Published on
3 March 2014
To the delight of secularists and ‘animal rights’ activists the Danish parliament last week passed a law banning Kosher and Halal methods of slaughter on the grounds that these violate the rights of animals. Dan Jørgensen, the Danish minister for Food, Agriculture and Fisheries told Denmark’s TV2 that ‘animal rights come before religion’. Unsurprisingly, Jewish […]
Published on
14 January 2014
Into another year the Jimmy Savile inquiry rumbles on. Today The Guardian runs a front-page article about a lawyer representing around sixty victims who is calling for a judge-led inquiry that should have access to evidence collected by other investigations. The extent of this scandal in particular, and the more widespread, even routine, sexual abuse […]
Published on
9 October 2013
Posted in Civil Liberties, Conscience, Culture, Human Life, Human Rights, Morality in Public
In the aftermath of horrible deaths at parental hands of Baby P., Daniel Pelka, Hamzah Khan and Keanu Williams, questions are naturally being asked as to what more might have been done by way of prevention. Unsurprisingly, the parents of these poor boys have been sentenced to prison. On paper perhaps, and technically, the local […]
Published on
1 October 2013
With publication of a series of YouGov polls the State’s funding of religious education is once again in the news. Secularists have renewed their assault on all things religious, and public and religious leaders have responded saying that State-backed faith schools are a ‘precious right’ and that it is wrong to drag children into an […]
Published on
5 August 2013
Andrew Brown in a recent blog for The Guardian argues that Catholic attitudes to gay sex fail to account for human beings. Though his conclusions are different, in terms of argumentation Brown often seems to adopt an approach that is quite like that of Judeo-Christian moralists, so it is refreshing to discuss an issue while […]
Published on
19 July 2013
The availability of pornography is nothing new, but reasons for prohibition need to be re-articulated, and sometimes re-discovered, as one generation succeeds another and re-evaluates what it has received of legislation and social mores from the past. There is no doubt that a certain public acceptance of pornography has grown significantly over the last twenty […]
Published on
1 July 2013
In order to maintain public order secularism in our time relies on well- established delineation of ‘public’ and ‘private’ realms. While attempting to play down divisions between social groups, secularism reinforces a distinction between public conduct and private life. In this way a moderate secularism can reduce public conflict by emphasising those aspects of public […]
Published on
26 June 2013
Posted in Big Society, British Politics, Civil Liberties, Conscience, Culture, Moral Philosophy
You wait months for a whistleblower to say something genuinely newsworthy and then two come along in quick succession: Edward Snowden, a former NSA worker who let the world know about PRISM; and Peter Francis, a former police officer who reports that he was ordered to find out compromising information on family and friends of […]