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Birmingham Humanists
The Birmingham Humanist Group was formed on 23 May 1962 at the Arden Hotel, New Street, Birmingham, England, at a meeting convened by Dr Anthony Brierley. It changed its name to Birmingham Humanists (Brum Hums) in 2000 and voted to become a Partner Group of the BHA, which changed its name to Humanists UK in 2017. It holds most of its meetings at the rooms of the Community Development trust in Moseley, Birmingham. History The group's first chairman was 22-year-old Colin Campbell, who later became Emeritus Professor of Sociology at York University. In its early years, under the leadership of Fred Lyne, the group was active in the campaign to allow parents the legal right to remove their children from collective worship in schools. In 1980 it held a joint public meeting with the newly formed humanist group for gay people at which one of its members, Dr Martin Cole, was the main speaker. Later that decade it started producing a newsletter variously titled ''Bir-Hug'', ' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
New Street, Birmingham
New Street is a street in Birmingham City Centre, central Birmingham, England. It is one of the city's principal thoroughfares and shopping streets linking Victoria Square, Birmingham, Victoria Square to the Bull Ring, Birmingham, Bullring Shopping Centre. It gives its name to Birmingham New Street railway station, New Street railway station, although the station has never had direct access to New Street except via the Grand Central, Birmingham, Grand Central shopping centre through Stephenson Street. History New Street is first mentioned as ''novus vicus'' in the surviving borough rental records of 1296, at which point it was partly built upon with burgage plots, but was also the site of most of the few open fields remaining within the borough, including ''Barlycroft'', ''Stoctonesfeld'' and ''Wodegrene''. It is mentioned again, this time as ''le Newestret'' in the rentals of 1344–45. The street may have been created at the time of the establishment of Birmingham's mark ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Harry Stopes-Roe
Harry Verdon Stopes-Roe (27 March 1924 – 11 May 2014) was a British philosopher known mainly for his active role in the humanist movement in Britain and around the world. He was a Vice-President of the British Humanist Association until his death in May 2014, having served as its Chair previously. Biography Born in London, he was the son of Marie Stopes, the women's rights and family planning pioneer, and Humphrey Verdon Roe. He started his career as a physicist, and received a BSc and MSc in physics from Imperial College, London. Thanks to studying physics he was exempt from military call-up during the Second World War. He then went to Cambridge University, and took a PhD in philosophy. After he married a short-sighted woman, his mother, an advocate of eugenics, cut him out of her will. His wife—Mary Eyre Wallis, later Mary Stopes-Roe—was the daughter of the noted engineer Barnes Wallis. Stopes reasoned that prospective grandchildren might inherit the conditi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
North East Humanists
The Tyneside Group of the North East Humanists (NEH) was founded on 17 September 1957, although organised secularism in North East England had been active from the 1860s. The group adopted the name North East Humanists in 1997, after merging with the Teesside Humanist group. NEH is a registered charity, consisting of over 200 members, and is the largest regional Humanist group in the United Kingdom. The group is involved in a wide range of activities including: working with school teachers to deliver lessons about Humanism in the RE curriculum, providing pastoral support in local hospitals and prisons, hosting events where invited speakers talk about a wide variety of topics, and numerous social events for members. In common with the basic principles of Humanism, the NEH is concerned with values and moral issues from a non-religious viewpoint and with the achievement of a more open, just, and caring society. To mark the 50th anniversary of the foundation of the NEH, the group ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Intelligent Design
Intelligent design (ID) is a pseudoscientific argument for the existence of God, presented by its proponents as "an evidence-based scientific theory about life's origins". Numbers 2006, p. 373; " Dcaptured headlines for its bold attempt to rewrite the basic rules of science and its claim to have found indisputable evidence of a God-like being. Proponents, however, insisted it was 'not a religious-based idea, but instead an evidence-based scientific theory about life's origins â one that challenges strictly materialistic views of evolution.' Although the intellectual roots of the design argument go back centuries, its contemporary incarnation dates from the 1980s" Article available froUniversiteit Gent/ref> Proponents claim that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." * * ID is a form of creationism that lacks empirical support and offers no testable or tenable ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Evolution
Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. These characteristics are the expressions of genes, which are passed on from parent to offspring during reproduction. Variation tends to exist within any given population as a result of genetic mutation and recombination. Evolution occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection (including sexual selection) and genetic drift act on this variation, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more common or more rare within a population. The evolutionary pressures that determine whether a characteristic is common or rare within a population constantly change, resulting in a change in heritable characteristics arising over successive generations. It is this process of evolution that has given rise to biodiversity at every level of biological organisation, including the levels of species, individual organisms, and molecules. The theory of evolution by ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Religion
