fashion – oh, and let’s put them in city centres”. In the face of the failure of multiculturalism, with the awful example of faith-divided schooling in Northern Ireland over decades, with news of Deobandi control of half of British mosques where hostility to the host community is preached, the government is choosing to continue to fly in the face of all reason and experience, and to design and pay for – with our tax money – greater future divisiveness and trouble.

Camp Quest is the first residential summer camp in the history of the United States for the children of Atheists, Freethinkers, Humanists, Brights, or whatever other terms might be applied to those who hold to a naturalistic, not supernatural world view. The purpose of Camp Quest is to provide children of freethinking parents a residential summer camp dedicated to improving the human condition through rational inquiry, critical and creative thinking, scientific method, self-respect, ethics, competency, democracy and free speech.