Latest news with #HumanistsUK
Western Telegraph
28-05-2025
- Politics
- Western Telegraph
Conviction of man over Koran burning ‘could resurrect crime of blasphemy'
Hamit Coskun, 50, allegedly shouted 'f*** Islam', 'Islam is religion of terrorism' and 'Koran is burning' as he held the flaming Islamic text aloft in Rutland Gardens, Knightsbridge, on February 13. The charge sheet says that Coskun was motivated by hostility towards Muslims. A successful prosecution in this case could represent the effective criminalisation of damaging a Koran in public, edging us dangerously close to a prohibition on blasphemy Stephen Evans, NSS Coskun is accused of a religiously aggravated public order offence of using disorderly behaviour 'within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress', motivated by 'hostility towards members of a religious group, namely followers of Islam', contrary to the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and the Public Order Act 1986. He is also accused of an alternative charge of using disorderly behaviour 'within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress', contrary to section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986. Coskun is on trial at Westminster Magistrates' Court on Wednesday and has pleaded not guilty to both charges. His legal fees are being paid for by the Free Speech Union and the National Secular Society (NSS). This reintroduction of blasphemy by the back door would have profound consequences Humanists UK Stephen Evans, chief executive of the NSS said: 'A successful prosecution in this case could represent the effective criminalisation of damaging a Koran in public, edging us dangerously close to a prohibition on blasphemy. 'The case also highlights the alarming use of public order laws to curtail our collective right to protest and free speech based on the subjective reactions of others. 'Establishing a right not to be offended threatens the very foundation of free expression.' A spokesperson for Humanists UK said that a successful prosecution would 'effectively resurrect the crime of blasphemy in England and Wales – 17 years after its abolition'. They added: 'This reintroduction of blasphemy by the back door would have profound consequences, not only for free expression in the UK but for the safety and wellbeing of hundreds of thousands of so-called 'apostates' in the UK and their right to freedom of thought and conscience.'
Daily Mail
16-05-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mail
I am 59, enjoy robust good health, live alone and have no children... but here's why I felt cold fear when MSPs voted for assisted suicide
When word came on Tuesday that the Scottish parliament had voted – and by an unexpectedly large margin – to legalise 'assisted dying', my reaction was not one of bewilderment or shock. Rather, a cold wriggle in my guts, and of fear. I am in my sixtieth year. I live alone. I am childless. So far I enjoy a vigorous life, a clear mind and robust good health. But, two or three decades down the pike, how might matters stand then, in a Scotland where a decisive moral line has now been crossed? The Holyrood vote was in some regards unexpected. Previous bids to legalise euthanasia had fallen at an early stage. But MSPs the other day backed Liam McArthur's Bill, on its first reading, by 70 votes to 56. There are other hurdles it must yet leap, but the odds of eight MSPs changing their minds are slight. All the preening Greens voted for death. Some decisions – on an unwhipped measure left to individual conscience – did startle. You can normally rely on Angela Constance, Humza Yousaf and Nicola Sturgeon to be wrong on any given subject, but they cast their votes against the Bill. In that regard they were in a minority of Nationalists. All the Liberal Democrats backed their Orcadian colleague, save Beatrice Wishart. So did an alarming number of Conservatives. But, of the 22 Labour MSPS, 15 bravely voted against. There was, afterwards, the inevitable crowing. 'Success! Scottish Assisted Dying Bill passes first vote,' screeched the website of Humanists UK. 'Today is a landmark moment for compassion, dignity, and choice in Scotland,' yipped Emma Cooper, convener of Friends at the End. 'A monumental step forward for human rights,' glowed Claire Macdonald, director of My Death, My Decision. Oh, that bastardised phrase, 'assisted dying'. This is legislation for assisted suicide – bluntly, a massive change in Scots law so that, henceforth, anyone helping Mum into eternity is no longer in the frame for murder. It's actually assisted killing. Assisted dying, in truth, is something we have been doing for as long as there have been people – tending and cradling those on the last mile of life, scampering to await upon their expressed or obvious needs, holding a hand in the face of the advancing last enemy: those eyes of fire that search out all. Not two years ago, I was doing it, as my 82-year-old father – for decades so strong, and till almost the last so bossy – disintegrated, in the final seven months, like a sandcastle in the pitiless tide. End-of-life care ain't for cissies. It is running up and down flights of stairs. Measuring out pills. The mobile going off, at four in the morning, because he needs a little spooned morphine. Swilling and sterilising urinals; whipping up bland pappy meals and thanking Heaven if he manages three swallows. You know the end is near, but it is marvellous how you blind yourself to things, even in the final days when Marie Curie carers are in attendance and the parent's life is reduced to a hospital-cot, their double-bed of decades is out and in bits on the landing, and sinister little devices – for the subcutaneous dosing of this and that – click and beep. You have, round the clock, but three duties. Is he safe? Is he clean? And is he comfortable? 