A guide blog site by Richard Wilson
My latest within the New Humanist
If there’s a person in your radio right now telling you there aren't any large suggestions in politics any much more, or that our risk-averse society is lowering ambition and infantilising grown ups, or that the outpouring of anguish more than Darfur says-more-about-the-anxieties-of-the-western-liberal-elite-than-the-realities-on the-ground, there is a good possibility they’ve acquired something to accomplish with an organisation known as the Institute of Suggestions.
The Institute’s goal,
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When a coalition of humanist, secular and equality teams rallied towards the Pope’s state check out to Britain previously this year, the IoI issued a press release (PDF) describing by itself like a “leading British humanist thinktank”, denouncing the “hysterical” arguments from the Vatican’s critics and accusing “fellow-secularists” of conducting a “New Atheist witch-hunt”.
The Institute of Tips incorporates a shut, if ambiguous, relationship with the on the web magazine Spiked, an outspoken scourge of environmentalism whose memorable slogans consist of “Bomb the Bans” and “Humanity is under-rated”. Each are orphan children with the magazine formerly acknowledged as Living Marxism (subsequently LM), which went bankrupt in the flip of the decade, subsequent a disastrous libel defeat. Equally are dominated by ex-members of the UK’s long-defunct Revolutionary Communist Get together. Spiked contributors frequently characteristic within the Institute’s debates, as well as the journal frequently echoes IoI worries. Forward with the Papal pay a visit to, Spiked ran content articles attacking the reaction from secularists, which includes New Humanist, being a “fear-driven marketing campaign of demonisation”.
Critics have accused the Institute of Ideas and Spiked of knee-jerk contrarianism, of empty sloganeering, of investing the garb of the far-left for that of hard-right libertarians,
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But what ever else 1 thinks, Spiked and the IoI possess a talent for finding observed. Claire Fox will get a weekly slot on BBC Radio 4’s Moral Maze dialogue programme. Spiked’s “editor at large”, Mick Hume, includes a regular column within the Instances. The Institute of Concepts is energetic in United kingdom educational institutions,
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So what sort of humanists are they? Do they've a real dedication to open debate or is this only a rhetorical conceit? And who’s really defending the legacy from the Enlightenment? I went along to this year’s Battle of Suggestions festival to check out to discover.
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