It had been a while since the last meeting of the Humanist Community of Leeds – we didn’t have a January meeting due to conflicts with New Year and the week after, so this meeting was our first since the start of December. It was cold and icy outside, so big thanks to all those who made the effort and braved the freezing temperatures.
Despite the cold and the train, December’s Humanist Community meeting was well attended and enjoyed by all. After all, the colder it is outside, the more a good Sunday Roast is appreciated! Conversation continued long into the night with this month’s topics including foreign policy, education and what everyone’s holiday plans were.
Despite many of our members being unable to attend because they were at Leeds Pride, the August meeting of Humanist Community was both well attended and a fascinating evening.
The topic of conversation covered social justice, balancing freedom of expression with protection of people’s safety, world languages, equality and whether the sausages Gijsbert had been given were actually vegetarian or not – turns out they weren’t, so it was a good job we had such a good discussion about it and checked before he started eating!
It was such beautiful weather at this month’s Humanist Community meeting that we held the meeting outside. However, just as we were going to get started, a drum parade started behind us! Luckily it had soon passed and we got down to discussing a range of topics – so much so I didn’t even get chance to give the talk I had written – but maybe that is what people were aiming for ;).
Last Sunday saw the June meeting of the Humanist Community of Leeds. This month’s meeting saw a very elaborate array of discussions with topics ranging from The moral landscape and global politics to exactly how you should cook extra thick steak. Big thanks to Gijsbert for his excellent news round up as usual.
Despite many people taking advantage of the four day weekend around May Day and going away, we decided to go ahead with May’s meeting of Humanist Community.
Turn out turned out to be higher than expected and interestingly, we even had a predominantly young audience with over half the people attending being under 30! Discussions were enjoyable, though not particularly heated – when we discussed the royal wedding, everyone just agreed. Great minds and all that I guess 😀 .
On April 3rd, Humanist Community returned due to popular demand. Back in February we had announced that the pilot project was coming to an end and while we had enjoyed our time, we did not intend to continue the project. But after the number of people who announced that they were deeply disappointed in this we decided to extend it’s life to see it’s continued development over the coming months.
At the April meeting, much of the discussion focused around an article featured in The Guardian, written by Deborah Orr claiming that the Census Campaign (the campaign to get those with no religion to actually tick no religion rather than CoE) was militant secularism in action. Surprisingly enough, most of the attendees didn’t agree.
Last Sunday was the February meeting of the Humanist Community of Leeds. Discussions were lively indeed – to the point that by the time the discussions first quietened down, most of the meeting was gone and we only just managed to squeeze the news in!
From December, the Humanist Community of Leeds is moving it’s meetings to the evening, with doors opening at 5:30pm. We were really impressed with how many people turned out this morning but we believe we can probably double attendance by moving to a later time, based on the feedback we have, so this should make for even better events.
Last Sunday saw the May meeting of the Humanist Community of Leeds. It was well attended and all those who spoke to me gave positive feedback – indeed a record number of people stayed on for Sunday lunch and we had to have the restaurant expand the area we are normally in!