'It's like having a baby in the house,' murmurs your exhausted mother. And you? When all is done, the remains removed – when you pick out the last raiment and stop off at the nearest chemist to hand over enough opiates to kill a horse – well, you feel nothing as much as unemployed. But never for a moment did it occur to any of you to stick Daddy into some facility or demand his hospitalisation. Yes, having a dying parent in the house is seriously inconvenient. But it's odds-on – back when he was young and lithe, in the days of Beatlemania and the family Morris Minor, and when his dark hair glowed red as the sun caught it – that you were a heck of an inconvenient baby. Central to Holyrood's calamitous Tuesday decision was fear: the widespread belief that dying is extremely unpleasant, and often agonising; on top of our curious modern culture where death is almost as taboo a topic as was sex for our Victorian forebears. And central to that fear is ignorance. I am no doubt unusual, given my Hebridean background, in that I have seen several people die, viewed many dead bodies, closed the odd coffin, helped to fill in graves – two in the past month alone – and, on occasion, even helped to dig one. But most, today, have never seen a corpse. Would be appalled at the very notion of an open coffin at home; inviting folk around for a chat and refreshments as they view the remains. Yet, not eighty years ago, dying at home was the norm; most of us knew the stages and processes involved – and it is not that long since, among the many skills expected of a housewife, the reverent washing and laying-out of your dead was one of them. Indeed, my late grandmother – born in 1912 – was so good at it she was routinely summoned by neighbours when there was a death in the village. The most startling thing (and it is certainly not the impression you would get from movies, TV dramas and hospital soaps) is how atraumatic dying is. Even anticlimactic. When Dr Douglas Glass stepped into her Balmoral chamber, at the last, in September 2022, no one at the bedside had even noticed Her Majesty had stopped breathing. Pain, says Dr Christopher Kerr – renowned American palliative-care physician – is exaggerated as a death-bed issue. 'Way overstated. Far and away, I'd say it's confusional states, psychogenic distress, the consequences of impaired sleep, or changing sleep architecture – those become more prominent. 'People need to be reassured what dying looks like. It's actually quite hard to die in a sufferable state. Because, to die, you need to sleep, and to sleep you need to be comfortable, not only physically but psychologically. So, gradually, that comes over you.' But, given the breadth of inexperience today, and especially when oh-woe-is-me celebrities get involved, reason seems to fly out the door. In Ireland, a decade ago, one young woman campaigned vocally for the legalisation of assisted suicide after her cancer diagnosis – though insisted on treatment when Death loomed momentarily at her window rather sooner than she had planned. It was, concluded Dr Seamus O'Mahony – leading Irish gastroenterologist and author of The Way We Die Now – all about control. 'Mary Fleming became famous. An Irish heroine. The media coverage was almost unanimously supportive and she was described as brave, courageous, clear-minded and an inspiration. 'But, as I suspect the various judges who ruled on her case surmised, the law is also there to protect the cowardly, the stupid, the unloved and the uninspiring.' A far greater scandal – and one MSPs could readily redress – is the inordinate delay now entangling far too many grieving Scottish families, and all the worse since Covid. It took a full eight days before I could register my father's death in May 2023. Cremation-slots are a mean twenty minutes, and in many cases – and especially around the festive season – the funeral may be delayed by four weeks more. No one can take a month off work and, as any funeral director will tell you, and for all their skill, a wait that long decrees a closed coffin. But there has been another huge cultural shift in Scotland: surging godlessness. It is hard for a younger generation to credit, but into the 1980s the school day at most Scottish primaries began with a collective act of Christian worship. Even into the Nineties, the Scottish Press Awards luncheon always began with a minister saying grace and, late at night, Late Call (on STV) and Reflections (on Grampian) granted some clergyman five minutes, unfiltered and without interruption, to talk of spiritual and eternal things. 'Church of Scotland membership peaked at 1.32million in 1956,' journalist Iain Macwhirter reflected in a thoughtful book about Scotland just before the independence referendum, 'when attendance was high as it has ever been in the previous hundred years. 'Then, suddenly, it collapsed in one of the most dramatic secularisations experienced by any country in the world. The Kirk lost 65 per cent of its communicants within twenty years. The divorce rate in Scotland increased by 400 per cent between 1960 and 1974.' The Kirk lost 65 per cent of its communicants within twenty years. The divorce rate in Scotland increased by 400 per cent between 1960 and 1974.' We were once so devout and Bible-centred a land that folk called us the People of the Book. 'Scotland has had a history of intense militant Christianity from the Covenanters to the Disruption,' Macwhirter concludes, 'and had an education system largely shaped by the Kirk. 