Archive for the ‘Events’ Category

With Mr Foley’s looking like our home for the moment, we had a great Skeptics in the Pub meeting in July with a really strong turn out despite it being in the middle of summer. Perhaps due to the excellent quality of talk delivered by Jonni on “The Mind, Illusion and the Need for Science.”

Browns played host to this year’s End of Year Ball in Leeds, with them providing us with no less than two private rooms – one for the reception and one for the dinner. As a bonus my fish came as an entire fish too.

The World Cup manages to get everywhere – and arguably so it should – though it was surprising to find that it even made it as far as the Humanist Community of Leeds with Gijsbert dressing up in all orange to support his home country, The Netherlands.

The June Skeptics in the Pub meeting was held at Mr Foley’s on The Headrow. It’s interesting that when you describe it as “opposite the art gallery” nobody really knows where you mean but as soon as you say “next door to Wildcats” everyone knows exactly where it is!

For the innocent of you, Wildcats is one of Leeds’ many strip joints.

June’s talk was by Stewart Richmond who is the man that proved magnetic bracelets are of course a load of nonsense. Good times.

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!

Last Friday saw the the Answers course start once again at the University of Leeds, hosted by Leeds Atheist Society. Answers is a course for those who have decided they are atheists but are not really sure where to go from there – how do you express your beliefs and make sense of your thoughts? Luckily, Answers has answers!

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!

With Rich having been doing research for his book on the Bermuda Triangle (the book isn’t about that, he’s just writing a section which it makes an excellent case to reference) he volunteered to give Skeptics in the Pub a talk on the topic.

It was really interesting even if the answers are somewhat mundane compared with the mystery. It was also interesting to know that statistically no more ships have actually disappeared in that area than any other similar size body of water – there is actually no mystery at all.

Steve also did an excellent job filling in for Daryl in the news segment.

For the final session of this year’s Perspective we invited Sam Butler over from the Church of Scientology in Manchester. It was really interesting to hear what he had to say and get a good insight into the beliefs that Scientologists hold.

Unfortunately it wasn’t chaired well and we ended up not getting any real chance for questions which was a disappointment. Also I managed to mess up the focus on my camera and so half the photos were out of focus. Still, the first of hopefully more such Perspectives.