I’m Chris Jenkinson, the Academic Affairs Officer at the University of Manchester Students’ Union.
Posted in Religion / secularism on Apr 24th, 2007
Interesting debate on the place of non-believers in modern society in the House of Lords (hat tip and interesting review). John Sentamu comes out with the new religious tactic of trying to define atheism as a religion, but this is my favourite bit:
Twenty-seven years ago I was chaplain to a young offenders remand centre, Latchmere [...]
Posted in Religion / secularism on Apr 22nd, 2007
Did you know that there are 5 hospitals in the UK run by the NHS exclusively dedicated to homoeopathic “treatment”? What is worse is that a significant proportion of the UK’s population (championed by the anachronism which is Charles Windsor) which believe that homoeopathy actually works, despite any supporting evidence. It, along with so-called alternative [...]
Posted in Religion / secularism on Apr 17th, 2007
Saturday’s Guardian carries an opinion piece from Nicholas Buxton entitled “Face to faith” where he touts out the now-frequent line from organised religions about how atheism is also a religious movement with a dogmatic approach to everything from science to social justice. He starts his piece with this rather extraordinary sentence: “Post-Enlightment critiques of religion [...]
Posted in Education, National politics, Religion / secularism on Apr 14th, 2007
Just thought a certain comment our Dear Leader made about education just about sums up how disastrously wrong New Labour’s focus is on this matter. So much for education, education, education. Schools are not meant to be “popular with parents”, they have a duty to the children. But on the other hand, children can’t vote, [...]
Posted in Religion / secularism on Apr 14th, 2007
With all this controversy about the supermosque proposal in London (which I don’t really care about, though I am slightly concerned about the source of funding), it might be easy to forget the increasing influence Christian creationist groups have in the US. They are fighting hard to open a “museum” detailing the literal Genesis creation [...]
Posted in Education, Student politics on Apr 7th, 2007
The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) have an interesting article titled “Whatever happened to student radicalism?“, written by Ben Lewis and Dave Isaacson. While it suffers from the usual “everyone who disagrees with us is right-wing” disease common among socialists and communists, it is worth reading for its analysis of the fractures between the [...]
Posted in National politics on Apr 5th, 2007
The new Animal Welfare Act is coming into force in England as of Friday. Basically, owners of animals are now legally required to ensure their basic welfare. It’s amazing to think that up until now there was no obligation in law to care for one’s pets, but congratulations to the government for doing the right [...]
Posted in International politics on Apr 1st, 2007
The slippery slope of content classification has been avoided for the next few years, at least. It’s not just free speech which has won here, young people with strict parents who would otherwise deny them access to information categorised into the XXX domain by well-meaning “think of the family” and “abstinence only” conservative politicians - [...]
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