Successive, well respected, UK-based social surveys have, for the past 30 years, been telling us that the proportion of UK adults identifying themselves as having no religion has increased from about 30% to just over 50%. The accuracy of the 50% figure was reinforced when (last December, 2015) the Woolf Institute – which studies relations […]
The Oxford University student newspaper, Cherwell, asked us to comment on the recent tweet from the Church of England, saying it was ‘praying for Richard Dawkins and his family’ after Dawkins’ recent stroke, and whether we agreed with allegations that it was opportunistic/disrespectful to Dawkins. Our response was as follows, made by David Lahee, in […]
I have always been attracted to religion. As a child attending a series of mostly C of E schools, I wanted to know God. Moses had his burning bush, the disciples had the feeding of the five thousand – of course they could believe in God. I actively looked for a sign It never came. […]
07 November 2015 My parents were ‘Anglo-Catholics’, this is the extreme ‘high church’ end of the Church of England spectrum. Naturally, as a young child, I believed everything my parents said; so followed their religion. However, I did start having doubts even before my teens; and never received satisfactory answers other than ‘God moves in […]
I became an atheist when I was about fourteen. My parents were both atheists, but I didn’t know that then, and was not brought up to be either an atheist, or religious. One of the attractive things about most of the atheists I have known is they don’t appear to feel a need to indoctrinate […]
Preamble The 2011 Census recorded that almost a third of Oxford’s citizens didn’t have a religion. Yet we humanists are still largely treated by the establishment as little more than a fringe organisation and, at best, only mentioned as a tag-on to the well-known phrase “All Faiths (and none)”. Fortunately, the tag-on has at least […]
OXFORD HUMANISTS : CONSTITUTION 1. Name and Objects 1.1 The Group shall be called Oxford Humanists. 1.2 The objects of the Group shall be: To promote Humanism; To enable Humanists to meet together; To act as the local representative body of the National and International Humanist Movement. 2. Membership 2.1 Any person, who agrees with […]
Reviewed – in good time for Christmas – by our very own Barbara Hudson: Strongly recommend ‘The Devil and Daniel Silverman’ by Theodore Roszak (Leapfrog Press). The blurb says ‘a wickedly funny novel about an outraged liberal trapped in a fundamentalist bible college.’ I’d thoroughly agree with that. The book is also scholarly and profound, […]