Posts Tagged ‘Leeds Atheist Soc’

Atheist Society recently welcomed Leo Dragon for a magic show and talk on illusions.

Leo describes himself as an honest liar in that he is tricking us but it’s ok because we all know it’s an illusion and we accept it – basically, it’s like democracy in cabaret format. Interestingly, along these lines, Derren Brown writes, in his book Tricks of the Mind, that all magicians are inherently bad people because their life is to trick people. Luckily, at A-Soc we don’t tend to subscribe to the idea of inherent evil.

Leo wowed the audience with a range of tricks, even after having appointed Michael to make sure there was no funny business going on – this means that either Leo is genuinely magic, or Michael should be permanently banned from working for the Child Protection Agency.

It could almost be Transhumanist Week between my talk the day before and Michael and John’s talk on Transhumanism and The Singularity at Atheist Society on Tuesday.

Recently, Atheist Society has really taken to fusing it’s events with steak nights. It’s a winning combination.

So recently we all headed down to Stick or Twist for a pub quiz created by the defacto quiz master Michael who did an excellent job of coming up with a quiz, despite the usual Italian bias. Craziest of all as people’s spirits began to run high, I even heard Elina shouting at one point – turns out she does have a volume other than quiet 😉 .

Despite only packing up from All Night Debate at 3am, we were all up bright and early the next morning to head down to Conway Hall in London for the AHS 2011 convention.

The day started with stalls from various related organisations and then moved into speakers starting with Lord Warner who is chair of the All Party Parliamentary Humanist Group talking about his experiences as a humanist, in politics.

Second up was Gerard Phillips, vice president of the National Secular Society. His talk was disappointing, it seemed to be an hour talk compressed into twenty minutes, I’ve literally never heard someone speak so fast when delivering a talk. It was also pointed at the wrong audience a little I think – given we’re all at the AHS conference, we don’t need to be told what secularism is and why we should advocate it – you’re preaching to the converted. Never the less, Gerald is clearly a passionate secularist and having had a chat with him later in the day, he seems like a great guy who really wants the best for the freethought movement.

He was followed by BHA chief executive Andrew Copson who, despite a lack of organisation with getting the slides ready, delivered a concise, informative and educational talk which made for one of the best of the day.

After a break, we welcomed Robin Ince to the stage. Jonni was hugely impressed with his talk and although it was evident he had, as he admitted, written it on a series of postcards in the hour, I really enjoyed it. Robin is also forming part of the line-up of the Enquiry 2011 Conference.

He was followed by Johann Hari, who, for my mind, gave the best talk of the day, reminding us all that despite we have all this nonsense such as faith schools often overly vocal religious people, when it comes down to it – we’re winning; more and more people every year declare themselves as non-religious.

The day was closed off by a speech by Professor AC Grayling and a performance by the BHA Choir. I have to say I was somewhat disappointed by Grayling’s speech – it was good, but then it was good when I heard it two years ago at the AHS press launch and it hasn’t really changed since then.

Afterwards, we all headed to a local pub for some well-deserved relaxation.

I had some more photos from Reason Week on my iPhone, some of which are actually better than the ones I took on my DSLR lol, so I thought I would share them as well.

We finished off Reason Week in the traditional manner – with an all night debate outside the union, talking to people about the society and what we do. It might have been a cold night but never the less myself, James, Rich, Michael, Elina and Elletra braved the night air until 3am.

For the Friday of Reason Week, Mark Edon presented his talk on Creationism. Mark is a committee member with the British Centre for Science Education which is a group that campaigns against creationism in the UK – and you can tell they do excellent work because the creationists have put up an “exposed” site about them.

Mark spoke recently on the same topic at Leeds Skeptics and his colleague Professor Paul Braterman is also speaking at the Enquiry 2011 Conference.

The Thursday event of Reason Week was hosted by the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire and featured a debate on Humanist Chaplains between HSoWY chair Dr Paul Dean (or Moz as he is generally known) and Gijsbert.

The event went well and while there were was no overall winner it did at least help people make up their minds – the undecided where exactly split down the middle when we took the second vote at the end.

Following the talk by Antony Lempert on Tuesday, we headed down to D-Fusion for a bit of Reason Week karaoke. D-Fusion was friendly as always though disappointingly they have moved over to a new karaoke system which is really difficult to use and has no where near the selection.

On Tuesday, Dr Antony Lempert, coordinator of the Secular Medical Forum, delivered us a talk on Cutting Religion out of Medicine.

I’ve heard Antony talk twice before, he spoke at the 4th Leeds Skeptics in the Pub event and again at last year’s Enquiry Conference and he always delivers an excellent performance, so it was great to see that he had been asked to speak at Reason Week.

As an extra bonus, he also brought his trophy having been named Academic of the Year at the Erotic Awards 2010.