No Change to UK Abortion Law

There has been a recent parliamentary vote on whether women wanting an abortion should have to receive independant counselling before the abortion is carried out. Critics of abortion clinics say the counselling currently offered is biased because they are run as businesses - this claim is denied by the clinics.


A human foetus at 24 weeks gestation - abortions can be carried out up to this date in the UK.


Last year, 202,400 were carried out in the U. K.

Abortion is a highly contentious issue with many Pro-Life groups, including the Catholic Church, considering the killing of an unborn baby to be the same as killing any other person. They see it as murder.

MPs however, rejected the call to offer women independent counselling by 368 votes to 118 so tha law remains unchanged.


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Can Religion tell us more than Science?

Too many atheists miss the point of religion, it's about how we live and not what we believe, writes John Gray.

When he recounts the story of his conversion to Catholicism in his autobiography A Sort of Life, Graham Greene writes that he went for instruction to Father Trollope, a very tall and very fat man who had once been an actor in the West End.

Trollope was a convert who became a priest and led a highly ascetic life, and Greene didn't warm to him very much, at least to begin with.

Yet the writer came to feel that in dealing with his instructor he was faced with "the challenge of an inexplicable goodness". It was this impression - rather than any of the arguments the devout Father presented to the writer for the existence of God - that eventually led to Greene's conversion.

The arguments that were patiently rehearsed by Father Trollope faded from his memory, and Greene had no interest in retrieving them. "I cannot be bothered to remember," he writes. "I accept."

It's clear that what Green accepted wasn't what he called "those unconvincing philosophical arguments". But what was it that he had accepted?

Could a robot be conscious?

If a robot is produced that behaves just like one of us in all respects, including thought, is it conscious or just a clever machine, asks Prof Barry C Smith, director of the Institute of Philosophy.




Human beings are made of flesh and blood - a mass of brawn and bone suffused with an intricate arrangement of nerve tissue. They belong to the physical world of matter and causes and yet they have a remarkable property - from time to time they are conscious.

Smartphones make religion mobile

As technology increases and more and more people have smart-phones, or similar, the world of religion has been making certain that it keeps up with the developments.

To find out how, watch the following clip:


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/9578162.stm

Home is where the Heart is.......

The heart of the last heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Otto von Habsburg, has been buried in central Hungary. The funeral of the last crown prince took place on Saturday in the Austrian capital Vienna, where his body was buried alongside those of his ancestors in the Imperial crypt. His heart was buried separately in accordance with Habsburg tradition. The event is also an echo of medieval aristocratic custom.

Mr Habsburg said he wanted his heart buried in Hungary to show the affection he held for the country, Austria's 19th-Century partner in the Austro-Hungarian empire. His heart was buried in a private ceremony on Sunday evening in the Benedictine Abbey in Pannonhalma, near Budapest, after a requiem mass.

The service in the chapel was simple compared to the pomp of the Vienna funeral

Mr Habsburg's heart, in a silver urn, was placed on a table in front of the alter - surrounded by a wreath of red and white flowers in green leaves to represent Hungary's national colours. At the end of the service his two sons carried the urn down to the crypt for burial. Mr Habsburg, the son of the last emperor, died earlier this month at the age of 98.