Date: March 10th 2008

Hi All,

Next weeks speakers are two science and anti-quackery bloggers of the highest order. They're both active and highly visible people in the fight against quackery and they have both suffered attempted censorship at the hands of quacks.

Andy Lewis is the creator and writer of The Quackometer blog and Prof. David Colquhoun is a pharmacologist at University College London who writes the Improbable Science blog at DC Science.

As this is science week, I'll spare you all the events going on and leave it to just three in this announcement, the first one being today.

All other events of interest will be on The Skeptic Magazine News blog.

Please feel free to forward this email to anyone you think would be interested in this, or any of these events.

Hope to see you all next Tuesday.

The Skeptics in the Pub Kabal

---------------------------------------

APRU Invited Speaker Series 2008@Goldsmiths

Title: The Truth About Mediums

Date: Tuesday 11th March 2008

Time: 4.10pm

Dr Ciarán O’Keeffe
Research Associate, Université de Paris 8, Laboratoire de Psychologie Sociale

More details.

---------------------------------------

Skeptics in the Pub

Title: Regulating Alternative Medicine: Are the Quacks Ducking the Issues?

Date: Tuesday 18th March 2008

Time: 7.00 pm

Description:

2008 is going to see a big battle between various groups as to who gets to pretend to regulate alternative therapists. The Government, through Prince Charles' Foundation for Integrated Health, is setting up The Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council, a voluntary federal register. The problem is, no one appears to want to join. Various homoeopaths' Membership Groups are setting up their own 'Single Registers'. More fundamentally, no group looking at this issue appears to want to tackle the inconvenient problem that most alternative therapies do no work and their practitioners hold strange and sometimes dangerous beliefs. Two sceptical bloggers will explore the issues.

Location:
The Penderel's Oak
283-288 High Holborn
London
WC1V 7HP

Tel: 020 7242 5669

www.skeptic.org.uk/pub

----------------------------------------------------

For those who didn't make it to the Center for Inquiry Grand Opening on the 18th January and feel they are missing out on all the fun, they are having a few more lectures in May:

THE SOURCES OF THE BOOK: An Anatomy of the Literary Beginnings of Judaism, Christianity and Islam

Starts:
Monday, May 5th
Ends:
Saturday, May 10th

Lecturers:

Professor R. Joseph Hoffmann, Senior Vice President of the Center for Inquiry and Head of The CFI Institute; Adjunct Professor of History at the State University of New York, Buffalo.

Ibn Warraq, MA, distinguished author of Why I am Not a Muslim, and Whose Koran? Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Inquiry, Amherst, New York.

This six day course is an intensive exploration of the literary origins of the books that define the Jewish, Christian and Islamic world-views. It is sometimes thought that the sacred scriptures of the book religions emerged from the pages of history as a fully developed canon. In fact, the materials themselves were the product of disagreement, heresy, rivalry between sectarian perspectives, and attempts to glorify their founders and beliefs. Join R. Joseph Hoffmann and Ibn Warraq for an unusual tour of the “origins” of the books and learn what critical modern scholarship has to tell us about the dating, origin, and purposes of the Bible and the Qur’an.

Registration fee: £30.00 for all six classes; £7 for individual classes.
Registration is limited. Advance booking and payment preferred, but payment at the door is acceptable.

7-9 PM at Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1
tel. 020 7242 8037 fax 020 7242 8036
http://www.conwayhall.org.uk