Religion is usually defined as a social- cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements; however, there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion. Different religions may or may not contain various elements ranging from the divine, sacred things, faith,Tillich, P. (1957) ''Dynamics of faith''. Harper Perennial; (p. 1). a supernatural being or supernatural beings or "some sort of ultimacy and transcendence that will provide norms and power for the rest of life". Religious practices may include rituals, sermons, commemoration or veneration (of deities or saints), sacrifices, festivals, feasts, trances, initiations, funerary services, matrimonial services, meditation, prayer, music, art, dance, public service, or other aspects of human cultur ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Social Equality
Social equality is a state of affairs in which all individuals within a specific society have equal rights, liberties, and status, possibly including civil rights, freedom of expression, autonomy, and equal access to certain public goods and social services. Social equality requires the absence of legally enforced social class or caste boundaries and the absence of discrimination motivated by an inalienable part of an individual's identity. For example, advocates of social equality believe in equality before the law for all individuals regardless of sex, gender, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, origin, caste or class, income or property, language, religion, convictions, opinions, health, or disability. Social equality is related to equal opportunity. Definition Social equality is variously defined and measured by different schools of thought. These include equality of power, rights, goods, opportunities, capabilities, or some combination of these things. It may also by ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Quality Of Life
Quality of life (QOL) is defined by the World Health Organization as "an individual's perception of their position in life in the context of the culture and value systems in which they live and in relation to their goals, expectations, standards and concerns". Standard indicators of the quality of life include wealth, employment, the environment, physical and mental health, education, recreation and leisure time, social belonging, religious beliefs, safety, security and freedom. QOL has a wide range of contexts, including the fields of international development, healthcare, politics and employment. Health related QOL (HRQOL) is an evaluation of QOL and its relationship with health. Engaged theory One approach, called engaged theory, outlined in the journal of ''Applied Research in the Quality of Life'', posits four domains in assessing quality of life: ecology, economics, politics and culture. In the domain of culture, for example, it includes the following subdomains of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Secular
Secularity, also the secular or secularness (from Latin ''saeculum'', "worldly" or "of a generation"), is the state of being unrelated or neutral in regards to religion. Anything that does not have an explicit reference to religion, either negatively or positively, may be considered secular. Linguistically, a process by which anything becomes secular is named ''secularization'', though the term is mainly reserved for the secularization, secularization of society; and any concept or ideology promoting the secular may be termed ''secularism'', a term generally applied to the ideology dictating secularism, no religious influence on the public sphere. Definitions Historically, the word ''secular'' was not related or linked to religion, but was a freestanding term in Latin which would relate to any mundane endeavour. However, the term, In saecula saeculorum, saecula saeculorumsaeculÅrumbeing the genitive plural of saeculum) as found in the New Testament in the Vulgate translation (cir ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Atheist
Atheism, in the broadest sense, is an absence of belief in the existence of deities. Less broadly, atheism is a rejection of the belief that any deities exist. In an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there no deities. Atheism is contrasted with theism, which in its most general form is the belief that at least one deity exists. The first individuals to identify themselves as atheists lived in the 18th century during the Age of Enlightenment. The French Revolution, noted for its "unprecedented atheism", witnessed the first significant political movement in history to advocate for the supremacy of human reason.Extract of page 22 In 1967, Albania declared itself the first official atheist cou ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Superstitio
The vocabulary of ancient Roman religion was highly specialized. Its study affords important information about the religion, traditions and beliefs of the ancient Romans. This legacy is conspicuous in European cultural history in its influence on later juridical and religious vocabulary in Europe, particularly of the Western Church. This glossary provides explanations of concepts as they were expressed in Latin pertaining to religious practices and beliefs, with links to articles on major topics such as priesthoods, forms of divination, and rituals. For theonyms, or the names and epithets of gods, see List of Roman deities. For public religious holidays, see Roman festivals. For temples see the List of Ancient Roman temples. Individual landmarks of religious topography in ancient Rome are not included in this list; see Roman temple. __NOTOC__ Glossary A abominari The verb ''abominari'' ("to avert an omen", from ''ab-'', "away, off," and ''ominari'', "to pronounce on an ome ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Life
Life is a quality that distinguishes matter that has biological processes, such as signaling and self-sustaining processes, from that which does not, and is defined by the capacity for growth, reaction to stimuli, metabolism, energy transformation, and reproduction. Various forms of life exist, such as plants, animals, fungi, protists, archaea, and bacteria. Biology is the science that studies life. The gene is the unit of heredity, whereas the Cell (biology), cell is the structural and functional unit of life. There are two kinds of cells, prokaryotic and eukaryotic, both of which consist of cytoplasm enclosed within a membrane and contain many biomolecules such as proteins and nucleic acids. Cells reproduce through a process of cell division, in which the parent cell divides into two or more daughter cells and passes its genes onto a new generation, sometimes producing genetic variation. Organisms, or the individual entities of life, are generally thought t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
