Berlin Rejects Religious Lessons
That was fairly close...
BBC News writes:
A referendum in Germany has failed to give children a choice between classes in secular ethics or religion. ... Opponents said that any changes to the curriculum would be divisive.
Sanity is preserved.
Referendum Pits Ethics against Religion
What a beautifully irony-laced headline from Spiegel Online International.
From the article:
Since 2006, ethics has been a compulsory subject for all high school students in Germany's capital city, while religion is an optional course. The "Pro Reli" campaign wants to change those rules so that pupils would have to choose between ethics and a faith-based religion class. Those classes would be strictly divided along religious lines, with Protestants, Catholics and Muslims being taught separately.
I actually can't believe this. It's like a piece of science fiction.
I've just posted a short essay on faith schools, based on a talk I once gave for a Warwick Atheists event called "The Importance of Atheism". The essay was prompted by a friend of mine's suggestion:
Got an idea for a blog article for you to do: "Faith Schools = Child Abuse?".
Do it, doooo eet. There could be a Bear Ass in it for you ;)
Well, I'm not sure if I'd go as far as to say that faith schools are child abuse — those are strong words. But I certainly think they're heinously bad for a number of reasons.
A poster I made while I was the publicity officer of the Warwick Atheists Society recently got some coverage in The Guardian's Comment is Free section.
A poster I designed for Warwick Atheists to publicise a series of talks exploring atheism and belief from personal perspectives. It's based on a part of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It was fun to paint-out god.
Step 1: Pick any British politician from any party.
Step 2: Listen to them talk.
Step 3: Think to yourself: Would I buy a car from them?
Step 4: Ask yourself why we're happy with them having the positions of maximal responsibility.
Over the last few days there've been a number of occasions when I've thought about something, and then thought "I wanna write something about this, but it's too long to sum up in 140 characters". I've had CaiWingfield.com registered for a while, and had some vague nothing sitting in a WordPress framework for a while. I had fun designing some fancy AJAX site but then (as is always the way) realised that I had no actual content. So today I decided that I'd go ahead and upgrade to WordPress 2.7, clear out everything that was content-free, and start again. Here it is. I'll probably add design back in, slowly, as it's fun.
