Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, spiritual head of the global Anglican communion, has stepped into a row which is flaring at the U.N. Human Rights Council over the persecution of gays and lesbians.

Williams, who has faced strong opposition from parts of his own church especially in Africa for his stance on gays, did not directly refer to the current controversy at the Council, according to the text of a speech prepared for delivery at the Geneva-based World Council of Churches (WCC).

However, he said on Tuesday that laws against sexual minorities were equivalent to racism, and warned that legal regulation of consensual sexual conduct “can be both unworkable and open to appalling abuse – intimidation and blackmail.”

A panel of the U.N. rights body will consider action in Geneva on Wednesday aimed at halting persecution of gays and lesbians around the world, despite fierce condemnation from Muslim and some African countries.

A report prepared for the gathering by U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay says homosexuals and bisexuals face execution in at least five countries and 76 nations had laws criminalizing gay sex.

They also accounted disproportionately for torture cases in jails around the globe, said the report which was mandated by a council resolution backed by Western and a range of developing states that was passed narrowly last June.

But in a statement in advance of the panel, Pakistan said the 57-nation Organization for Islamic Cooperation (OIC) opposed the convening of the panel and would not accept any recommendations that it might issue.

“We don’t call it the ‘God particle’, it’s just the media that do that,” a senior U.S. scientist politely told an interviewer on a major European radio station on Tuesday.

“Well, I am the from the media and I’m going to continue calling it that,” said the journalist – and continued to do so.

The exchange, as physicists at the CERN research centre near Geneva were preparing to announce the latest news from their long and frustrating search for the Higgs boson, illustrated sharply how science and the popular media are not always a good mix.

“I hate that ‘God particle’ term,” said Pauline Gagnon, a Canadian member of CERN’s ATLAS team of so-called “Higgs hunters” – an epithet they do not reject.

“The Higgs is not endowed with any religious meaning. It is ridiculous to call it that,” she told Reuters at a news conference after her colleagues revealed growing evidence, albeit not yet proof, of the particle’s existence.

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International scientists said on Tuesday they had found signs of the Higgs boson, an elementary particle dubbed the “God particle” that is believed to have played a vital role in the creation of the universe after the Big Bang. Scientists at the CERN physics research centre near Geneva said, however, they had found no conclusive proof of the existence of the particle which, according to prevailing theories of physics, gives everything in the universe its mass.

“If the Higgs observation is confirmed…this really will be one of the discoveries of the century,” said Themis Bowcock, a professor of particle physics at Britain’s Liverpool University. “Physicists will have uncovered a keystone in the makeup of the Universe…whose influence we see and feel every day of our lives.”

Physicists think this subatomic speck of matter, if it is ever found, could explain the mysterious code at the origin of the physical world. To know this would be to “know the mind of God,” as Einstein wanted to do.  The physicist who launched the hunt for this elusive particle doesn’t like its nickname. “It embarrasses me,” Peter Higgs has said. “Although I am not a believer myself, it’s a misuse of terminology that might offend some people.”

The leaders of two experiments, ALTAS and CMS, revealed their findings to a packed seminar at CERN, where they have tried to find traces of the elusive boson by smashing particles together in the Large Hadron Collider at high speed. “Both experiments have the signals pointing in essentially the same direction,” said Oliver Buchmueller, senior physicist on CMS. “It seems that both Atlas and us have found the signals are at the same mass level. That is obviously very important.”

Fabiola Gianotti, the scientist in charge of the ATLAS experiment, said ATLAS had narrowed the search to a signal centered at around 126 GeV (Giga electron volts), which would be compatible with the expected strength of a Standard Model Higgs. “It is too early” for final conclusions, she said. “More studies and more data are needed. The next few months will be very exciting…I don’t know what the conclusions will be.”

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When Switzerland goes to the polls to elect a new parliament later this month, voters in Zurich will for the first time in the country’s history have the chance to cast their ballot for a slate of Freethinkers.

“We decided we had to stand up and tell our politicians that it’s time they recognised that there are a lot of non-religious people in their electorate,” says 42-year-old Andreas Kyriacou, who heads the list. “We, and probably a lot of Swiss people who have never thought about humanism or atheism, are tired of the influence the churches and religion still exert in this country,” he said in an interview with Reuters.

Kyriacou, a management consultant, was speaking at a “Denkfest”, or “Think Festival,” that the Swiss Freethinkers Association held in Zurich last month, attracting scientists, philosophers and even comedians from around the world.

The Swiss Freethinkers — a term that covers atheists, agnostics, secularists, rationalists, sceptics and just plain critics of religion — argue that the country’s political parties and leaders run scared of religious voters. “There is a group for Bible study in our parliament, but no cross-party humanist group, though we know many of the deputies are non-believers,” he says. “On right and left, they prefer to keep their heads down.”

