Posts Tagged ‘lecture’

For the December lecture at West Yorkshire Humanists two local Greenpeace volunteers came down to tell us about their organisation. This took the form of an interactive workshop: we were answering true or false questions, putting photos into a timeline and discussing the ethical issues surrounding the environment and protesting.

They started with a video. I think if anything that did dispel a myth as I assumed they were quite a well rounded organisation that did thinks like education and lobbying. The video just seemed to suggest they spent all their time making trouble. I’m not saying that annoying Shell is a bad thing. I suspect it is a probably a good thing. However, I did not seem as multi-faceted as I had expected. The rest of the session was more engaging though.

Alan and Joe were lovely people and delivered a very honest and open presentation. It was a pleasure to have them at the group.

Happy Galileo Day! Leeds is lucky enough to be hosting two Feasts in honour of the man – one at Fazenda at lunchtime and one at Browns this evening. Tomorrow, also sees Leeds Skeptics host the 2013 Galileo Day Lecture, Brian Quinn with a talk entitled “Superstition – The Odd Delusion”.

Last month, we announced the Worfolk Lecture 2011, as the second annual event since we established an annual public understanding of science lecture last year.

This year’s talk was delivered by Dr David Jenkins and was entitled “From Rutherford to the LHC”, looking at the last one hundred years of atomic research.

At Atheist Society last week, they screened a Dan Dennett lecture given at Conway Hall. During the talk he made some excellent points including a new quote to go on my favourite quotes list: fairies are invisible – so how come everyone knows what they look like?

In the lecture he also answers the question often asked – if religion was just total rubbish, why is it still around? Surely it must be good for something? Dennett’s response was to give an analogy – think of the common cold. What is it good for? It’s good for itself. Similarly, what keeps religion alive is not because it’s good for society, or humanity – it’s just good at keeping itself around.