A new study argues that religion is headed for extinction in nine countries, including Ireland , if present trends continue. That’s a very big ‘if’, of course. I suppose if religious affiliation continues to drop by one or two percent a year into the future eventually you get down to zero. However, if religion eventually...

Last week’s momentous ruling by the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights in the Italy v Lautsi case, which found in favour of Italy’s right to continue to place crucifixes in its State classrooms turned partly on the Court’s finding that Council of Europe member states have a “wide margin of appreciation”...

In Ireland over the last few years hospitals and other public places have been removing Christian symbols from view in the name of ‘not causing offence’. This has even extended to not displaying cribs at Christmas. Cromwell would have been proud of these secular Cromwellians. On Friday, the European Court of Justice momentously overturned a...

The latest unemployment figures released this week by the CSO confirm that men are much more likely to be unemployed than women and hence the term some people have coined for this recession, namely the ‘mancession’. Figures from the National Household Survey for the fourth quarter of last year show that whereas the female unemployment...

Last week on the BBC’s Question Time, a member of the audience asked whether it was right for the State to prevent a Christian couple fostering children because they believe in traditional sexual morality. The question was prompted by a High Court ruling which held that Eunice and Owen Johns couldn’t foster children under equality...

In debates about conscience rights something very strange has happened. The left, which used to champion conscience rights, is now  frequently opposed to such rights. In this article, American scholar Robert Vischer wonders why this has happened. He takes as his starting point the decision by President Obama to curtail the conscience rights afforded to...

Currently I am reading ‘Broken Promises: How the AIDS Establishment Has Betrayed the Developing World’ and it is a truly devastating expose of the AIDS industry in Africa. In particular, it indicts the industry for doing its utmost to ignore, or deny, or actively undermine and condemn efforts to persuade at-risk Africans to moderate their...

In the West we are doing our best to destroy our Christian heritage but in China, Chinese intellectuals are coming around to the view that it is precisely this heritage that has made the West so successful. Former editor of the Sunday Telegraph, Dominic Lawson, in a review in the Sunday Times of Niall Ferguson’s...

The High Court in Britain has effectively ruled that no-one who believes in traditional sexual morality can foster children. Adoption can’t be too far behind. This is the latest in a series of rulings intent on driving belief in traditional sexual morality underground. Observant Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, Orthodox Jews etc all believe in traditional...

Atheist Ireland sent a range of policy questions to political parties and individual candidates. Amongst the questions they asked were whether parties or candidates would support a referendum to remove religious references from the Constitution, whether they would support legislation to prevent hospitals from having a religious ethos and whether churches should pay taxes. They...