News and Opinion

The leading article in the Nov/Dec issue of New Humanist, illustrated with a Rowson cartoon, which also features on the cover, is an attack on fellow humanist Richard Dawkins (a "distinguished supporter" of BHA) and fellow "new atheist" Christopher Hitchens , by another humanist, Richard Norman, who is a former Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Kent, and is a member of the Humanist Philosophers' Group: http://newhumanist.org.uk/1623 There is also a discussion on their blog about the offensiveness or otherwise of the cartoon: http://blog.newhumanist.org.uk/2007/11/new-humanist-cartoon-controversy.html In a comment on the blog I wrote: "The issue here in my view is not the cartoon but the article by Richard Norman that it illustrated. It is an attack on one humanist figure (Dawkins) for being a humanist by another (Norman) who wants to pussy-foot round the poor religionists in case we upset them too much. There is far too much of this in theh...

I've just come back from a lecture given by the Bishop of London at Leicester University on the subject of "Climate Change and the God Delusion", so thought I'd write up my impressions while still clear in my mind. The lecture was due to start at 5:30 but the Bishop didn't arrive until about an hour later (meanwhile I took a little walk to get some fresh air). The delay was due to his chauffeur-driven car being held up in traffic on the way from London (a measure of his commitment to fighting climate change?). The Bishop's use of "The God Delusion" in the title was a bit of a fraud since he did not address any points in Dawkins' book, merely throwing out the customary jibe about "fundamentalist atheists". He has however evidently read the book, since he made use of some of the ideas in it for his own purposes, as indicated below. The lecture was the inaugural one of a series which are to be concerned with "theological thinking on c...