Events Archive 2015
Happiness Through Science
Saturday 18 April 2015, 8:00 pm
Storey Hall, Melbourne
The Atheist Foundation of Australia is bringing Robin Ince’s Happiness Through Science to Australia. Best known for presenting the BBC radio show The Infinite Monkey Cage with physicist Brian Cox, Robin’s recent tours include the Uncaged Monkeys Tour with Simon Singh, Brian Cox and Ben Goldacre, and The Importance of Being Interested.
Robin organised Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People in the UK and co-wrote the Australian movie Razzle Dazzle. He has won the Time Out Award for Outstanding Achievement in Comedy (2006), the Chortle Award for Best Compere (2007) and the Sony Radio Awards Gold Award for Best Speech Programme (2011). In Happiness Through Science, Robin asks whether you can be happy and rational at the same time. Covering Schrödinger cats, multiverses and evolutionary conundrums, Robin traverses the landscape of evolution and the depths of his own murky consciousness, all without the aid of a safety net. Happiness Through Science will be in Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane and Sydney in April 2015.
Annual convention of Australian Humanists
Friday 29 to Sunday 31 May 2015
Perth
Featuring Australian Humanist of the Year presentation dinner (Saturday) and public lectures (Sunday).
Bringing Ethical Understanding to Primary Schools
Wednesday 30 September 2015, 6:00 to 7:30 pm
State Library of Victoria Theatrette, 179 La Trobe Street, Melbourne
Professor Philip Cam launches the Humanist Society of Victoria report on teaching ethics in Primary Schools. Read Event Details …
Conference: Secularism in the Modern World
Saturday 31 October 2015, 9:30 am to 4:10 pm
Melbourne Unitarian Church, 110 Grey Street, East Melbourne
This conference will focus on the challenges we face in a globalised world of different faiths and worldviews. How can we all live peacefully together and work towards solving the global challenges we face?
Sunday Summer Social
Sunday 13 December 2015, 12:00 noon to 3:00 pm
4 Alandale Ave, Balwyn
By tradition this end-of-year festive period is called Christmas. It is a time for get-togethers with family, friends, and work-mates; gift giving; for Christians to celebrate the birth of Jesus and for retailers to hope we will go out and buy. The general mood is a mix of enjoyment, social bonding, over-indulgence and the likelihood of family squabbles.
These celebratory traditions began in the northern hemisphere thousands of years ago, to mark the shortest day or winter solstice. It was a time of log fires and feasting, associated with killing livestock that would not have survived the winter. Much later Christians appropriated this long established celebration for their own event of Christ’s birth in a manger, visited by shepherds and wise men, etc. Read Details …
Rethinking the Enlightenment
Wednesday 16 to Thursday 17 December 2015
Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University, Burwood, Victoria
This philosophical conference will be devoted to reconsidering the complex legacies of the European enlightenment: the realities of its history, and the vicissitudes of its contestation and receptions in the light of the events of the 19th, 20th and 21st Centuries. Scholarly work in the history of 18th Century ideas calls into question postmodern images of the enlightenment as a single movement of thinkers characterised by a naïve, utopian rationalism closed to otherness or difference and the affective, playful and poetic dimensions of thought, sociability and experience in ways that would lead, in time, to the horrifying European catastrophes of world wars and total states. Works such as those by the keynote speakers Peter Anstey, Dennis Rasmussen, Karen Green and Genevieve Lloyd have explored the different strands of enlightenment thought and the importance of deistic, empiricist, sceptical, literary, democratic, and moral-sentimental (as well as rationalist and materialist) strands of the French and British enlightenments.
