Chris Worfolk's Blog

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.

Having announced the Humanist Library Project in December, we have slowly been building up quite a collection of books for it which have until now just been sat around in piles of the office, waiting to be dealt with.

Thankfully, our volunteer David (or Fonze as he is better known) was finally able to spare some time and do a little construction work for us. So after a few cryptic texts about “building a library”, he turned up hammer in hand to start building some book shelving for us.

If you haven’t heard about the project yet, the idea is to build a Humanist Library, right here in Leeds. We’re currently building our collection so if you have any appropriate items you are willing to donate to the project, do get in touch!

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 on from Andrew Copson’s talk on the Wednesday of Reason Week, we headed to Sam’s Chop House for dinner.

I was initially a little sceptical, especially given they didn’t book my salmon (on purpose, I presume), but once we tucked into the steaks, it turned out to be an excellent choice. Not quite up to the standard of the steak powerhouses in Leeds, but I would say it easily topped Brooklyn and The Restaurant. The sides were excellent as well as was the desert which featured no less than three different types of chocolate-based baked product.

It was reasonably pricey, but no more so than The Restaurant, and I would definitely return there given the quality of good – and hopefully next time I go they won’t have run out of chops. Rather a big omission given the name of the restaurant!

For the Paganism session of Perspective Citywide, we welcomed Rhiannon Grant to the group. I had already seen the talk at the Atheist Society the previous Friday but it was never the less entertaining and the discussions were great.

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.