If you are involved with RE teaching in Suffolk you’ll know about the new RE syllabus that was launched at Endeavour House yesterday. Now that Humanism is officially included in the syllabus, we must provide teachers with the resources to teach it. RE is often taught by non-specialists and teams that change from term to term. Teachers who are new to Humanism will find it especially difficult to work out how to approach the subject.

Book Reading, ‘The God Delusion’ by Richard Dawkins. Institute of Education, London, 9 October 2006 Last week my partner Marion and I attended this reading organised by Foyles at the Institute of Education in Bloomsbury. The Logan Hall seats almost a thousand and the venue was sold out, with many disappointed non-ticket holders turned away. The event followed a format that Dawkins has used before. He and Lalla Ward, his wife, take turns to read out sections of the book, and after three quarters of an hour or so Lalla leaves the podium and Professor Dawkins invites questions.

E-mail: mail@suffolkhumanists.org.uk Event description: Suffolk Humanists Chair Michael Imison will make a brief appearance on ITV1 in Anglia TV’s ‘Late Edition’ regional politics programme, talking about faith schools.

Horrified by escalating religious violence and alarmed by the Bush administration’s “faith-based initiatives,” which make government money available to religious organizations, atheists are coming out of the closet — and organizing. Link: Atheist groups are on the rise: South Florida Sun-Sentinel Now all we need to do is to stir British atheists out of their complacency. Won’t you join us? And how about joining the BHA and/or the NSS?

The cabinet is in open warfare over new gay rights legislation after Tony Blair and Ruth Kelly, the Communities Secretary, who is a devout Catholic, blocked the plans following protests from religious organisations. Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, was so angry with the move that he wrote a letter to Kelly three weeks ago, telling her that the new rights should not be watered down. Link: The Observer | Politics | Cabinet split over new rights for gays

Since the publication of my first book, The End of Faith, I have received thousands of letters and e-mails from religious believers insisting that I am wrong not to believe in God. Invariably, the most unpleasant of these communications have come from Christians. This is ironic, as Christians generally believe that no faith imparts the virtues of love and forgiveness more effectively than their own. Please accept this for what it is: the testimony of a man who is in a position to observe how people behave when their faith is challenged.

Author of ‘The End of Faith’ and ‘Letter to a Christian Nation’, Sam Harris has studied philosophy, religion and neuroscience. He exposes the dangers of religion and its connection with terrorism.

Secularisation is not on the retreat in western Europe. Yet it is true that new threats to individual liberties and to the religious neutrality of governments are coming from many (not all) organised religious denominations. National situations are somehow different from one another, but nowhere in Europe is the society going back to the time when a common set of religiously-based beliefs was the one and basic common ground for values and views shared by almost every member of the society itself.

A Humanist contribution to a Forum of Faiths, Suffolk College, 11 October 2006 Humanists think we can be good without God. We’re atheists or agnostics. There are other words to describe a positive, non-religious approach to life; they include secularist, rationalist and freethinker. I particularly like the last one. Humanists are independent thinkers, so it’s sometimes hard to agree. However, there are some things that we do agree about, and one is the notion of an afterlife; we don’t think there is one.

The map to the right shows where some of our visitors have come from today (click the image to view full size). Hello! We’re also very pleased to have had recent visits from Cambodia, New Zealand, Palau, Israel, Sweden, China, United Arab Emirates, and France. It’s a small world on the Internet – wherever you’re visiting from today, thank you, and we hope you found something interesting, and come back soon.