Religious critics of evolution have trained their sights on one of the world’s pre-eminent fossil exhibits — Louis and Richard Leakey’s extensive skeletal collections illuminating the origins of man. Evangelical Christians in Kenya are demanding that the exhibit at Nairobi’s National Museum edit out references to human evolution in order to prevent young African Christians from being taught falsehoods. Link: Wired News: Evolution Attack Goes Global Falsehoods? Like the evangelical Christians of America, Bishop Boniface Adoyo, chairman of the Evangelical Alliance of Kenya, says evolution is “still a theory”.

Be afraid… be very afraid. If you can’t see the video above, see the film website. According to an interviewee in this trailer, there are two kinds of people in the world… people who love Jesus, and people who don’t. The co-ordinators of the ‘Kids on Fire’ evangelical summer camp, who insist that “we have the truth”, want to see Christian children as radicalised as the Muslim children with grenades strapped to their bodies – assuming that all children are, or should be, radicalised in the first place.

The other week I read a newspaper article by Euan Ferguson in which he wrote of his experience of a freak storm on a public holiday in Budapest, when flash floods overwhelmed a crowd that had taken shelter under the Elizabeth Bridge. Ferguson wrote that most people reacted by helping each other, passing small children and the infirm to safety out of the rising floodwaters. Others, however, behaved differently; they “… pushed forward, pushed everyone out of the way; stamped and splashed and elbowed and forced their way to higher, drier ground.

Frightened for your life in these days of madness? It’s not about religion, stupid. It’s about foreign policy, and silly us for thinking any different. So let’s have a look at the unique feelings of those young Muslim men who are so deeply affected by international politics and certainly not religion – no, no, goodness me no – and examine those gaping differences between us. We can use the martyrdom tape of July 7, 2005, as a guide to why we’re on such opposing sides and take it from there.

The doctrine of tolerance and, foremost, respecting cultural and religious diversity cannot easily cope with those who claim the right to intolerance, especially within the same society. Link: IHS :: HNN :: Entrapped by Tolerance: Humanism in the Netherlands Dr Floris van den Berg, a philosopher at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, is a member of the Dutch Freethought Association. He argues that Dutch Humanists have got into a muddle about multiculturalism.

E-mail: mail@suffolkhumanists.org.uk Event description: Peter will talk to us about his human rights work. We’ll be in the hexagonal room at the Friends' Meeting House, Colchester. Friends and other guests welcome. We’ll be going for a restaurant meal before the meeting. If you’d like to join us, please email us. Further info: www.petertatchell.net Map link: http://tinyurl.com/2242bj

A week into one of the most severe crises the Middle East has seen in years, Israel is getting an influx of support from an unusual source. More than 3,400 evangelical Christians have arrived in Washington to lobby lawmakers as part of the first annual summit of Christians United for Israel. Link: BBC NEWS | World | Americas | Evangelical Christians plead for Israel The pastor of the 18,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, is John Hagee, “a long-time fervent supporter of Israel.

I know a small boy called Tom. He sees the world through exciting rose-coloured spectacles. He must get grumpy, but I never see him then. He quite likes my dog, but what he likes better is fiddling with her harness, and the little light that we use when we go walking after dark. Tom likes to switch it on and off, on and off. The other day, while out walking my dog with my mobility scooter, I saw Tom with his mum and dad, peddling towards me in his peddle-car.

If we can’t thank God, who do we thank? Ronald Aronson, Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Wayne State University, writes in The Philosophers’ Magazine about gratitude in a Godless age. Living without God today means facing life and death as no generation before us has done. It entails giving meaning to our lives not only in the absence of a supreme being, but now without the forces and trends that gave hope to the past several generations of secularists.

How can you choose an appropriate funeral, and someone to conduct it? Theres an increasing choice of funeral styles, but also more confusion. Many still choose traditional Christian funerals, with familiar hymns and so on, but this isnt appropriate for a significant proportion of the population. Various surveys indicate that only a minority attend church regularly and that few are interested in organised religion. Many young people arent religious, while many older people have developed unconventional personal religious beliefs.