Barrie Webster is president of the Victoria Secular Humanist Association and the Memorial Society of BC. Barrie will speak about both organizations. The VSHA is one of Canada's oldest Humanist groups in Canada (since 1953). They offer a community for the non-religious in the Victoria area, and a forum for discussing and advancing a secular worldview based on our common humanity. They have a variety of regular activities which are free and open to the public. On Sunday mornings throughout the yea...
Jan 14, 2018•13 min
Anne George is Associate Professor Emerita Pediatrics at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on public and population health, and on examining social determinants of health, including: The health and well-being of populations, including immigrant and refugees, and aboriginal peoples alcohol and alcohol-related risks, including alcohol exposure during pregnancy improved health research practice, particularly with respect to ethical considerations together with fellow UBC Prof...
Jan 07, 2018•28 min
Ian Bushfield, executive director of the BC Humanist Association, explores Humanist views on the paranormal at the Sunday, October 29, 2017 Vancouver meeting. Learn more about the BCHA and support our work at http://www.bchumanist.ca
Dec 18, 2017•1 hr 17 min
Zero Waste Canada (ZWC) is a non-profit grassroots organization, dedicated to helping end the age of wasting through better design & education! Zero Waste Canada works with individuals, businesses and communities across Canada to support continuous reuse of resources and promotes the elimination of landfills and waste-to-energy plants. They also advocate at all levels of government for responsible resource management and policies, legislation and initiatives that eliminate waste. The BC Huma...
Dec 10, 2017•21 min
Dr Kanbawaza (Ba or Eddie) Win is a Burmese Canadian and political scientist. During his years in Burma he witnessed students shot at point-blank range during protests against the junta in 1962. He took part in the 8888 Movement and is an active supporter of democracy and federalism in Myanmar. Dr Win will cover the modern history of Burma leading to the current crisis facing the Rohingya people. The BC Humanist Association was formed in 1984 and we have a regular attendance of over 30 people at...
Dec 03, 2017•50 min
The Government of BC has recently introduced a revised curriculum (https://curriculum.gov.bc.ca/) for all students that moves an emphasis from content to competencies. What does this mean for teachers and science education? Sonia Milbradt is a high school science teacher in Burnaby. She has a MSc in Physics from Simon Fraser University and a BEd from UBC. From 2013-2015 she taught in England. The BC Humanist Association was formed in 1984 and we have a regular attendance of over 30 people at our...
Dec 01, 2017•59 min
Muju Naeem - From Islam To Atheism by BC Humanist Association
Nov 20, 2017•1 hr 4 min
On Remembrance Day About 180 people joined us (despite the rain) in Vancouver at Seaforth Peace Park Saturday Nov 11 at 2:30 pm for Let Peace be Their Memorial - Mourning Less-Recognized Victims of War a wreath laying ceremony commemorating civilian victims of war and conflict. This free, public, city sanctioned event was again co-hosted by Vancouver Peace Poppies and the BC Humanist Association at the south plaza of Seaforth Peace Park (Burrard @ 1st Ave) from 2:30 to 3:45pm on Remembrance Day....
Nov 15, 2017•1 hr 9 min
No Kidding! was founded by Jerry Steinberg in Vancouver, BC, Canada in 1984. After searching for a social club for childfree couples and singles and finding that none existed, he decided to take the initiative and start a group on his own. Today, No Kidding! has over 40 active chapters. Jerry has recently retired from No Kidding! to become the Founding Non-Father Emeritus, but he is glad the organization is continuing. The BC Humanist Association was formed in 1984 and many of our members are no...
Nov 12, 2017•25 min
On Monday, October 30, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights met to continue its discussions over the bill to amend the criminal code. The BC Humanist Association last week submitted our brief to the committee setting out why we support the government's decision to repeal sections 296 and 176 which prohibit blasphemous libel and disrupting a religious service respectively. In this recording from the committee, Greg Oliver, President of the Canadian Secular Alliance,...
Nov 01, 2017•35 min
A panel of activists speaks about the South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy and social justice. The mission of SANSAD is to develop a secular democratic South Asian diaspora in Canada. Their goal is to create a secular democratic force within the South Asian diaspora through education and engagement in the struggle for peace, social justice, human rights, democratic rights, and a sustainable world. Their concerns embrace their homelands, adopted land, and other lands where people shar...
