News and Opinion

Ken Ham of "Answers in Genesis" is in Leicester again on 1st September, at the Students Union building on Leicester University campus. While the creationists should be allowed free speech, they could easily hire a church hall or leisure centre (as they did last year). By allowing such an anti-science event on the University site it seems to me the LUSU is undermining the University's educational and scientific reputation. At the same time it allows the creationists and IDers to use the University's name to add weight to their claims to be scientific. Some members of Leicester Secular Society, I should add, don't agree with me on this, but say we are committed to freedom of religious worship and to free speech, so long as we get to put the other side of the story. And we are getting to put the other side in a constructive way, as in conjunction with Leicester University, we will be welcoming the geneticist Professor Steve Jones , on 7th November. The title of his t

The absence of activity on this blog is partly due to the traditional inactivity at this time of the year, but mainly because I've been busy with redesigning the Leicester Secular Society website. This was partly prompted by a half-day course I was persuaded to attend about accessibility of websites to disabled users, run by something called the ICT Hub . This led me to think about using "cascading style sheets" (CSS), well one style sheet anyway, and to avoid using the html "tables" facility to structure the layout. The result is a more consistent appearance of the pages, and I hope a better colour scheme that is easier on the eyes, and more readable. The site is now, apart from the section on Islam which needs updating, completely in the new style. The main changes that will be noticed are that there is no longer a single "sitemap", instead access to the pages is via the green buttons on the left of the home page which lead to partial sitemaps coveri