From their Website:

The problem: Many people around the world are suffering because they cannot be honest about their lack of belief in the god of their parents, community or country. They are caught between their desire to live honestly and the fear of losing their loved ones or the support of their community. They might even face violent reprisal. The decision to leave your faith behind can be scary, disorienting and lonely.

Our solution: If you are questioning your faith or wanting to leave your religion you need help and support. You may be leaving behind family, friends and community, but where are you going and how do you get there? The Apostasy Project will help by offering guidance and resources and direct access to others who have been through the same experience. When you doubt your faith it can feel like you have nowhere to turn. The Apostasy Project will fill this gap, and offer reliable information and, more importantly, a sense of community. The project is not about criticising religion but supporting the right to choose what you believe.

“Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief…”

How you can help: Donate now so we can build a stock of resources and a network of advisors to start helping those in need. Without the financial support of the secular community these people will go unsupported. We want to raise £20,000 so we can fully fund the first phase of the project and make sure that these people have the chance to live honest, fulfilling lives, with freedom to believe what they choose.

Why we need £20,000: Providing the full-time support and resources we want to takes time and skill, which means, ultimately, money. We want to be able to pay our expert editors to produce high-quality resources – like a “coming out” guide, podcasts and video – we want to be able to staff an email helpline that can provide guidance to individuals, and keep up regular blogging to inform the community about what’s going on, and develop a website for all of this to sit on. We have a team of people from a variety of faith backgrounds – evangelical Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Catholic, Jehovah’s Witness – ready to share their experiences and support others going through the same issues. But we need your support to make it happen.

Other ways you can help: Making a donation towards our £20,000 target is the most immediate way to help. But we know that for some this is not possible, so we also welcome offers to help out with our work (especially those who have left faiths not yet represented in the project). And please spread the word.

If you want to help or get involved get in touch at info@rationalist.org.uk

Jonny was brought up in a fundamentalist Christian home and went to a school which utilised the Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) system, before having a meltdown in school and being transferred to a regular school to finish off his education. He has now fully recovered and has left behind this so called education system and is currently undertaking his PhD research in to the effects of ACE on its participants. The talk he gave was funny, entertaining, informative and ultimately very very frightening. The main points (and this is a whistle stop tour of his talk!) that I picked up are below.

• ACE was founded in Texas (where else) in 1969.
• It came to the UK in 1980.
• There are about 50 schools in the UK that utilise ACE and a further 800+ homeschoolers utilising it.
• The entire curriculum utilises workbooks called PACEs, most exercises consist of fill in the blanks style questions.
• Children work at their own pace (sic) in individual booths called “offices”, which OFSTED once described as the modern equivalent of a medieval monk’s cell.
• There is no Religious Education per se, religion runs through the ENTIRE curriculum.
• The curriculum is rote learning in its entirety, there is no opportunity for discussion or the development of ideas (in fact this is extremely discouraged).
• Children mark their own work.
• There is no requirement or need for qualified teaching staff.
• Everything it taught from a Biblical literalist / US political conservative point of view.
• Children are ‘taught’ that anything that contradicts the Bible or that US political point of view it is BY DEFENINTION evil and it is not to be considered, listened to, engaged or discussed it is simply wrong.
• Anyone on the political left is evil and those on the political right are closer to godly perfection.
• Government funded healthcare is immoral and satanic.
• ACE employs Orwellian style redefinition of words and concepts e.g.
  • Scientist = Young Earth Creationist
  • Evolutionist = (Proper) Scientist
  • Liberal = Evil/Satanic
  • Humanism = swear word
• In the science curriculum the Loch Ness Monster is a Plesiosaur therefore Evolution is disproved! Their evidence for this? A decomposed basking shark carcass!
• At least 13 objectives taught by ACE even appear on Answers in Genesis’ list of arguments not to use!
• All mythical creatures in historical literature also prove creationism.
• Never trust man’s (it’s always man’s) reason and ignore any counter argument.
• Linguistics is taught with reference to the Tower of Babel.
• Psychology is based on atheistic ideas and is therefore wrong.
• Archaeology teaches us that the Brass and Iron Ages were not separate times because the Bible says so.
• Corporal punishment is approved of in ACE and the teacher’s handbook provides instruction and photographs of how to beat children with wooden implements.
• ACE will not engage in discussion of its curriculum nor will they speak to the press.
• The founder of the system has admitted that it amounts to ‘Brainwashing”!

