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.
February 22nd, 2011 |
Life
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.
The Humanist Society of West Yorkshire is a society with considerable history, having been around for over forty years now. One thing it hasn’t had, at least in the past decade anyway however, was a logo. Which has proved somewhat annoying when launching the group onto social media platforms.
Wanting to rectify this, I asked Emma Bryce, currently serving as the president of Durham University Humanist and Secularist Society and press secretary of the AHS, to use her graphic design skills to come up with something for us. We’re pretty impressed with the result!
You can check out some more of her amazing work here.
Last Friday saw the second session of Leeds Atheist Society‘s 2011 Perspective. Unfortunately the speaker, who was going to be speaking on Hinduism, was unable to do the Friday, so Norm kindly stepped in at the last minute to save the event and talk about Humanism.
Following on from last week’s first session, on the Quaker movement, this week Perspective Citywide was joined by Aarik Subramanyam to talk about Hinduism. This was the first time a Perspective course has never covered Hinduism so we were very excited to learn about a religion which many people in the West know little about. The session was interesting and very informative, and not one to miss!
Last Tuesday myself, Si and Norm headed down to the Leeds Academy to see Feeder. While both of my friends had seen them many times, this was my first time, and I can’t help feeling that it was somewhat a fall from grace to them to be now playing a relatively small venue such as the Leeds Academy.
The gig took a bit of time to get going while they insisted on playing their new stuff but from Buck Rogers onwards the crowd picked up and despite scary comments from Si on the subject, they did manage to make the rounds on all their classics.
They also played a brand new song off their upcoming album during the encore which was somewhat annoying – I can’t help feeling everyone would have been much happier if they had simply played Buck Rogers again, but of well.
Last week saw Super Bowl XLV.
Norm is a big fan of American Football so was hosting somewhat a Super Bowl party until he came down ill, so it ended up just being a few of us braving the long night despite most of us having work in the morning.
Despite knowing nothing about American Football I found the game incredibly entertaining. With it being on the BBC, we didn’t get the watch the legendary Super Bowl commercials, which is most of the game given each 15 minute quarter took 45 minutes to play out.
I’m definitely planning to book the morning off for it next year so I can stay up without worrying about having work on the morning. Well worth staying up for.
