Faith charities encouraging or promoting violence or hatred risk losing their charitable status as part of a radical overhaul proposed by the Charity Commission. For the first time all charities – including those advancing religion – must show that their aims are for the benefit of the public. Draft guidance, issued today, will explain to the registered religious charities what constitutes a public benefit and warns that “the abuse or misuse of religious teachings” might lead to a charity being stripped of its status.

Grinding poverty and the escalating war is driving an increasing number of Afghan families to sell their daughters into forced marriages. Girls as young as six are being married into a life of slavery and rape, often by multiple members of their new relatives. Banned from seeing their own parents or siblings, they are also prohibited from going to school. With little recognition of the illegality of the situation or any effective recourse, many of the victims are driven to self-immolation – burning themselves to death – or severe self-harm.

The following was posted on Facebookby Laurence Boyce of Cambridge (a member of the NSS and the Liberal Democrats), in response to the accusation from pro-religion people that hes a bigot elsewhere on the Internet. Laurence wrote that one of his accusers had asked him to justify my sweeping assertion that the claims of religion have largely been debunked by science and philosophy determined to answer everyone’s points (though nobody much was answering mine), I put together a little series of notes which I now collect here for future reference.

We’ve tended to post items about biology on this site, because of our opposition to children being taught that Creationism or Intelligent Design explain the origin of life, rather than evolution, but there are some fascinating things going on in physics too. Maybe the physicists don’t attract as much attention, particularly from religious people why deny science, because their work is so mind-boggling that few people understand it. There are two stories that have caught my attention over the last week.

While voters in the US are getting themselves in a tizz at the prospect of either a black(ish) or female president, and there’s no chance of an open atheist in the White House, the Dutch don’t seem to have the same hang-ups. 78% of voters in Holland would be comfortable with a homosexual leader, a wide-ranging opinion poll has revealed. Under a third would find an Islamic Prime Minister acceptable, while a mere 33% would be happy with a fundamentalist Christian.

It seems that the archbishop was wrong to compare sharia with the Jewish beit din. Earlier this month Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams stunned much of his own church and the rest of the world by saying that it seems unavoidable that elements of Sharia will be adopted into the British legal system… But perhaps even more disconcerting was one of the reasons Williams offered as justification for his thinking: “We have Orthodox Jewish courts operating in this country.

On Tuesday, the Florida Board of Education was going to discuss whether or not children should learn about evolution. We might point a finger and giggle at such silliness, if it weren’t for the fact that a vocal minority over here think that British children shouldn’t learn about evolution either. The author of an article at Tallahassee.com wrote: The intensely heated and divisive discussion over the veracity of evolution elevates the updating of standards that were adopted in 1996 — a review of what our students are learning or ought to be learning — to a level of, well, craziness.

The BHA’s annual Darwin Day Lecture is held each year on or around Darwin Day (12th February) in the Darwin Theatre at University College London. In 2008 the Lecture was again chaired by Richard Dawkins. The Lecture was given by Tim Lewens whose talk was entitled “Darwin: A Philosophical Naturalist?” Audio files are available of Dawkins’s introduction and Lewens’s lecture as well as the Q & A session which followed.

The Government has responded to the following e-petition on faith schools, signed by many secularists and humanists: “We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Abolish all faith schools and prohibit the teaching of creationism and other religious mythology in all UK schools.” Its response is, The Government remains committed to a diverse range of schools for parents to choose from, including schools with a religious character or “faith schools” as they are commonly known.

More on the Archbishop’s position on Sharia, from Andrew Copson, Education & Public Affairs Officer at the BHA: Imagine that you are sitting in Lambeth Palace as Archbishop of Canterbury, head of the established church in England. It may not seem an enviable position (even without the fracas of recent days). Although your church is nominally the national church, most people don’t even get married (pdf) in it any more, hardly anyone comes to your services, most people don’t believe in the doctrines that your church promotes, they’re not religious and a lot of them don’t even believe in god(s) at all.