Fortunately ACE schools do not receive public funding (bar one pre-school in Bristol which get money from vouchers) and are financially struggling [GOOD!] however a change in government policy and vouchers for private schools could make them profitable overnight! We must be wary of this.

They were heavily criticised by OFSTED in the early days but recently they have been getting good reviews. Is this a case of OFSTED not looking at the curriculum or is it something more insidious? (Please bear in mind that a senior OFSTED official has spoken in favour of ACE)

NARIC a government body (in the Dept of Trade) has recommended that the ACE certificate be considered as equivalent to A Level when it comes to University applications. Fortunately this is not legally binding but a number of Universites do accept it!

This leaves us with the question of what can be done. Jonny is collecting contact details of everyone interested in formulating some kind of response/strategy to this and he is free to be contacted. I have extended Atheism UK’s contact details as we are very happy to engage in fighting the abomination of this so called education system. Please feel free to contact him also!

Jonny Scaramaga can be reached via his blog Leaving Fundamentalism or on Twitter @JonnyScaramanga

Please come and join them for an afternoon of music, comedy and good company.

£10 per head.

For more details click here for the LAAG Meetup page.

Since the last report of my communications with my MP Adam Afriyie things have gone belly-up, with this entirely dismissive declaration from his House of Commons office:

The office will therefore have no longer further communication with you

Full letter here.

This was a rather surprising letter to receive especially as it made unfounded claims against me, while I was just trying to get a personal meeting arranged with Mr Afriyie to get responses to my queries. I do not think it is acceptable for a MP to exclude a constituent in this way, so I will be escalating this issue. Here is my response:

Thank you for your letter of the 18th of April 2013.

I was, though, astonished at the rhetoric you employ and your subsequent conclusions. I am afraid you have completely misconstrued what I say and the intentions behind my communications, which are neither accusatory nor hostile; criticism and disagreement do not equate to accusation and hostility. I suggest you re-read my letters as the claims you make against me are entirely without foundation.

At no point did I say that Mr Afriyie is anti-atheist, I merely re-stated the fact, from Mr Afyrie’s letter of 9^th of May 2011, that he supports Christianity, a movement which, in my view, is anti-atheist.

Neither have I refused to say what I want to achieve from a meeting with Mr Afriyie. In fact I sent you the queries I was looking to get answered in an email. I am more than happy to provide more details, however, your letter indicated that there was a more complicated approval process for a meeting, hence my request for clarification of what that process is. I am unable to engage properly in the process if you do not tell me what it is. Please do so.

I have also spent many valuable hours on this interminably protracted communication, but may I remind you that the reasons for this is because your office took many months to respond to me, my queries were not actually answered and, at your request, I made some modifications to my blog post that you felt could be interpreted as inaccurate. I have gone out of my way to clarify the issues you raised regarding my post to make it clear that it is my personal viewpoint based upon the facts available to me at the time of writing. If your office had answered my queries, and in a timely fashion then most of this prolonged communication would not have been necessary.

My rationale for writing the blog post in the first place was that I had concerns that I was being marginalised due to my personal views. Your letter and action to exclude me from the political process do little to dispel those concerns.

Anyone wishing to get involved with Atheism UK’s education campaign cannot afford to miss this talk by Jonny Scaramanga, former Christian fundamentalism and former pupil of a school that utilized the Accelerated Christian Education system, for insight into this intellectually abusive system:

INSIDE BRITAIN’S CREATIONIST SCHOOLS

11.00 Sunday 19th May 2013

Conway Hall

www.conwayhall.org.uk

Free for members of Conway Hall Ethical Society (formerly South Place Ethical Society)

£3 non-members / £2 concessions

It was a pleasure to meet old (as in long-standing) and new members at our AGM yesterday, 27th April.  I was particularly impressed that the majority of those who were there had traveled not inconsiderable distances from outside of London.

I’m assuming that some of you may feel a tad ‘delicate’ today as it’s clear that atheists know how to party! They also know how to have great in-depth conversations about key issues and ideas, and I lost count of the number of separate discussions that were going on.

Also, a big thanks to Ginny and Adrian from the London Atheist Activist Group who came to tell us about their group and the impressive number of events they organize for their members.

We may need a bigger room next year!

“I can’t believe that!” said Alice.

