Alexander Delorme is the current President of the University of Alberta Atheists and Agnostics group. He accompanied our car pool to Kamloops for the Imagine No Religion conference that was held last weekend and he has shared some thoughts on the event.
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I spent this past weekend in Kamloops, British Columbia, at the Imagine No Religion 4 conference. This annual conference is propped up by a number of Canadian humanist and secular organizations, and consistently features an A-list lineup of speakers. This year’s speakers offered a wide range of topics, from evolution to rhetoric to popular culture, and effortlessly entertained the crowd with natural and engaging stage-presence. Perhaps most wonderful about the conference, however, was the opportunity to meet friendly and thoughtful people and to forge boundary-defying bonds with freethinkers, scientists and philosophers of all stripes.
Anyone involved in the freethought community knows that such interactions lead to factually dense and sometimes long winded conversations and, by natural extension, arguments. The thoughts of these otherwise like-minded people are just that – free, despite a number of agreed upon generalities. This is why such gatherings are meaningful and impressive. Disagreements between evolutionary biologists; disagreement between deterministic philosophers; disagreements between gnostic atheists; the variety and power and complexity of the concentrated knowledge in Kamloops was overwhelming.
Which, I think, lends to the validity of the conference’s explicit thought-experiment. A world without religion; what might this be like? The fact that there is so much disagreement and controversy between non-religious people only affirms, in my view, that a world without religion is a preferable world, as time wasted by scientists debunking creationism, time wasted by philosophers discussing Euthyphro, and time wasted by preachers convincing people of counter-productive ideology could instead be spent discussing and refining ideas of real importance. A world without religion would not produce a Bill Craig vs Richard Dawkins theological debate, but instead a Jerry Coyne vs Richard Dawkins evolutionary debate. We would have our outright disagreements – an example being on the usefulness of philosophy, a controversy made clear by Lawrence Krauss at our conference – but at least these disagreements would be of real importance and in the interest of bettering the world, and would not be preoccupied with spiritual pipe-dreams.
As a first timer, I can’t compare Imagine No Religion 4 to any of its previous manifestations. But I can imagine that those who came before me, and those who were first timers this year as well, could have only come away from the conference with more knowledge, more inspiration, and most importantly, more friends.
And, in the immortal words of Han Solo, I can imagine quite a lot.
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To read more from Alexander you can follow his blog
http://alexanderdelorme.wordpress.com/
Articulate and thought provoking!