Atheists fight against prejudice

British Humanist Association (BHA) chief executive Hanne Stinson thinks atheists usually have to fight against two myths: “Often a lot of people equal non religion with no having any values or morality, and on the other hand a lot of religious people see secularism as anti-religion.”

Humanists, atheists and non-religious people in general claim that there has been an increase in discrimination and disadvantage in recent years: “There are a growing number of religious employers, obviously faith schools is one, but also hospices and a very large number of charities have a sort of Christian foundation.”

They have campaigned for a long time particularly with the BBC and other public service broadcasters to include programmes about humanism: “They tend to say that only about 2% of the BBC’s output is religious and all the rest is secular, but that is actually insulting because what they are saying is that sports programmes, football matches, soaps, are going to meet our needs.”

In the UK there are government departments or units that are set up to work specifically with faith groups, to consult faith groups on all kind of policy issues.

“Humanists are included very rarely and only when we have really pushed to say you can’t do that. In the UK there are just a couple of local exceptions where interfaith groups do not exclude non religious representation”, Mrs Stinson claims.