The BBC does not allow secular thinkers on ‘Thought For The Day’, and is stubbornly committed to keeping the slot religious. Humanists who affirm that morality and ethics are not the sole preserve of faith groups and are fed up listening to religious points of view on the BBC’s Thought for the Day now have an alternative.

The Humanist Society of Scotland (HSS), an IHEU member organization, launched on 12 February (Darwin Day) a Humanist Thought for the Day which is now being podcast on www.thinkhumanist.org HSS declared “Our aim is to offer both an alternative to religious morality and to show the BBC and the public that Humanists can be equally, if not more, thought provoking than religious thinkers, when tackling moral and ethical issues”.

Humanist philosopher A.C Grayling who podcast in the first week said: “It is wrong that ‘Thought for the Day’ refuses to have any but religious voices on it. The far richer and longer-standing humanist tradition, stemming from Socrates to our own day, is a treasure-house of insights and perspectives that our world is tragically lacking, oppressed as it is by mainly religion-fuelled divisions and atrocities. The Humanist Society of Scotland has done us a service in offering a real alternative to predictable pieties that now speak to minorities only in our society.”