For the forth session of Perspective Citywide, we welcomed Joel Baker to talk about Christianity.
Joel is currently serving as the interfaith secretary for the Christian Union at Leeds and discussions were very forthcoming – I had to call an end to them in the end because we ran out of time. A big thanks to Joel for coming down and very much looking forward to Tim tonight.
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.
Having not really done much with my Saturday other than try and get some work done, I decided to ask George out on a romantic man-date (which also would have involved Norm, but he hadn’t been paid yet).
We ended up at the recently opened Brooklyn Bar at the bottom of Call Lane, as they had a restaurant upstairs which looked good. The bar was well stocked as well – anywhere which stocks 42 Below and Belvedere gets a big thumbs up in my book.
The steak was very nice, but not amazing. It was reasonably well cooked and good quality meat, but can’t stand up to the amazing flavours of Blackhouse or River Plate. Never the less, I wouldn’t have any hesitation in eating there again.
Last Saturday we hit up Wendy House for a good old fashioned night out. The theme was in disguise to which some people really put the effort in – notably Viv who managed to survive a night in that outfit without slowly cooking herself, which is no mean feat.
I hadn’t blogged about it until now as I was waiting on someone to post some photos. The ones below were posted by Kat, and I have to say how impressed I am that someone managed to get into so many photos taken with her own camera lol.
Sunday finally marked the arrival of George’s long awaited fry up. Given there were five of us in the apartment, we ended up having a bit of a family style breakfast round the table. These are the days kids, these are the days.
On Saturday, Mark Edon delivered a talk to Leeds Skeptics on the subject of Creationism. Mark is on the committee for the British Centre for Science Education which is a religiously-neutral organisation which aims to combat creationism and you can tell they do great work because the creationists have even built an “exposed” website about them 😀 .
If you are interested in learning more about the BCSE, you can find their website here and even join for free too.
On Thursday, I attended two workshops organised by the Community Development Foundation, on fund raising strategies and using the media to promote your charity. They were being held at the Leeds Church Institute so while other people had traveled quite a distance to attend the sessions, I rolled out of my building, crossed the street and entered the venue lol.
The workshops were delivered by a man named Martin who seemed to have loads of experience in the fund raising industry – there didn’t seem to be a topic we could cover that he didn’t have an interesting anecdote about.
I was actually very impressed as to how useful a lot of the information was. I find a lot of workshops you go to, just to be fill with buzz words or tell you things that are just common sense (of course there is always a bit of that – everyone knows you should be well planned), but I found these contained a lot of useful information as well. Well worth attending.
For the third session of Perspective Citywide, Sam Butler joined us from the Church of Scientology in Manchester. Scientology is a great religion for us to cover because it’s one where the popular conception and the church’s official line on what they believe are very different so it’s fantastic that Sam can come over and talk to us. Things got a little heated during some of the session, but Sam handled it well and the feedback after the session was on the whole positive.
On Tuesday, we celebrated Galileo Day. The day started with Michael delivering the Galileo Day Lecture on the life and works of the man himself. Unfortunately I ended up missing most of the talk as I had to take some phone calls. Luckily I’m fairly familiar with the subject anyway having contributed to the recently published Galileo Day pack.
Afterwards, we headed down to Red Hot World Buffet for some all you can eat goodness. I ended up setting a new personal record, getting through seven plates, so I’m fairly sure that isn’t something to be proud of lol. I was actually ready to give up after five but then when I found out that Elina was on her sixth, I had to up my game.
Last Tuesday, 15 February, saw the third annual Galileo Day celebration.
In Leeds, Michael Braham delivered this year’s Galileo Day Lecture on the life and work of Galileo and the traditional Galileo Day Feast was held afterward at Red Hot World Buffet.