Chris Worfolk's Blog

Browns played host to this year’s End of Year Ball in Leeds, with them providing us with no less than two private rooms – one for the reception and one for the dinner. As a bonus my fish came as an entire fish too.

The World Cup manages to get everywhere – and arguably so it should – though it was surprising to find that it even made it as far as the Humanist Community of Leeds with Gijsbert dressing up in all orange to support his home country, The Netherlands.

The June Skeptics in the Pub meeting was held at Mr Foley’s on The Headrow. It’s interesting that when you describe it as “opposite the art gallery” nobody really knows where you mean but as soon as you say “next door to Wildcats” everyone knows exactly where it is!

For the innocent of you, Wildcats is one of Leeds’ many strip joints.

June’s talk was by Stewart Richmond who is the man that proved magnetic bracelets are of course a load of nonsense. Good times.

We’re pleased to announce the launch of our latest web resource, the Secular Portal Resource Library! This is exactly what it says on the tin – a library of resources for secular groups. It houses a huge variety of talks, slides, presentations, letters, forms, document templates and much more all available for secular groups to make use of.

Many groups develop some fantastic resources which would be of great value to other groups and we’re hoping this will provide a great way for groups to exchange material and save time and energy on not having to start from scratch every time they want to put together a top quality presentation, leaflet or document.

There are already several hundred documents in the system with more on there way so do browse around and see if you can find anything which may be of use to you. If you would like to contribute any documents for other groups too, please email them over to us!

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything is a book co-written by Steve Levitt and Stephen Dubner. It explores quirks of society and challenge some commonly held ideas about how the world works, providing better explanations.

For example, why do drug dealers most drug dealers live with their mothers? The answer is that they are earning less than they could make at McDonald’s. Drug dealing is a pyramid scheme at the people at the bottom are on less than minimum wage.

The most controversial chapter of the book looks at falling crime rates in New York. This is the shining example of broken window theory, as Malcolm Gladwell discusses in The Tipping Point. Dubner and Levitt show this is nonsense. Other cities in America that did not implement zero-tolerance also experienced this drop in crime. What fits the actual data far better is that it was a result of legalising abortion, which leads to would-be-criminals simply never being born.

We’re pleased to announce the launch of the foundation’s newsletter, Engage. This will be a quarterly newsletter containing all the latest news, events and projects that the foundation is working on. The first issue looks at Enquiry 2010, Atheist, Sunrise and several other initiatives. You can read the online version here.

There was a really interesting poll on SitePoint today asking whether freelance web developers were working this weekend. The results were as follows:

• 43% said they always worked weekends
• 34% said they sometimes worked weekends
• 20% said they worked weekends if necessary
• Only 3% said they never worked weekends

What we can probably assume from this is that on any given weekend, more than half of people who do freelance web development are working. Crazy people. Anyway, I would love to chat more about this but I have code to write…

I’m pleased to congratulate our trustee Gijsbert who has been elected to serve onto the University of Leeds Equality & Diversity Committee for the next three years.

The Equality & Diversity Committee is the highest body at the university for deciding on relevant issues, being chaired by Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Students and Staff Professor Stephen Scott. Members are elected by their fellow university staff members to serve on the committee.

Dr Stoet beat off both other candidates to win the election with a manifesto promising to ensure everyone was given fair representation including majority groups such as the non-religious community on campus who are often discriminated against leading to the atheist student group having to file several discrimination complaints over their three years of existence.

One of the aims I always wanted for the foundation, was that we would be an organisation that got out there and did stuff. Not just talked about it, or planned it, but actually got out there and got something going. I’m pleased to say that our work seems to be inspiring other organisations to do the same.

Having just read the latest copy of the BHA News which arrived through my door a few days ago, I noticed they have now formally launched their equivalent to our One Life course, Exploring Humanism, complete with a overtly stock image as I am a sucker for using on our projects too.

Just a week after our Enquiry 2010 conference took place, the BHA have announced the return of their annual residential weekend conference and following our public announcement of the Humanist Chaplaincy Network during the weekend, they have also announced they will soon be launching the Humanist Chaplaincy Working Group too.

I’m really proud that despite only being a year old, the work of the foundation is already inspiring many others in the non-religious community to get out there and make a difference. Long may it continue!

Last weekend saw people from all across the country flock to the Crowne Plaza Hotel Birmingham for the Enquiry 2010 Conference – a weekend on the topic of “atheism in the 21st century.”

Speaking at the conference were Professor A. C. Grayling, Professor Chris French, Andrew Copson, Norman Ralph, Maryam Namazie, Chris Worfolk, Dr Gijsbert Stoet, Dr Evan Harris, Dr Antony Lempert with Saturday night entertainment from Simon Munnery too!

If you missed the event you can see some of the photos from the event on Facebook and Flickr.

We would like to say a big thank you to all our guest speakers who gave their time to be with us over the weekend and indeed all those who attended the conference too. We hope you enjoyed it!