News and Opinion

The bookshop that occupies part of the frontage of Secular Hall, now trading as Frontline Books, is one of fifteen Independent bookshops featured in The Guardian (G2 section) on Monday this week (22nd May). The online text is here . There has been a bookshop associated with Secular Hall since it was opened in 1881, and even before that the bookseller who operated it at that time, William Henry Holyoak, (born: Sileby Jan 27, 1818, died: 1907) sold radical books at several other addresses in Leicester as far back as 1846. Ned Newitt, local Labour historian, recently sent me the following poem by WHH that he found in The Leicester Reasoner dated 1876. Let us lift up our voices in song And rejoice in the freedom we’ve won From the maze and the story Of God and his glory As taught by the priest to the young The mists of life’s morning have faded And we see with a vision more clear That a man need not wait For a blessed estate If he works with a will whilst he’s here There’s no help in a H

Yet another prominent religionist has decided that his god wants to dictate our rights and freedoms. The Bishop of Leicester's letter to the Mercury is available here . This is my response: Due to his misguided beliefs the Bishop of Leicester has come out against a Bill that would finally grant people the right to die with dignity at a time and in a manner of their choosing. In doing so he has helped condemn large numbers of people to years of avoidable physical and psychological pain. Whilst he is justifiably concerned that some people may be pressured into hastening their own demise, he conveniently ignores the evidence from places such as Oregon and Switzerland , which shows that allowing assisted suicide does not lead to people choosing to die early because they feel they’ve become burdens. Why is a 27 year old atheist supporting assisted suicide when to atheists this life is the only one we’ve got? Let me explain. In my family we have a history of late onset mental disord

Below is an email our member Frank Friedmann sent to the BBC, concerning Ann Atkins' latest "Thought for the Day", and their response. ====== -- To BBC -- Dear Sir, Ann Atkins used the programme on 9 May 2006 today to launch an attack on Rationalists. That she can do so shows up the lack of natural justice in the policy of denying atheists access to the programme - they can be collectively slandered and misrepresented but have no right of reply. I notice that speakers on the programme do not use it as a platform from which to condemn the adherents of other religions - I don’t know if this is out of respect or because they are constrained by editorial rules, but it does emphasise the injustice in the censorship of atheism. Were you to change the policy, might I put forward my wife, Eleanor Davidson, as a candidate? She has just become the country’s first Humanist member of a hospital chaplaincy team (See First Person article in Leicester Mercury 29 April 2006). [See also

A few months ago we published a welcome to the new Derby Secular Society. Mike Lake's latest initiative is to try to get local schools to adopt his wording of a statement for their parents' prospectus as here: http://www.secularderby.org/local.htm He writes that he wants it to look as reasonable and unobjectionable as possible to any thinking person. "However, it is obvious that it is a major threat to the religious because it spells out very clearly what parents rights are and it clearly divorces moral and civic education from religion." This proposal will be discussed at the next meeting in Derby at the MultiFaith Centre at 7.00pm on Wednesday 17th May. Perhaps we at Leicester, and secularists elsewhere, should join in this initiative.