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A meeting of the Atheism, Secularism and Humanism Society at Queen’s Mary’s University in east London on 18 January, discussing “Shari’a Law and human rights”, was cancelled after a man burst into the room, filmed all the attendees and proclaimed he would “hunt down” anyone who insulted the Islamic prophet Mohammed.
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The Lucas Arms, 245a Grays Inn Road, Kings Cross, London
2009 is the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his On the Origin of Species - a book about which Karl Marx wrote that it "contains the basis in natural history for our views".
Yet since then, many right-wing movements have tried to claim Darwin and Darwinism.
At a time when Darwinian ideas about evolution, and scientific rationality more generally, are under attack from politicised religion, we are holding this meeting to celebrate this great thinker, explore his ideas and discuss their implications for Marxists.
Speaker: Les Hearn
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By Molly Thomas
While I am an atheist, I still respect people with faith (or superstition, as it is sometimes called). But should we respect faith itself?
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Azar Majedi of the Organisation of Women's Freedom in Iran and the Worker-Communist Unity Party delivered the following speech at a conference on secularism at Ivry-sur-Seine, Paris, on 2 December
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A Hymn for the Godless
(After listening to a recording of poems by
Gerard Manley Hopkins)
Once, God and Kate Ni Houlihan* were one.
I know Truth, negating Truth, as drought,
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AWL comrades attended a meeting at the SWP’s “Marxism 2009” event (2-6 July) on “Islamism and the new Arab left”, in fact mostly about Egypt.
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There are striking parallels between the SWP's attitude to Islam over the last period and the way the Communist Party used to relate to Irish Catholic immigrants in Britain. I had some experience of that.
For a while, over forty years ago, I was involved in the work of the Communist Party among Irish people of devout Catholic background in Britain, people from the nearest thing to a theocracy in Europe, where clerics ruled within the glove-puppet institutions of a bourgeois democracy.
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LAMENT FOR AN UNEXPECTED DEATH
God
God
God
God!
My God
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ROADS TO ENLIGHTENMENT
The Virgin Mary came to Ennis
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When Archbishop Rowan Williams proposed that British courts should use Islamic sharia law for family matters among Muslim citizens, he met with a just uproar of denunciation.
Williams was not concerned only with extending the role of sharia law amongst Muslims in British society. He wants — and he said so clearly — to increase the role of all the different religions, in British society, and not least the one at whose head he stands.