“Can’t you?” the queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again, draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”

Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said. “One can’t believe impossible things!”

“I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the queen. When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

From “Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There” ( Lewis Carroll, 1871)

Atheism UK has a strapline – “Challenging religious faith”. In many ways it defines the purpose of our organization. While other groups may promote secularism, science and reason, humanist or other non-religious ethical systems or challenge religious privilege, we are the only national organization that specifically identifies religious faith itself as a problem in our society that has a deleterious effect on both its religious and non-religious members alike.

Before going on to offer evidence for our position it is important that we define the term ‘faith’ as used in a religious context. If you consult a dictionary you will see that the word ‘faith’ has a number of definitions, many of which are good and desirable. It can be defined as a confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea or thing. It can also be loyalty to a person or thing. To act in good faith is to be sincere or honest, to keep faith, or, be faithful is to be loyal, honourable or steadfast.

Doesn’t sound too bad, does it? No reasonable person would object to that kind of faith but English is a funny language; the same word can have a number of different meanings. The faith you might have that the sun will rise tomorrow, or in the Theory of Evolution, or in a friend’s good intentions are all based on evidence, your past experience, the fossil record, your knowledge of your friend’s character.

This brings us to the second definition of faith, the one with a religious context, that is, a strong and unshakable belief in something without proof or good evidence. Now this is a very different kind of ‘faith’ indeed. This is the sort of faith you require to believe the sun will rise tomorrow when it failed to rise this morning, or to continue believing in the Theory of Evolution after they find rabbit skeletons in Pre-Cambrian rock strata. The kind of faith you need to believe your friend is trustworthy even after you find out that he has stolen all your money, run off with your wife and framed you for murder. In short, this kind of faith is just plain stupid.

It is this kind of faith that religions would have you believe is a virtue. In fact the less evidence you have for your belief the more virtuous your faith; indeed the most virtuous kind of religious faith is that held when all the evidence directly contradicts it. It is the glorification of gullibility; the exaltation of wilful ignorance. In no other field but religion would this be considered a good thing, but religion needs you not to think and reason because it has no good evidence that it is true. To quote Benjamin Franklin – “The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason”.

Oddly, in this matter both sides seem to be in agreement. Martin Luther, the father of Protestantism said – “Reason is a whore, the greatest enemy that faith has. It never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but more frequently than not struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God”.

So then, the choice appears simple. Either blind faith is a virtue and reason a vice, or else the converse is true.

Religions know they need to get to you early before you develop critical thinking skills, while Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy still make sense because they are magic and magic can do anything. Then they can persuade you that their scripture and dogma are the inerrant Word of God (and always were and will forever be, no matter how many times they are rewritten or reinterpreted for the convenience of priests and despots). If they can get you at this stage and convince you that “You must have faith” then you may simply join the unquestioning flock and bleat in unison with the other sheep.

Some however will escape the indoctrination process. They won’t believe what the religion is telling them because it doesn’t make sense to them. They cannot be cowed into believing by threats of eternal torment or bought with the promise of 72 virgins when they don’t believe that a Hell or a Heaven exists. They may call themselves agnostics or even atheists. They may even become anti-religious and join an organization such as ours.

However, religion has one last trick up its sleeve. It is the third definition of ‘faith’ – that is, a specific system of religious beliefs. “Hold on a minute …” you may say. “Isn’t that the same as ‘religion’?” Well, of course it is but ‘religions’ are all Crusades and Jihads, and Inquisitions and burning witches or beheading heretics whereas ‘faiths’ are more carols and bell-ringing and pretty cathedrals, and harvest festivals and charitable work.

Some will be hornswoggled by this mountebank’s legerdemain and join the ranks of the ‘spiritual but not religious’, or else become ‘faitheists’, accommodationist atheists, who while obviously not believers themselves think patronisingly that religion is good for others (usually the poor, less educated and/or brown skinned) and that it should not be criticised. If religion succeeds in conflating religious faith with the other nice, fluffy, totally different definition of faith we discussed earlier then all it does is put lipstick on a pig and before you know it you are marrying a Gloucester Old Spot and proclaiming to everyone that she’s the prettiest girl in the world.

