Archive for the ‘Humanism’ Category

The Atheist Society has a long history of running annual Winter Solstice meals, and this year was no exception. Despite us being unable to get in to Red Hot World Buffet, or be able to get karaoke going at OK Karaoke, it was never the less an enjoyable evening.

Best of all, I achieved the impossible – I think I am probably the first Yorkshireman ever to manage to stop eating when he was full and not keep going until he felt like a short walk over to the hospital on the other side of Millenium Square would be a strongly advisable course of action, in an attempt to squeeze every last penny of value out of the all you can eat buffet. I knew it was going to be a challenge, so I’m quite pleased with myself :D.

For the last talk of 2011, the Atheist Society had shameless plundered my Leeds Skeptics speaker (who I had plundered from Bradford Atheists) to present his talk “Neuroscience for the Soul” which he presented at Skeptics last month.

Huzzah, the German Market has once again arrived on Millennium Square. So, A-Soc headed down there for a good bit of German sausage.

Mark Edon recently gave a talk to West Yorkshire Humanists about “talking to creationists.” I’ve already seen Mark talk three times before but never the less it was interesting as ever, with plenty of fresh material.

As part of Non-Prophet Week, Atheist Society recently held a charity quiz to raise money for the very much worthwhile cause, Medicines Sans Frontiers. It was an enjoyable night and I came away with a pair of tickets to the West Yorkshire Playhouse so a good night all round.

As part of their Give It A Go, the Atheist Society finally got a session of speed debating organised. The concept is similar to speed dating, but instead of finding out about each other, you just basically argue.

The turn out was quite good, though unfortunately the implementation was disappointingly poor in all honestly. The sessions were also 10-12 minutes long, and so you only got four topics – I would have much preferred to be on each topic for five minutes and got through many more topics.

Still, an enjoyable evening none the less.

Last week, we hosted a house party for Atheist Society as part of the traditional way the society parties through the festival.

Last Tuesday, Atheist Society showed the documentary film, Jesus Camp.

We showed it back when I was involved in the society back in 2008 and it contains some amazing quotes. With a fresh set of faces watching it, people were once again shocked and appalled, with some Christians who attended voicing their shock to James at the end.

Luckily, of course, it isn’t representative of a lot of Christians, but it’s worrying to think many evangelicals across the United States could share similar views.

Last week, myself and Elina headed down to One Life for their session on Ethics, to explain to all the young people why they are wrong. As expected, most people there argued that morals were subjective, so I put forward the case from Sam Harris’ excellent book, The Moral Landscape, which I will be blogging about shortly.

Last week, Sheffield Skeptics invited me down to present a talk on Ray Kurzweil, and his book The Singularity is Near.

I’ve been to the group before to see Richard Wiseman speaking and they’re a really nice group. They’ve now become so popular that they’ve taken over the main bar at their arena and have a great projector setup and sound system.

The talk went quite well from the feedback I gathered, I took out a lot of the more technical site that was originally in the talk when I delivered it to Nottingham Skeptics in the Pub in July, so I think I’ve got it about the right level between factual and not too technical now.