Archive for the ‘Humanism’ Category

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.

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!

On Wednesday, we welcomed Hull & East Riding Humanists secretary Tim Stephenson over to Leeds to present the Perspective Citywide session on Humanism. Tim’s talk was excellent, looking at both the philosophical side behind Humanism and also why it is important to stand up and be counted as a Humanist.

On Tuesday, Atheist Society hit Stick and Twist for what was officially a Think and Drink, though more importantly was also steak night at Wetherspoon’s :D.

Last Tuesday I delivered a talk entitled “A History of Atheist Charity” at Leeds Atheist Society. I’m not sure how accurate the title was, it also looked at religious charities and why we shouldn’t expect atheist charities, before going on to discuss atheist charities past and present. The feedback was positive however, so it seemed to go quite well.