Two months ago, the new school year began. For a substantial and growing number of Scottish parents this raised a difficult and continuing challenge. They are the Scots who are non-religious and who are now one Scot in three, according to the Scottish Annual Household Survey (2005). Their children return, in many instances, to a school environment where religion, often largely Christian, predominates, where religious and moral education is a fixed element in the curriculum and where religious observation is…

The General Registrar Office of Scotland has just released its statistics on marriage in Scotland in 2007 and they make interesting reading.

While marriage overall, and religious marriage in particular, continues to decline, the number of marriages conducted by the Humanist Society of Scotland (HSS) has risen dramatically for the third year running.

In 2007, the HSS conducted 710 legal marriages, 285 more than the 2006 total of 434. This represents an annual rise of 64%,…

Two stars are born.  HSS members Clare Marsh and Derek Young are the headline acts on the latest podcast from the Institute of Humanist Studies and American Humanist Association, Humanist Network News, recorded at the recent World Humanist Congress in Washington DC.  The podcast can be downloaded from this webpage.  Needless to say, they get top billing and their "segment" lasts for much of the first 15 minutes of the programme, followed by…

Before the turn of the year I decided that this would be the Summer issue of Humanitie’s “Education Issue”. We would just have launched our own Humanism in Education campaign, founded on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, that “affirms the right of all children to an education that respects both their own cultural values and those of others”, and I thought that Alex Salmond would jump at…

A government computer system intended to improve the handling of child abuse cases has led to social workers having to spend more than 100 hours for every case filling out forms, cutting the time they have to make visits.   Read more...

New laws will make it illegal to pay for sex with women "controlled for another person's gain" such as a pimp, trafficker or brothel owner.   They will receive a criminal record and a large fine and will have no defence…

When Barack Obama was being elected as the most powerful man in the world, James Bond was again laying claim to the same title, as the new 007 movie Quantum of Solace opened worldwide. Having watched both, on screens big…

Late next month, atheists, humanists, freethinkers, secularists -- in short, nonbelievers of every description -- will gather in dozens of US cities to mark the holiday they call HumanLight.   NSS

Alex Salmond engages in scurrilous pastiche of late call in the spirit of Ricky Fulton for BBC's Children in Need appeal.  Watch it here! .

The time has come once more to name and shame this year's most scurrilous enemy of reason. Yes, its the New Humanist Bad Faith Awards. This year they have an added twist, nominations by podcast, featuring a stellar cast of…