And Kyriacou points to the failure of politicians to take a stand on social issues like assisted suicide and abortion, where the Catholic Church in particular has strong views, and on the powerful place of religion in education in parts of the country.

His stance — as measured by comments at other conferences around Europe over the summer — reflects growing determination among humanists and atheists on all five continents to make themselves more visible and their influence felt.

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Scientists chasing a particle they believe may have played a vital role in creation of the universe have indicated they were coming to accept it might not exist after all. But they stressed that if the so-called Higgs boson turns out to have been a mirage, the way would be open for advances into territory dubbed “new physics” to try to answer one of the great mysteries of the cosmos.

The CERN research centre, whose giant Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been the focus of the search, said on Monday it had reported to a conference in Mumbai that possible signs of the Higgs noted last month were now seen as less significant. A number of scientists from the centre went on to make comments that raised the possibility that the mystery particle might not exist.

The Higgs boson is posited to be the agent that gave mass and energy to matter just after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. It has been dubbed the “God particle” because understanding how mass was created would amount to understanding “the mind of God,” as Albert Einstein put it.

“Whatever the final verdict on Higgs, we are now living in very exciting times for all involved in the quest for new physics,” Guido Tonelli, from one of the two LHC detectors chasing the Higgs, said as the new observations were announced.

CERN’s statement said new results, which updated findings that caused excitement at another scientific gathering in Grenoble last month, “show that the elusive Higgs particle, if it exists, is running out of places to hide.”

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A coalition representing most Christian churches around the world launched a rule book on Tuesday for spreading their faith that aims to reduce tensions among themselves and with followers of other faiths. The pioneering code of conduct, under negotiation for five years, was unveiled by the World Council of Churches (WCC), the Vatican and the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA), which together claim to represent over 90 percent of Christianity.

It reaffirms their right to seek converts but also urges them to abandon “inappropriate methods of exercising mission by resorting to deception and coercive means”, saying that such behaviour “betrays the Gospel and may cause suffering to others”. Click here for the PDF text of the guidelines.

Christian missionaries have long been accused of offering money, food, or other goods to win converts in poor countries, either from other faiths or from rival churches. Tensions have also risen in recent decades as evangelical Protestants have stepped up efforts to convert Muslims, which is a capital offence in some Islamic countries. This also prompts retaliation against local Christians who do not seek converts.

“In spite of our divisions, we Christians have the duty to proclaim our faith without any compromise,” said Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, head of the Vatican’s department for interfaith dialogue. “Christian witness is facing new challenges which are putting accepted practices in question and are weakening our well-established ways of doing things. In a word, the situation is requiring Christian communities to consider, in a new way, how best to proclaim the Christian faith.”

“As our shared history has taught us, a lack of prudence and respect for others, leading to inappropriate means of proclamation of Good News, unavaoidably brings religious tensions, even violence, and the loss of human life,” he added.

WEA Secretary General Geoff Tunnicliffe said the code, entitled “Christian Witness in a Multi-Religious World,” would be “a great resource” for Christians lobbying against anti-conversion laws passed in countries such as India. “Missionary zeal, as a sign of obedience to the gospel of Jesus, has always been a cornerstone of belief for evangelicals and so it is a special privilege to have the opportunity to work with these colleagues on such a document,” he said. “It is our hope that with this text we will learn together to practice our obedience better – to witness more and to be more faithful to Christ in our witnessing.”

In recent years, there have been increasing attacks on local Christian churches seen as the focus for conversion activity — in Pakistan, Egypt, India, Indonesia and other countries — in which many Christian believers have died.

Islamic countries set aside their 12-year campaign to have religions protected from “defamation”, allowing the U.N. Human Rights Council in Genea to approve a plan to promote religious tolerance on Thursday. Western countries and their Latin American allies, strong opponents of the defamation concept, joined Muslim and African states in backing without vote the new approach that switches focus from protecting beliefs to protecting believers.

Since 1998, the 57-nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) had won majority approval in the council and at the United Nations General Assembly for a series of resolutions on “combating defamation of religion”. Critics said the concept ran against international law and free speech, and left the way open for tough “blasphemy” laws like those in Pakistan which have been invoked this year by the killers of two moderate politicians in Pakistan. They argued that it also allowed states where one religion predominates to keep religious minorities under tight control or even leave them open to forced conversion or oppression.

But Pakistan, which speaks for the OIC in the rights council, had argued that such protection against defamation was essential to defend Islam, and other religions, against criticism that caused offence to ordinary believers. Islamic countries pointed to the publication of cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed in Denmark in 2005, which sparked anti-Western violence in the Middle East and Asia, as examples of defamatory treatment of their faith that they wanted stopped. However, support for the fiercely-contested resolutions — which the OIC had been seeking to have transformed into official U.N. human rights standards — has declined in recent years.

