Herman Van Rompuy, president-designate of the European Council, speaking in 2004:
"Turkey is not a part of Europe and will never be part of Europe. An expansion of the EU to include Turkey cannot be considered as just another expansion as in the past . . . The universal values which are in force in Europe, and which are fundamental values of Christianity, will lose vigour with the entry of a large Islamic country such as Turkey."
Ahead of tomorrow's anniversary of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which neatly coincides with this year's BBC Children in Need day, Northern Ireland's humanists have launched an ad campaign to try to persuade parents to stop attaching religious labels to their children.
Humanist spokesman Brian McClinton: "Northern Ireland needs this kind of awareness-raising exercise more than anywhere to counter our extreme levels of religiosity which has been shown to go hand-in-hand with our extreme levels of insularity, xenophobia and bigotry."
Free Presbyterian minister David Mcilveen: "It is the height of arrogance that they would try to interfere between children and parents and what faith they are instructed in."
New archaeological findings throw more light on the genesis of religious belief. A possible reading of that research:
"Religion has the hallmarks of an evolved behavior, meaning that it exists because it was favored by natural selection. It is universal because it was wired into our neural circuitry before the ancestral human population dispersed from its African homeland. For atheists, it is not a particularly welcome thought that religion evolved because it conferred essential benefits on early human societies and their successors. If religion is a lifebelt, it is hard to portray it as useless."
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