'It is hard to believe that all this could disappear, in historical terms, overnight. And yet it did.' Researching the history of my old Glasgow school in 2018, I was startled to find a petition signed by a rake of local clergy when, in the late Sixties, the government of the day had threatened its closure. The surprise was not that most of these ministers were now dead; but that most of their congregations – Scotstoun West Kirk, Victoria Park, Whiteinch Methodist, Drumchapel Free Church and Partick United Free – have long gone. The ultimate tenets of the Christian faith – the 'Four Last Things' – are death, judgment, Heaven and Hell. In a social order where they are still widely believed, the very notion of euthanasia is repugnant. In the Scotland of today, when most do not even know who God is, we have become less a people who believe in nothing than a bunch of spiritual illiterates who believe in anything. There are two inconvenient truths widely overlooked in the assisted suicide debate. The first is the degree to which the campaign has been driven by people who hate organised religion in general and the Christian faith in particular. 'So much of [the opposition to it] is all bloody Christians,' brayed Dr Henry Marsh – eminent brain-surgeon and author of Do No Harm – to the Sunday Times in 2017. 'They argue that grannies will be made to commit suicide. Even if a few grannies get bullied into it, isn't that a price worth paying for all the people who could die with dignity?' In their broader assault on marriage, on family and to some degree even language itself, they have now brought us to the pass where sanitised murder is about to be enshrined in law by a bunch of career politicians who, for the most part, cannot even tell you what a woman is. An order where the elderly, the failing, the disabled and the inarticulate will start to question their own value. Where the doctor, and even your own avaricious children, will become people to fear. But darker still is the roots of the euthanasia campaign in the pre-war eugenics movement. Dignity in Dying was actually founded by a member of the Eugenics Society and, in my youth, called itself EXIT – the Campaign for Voluntary Euthanasia. It was in the name of progress that the likes of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Bertrand Russell and Marie Stopes called for the sterilisation of the disabled and the sick. George Bernard Shaw, no less, pressed for 'the socialisation of the selective breeding of man'. Even, chillingly, proposing the euthanasia of the mentally ill and other members of the 'unfit' classes via 'extensive use of the lethal chamber'. I mentioned two funerals. On April 18 we buried a venerated 96-year-old aunt. Ten days later, I attended the obsequies for a man I knew but slightly, a chap from the heart of Ireland who had spent his last years on the west side of Lewis. One was Free Presbyterian; one was Roman Catholic. One was seen off with sprinkling and incense; one was not. Yet the readings, prayers and praise were much the same; each was briefly, afterwards, processed through the streets of Stornoway. And, at each graveside, the attendant men jostled amiably for their turn to wield a shovel, once the cleric was done. Padding back to my car after the last, through damp grass and by the graves of my people, two lines struck me from Runrig's Calum MacDonald. In surely the only elegy ever written for a Free Church minister by a gifted rock musician. 'The poppy scatters lazy through the corn – we turn for home, to wrestle with our years.'
Yahoo
27-03-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Two in five bought up as Christian have lost their faith
Two in five British people raised as Christians have lost their faith, a report has found. The findings from the US-based Pew Research Centre come as weekly attendance at Church of England services continues to plummet from 1.6 million in the 1960s to 557,000 in 2023. Considered together alongside attendance data and the latest census, the new figures further highlight how people in the UK are continuing to shift away from Christianity towards atheism and agnosticism. They also indicate that being taken to church as a child does not guarantee that one will become a believer. Andrew Copson, chief executive of Humanists UK, said: 'Religious identity has been worn lightly in the UK for some time. 'Today's stats, like those of the Census, show the large population who don't believe in gods today feel much less tied to the religious label of their family, school, or community.' The report showed that 42 per cent of Britons brought up to believe in Christianity are now atheist, agnostic or have converted to other faiths. The research found similar trends in other Western countries including the Netherlands, Sweden, Australia, France and Spain. People in South Korea were the most likely to have abandoned Christianity, with 43 per cent saying they were no longer believers and 7 per cent having converted to another religion. South Africans who grew up Christian most commonly switched to another religion by adulthood (11 per cent). That was followed by Singaporeans (5 per cent of former Christians) and Americans (4 per cent of former Christians). Citizens of non-Western countries who were raised as Christians were overall much more likely to retain their faith. In the Philippines, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and Sri Lanka, more than 92 per cent of those raised Christian remained so into adulthood. Some 98 per cent of Christian-raised people from Hungary still followed the religion, while in Poland it was slightly lower at 95 per cent. The Pew Research Centre findings are consistent with the most recent UK census. In 2001, some 72 per cent of people across England and Wales said they were Christians. Two decades later, that had declined to 46 per cent. The second-largest group was people who said they did not have a religion, at 37 per cent, followed by followers of Islam on seven per cent. Anglicanism remains the largest Christian denomination in Britain, followed by Roman Catholicism. Pentecostal (plus 25 per cent), Orthodox (plus 11 per cent) and new churches (plus 10 per cent) have risen, capturing the enthusiasm of young and immigrant Christians. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
