A spokesman for Cheshire County Council said 'Educating children in the beliefs of different faiths is part of Cheshire's diversity curriculum'
It was claimed that the boys, from a year seven class of 11 and 12-year-olds, were given detention after refusing to take part in a practical demonstration of how Allah is worshipped.

Yesterday parents accused the school of breaching their human rights by forcing them to take part in the exercise.

One, Sharon Luinen, said: "This isn't right, it's taking things too far. I understand that they have to learn about other religions. I can live with that but it is taking it a step too far to be punished because they wouldn't join in Muslim prayer.

The survey was conducted with 100 Canadian senior executives by staffing service Office Team.

Nearly one-third of employers have seen clashes connected to religion in their workplaces, 31 per cent said that the "unsolicited sharing" of religious views has been a problem, and 13 per cent have seen employees refuse to do certain work or associate with certain co-workers because of their religious beliefs, a survey of 278 organizations by the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) finds.

The survey also found that 61 per cent of respondents said they have made an accommodation for an employee based on his or her religious beliefs, 55 per cent of companies provide flexible scheduling to let employees attend religious services, and 33 per cent offer paid time off for religious holidays.

Still, 68 per cent said they "make reasonable accommodations for beliefs and practices," implying the remainder don't. "This is interesting because, by law, all companies are supposed to offer reasonable accommodations," noted i4cp research analyst Anne Lindberg.

British Muslim parents are to blame for leaving their children open to the lure of Islamic extremism, according to an influential academic

Dr Farhan Nizami CBE, a key adviser on Islam to the Prince of Wales, accused British Muslims of failing to make sure their children learn to speak English or supporting them in their education.

He said this leaves them alienated from mainstream society and exposed to being groomed by radical Islamic groups.

It is the first time Dr Nizami, the director of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, which has links with Oxford University, has spoken out about the failure of Muslims to integrate with British society.

The academic institution, whose patron is the Prince of Wales, carries considerable influence and aims to build bridges between Islam and the West.

His comments come just weeks after the Bishop of Rochester, the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, warned that radical Islam is filling the "moral vacuum" created by the decline of Christian values in Britain.

Speaking to The Daily Telegraph, Dr Nizami said Muslims would never play a full role in British society until they improved their education, language and aspirations.

ALBANY, N.Y. — When Joe Fox sends his daughters away to summer camp, he's confident they'll be surrounded by kids who share his family's beliefs and values.
Caitlin, 16, and Elizabeth, 10, go to Camp Quest, which in 1996 created a niche getaway for children who are agnostic, atheist, or just not sure what to believe yet.
Parents have plenty of summer camp options, from Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts to the YMCA to soccer, dance, music and drama camps. Many claim no religious affiliation while others are Jewish, Catholic or evangelical Christian. The Camp Quest concept started in 1996 with 20 kids at a site in Ohio with the slogan "Beyond Belief."
Since then, demand has grown and week-long camps have been added in Waterloo, Ont., Minnesota, Michigan, California and Tennessee. In 2007, the camps accommodated 150 kids, generally ages eight to 17. The projection for 2008 is more than 200 campers and new camps are also being considered in Vermont and the United Kingdom.

WASHINGTON - The American Humanist Association has launched a curriculum that mirrors the "Sunday School" model used by churches and synagogues with one major omission - no God.
    The Kochhar Humanist Education Center will distribute pre-designed course materials, electronic books and other resources about humanism to its 119 chapters across the United States. The classes are broken into four age groups: preschoolers, teens, college students and adults.
    The courses focus on social justice, "God-free ethics," church-state separation and humanity's relationship to nature.
    "Religious organizations have long had educational programs and institutions for passing their values to each new generation," said Bob Bhaerman, education coordinator of the center. Now is the time, he said, for a broad group - humanists, atheists, agnostics or even religion groups like Buddhists or pagans - to join and create their own viable institution.

Glasgow University has appointed its first Humanist “chaplain” (a chaplain is usually defined as a clergyman or priest). Mandy Evans Ewing will supplement a huge team of religious chaplains that are already operating in the university and will provide “support and guidance for students”.

Mandy is one of the first Humanist representatives in education to take up a permanent honorary Chaplain’s position at a UK University. She says that she will “contribute to interfaith gatherings” and provide pastoral care and rites of passage ceremonies for those who desire a non-religious service, and participating in the Interfaith Council and the Religion and Belief Equality Group.

Registered as a Humanist Society of Scotland Celebrant since 2001, Mandy is also a qualified Social Worker and is actively interested in the arts.
She said: “I have provided chaplaincy support at the University on and off for a few years in an unofficial capacity so it is fantastic to now have a permanent position. I appreciate the opportunity to contribute to University life in this way. I look forward to developing the chaplaincy work with the chaplaincy team and doing what I can for staff and students.”