Oct 23, 2017•47 min
Maggie Rayner is one of the women, who, with Jancis Andrews, began lobbying the BC government in 2004 to take action on the abuses in Bountiful. After CBC’s, The Fifth Estate documentary, Leaving Bountiful, aired, she spent time with Debbie Palmer and was saddened to learn specific details of the abuses taking place in the community. Her ancestors were polygamists and her parents, mainstream Mormons (devout members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints,commonly known as Mormon, or L...
Oct 15, 2017•41 min
A global consensus has taken hold in the healthcare field that doctors who object to abortion and other reproductive healthcare for personal or religious reasons should be allowed to refuse to provide care. But measures to regulate the exercise of “conscientious objection” (CO) so that women can still have access to abortion have fallen far short. The result has been rampant abuse of the “right” to CO in many countries. In countries such as Italy, Poland, and Spain, a majority of Obstetricians/G...
Oct 08, 2017•55 min
Eiynah is a Pakistani-Canadian illustrator/blogger who writes and draws about sexuality in South Asia (mostly Pakistan), religion, politics, feminism, godlessness. Her podcast is Polite Conversations. Follow her on twitter @nicemangos or Facebook and support her work on Patreon. Eiynah spoke to us remotely. https://soundcloud.com/politeconversations https://twitter.com/NiceMangos
Oct 04, 2017•27 min
What on earth is going on with American politics? Fake news? Eric Merkley demystifies our instincts to develop bias, how they are targeted by politics, and how to overcome them to make our political discourse more productive, civil and factual. Eric Merkley is a Ph.D. candidate at UBC’s Department of Political Science and a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Scholar. His research focuses on how citizens make judgments on public policy in the context of limited information and motivation. His recent ongoin...
Sep 24, 2017•39 min
The Vancouver Tenants Union seeks to build a base of tenants throughout the city to establish political power to create change. Over 50% of Vancouver households are rentals, yet tenants continue to be disempowered and disconnected. In an effort to address this, the Vancouver Tenants Union is committed to educating renters on their rights and standing up to landlords and developers who persistently compromise our security and livelihood. We are fighting for the rights of tenants and the preservat...
Sep 17, 2017•41 min
Ian talks about the status of the legal battle for Trinity Western University to exercise a charter that evangelizes and implicitly discriminates against non-Christians. It questions the nature of religious organization and what rights they have. He discusses the role and efforts of the BCHA in standing for secularism and human rights. Make a donation to support our campaign: https://www.canadahelps.org/dn/27636 Read our response: http://www.bchumanist.ca/bcha_scc_twu_arguments
Sep 10, 2017•37 min
Stacey Hrushowy is a Masters student in biology at Simon Fraser University. She studies the role of microparasites like bacteria and viruses in wild populations of salmon and trout, and just completed her third field season on the beautiful Central Coast of BC in the unceded territory of the Oweekeno First Nation. Before this, Stacey studied archaeology and biology at UVic and has spent time working with seabirds in Alaska, steelhead in California, and school children at the Bamfield Marine Scie...
Sep 03, 2017•53 min
Christopher Levenson taught English and Creative writing at Carleton University, Ottawa, and now lives in Vancouver. He has publish 12 books of poetry. Arriving at Night won the Archibald Lampman Award in 1978. He was co-founder and first editor of Arc magazine and series editor of Carleton University Press’s Harbinger imprint for first books of poetry. His 12th book A tattered coat upon a stick has just been published. Recorded at our August 27, 2017 Sunday meeting in Vancouver, BC.
Aug 27, 2017•33 min
The crucifix is in! You can fool most of the people most of the time. In The God Con, Lee Moller, a life-long atheist and skeptic, looks at organized religion through the lens of the con. Organized religion has been selling an invisible product, that it never has to deliver, for thousands of years. It has given us bigotry, rampant paedophilia, terrorism, and bloodshed beyond imagining. And its acolytes have, in turn, given organized religion power over their bank accounts, their reproduction, an...
