BC Humanists Podcast

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 sustai...

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 Mormo...

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” t...

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

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 ma...

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...

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.canadahel...

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 worki...

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 h...

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 aco...

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 Live...

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...

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...

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 el...

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 dea...

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 wo...

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 c...

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 America...

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 roma...

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, irr...

Gurpreet Singh is an atheist and voice in Metro Vancouver's Punjabi community. He's the founder of Radical Desi, a Georgia Straight contributor and he hosts a show on Spice Radio. He has sought to bring a liberal and anti-extremist voice to discussions that were often marked by Sikh fundamentalism. Read more about Gurpreet in his autobiographical column in the Georgia Straight. http://www.straight...

Dr John Nightingale is President and CEO of the Vancouver Aquarium. Dr Nightingale spoke to us about the Aquarium's educational and research programs, why it continues to have whales and dolphins in captivity, and what this change could mean for the future. The Vancouver Parks Board is set to consider a bylaw to ban cetaceans in captivity at the Aquarium at its next meeting on May 15. To learn mor...

Ian Bushfield, Executive Director of the BC Humanist Association, speaks at the March for Science in Vancouver on April 22, 2017. Listen to all of the talks from March for Science Vancouver on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bj_Xm7TTocw&list=PL2WM8vqZFxd1WWhUvzYIfsNT8K9SQvpgb

The March for Science is a celebration of science. It's not only about scientists and politicians; it is about the very real role that science plays in each of our lives and the need to respect and encourage research that gives us insight into the world. Nevertheless, the march has generated a great deal of conversation around whether or not scientists should involve themselves in politics. In the...

Yasmine Mohammed is co-host of the new Secular Jihadists podcast and is an ex-Muslim living in Canada. This talk was given on April 9th, 2017. The BC Humanist Association was formed in 1984 and many of our members are not on Meetup. We have a regular attendance of about 30 people at our Sunday meetings (rather than the small number who RSVP on Meetup).