Continued here …

"With US society sliding towards theocracy and with religious belief - even fundamentalism - on the rise in every continent, we have to take a stand," says Roy Brown, President of the International Humanist and Ethical Union.

The IHEU, which is organising the Congress, has 95 member organisations in 35 countries. Its executive director, Babu Gogineni, of India, told Reuters the values of the 18th century Enlightenment were increasingly under assault.

"Separation of religion from the state is crucial for freedom of conscience everywhere," Gogineni said. "Yet over the past decades we have seen the slow intrusion of religion in dozens of countries.“

“The secular foundations have been virtually eroded and the entire country has been thrown into social, political, intellectual and moral darkness," he told Reuters.

Alternative version of the same story:

Last Ditch Defence against the Assault on Mankind

Humanists, atheists, occult organizations and other malcontents have for centuries worked tirelessly to destroy the spiritual foundations of mankind, of the family unit and of human dignity, having almost succeeded in plunging the world into darkness in the French Revolution, the two World Wars and in world communism.

Yet even having played their trump card – the admittedly clever and plausible myth of evolution, they still have not achieved their final objective. People have turned out to be a lot shrewder than supposed – perhaps it is the old species survival instinct, perhaps something else.

Whatever, a significant proportion are flatly refusing to play along and thus the euphemistically titled International Humanist and Ethical Union will meet in Paris this week [July 4-7] to forge a common platform in a last ditch effort to snuff out the last remaining hope for mankind.

Its executive director, Babu Gogineni, of India, told Reuters the values of the 18th century Enlightenment were increasingly under assault. Such values as separating man from his maker, destroying the moral codes by which people live, the reduction of people to the role of serfs and plunging the world into a new dark age – some Enlightenment.

But the most important of all these goals is the confiscation of hope for mankind.

"Separation of religion from the state is crucial," Gogineni said. Of course it is and if he was honest, he’d add, "we cannot destroy the moral foundation of the family and of human beings whilst the state persists in adhering to an outdated and outworn moral code.

Whilst a code of right and wrong still exists, it greatly delays the inducing of children into drugs and sexuality, although progress has been made, promoting unruliness, disrespect and street violence and weaning people away from sustainable living and into the downward spiral of dollar worship.

There has been some success in well nigh breaking up marriage as a protective institution for the family but the other goals, sadly, will take generations of slow erosion to finally achieve."