The new three-page resolution, which emerged after discussions between U.S. and Pakistani diplomats in recent weeks, recognises that there is “intolerance, discrimination and violence” aimed at believers in all regions of the world. Omitting any reference to “defamation”, it condemns any advocacy of religious hatred that amounts to incitement to hostility or violence against believers and calls on governments to act to prevent it.

The U.S.-based Human Rights First campaign group said the new resolution was “a huge achievement because…it focuses on the protection of individuals rather than religions” and put the divisive debates on defamation behind. However, diplomats from Islamic countries have warned the council that they could return to campaigning for an international law against religious defamation if Western countries are not seen as acting to protect believers.

For more on Pakistan’s blasphemy law, see:

Towards a review of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws

The United States and NGO campaign groups say diplomatic shifts on highly-charged issues like religion and Iran in the long-polarised U.N. Human Rights Council could turn it into a more effective body.

U.S. ambassador Eileen Donahoe said emerging accords on tackling religious hatred, Iran’s rights record and unusual cooperation across mutually suspicious regional blocs on Libya could mark a turning point for the forum.

“While the council remains an imperfect body, we have seen distinct progress in terms of its ability to respond to happenings in the world with respect to human rights in real time,” the U.S. ambassador to the council told reporters on Wednesday. “There is more shared common ground here than people realise.”

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working to promote universal human rights used terms like “seismic shift” and “groundbreaking” to describe an apparent softening in demands from the 57-nation Organisation of Islamic States (OIC) that religions be protected internationally from “defamation.”

NGOs had previously welcomed the council’s surprising consensus decision last month to expel Libya — whose rights record most members had praised effusively only three months earlier — for killing anti-government protesters.

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The World Council of Churches, the main global grouping of Protestant and Orthodox Christians, revealed on Wednesday it aims to scrap the communist-style name of its governing body, the Central Committee. The name, identical to that of the policy-setting body of the old Soviet Communist Party and of other anti-religious hard-left parties around the world, is long known to have embarassed many WCC member churches and their leaders.

News of the planned change — 63 years after the WCC was set up as the East-West Cold War was born — was outlined at a Geneva meeting of the committee by its moderator, Brazilian Lutheran Walter Altmann. “We should not underestimate (the change’s) importance in terms of visibility and of identification with our churches and partners,” he said. As far as he knew, no individual church had a “central committee”.

“But I do know that there are political parties that call their governing bodies by that name. It is certainly not the best name for an organisation like the World Council of Churches,” declared Altmann.

Over the years, critics of some policy stands taken by the WCC — its positions on Israeli-Palestinian issues or poverty in developing countries — have argued that the name “central committee” showed the WCC was a dangerously left-wing organisation.

In discussions so far on alternatives, no agreement had been reached. But the worst decision the WCC could take, likely to be finalised at an overall Assembly in South Korea in October, “would be to keep the present name,” he said.

The effective chief officer of the WCC — currently Norwegian Protestant pastor Olav Fykse Tveit — is called the General Secretary, a title that was also used by communist leaders including Josef Stalin. But there was no indication that the WCC, that claims 349 member churches with a total of 560 million members around the globe, plans to alter that.

Link:  Church body moves to scrap communist name.

Ecumenical News International, an award-winning agency reporting on religion and based at the World Council of Churches (WCC), has been temporarily closed and had its two top editors removed, one of them said on Monday. The decision, taken at a meeting of its executive committee last week, comes after the Geneva-based WCC cut the agency’s funding and its former head criticised its coverage.

The suspension and leadership changes led to the resignation of the ENInews president and its treasurer, both senior figures in Scandinavian Protestant churches, a report by the agency said. WCC officials said the agency was not being closed but would resume some time in 2011 with one part-time editor.

Earlier this year the WCC, which has been ENInews’s main funder and in whose headquarters the agency was based, said it was reducing its financial support for 2011 by over 50 percent.

The WCC is an umbrella body linking Protestant and Orthodox churches around the globe. An acting spokesman for the organisation told Reuters on Monday that the funding decision was “part of a broad redeployment of WCC resources” and had been a “key element in decisions related to the re-shaping of ENInews.”

The cash cut came in the wake of complaints by the WCC’s former Kenyan general secretary Samuel Kobia of “inaccuracy” and “sensationalism” in coverage of the body by ENInews — which had run reports from an authoritative German religious news service that he had falsely claimed an academic degree. WCC sources said at the time that the affair effectively blocked Kobia from seeking a second four-year term.

ENInews, which ran a network of some 50 correspondents around the globe, had also angered some WCC officials by revealing the list of candidates to replace Kobia in advance of a meeting of the body’s central committee in 2009.

According to a story about the closing on its website, “the financial instability for ENInews began on 6 May when the WCC wrote to ENInews president (Anders) Gadegaard announcing a cutback in its financial support for the agency in 2011.  Two days later in Washington DC, ENInews won an award from the Associated Church Press for being the best news agency covering religion, and another top award for courageous reporting related to the WCC, as well as two other awards for feature stories published.”