Why should any of this matter? What concern is it of ours what others believe? Thomas Jefferson is quoted as saying – “It does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg”. The problem is that beliefs inform actions. While some religions such as Jains or Wiccans do not seek to impose their moral outlook upon others many others do. We do not have to look far for examples whether from extremists such as Wahabi Islamists and Dominionist Christians to more moderate religions who still seek to enshrine religious privileges or deny rights to others. Religions demand to limit free speech, to deny women and LGTB people equal rights, to indoctrinate our children into their belief systems, to inflict unnecessary pain on animals, to mutilate children’s genitals, to disproportionate political representation and privileged exemption from taxation, to prevent people dying with dignity, to deny people sexual and reproductive freedom, to limit scientific research, to give but a few examples. They seek to enforce their rules even on people do not subscribe to their belief systems, and they do this based on dogma that is not open to question.

Religion makes many truth claims. It claims to have answers but they have repeatedly failed to demonstrate the veracity of any supernatural assertions. When challenged with evidence that is contrary to their dogma religious faith simply sticks its fingers in its ears and goes “Na,na,na,na, … not listening, not listening”. By contrast we have discovered another way of determining the truth; the scientific method. Science is open to questions, in fact, they are its lifeblood. Unlike faith, science does not ignore evidence, it assimilates it and its theories evolve. Unlike faith, science has delivered. It has cured disease, fed the multitudes, taken us to the depths of the deepest oceans and let men walk on the moon. Science has split the atom, explained how we are related to every other living thing on our planet, shown us that although we are only one amongst billions of our species on this planet there are a hundred planets in our galaxy for each of us and a hundred billion galaxies to choose from. And it has told us that we are all made of stars which died and in doing so created the elements of which we are made. The truth is so much cooler and more interesting than any creation story involving gods and the great thing is we have only just stopped making things up and started to find things out.

It’s time to put an end to the charade that religious faith is worthy of respect. It has had ample time to demonstrate its worth and has failed every test. We have a simple choice. To stand on the shoulders of giants and see as far as we can, or, as religions would have us do, huddle ignorant and afraid in the shadows of pygmies, blinded by faith.

We have noted several (until now unsuccessful) attempts to create one: This piece is written by pedebumchin from The Omega Mission (and our forum) proposes just that:

The Atheist Alliance International will also be holding its AGM during the course of the conference and all members are welcome to attend.

Speakers include:

• Ivana Bacik, Irish Senator and member of Atheist Ireland
• Dan Barker, Freedom From Religion Foundation, USA
• Ophelia Benson, author and commentator, USA
• Ann Brusseel, Member of Flemish Parliament, Belgium
• Mairin de Burca, writer and secularist, Ireland
• Carlos Diaz, President Atheist Alliance International, Argentina
• Jane Donnelly, Education Policy Officer Atheist Ireland
• Annie Laurie Gaylor, Freedom From Religion Foundation, USA
• Anthea McTiernan, reproductive rights activist and journalist
• PZ Myers, science professor and blogger, USA
• Maryam Namazie, Council of Ex-Muslims in Britain, Iran
• Taslima Nasrin, novelist and activist, Bangladesh and India
• Michael Nugent, Chairperson Atheist Ireland
• Nina Sankari, Polish Rationalist Association
• Farhana Shakir, lawyer and legal consultant, Pakistan
• Kate Smurthwaite, comedian and activist, Britain
• Anne Marie Waters, One Law for All Campaign, Britain
• Rebecca Watson, Skepchick network, USA

For full details and booking information please go to the Conference Website.

A new atheist-based novel by Robert Breeze. A precis by the author:

‘2082: The Chronicles of Hope’ is one of  a series of political fiction books based in the late 21^st century, featuring an alternative politician in Frank Noon. He provides a political alternative in that he’s a visionary, honest, open and trustworthy politician, one who is stoically atheist, and wants to push this as a way to mould and shape society. Whilst some say he’s a philosophical genius, some say he’s a fanciful dreamer who deliberately courts controversy with his anti-establishment views about the failings of modern society. Seemingly nearing the end of his life in politics, he reluctantly fronts an experimental inter-galactic government project aimed at making life on an overpopulated Earth more sustainable. As he battles to gain control of a relative asylum, consisting of a cross section of the populous as much at odds with themselves as the situation, he unwittingly embarks on a life-changing journey of self-discovery and gets the chance to stamp his authority on the British political system.

’2082: The Chronicles of Hope’ is available in Kindle and hard copy versions in our shop.