Weekly Coalition News
by Deanna Cantrell
Haiku? First ever Secular Haiku Invocation?
News from SPI Coalition member, Atheists of Butte County, in January 2015 George Gold delivered Chico’s first ever s
ecular invocation at a Chico California City Council meeting.┬á Soon after that invocation, the city council adopted a new rule that all invocations must be sixty seconds or less. To honor the sixty second rule, on November 3, 2015, George Gold will deliver Chico’s first ever secular Haiku invocation:
maybe no god talk
time for reason and logic
let’s go for ice cream
 
Catch up with a conference
Secular Connexion S├®culaire President, Doug Thomas will be addressing the subject, ÔÇØTackling Radicalization in HumanistsÔÇØ at the World Religions Conference in Guelph, Ontario on Sunday, Nov. 1. Ted Spicer of The Society of Ontario Freethinkers will be presenting a reading from Carl Sagan and ÔÇ£Good Without a GodÔÇØ will be performed by Erin Moffat. ┬áView the website to see video of the conference.
Join the Defend Free Speech campaign
The National Secular Society needs you to join their free speech campaign.   The Defend Free Speech campaign, formed in response to Government plans to introduce sweeping new powers to combat extremism.
Extremism Disruption Orders (EDOs) will allow courts to ban someone from speaking in public or on social media, restrict their freedom of association, and ban them from taking up various positions ÔÇô such as a school governor.
The proposals risk capturing a whole range of behavior and speech which fits under a broad, ill-defined conception of ‘extremism’.
George Osborne has said that for a court to serve an Extremism Disruption Order an individual must have participated in “activities that spread, incite, promote or justify hatred against a person or group of persons on the grounds of that person’s or group of persons’ disability, gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, and/or transgender identity.”