“My apologies to any non-physicists in the room”

I looked around the room. I didn’t see any obvious physicists. It was baffling. Tonight was our first Humanist meeting. We didn’t know what to expect and, seriously, how could we have expected what we sat through tonight.

So, what is a Humanist, I hear you asking. Well, thanks for asking. Basically, a Humanist tries to make sense of the world without resorting to silly myths, fairy tales or other religions. A Humanist takes a human-centric view of the world. It sort of really fits well with my own ideas of life. I hate the way that people blame things on invisible creations of primitive humans. People are flawed because they are flawed, not because God made them that way. Religion is not a catch all, excuse bucket. Though many use it as one.

But I don’t want to debate the wrongs of religion because I’m pretty sure my mother would stop reading pretty soon. I want to talk about tonight’s meeting because it’s much more entertaining.

But before I do…a picture of a deflating balloon…

A Virgin hot air balloon that landed in Farnham Park

It fell to earth as we walked along the path into Farnham for our date with the Humanists. It had nothing to do with god, it just landed where it landed because…because of gravity.

So, into the Hop Blossom we marched and then wandered out the back where a nice sized room was waiting with lots of chairs arranged in a circle. We took a couple after chatting with two of the committee and waited.

This bit is going to be a bit tricky because Mirinda told me to be nice. This basically means I can’t say very much. Actually all I can say is that if this was the first Humanist meeting I’d been to and had I not chatted to a really nice guy who convinced me otherwise, I would NEVER go back. It was really, really bad. The sort of thing that gives Humanists a bad name. Sort of like the Catholics during the Inquisition. OK, not REALLY like that but it sure did give them a bad name.

We had two discussions (and I use that word in it’s broadest sense) from members of the group. One on Art and the other on…I’m really not sure what the second one was about. It wandered everywhere and never really came back. Both discussions were way too broad in scope (the scope in the second discussion was so broad it met itself coming back around the curvature of the universe) and when it was question time, made it impossible to ask a question. Though that didn’t stop everyone.

There were questions. And there was some lively debate among the group, not just agreeing and cheering the speakers. That was refreshing.

Next month there will be a guest speaker from the Skeptics in the Pub group which should be a whole lot better.