Students across British Columbia will be returning to classes next week. For many it will be their first time living away from home and for some it will their first time being exposed to new ideas and worldviews. Religious clubs are well established at BC universities (there are 20 different religious clubs at UBC alone). I need your help to make sure Humanists have a voice on BC campuses this year.

Through our weekly newsletter, we like to let you know about our upcoming events as well as a number of issues and campaigns that we think might be of interest to you. Let me know if you have any suggestions to include in future roundups. Email: [email protected]

And for the latest news items, be sure to like the BC Humanists on Facebook and follow @BCHumanist on Twitter.

DISCLAIMER: The opinions which appear in the newsletter and in this roundup of all the news which didn't fit within the newsletter are not necessarily shared by all or even most of the members and board of the BC Humanist Association.

Are physicists more playful because they’re more religious?

Vancouver Sun spirituality reporter Douglas Todd seems to argue for this connection in his latest blog. His post was motivated by a quote from anthropologist David Graeber saying that “physicists are more playful than biologists.” Todd suggests this is echoed by opinion surveys that show “physicists are more likely than biologists to believe in some form of transcendent reality, which some might call God.”

Except Todd doesn’t reference any surveys that show that.

Everyday we see people walking around alone, looking a little downcast. But what we cannot see and cannot know is how isolated they are really. If they are one of the approximately 25 percent Metro Vancouverites seriously isolated then their isolation could be FOUR TIMES as damaging health-wise as obesity.

I find that statistic stunning and incredibly revealing. I am almost tempted not to believe it. But it comes from a man who is arguably the single best expert on this subject in the world, a man who has been head of the top organizations for psychiatric researchers in the USA. Professor John Cacioppo cites the damning number at the end of a clip I found on YouTube, a clip I have shown very widely since and which is intriguing to almost everybody who watches it. It is just ten minutes long, so I advise you to watch it too dear readers.

Through our weekly newsletter, we like to let you know about our upcoming events as well as a number of issues and campaigns that we think might be of interest to you. Let me know if you have any suggestions to include in future roundups. Email: [email protected]

And for the latest news items, be sure to like the BC Humanists on Facebook and follow @BCHumanist on Twitter.

Through our weekly newsletter, we let our members and supporters know about our upcoming events as well as a number of issues and campaigns that we think might be of interest to them. However it’s recently grown in length and has been difficult to read.

So we’re trying something new. From now on, each week we’ll be posting our news items of interest on our blog and linking to these posts from the newsletter. Then, those who want to explore more can do so while our newsletter is kept to a more manageable level.

John Oliver takes on the failings of sexual education across the USA in his latest episode of Last Week Tonight. It’s worth watching the full 20 minute clip.

Gretta Vosper, the atheist and Humanist minister of a small United Church of Canada congregation in Ontario, is facing expulsion from her church for heresy. You can read the full story in the National Post. Vosper is a member of The Clergy Project which supports current and former religious professionals who have lost their beliefs in the supernatural.

Kirsten Brawn, one of our Board members, wrote the following poems for a friend’s funeral and wanted to share them. Let us know if you have your own humanist-inspired art that you’d like to share.

For the sixth consecutive year, the BC Humanist Association marched in support of Vancouver’s LGBTQ2+ community. This year, we were one of the many organizations to sign a pledge calling for federal and provincial legislation to ensure gender identity and gender expression are protected by human rights laws.