Archive for the ‘Humanism’ Category

In October, we launched Sunday Assembly Leeds with the help of London-founder Sandison Jones. 120 people turned out for the event as well as BBC Look North, BBC Radio 4 and plenty of other media too. We held it in the beautiful St John the Evangelist’s Church next to the St John’s Centre (surprisingly).

Last month John Fletcher presented a talk entitled “A Skeptical Look at Statistics” at Leeds Skeptics. It was great to see people there who were really interested in stats. It was also the first event we have held at the Hedley Verity and while it isn’t perfect, it is certainly an acceptable backup venue.

Last month, Simon Singh came to Leeds Skeptics to promote his new book, The Simpsons and their Hidden Mathematical Secrets.

Turn out was excellent, we had 85 people there, topping our previous record of 68. We had to move a lot of the tables out of the room, move extra chairs in and still had people queuing out of both doors.

Simon put on a very entertaining talk and it was a pleasure to host him.

After a great time last year, we returned to the North West Humanist Conference last weekend to represent our work in Leeds.

Organised by Greater Manchester Humanists and Central Lancashire Humanists the organisers do a great job of putting together a programme. This year featured a keynote by David Pollock, Sara Passmore talking about the BHA, Robin Cross talking about Humanism in the Armed Forces, Amy Walden talking about Humanist chaplaincy in prisons and the inaugural performance of the North West Humanist Choir.

Videos of the talks will be available via Worfolk Lectures at a later date and you can see the full set of photos on Flickr.

For the October meeting of the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire, Brian Quinn presented a talk “why does god hate women?” It was delivered in Brian’s usual eloquent style, with plenty of very dry humour and well-researched well-sourced information.

For our September meeting, Ian Bushfield presented a talk entitled “Skeptics with an Eh: A view of the Canadian Skeptical movement”.

For the August meeting of Leeds Skeptics, Kat Ford presented her talk “The Modern Face of Physiognomy”. The talk looked at how we make judgements of people based on their face. Kat was an entertaining speaker and we really enjoyed hosting her.

The talk is also available to watch on Worfolk Lectures.

While not having a well though through name, The Pour House does offer quite a nice location by the canal. As such, it made a promising location for an A-Soc Tuesday night social.

For the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire’s summer social, we organised a trip to Thwaite Mills Watermill, a working watermill located on the River Aire just outside the city centre.

Earlier this month we welcomed BBC Panorama reporter John Sweeney to present his talk “Oi! Scientology!”, a mini tour he is doing to support his book, Church of Fear. It was a bit of a shaky start when we couldn’t find John, but once resolved he gave us a highly entertaining insight into his experiences.

The discussions continued long after the event – indeed, it was nearly 2am by the time the last of us left the bar of Malmaison!