27-03-2025
- General
- Telegraph
Two in five brought up as Christian have lost their faith
Two in five British people raised as Christians have lost their faith, a report has found. The findings from the US-based Pew Research Centre come as weekly attendance at Church of England services continues to plummet from 1.6 million in the 1960s to 557,000 in 2023. Considered together alongside attendance data and the latest census, the new figures further highlight how people in the UK are continuing to shift away from Christianity towards atheism and agnosticism. They also indicate that being taken to church as a child does not guarantee that one will become a believer. Andrew Copson, chief executive of Humanists UK, said: 'Religious identity has been worn lightly in the UK for some time. 'Today's stats, like those of the Census, show the large population who don't believe in gods today feel much less tied to the religious label of their family, school, or community.' The report showed that 42 per cent of Britons brought up to believe in Christianity are now atheist, agnostic or have converted to other faiths. The research found similar trends in other Western countries including the Netherlands, Sweden, Australia, France and Spain. People in South Korea were the most likely to have abandoned Christianity, with 43 per cent saying they were no longer believers and 7 per cent having converted to another religion. South Africans who grew up Christian most commonly switched to another religion by adulthood (11 per cent). That was followed by Singaporeans (5 per cent of former Christians) and Americans (4 per cent of former Christians). Citizens of non-Western countries who were raised as Christians were overall much more likely to retain their faith. In the Philippines, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and Sri Lanka, more than 92 per cent of those raised Christian remained so into adulthood. Some 98 per cent of Christian-raised people from Hungary still followed the religion, while in Poland it was slightly lower at 95 per cent. The Pew Research Centre findings are consistent with trends highlighted by the most recent UK census. In 2001, some 72 per cent of people across England and Wales said they were Christians. Two decades later, that had declined to 46 per cent. The second-largest group was people who said they did not have a religion, at 37 per cent, followed by followers of Islam on 7 per cent. Anglicanism remains the largest Christian denomination in Britain, followed by Roman Catholicism. Pentecostal (plus 25 per cent), Orthodox (plus 11 per cent) and new churches (plus 10 per cent) have risen, capturing the enthusiasm of young and immigrant Christians.
Sky News
13-03-2025
- Health
- Sky News
MPs vote to scrap High Court judge requirement in assisted dying bill
A requirement for a High Court judge to approve assisted dying cases has been scrapped, prompting criticism from opponents. MPs on the parliamentary committee scrutinising the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill last night voted to remove a clause that had been used to reassure those uncertain about the legislation to approve it at second reading. When introduced to parliament last year, the bill proposed terminally ill adults in England and Wales who had less than six months to live should be legally allowed to end their lives, subject to approval by two doctors and a High Court judge. But on Wednesday, MPs on the scrutiny committee voted 15 to seven in favour of removing the court-approval clause. Instead, Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP behind the bill, has proposed to establish a voluntary assisted dying commissioner. It will comprise a judge or former judge to oversee assisted dying cases, along with expert panels featuring a senior legal figure, a psychiatrist and a social worker, and will be voted on at a later stage. She said such a change would give her bill "additional patient-centred safeguards" by providing a "range of expertise" via the three-member panel, arguing it was "is a strength, not a weakness". Opponents of assisted dying disagreed, and said removing the High Court judge requirement "fundamentally weakens protections for the vulnerable and shows just how haphazard this whole process has become". 1:50 In a statement issued after the vote, 26 Labour MPs who previously voted against the bill issued a statement which said: "It does not increase judicial safeguards but instead creates an unaccountable quango and to claim otherwise misrepresents what is being proposed." They raised concerns that the new panel process could be held in private, would not have the power to make witnesses appear before it or take evidence under oath. "They will inevitably drain public services of vital frontline staff without any idea of how much this will cost the taxpayer or any assessment of its impact upon the vulnerable," they added. 2:05 Jack Abbott, the Labour MP for Ipswich who voted against the bill last November, said he was supportive of the panel idea. "I think it's important that it's robust," he told the committee. We're including social care workers and psychiatrists alongside legal professionals." Andrew Copson, the chief executive of Humanists UK, also welcomed the amendment as "good news". "The High Court proposal was unworkable in the demands it placed on the state and provided no meaningful additional safety," he said. "This new proposal will routinely bring in relevant expertise while solving those workability problems." The committee's line-by-line scrutiny of the bill continues before it returns to the House of Commons, most likely towards the end of April, when there will be further debate and a vote.
