Sign online petitions addressed to the Government

Peter Klaver significantly helped to make 'The God Delusion Pledge book to your MP' successful.

Here are his suggestions for online petitions addressed to the Government. Signing all of them should take no more than 5-10 minutes. Petitions relate to abolition of faith schools and ending the teaching of creationism and Bishops in House of Lords.


From: Peter Klaver [mailto:]
Sent: 30 May 2007 18:54
To: Chris Street
Subject: online petitions

Hello Chris,

The UK government has made it possible for people to open online petitions addressed to the government. Some of these are very much in line with humanist thinking. For instance, when it was decided that the House of Lords would become an all elected or appointed chamber, it seemed the 29 unelected seats for the bishops would diappear. However, the churches have been lobbying and now there are serious considerations for 16 of the 29 seats to be retained, some of them being allocated to clergy of minority religions. See petition against that at

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Episcopal/
[Chris Street] signed

There's a few more relevant petitions. Here's one calling for the abolition of faith schools and ending the teaching of creationism:

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/faithschools/
[Chris Street] already signed a month ago

While that petition has over 14000 signatures, there is a 'mirror' petition calling for the mandating of teaching creationism that has over 18000 signatures. Something most humanists would like to see rectified I think.Other relevant ones, some with slightly overlapping subjects to the ones mentioned above, are at

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/ChurchPay4Church/
[Chris Street] signed
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/NoCreSciEd/
[Chris Street] already signed a month ago
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/No-to-religion/
[Chris Street] already signed a month ago
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/schoolassembly/
[Chris Street] already signed a month ago

Signing these petitions doesn't require extensive registration, copy-pasting you address info between them won't take more than a few minutes. I've sent the links to the Humani email list. I think members of your local humanist group would probably look at them in a similar manner. I don't know if they operate a mailing list for members. If so, I would ask you to consider including the links the next time an email is sent to members.