Christianity

A Commission appointed by the Irish government to look into the mass burial of infants at a former “mother and baby” home has confirmed “significant quantities of human remains” have been found in the grounds of the home. The Commission was appointed in 2015 after historian Catherine Corless found death certificates for babies born at a home in Tuam, County Galway, but no burial records. The commission will look at how these babies died, whether they can be identified, and how dead bodies were disposed of, at up to 70 other similar homes. The statement from the Mother and Baby Homes Commission...

“Is sex dirty? Only when it's being done right”, Woody Allen On Tuesday 22 December, the Greek Parliament ratified the Civil Union Agreement for Same-Sex Couples. The new legal framework for co-habiting couples is also a limited step (forward towards the abolition of discrimination for the LGBTQI community. The legislation makes the termination of civil partnership more difficult and provides rights to “civil partners” over inheritance, social security rights (pensions), and taxation. The government has yet to move to legislate for political marriage between persons of the same sex or the...

Karl Marx wrote in favour of free speech, free criticism, and free expression in these passages of an article of February 1843, “Comments on the latest Prussian Censorship Instruction” “According to this law,” namely, Article II, “the censorship should not prevent serious and modest investigation of truth, nor impose undue constraint on writers, or hinder the book trade from operating freely.” The investigation of truth which should not be prevented by the censorship is more particularly defined as one which is serious and modest. Both these definitions concern not the content of the...

Pragna Patel, of Southall Black Sisters , and Yemisi Ilesanmi , Nigerian socialist and LGBT rights activist spoke at a Workers' Liberty London Forum on secularism and religious fundamentalism on Thursday 12 February. Here are recordings of their speeches (unfortunately the recording of Yemisi's speech was cut short):

"Must The Priest Believe?" — in God! — would, I thought, as my eye first flicked over the programme page, be a satire or a skit. But no, it was a serious edition of Joan Bakewell's "Heart of the Matter", provoked by the case of a Church of England priest, Anthony Freeman, unfrocked for publishing a book explaining why he no longer believes in God. He doesn't want to be sacked either — he thinks he should continue as a priest! The exclamation mark embodies my own incredulity — but possibly my ideas about these things are old-fashioned. There are quite a number of such Church of England priests...

"Must The Priest Believe?" — in God! — would, I thought, as my eye first flicked over the programme page, be a satire or a skit. But no, it was a serious edition of Joan Bakewell's "Heart of the Matter", provoked by the case of a Church of England priest, Anthony Freeman, unfrocked for publishing a book explaining why he no longer believes in God. He doesn't want to be sacked either — he thinks he should continue as a priest! The exclamation mark embodies my own incredulity — but possibly my ideas about these things are old-fashioned. There are quite a number of such Church of England priests...

"Must The Priest Believe?" — in God! — would, I thought, as my eye first flicked over the programme page, be a satire or a skit. But no, it was a serious edition of Joan Bakewell's "Heart of the Matter", provoked by the case of a Church of England priest, Anthony Freeman, unfrocked for publishing a book explaining why he no longer believes in God. He doesn't want to be sacked either — he thinks he should continue as a priest! The exclamation mark embodies my own incredulity — but possibly my ideas about these things are old-fashioned. There are quite a number of such Church of England priests...

"Must The Priest Believe?" — in God! — would, I thought, as my eye first flicked over the programme page, be a satire or a skit. But no, it was a serious edition of Joan Bakewell's "Heart of the Matter", provoked by the case of a Church of England priest, Anthony Freeman, unfrocked for publishing a book explaining why he no longer believes in God. He doesn't want to be sacked either — he thinks he should continue as a priest! The exclamation mark embodies my own incredulity — but possibly my ideas about these things are old-fashioned. There are quite a number of such Church of England priests...

"Must The Priest Believe?" — in God! — would, I thought, as my eye first flicked over the programme page, be a satire or a skit. But no, it was a serious edition of Joan Bakewell's "Heart of the Matter", provoked by the case of a Church of England priest, Anthony Freeman, unfrocked for publishing a book explaining why he no longer believes in God. He doesn't want to be sacked either — he thinks he should continue as a priest! The exclamation mark embodies my own incredulity — but possibly my ideas about these things are old-fashioned. There are quite a number of such Church of England priests...

Taking advantage of what is left of my rights, I hereby serve notice of intention to join in the public discussions stirred up by President Truman's decision to send a United States ambassador to the Vatican. And if you expect me to be calm and politely restrained in my utterances, you're in for a disappointment. I was burned up about the encroachments of authoritarian clericalism long before the President's decision was announced. His latest stroke of statesmanship just added a little fuel to the flames which have been scaring my tender flesh. This is not a debate, properly speaking. From the...