Raphael Vassallo met with the British Humanist Association earlier this year to discuss setting up a humanist association in Malta. Via IHEU he now reports on Malta Humanist Association’s first half year.

Outspoken atheists do exist [in Malta], but are a tiny minority. And while no direct discrimination exists on paper, popular prejudice against atheism (mainly social and family pressure) remains an issue. This in turn suggests that the actual numbers may be higher than many would assume. But conditions for ‘coming out’, as it were, are not exactly optimal.

Matters were not helped when the Catholic Church declared a full-scale holy war on secularism in 2008–with the bishops variously comparing the ‘threat of secularism’ to Nazism in WWII, a barbarian invasion, the H1N1 virus, and so on. It was against this hugely encouraging backdrop that some of us decided to found the Malta Humanist Association (www.maltahumanist.org) in April 2010.

Full article: http://www.iheu.org/humanism-malta-starting-somewhere