Posts Tagged ‘reason week’

As part of the Atheist Society‘s Reason Week, I recently attended a talk by Martin Robbins, author of The Guardian’s Lay Science blog, on Bad Science in the Developing World.

In the talk, Martin described an expedition to Africa that he undertook last year to investigate the quackery that the Western World is bringing to the continent. As you can imagine – it’s a lot. With limited education, how are people supposed to know that homoeopathy is nonsense? Of course, they can’t be expected to, so it’s an easy sell.

The real question though, is probably “what is the solution?” As Martin points out, when the competition is local herbalists and shamans, finding an answer is going to be tough.

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.

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.

Monday of Reason Week saw us host a panel discussion on Religion as a Human Creation. The panel included two speakers from the Sea of Faith, the non-theist Quaker chaplain from the university chaplaincy and our very own Gijsbert talking on behalf of Humanism.

I’m not quite sure we briefed all of the speakers on the topic quite well enough – Gijsbert was perhaps a little too assertive – making valid points that I am sure we would all agree with – but maybe not really required at an event where we all already agree that religious is a human creation.

I really enjoyed the discussions that you might be forgiven if you came away from the event still wondering what Sea of Faith actually is. Much like the Quakers, they don’t have a set doctrine, so they don’t actually have a list of things they believe. However, Sea of Faith and Quakers seem to share a common theme of taking the good out of something that most of them don’t actually believe is there.

Thanks to everyone who helped out to make Leeds Reason Week 2011 a fantastic success. A big thanks to whose who put the time in during the day the man the stall and allow us to talk to so many people and it is great to see James successfully made it through the week without exploding from organising everything – good result all round!

Last Sunday I spent five and a half hours in meetings. I think that has to be somewhere near a new record for a Sunday.

The day started with a Reason Week planning brunch, which was productive, though didn’t actually include any food which was disappointing. Things are starting to fall into place for the week, which is promising given how close we are to it lol.

The second meeting was a Foundation trustee meeting which produced some interesting results – more on that will be announced soon, I’m sure.

Leeds Reason Week has come and gone for another year and what a year it’s been! 22 events and 7 days later and we’ve had another amazing week in which we’ve talked to hundreds of people acquired many new members as well.

The marquee was packed out every night, often with us running out of chairs to put people on. The Christian Union debate alone has 67 people attending and the other nights weren’t too far behind in terms of attendance either.

See the official photo gallery for pictures from the week.

Last Saturday we kicked off Leeds Reason Week 2010 with Skeptics in the Pub. The duty had fallen to me to deliver the event so I settled on the topic of L. Ron Hubbard. I wanted to find out the true story behind his life and came across the book Bare Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard.

Whether the book itself is entirely accurate is of course open for dispute too, though it does at least go as far as to regularly cite sources. It was a fascinating journey because in many ways Hubbard was an amazing man – everyone laughs at Scientology but he convinced millions to take it up and follow him – no mean feat by any standards!

On Monday we headed up to Durham for the Humanist Society’s Reason Week. We were a bit lacking in numbers with only myself and Sophie going up in the end but it was a great chance to have a good chat with Sophie, especially given I don’t currently have a working stereo after last week.

Ellis delivered an excellent talk over lunch and it was reasonably well attended – around 20 people showed up for it which is better than we normally do on the first day of Rationalist Week. The evening screen attracted only half that but was never the less a good event, who can say no to Life of Brian?

Ellis also delivered me a tour of Durham which is a beautiful city and includes lots of cool bars too so it made for a very interesting day. I was very impressed with however together they are in Durham and I’m sure they will have a very successful future.