Aug 20, 2017•54 min
Daphne Bramham has been a columnist at the Vancouver Sun since 2000 and has won numerous awards for her writing, including a National Newspaper Award. She was named Commentator of the Year by the Jack Webster Foundation in 2005 and was honoured by the non-profit group Beyond Borders for a series of columns on the polygamous community of Bountiful, BC. She is author of the 2009 book The Secret Lives of Saints: Child Brides and Lost Boys in Canada's Polygamous Mormon Sect and has been providing ex...
Aug 14, 2017•42 min
Kat's main interest is in how changes in the physical environment alter biological interactions. My current research focuses specifically on how the addition carbon dioxide (ocean acidification) changes competition and herbivory in seaweed communities. Understanding the outcomes of anthropogenic climate change is one of the most pressing issues facing biologists today; while we expect that climate change will have large impacts on community structure and ecosystem function, we have only a minima...
Jul 30, 2017•35 min
Last June Freemasonry celebrated worldwide its 300th anniversary as an organisation, although Freemasonic Lodges have existed, as historically proven, since at least the 1600’s. There are over 5 million members in the world today who made an oath never to reveal its secrets. What are its tenets and what does it stand for? Is there any relationship between Freemasonry and Humanism? For an answer to these and other questions, Helio Da Costa, a Freemason for 32 years, a Humanist and a descendant fr...
Jul 23, 2017•52 min
As applications of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) extend to areas outside of industrial environments, it is increasingly important for designers and policy makers to address the question of “What should an autonomous system do?” For example, what should a robot do when it is on an urgent mission to deliver a package to someone upstairs, but the elevator is already occupied by someone else? Designing the robot to always yield (or never yield) might be a matter of a design decision for ...
Jul 17, 2017•33 min
Donate to the Overdose Prevention Society: https://www.gofundme.com/wesavelives In September, 2016, three women were so concerned about the growing fentanyl overdose crisis that they set up a tent & table in an alley behind the DTES Market they managed. In potential violation of the law, they set up a drug injection/ consumption site in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside to combat the many overdose deaths. About Ann: Ann Livingston is a creative, energetic and focused community organizer, who has...
Jul 10, 2017•55 min
Nasser Najjar was formerly the spokesperson and head of communications for the International Committee of Red Cross mainly in Gaza, Palestine and went to other short mission in different places in the Middle East. He was also a researcher for Human Rights Watch and had documented violations committed against civilians in Gaza and refugees along the Turkish-Syrian border. In addition, Nasser had worked for a UN agency as a production manager. He wrote for some paper such as USAToday, Al Monitor, ...
Jul 10, 2017•39 min
Dr. Ellen Wiebe is a Clinical Professor in the Department of Family Practice at the University of British Columbia. After 30 years of full-service family practice, she now restricts her practice to women’s health and assisted death. She is the Medical Director of Willow Women’s Clinic in Vancouver and provides medical and surgical abortions and contraception. She developed Hemlock Aid to provide consultations for doctors and patients about aid in dying and provides assisted death. The BC Humanis...
Jul 10, 2017•40 min
Why sharks matter: the ecological and economic importance of sharks, threats they face, and how you can help. Dr. David Shiffman is a Liber Ero Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Simon Fraser University, where his research focuses on the sustainability of Canadian shark fisheries. He is also an award winning science communicator who has written about sharks for the Washington Post, Scientific American, and other outlets. Follow him on twitter @WhySharksMatter The BC Humanist Association was formed ...
Jun 18, 2017•33 min
Carrie Jenkins is a philosopher and author of the new book: What Love Is "Aside from being the title of many a popular love song, this is one of life's perennial questions. In What Love Is, philosopher Carrie Jenkins offers a bold new theory on the nature of romantic love that reconciles its humanistic and scientific components. Love can be a social construct (the idea of a perfect fairy tale romance) and a physical manifestation (those anxiety- inducing heart palpitations); we must recognize it...
Jun 11, 2017•58 min
One of the stories we tell ourselves is that human beings are dispassionate, rational, calculating machines. We collect data, we weigh evidence, we discuss, we debate, we judge, we decide. Not quite. Evidence suggests that when it comes to decision making, we're often biased, emotional, and irrational -- and there are few better examples of this than how we do politics. I'll discuss emotional, irrational decision making in the context of the recent rise of of nationalist and xenophobic populism ...
Jun 04, 2017•52 min
