No meeting this month – usual time and place next month.

Last November, SH&S group members watched a film called The Age of Stupid, which included footage of the environmental damage caused by oil companies in Nigeria. You may not be aware that similar damage has been caused to the environment in the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador by Chevron, formerly Texaco, poisoning the indiginous people who live there. Please click here to view a video about the damage and sign an online petition telling Chevron to clean up its mess, which they’ve so far denied.

People at last year’s Burning Man festival in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert recite Dr Seuss‘s ‘Oh, the places you’ll go’, his last book.

An angry parent has told us that the Gideons have visited her child’s school, where they contributed to an act of collective worship and gave every child a Bible. Most people have heard of Gideon Bibles being left in hotel rooms, but they distribute them in many other places too. On their website they say, We are aware that many people in Britain have never seen a Bible and may be uncertain what it is.

The most odious of concealed narcissisms – prayer.

It only takes a girl

Last week, during a celebration of the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible in Oxford, David Cameron said “the Bible has helped to give Britain a set of values and morals which make Britain what it is today,” and that a “return to Christian values” could counter the country’s “moral collapse”. Admitting that he’s a “committed but vaguely practising Church of England Christian” might explain Cameron’s ignorance of what the Bible actually says.

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.

The Internet has been flooded with obituaries to Christopher Hitchens today, since the news of his death. One of the so-called ‘New Atheists’, his book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, upset lots of religious people and delighted many fellow atheists. True, he was exceptioanally gifted with the written and spoken word (there are some examples in the Guardian), and wrote lots of thought-provoking copy for Vanity Fair, among other publications, but I wasn’t a fan, especially because he thought that invading Iraq was a good idea, regardless of the consequences – who were mostly civilian.

If you haven’t seem these sites, they’re worth exploring: The Secular Web has pages and pages of food for thought. Thay say: The Secular Web is owned and operated by Internet Infidels, Inc., a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to defending and promoting a naturalistic worldview on the Internet. Naturalism is the “hypothesis that the natural world is a closed system” in the sense that “nothing that is not a part of the natural world affects it.