A CHARITY set up by an ardent Christian to fight slavery and the opium trade has identified a new social evil of the 21st century - religion.

A poll by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation uncovered a widespread belief that faith - not just in its extreme form - was intolerant, irrational and used to justify persecution.

Pollsters asked 3,500 people what they considered to be the worst blights on modern society, updating a list drawn up by Rowntree, a Quaker, 104 years ago.

The responses may well have dismayed him. The researchers found that the “dominant opinion” was that religion was a “social evil”.

Many participants said religion divided society, fuelled intolerance and spawned “irrational” educational and other policies.

One said: “Faith in supernatural phenomena inspires hatred and prejudice throughout the world, and is commonly used as justification for persecution of women, gays and people who do not have faith.”

There is a group in the Dallas area called the Hot Tub Mystery Religion. Its adherents hold to no particular spiritual dogma, borrowing freely from such sources as Jewish mysticism, Roman paganism, Islamic heresy, and experimental art. One of its founders has compiled a recommended reading list for the faithful; it includes a collection of Tantric exercises, a text on Sufism, one of Philip K. Dick's Gnostic science fiction stories, and a novel by the Catholic apologist G.K. Chesterton. The group has been known to treat nitrous oxide as a sacrament and to throw Jacuzzi parties -- hence the name.

In raw numbers, the Hottubbists constitute one of the smallest religions in the world: With well under 100 practitioners, it is dwarfed even by Rastafarianism and Scientology. The group is interesting for many reasons, but its social influence is not among them.

Though small and obscure, it is an example of a significant social trend: the blurring boundaries between art and faith. Atheists have long regarded religion as, at best, a collective work of art, but in the last century that view has grown popular with churchgoers as well. Many Christians and Jews today will declare that the Bible is a collection of myths and metaphors, not literal truths, and some will aver that there is more than one path to God. Neopagans and others take this nonliteral and eclectic approach and run with it, freely fusing classical mythologies, tribal spiritual practices, and even popular fiction, all of which would be mutually exclusive if they were regarded as, to borrow a phrase, the Gospel truth. At the far end of the spectrum are those who do not merely regard religion as a human creation but actively identify themselves as its creators. The Hot Tub group actually began as an art project, becoming a more spiritual endeavor only gradually. If it is unusual, it is only because it is so radical. Most people do not feel the need to be the authors of their own religions, though quite a few are happy to be the editors.

The Mormon Church has to be among the most outgoing on earth; in recent years its leaders have reached out to, among others, Latinos, Koreans, Catholics and Jews.

One of the most enthusiastic responses, however, has come from what some might consider a surprising source: U.S. Muslims.

"We are very aware of the history of Mormons as a group that was chastised in America," says Maher Hathout, a senior advisor to the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Los Angeles. "They can be a good model for any group that feels alienated."

Which perhaps explains an open-mosque day held last fall at the Islamic Center of Irvine. More than half the guests were Mormons.



"A Mormon living in an Islamic society would be very comfortable," said Steve Young, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints attending the event.

The sentiment is echoed by Muslims. "When I go to a Mormon church I feel at ease," said Haitham Bundakji, former chairman of the Islamic Society of Orange County. "When I heard the president [of LDS] speak a few years ago, if I'd closed my eyes I'd have thought he was an imam."

Reverberations from the Pew Forum's groundbreaking U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, the first independent survey to place modern Paganism over the one million mark, are still being felt. Recently The Chronicle Review, a publication of The Chronicle of Higher Education, explored some of the ramifications of these findings.

"...findings in the study shed new light on issues around which there has been no scholarly consensus ... it is becoming increasingly obvious that the term "Judeo-Christian" no longer makes sense, given how many Americans are neither. But the favorite terms to replace it - "Judeo-Christian-Islamic" or "Abrahamic" - seem equally inappropriate. It is not just that Buddhists, who do not trace their roots to Abraham, may outnumber Muslims, who do. It is that the combined percentage of those who identify themselves as either Hindu (0.4 percent) or from "other world religions" (0.3 percent) does so as well. We are not one nation divided into three monotheistic faiths. We are a nation characterized by many faiths, as well as by none."

If America is no longer a "Judeo-Christian" (or "Abrahamic") country, what does that mean? Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life, claims that the era of a common Christian morality is coming to a close.

"The fact that we now have so many religions in this country suggests either that no common morality is possible, or that, if it is, religion cannot be its most important source. The ways in which religious diversity either increases or detracts from speaking about the common good ought to be a subject stimulated by Pew's conclusions."