At times, it seems that the world of fast speed communications has come upon us way ahead of our ability to effectively handle so much information. As a result, people easily fall in the danger of losing the chance for communicating effectively in a progressive and effective way, and their arguments go lost in a sea of Red Herrings. The dialogues in the EU Council are not being efficiently managed. It seems that the dialogues are passing by one another instead of effectively reaching targets for some positive outcomes. The Council shall respect the separation of Church and State. The Council is an organ of States' Affairs. There is no room for discrepancies of whose God is right or wrong in the arguments brought up for common analysis. Hitler was Catholic. I don't see anyone coming up protesting that, "the Neo-Nazis are cruel, because Hitler was a Catholic." Well, there are more effective ways of dealing with argument than blowing on each other's faces what their religion is wrongly doing in society as a whole. For respect to those human beings of great value who still hold to their religions and act as benefactors of society, it is necessary to limit the argument and condemn the act not the religion. No matter what people believe in, if it is God, the Spaghetti Monster, Freud or the Nothingness (which I doubt it exists...), the realm of conviction is a personal freedom that cannot be addressed in the Council of Europe, or in the UN deliberations. The topic is self-explanatory and it does not require further semantic elaboration.

Perhaps it would be more effective for the honorable representatives of IHEU at the Council, if they tried to reformulate their manifestoes and do not mention the religions as causes for the ills in society, but simply refer to the social ills as of how are they affecting all of the concerned members. It should be possible to reformulate the argument and condemn the wrong outcomes not the imagined religious causes leading to those acts. The fact that someone believes in Islam, for instance, does not instantaneously make that person into a Jihad, or into a cruel torturer of women. We all know Moslems who are loving parents and nice neighbors. The violent acts that are committed by some in the name of religion are not / should not be attributed to the religion - which is a private area that should not be discussed in the Council - but rather to the lacking control of individual and society in the challenge of handling social justice.

The Council of Europe was formed basically by the religiously-oriented in Europe; they have been around for thousands of years generating the culture in which we live and find home. It may turn out as impossible if the honorable representatives of the IHUE to the Council of Europe persisted in trying to deconstruct their opponents' presence in the Council by constantly appealing to their mistakes being caused by their religions. Such arguments are self-destructive, because they mark an ending for any possibilities of dialogue. Perhaps it would be much more effective on the Council, if they were to hear accusatory arguments of the acts against the law, not of the actors' religious affiliations. What the Council is trying to say, seems to be, "Please don't bring religion into politics, because that kills our whole dialogue."

The mishandling by the PACE of the report on creationism is as ominous as it was to be expected. It shows the cleverness of modern creationists in "playing the system" and requesting an "equal hearing" for their brand of pseudoscience whenever the science of evolution is being presented. It is an omen of the new alliance of the two main brands of obscurantism in today's world: religious dogmatism and postmodernist "anyting-goes-ism".

In this respect, the Council of Europe's statement to the effect that: “freedom of thought and discussion is a fundamental value of the Council of Europe. The Committee on Culture, Science and Education believes that it is the duty of the Assembly to show itself exemplary in this requirement” is actually quite ambiguous: does it mean that all ideas, however vacuous or silly, may be aired from the appropriate soap-box without censorship? Then it is clearly right and simply stating the obvious. Does it mean instead that whenever a silly and erroneous idea is backed by a sufficiently strong political-religious coalition, it has the right to influence school teaching, including in scientific subjects ? Then it is in fact catering to the obscurantist spirit of the age, that dismisses the honest search for scientific truth for fear of offending religious sensibilities. As humanists, we must realise that we are now at war on two fronts: against religious dogma that seeks to buffer its pseudo-knowledge (and the social influence that goes with it) from the acid of rational critique; against postmodernism, for whom "anything goes": religions, philosophy and science are just rival and interchangeable worldviews to be treated in a "non-discriminatory" manner. That is the pseudo-principle of fairness that was once satirized by a critic of the modern media with the formula: "five minutes of airtime for Hitler, five minutes for the Jews".

Creationists are always clamouring that they are the underdog, oppressed by the "scientific establishement". Yet creationist nonsense is more influential then ever before. It is all over the Internet, has all the media access it wants in America, and increasingly in other parts of the world. It is pushing itself on the agenda of increasing numbers of educational institutions and of policy bodies concerned with education. To portrait creationists as victims is laughable. They are a mighty enemy for the defenders of humanist and Enlightenment values. Maybe the war is only beginning.

"The slumber of reason begets monsters" F. Goya