Religious believers, when mentioning heaven, have traditionally cast their eyes skywards, but the possibility of an afterlife may now be proved by looking down towards the ground. Doctors at Southampton University are placing pictures in resuscitation areas that can only be seen from the ceiling. These will test the stories of defibrillated patients, who claim they have looked down on the crash teams attending to their lifeless bodies. The theory is that any of the chest-thumped who successfully play this posthumous game of Where’s Wally?

The British Humanist Association has issued legal proceedings against the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) over their decision not to allow the study of Humanism in a Religious Studies GCSE in the same way as religions are studied. The exam board OCR had included Humanism alongside religions in its proposed GCSE in Religious Studies, announced in April 2008, but a decision by the QCA has meant that it could not be included.

On first appearances 12-year-old Caitlin McNabb is very much like any other schoolgirl. Sitting on the sofa with her parents, Wes and Jane, at their home in Greenwich, south-east London, Caitlin talks excitedly about her friends, her favourite subjects and the new school year. But there is one difference between Caitlin and the other pupils at Plumstead Manor: she is reluctant to believe everything she is told. “I was in a geography lesson and there was a lot of talk about ‘this is how old the Earth is’,” she says.

Turkish internet users have been blocked via a court order from accessing the site of prominent British biologist Richard Dawkins after complaints from lawyers for Islamic creationist author Adnan Oktar, the website of Turkish television station NTV reported on Wednesday. A court in Istanbul ordered that Turk Telekom block access to the site and since the weekend Turkish internet users seeking the site have been redirected to a page that says in Turkish ‘access to this site has been suspended in accordance with a court decision’.

The Reverend Michael Reiss, the Royal Society’s Director of Education, is in trouble because of his views on the teaching of creationism. Although I disagree with him, what he actually said at the British Association is not obviously silly like creationism itself, nor is it a self-evidently inappropriate stance for the Royal Society to take. Scientists divide into two camps over this issue: the accommodationists, who ‘respect’ creationists while disagreeing with them; and the rest of us, who see no reason to respect ignorance or stupidity.

Sheikh Muhammad Munajid claimed the mouse is “one of Satan’s soldiers” and makes everything it touches impure. But he warned that depictions of the creature in cartoons such as Tom and Jerry, and Disney’s Mickey Mouse, had taught children that it was in fact loveable. The cleric, a former diplomat at the Saudi embassy in Washington DC, said that under Sharia, both household mice and their cartoon counterparts must be killed

Biofuels are a false solution to climate change and are doing much more harm than good. The EU is proposing a binding target to increase biofuels use to 10% of road fuels by 2020. This massive increase in Europe’s demand for biofuels will have a devastating impact on the world’s poorest countries by: * Destroying communities. * Damaging wildlife. * Pushing up food prices. In recent months, report after report from esteemed organisations like the UN and the Royal Society have warned of the dangers of biofuels expansion.

The Church of England will concede in a statement that it was over-defensive and over-emotional in dismissing Darwin’s ideas. It will call “anti-evolutionary fervour” an “indictment” on the Church”. The bold move is certain to dismay sections of the Church that believe in creationism and regard Darwin’s views as directly opposed to traditional Christian teaching. The apology, which has been written by the Rev Dr Malcolm Brown, the Church’s director of mission and public affairs, says that Christians, in their response to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, repeated the mistakes they made in doubting Galileo’s astronomy in the 17th century.

Europe’s first state-funded school for Hindus, which receives its spiritual guidance from the Hare Krishna movement, opens today in London amid continued concern about the divisive nature of faith schools. Krishna-Avanti primary school, in the north-west borough of Harrow, home to about a quarter of the UK’s Hindu population, is welcoming 30 children to its temporary base at Little Stanmore primary school. The school will gradually increase in size until 2014, when it will have filled places for 236 pupils, including a nursery.

With reference to an earlier post; Mr Brown is nothing to do with us and is clearly in need of psychiatric help. AN ATHEIST subjected a devout Christian woman to a “relentless” campaign of harassment in which he smeared dog faeces on her car and urinated on her doorstep. Timothy Brown, of Edwin Avenue, Woodbridge, may seek medical help after a year-long bid to change Helen Watson’s religious beliefs.