Young Australian Skeptics

First of all I apologise for the obscene length of this blog post for day one. I assure you, when the conference actually begins, my posts will be noticeably smaller considering I will have not nearly as much time on my hands as I did this evening.

To begin, before I left Australia I decided to pull an all nighter the night before my flight to Los Angeles, to assist with jet lag. It worked up until about 7:30am, when I decided to “rest my eyes”, only to open them and find all of a sudden it was 9am (I was supposed to have driven to St Kilda at 8:30 am to pick up a box of Young Australian Skeptics business cards and be back home by 9am, ready for mother to pick me up and take me to the airport). Nice start to the trip, Jason!

It was then that I lifted my luggage for the first time, discovering it most definitely had to be over the weight limit. This was probably due to filling it with copies of the Australian Rationalist (journal of the Rationalist Society of Australia) and copies of the Australian Humanist (journal of the Council of Australian Humanist Societies), my two major sponsors… but I decided I’d cross that bridge when I came to it…

In the end (thanks to mum’s classy James Bond driving skills) I managed to get the business cards, get to the airport, get my luggage checked in (phew) and board my flight. The flight was long. Long, long long.

I arrived in Buffalo, situated in up-​​state New York, at about 11:30pm Monday evening without a hitch. That is, unless you consider arriving without your luggage that got lost somewhere in LA a hitch? In fact, as write this post I am still wearing the clothes I left Melbourne in. Hopefully my bags will arrive tomorrow, before I leave for Washington D.C.

CFI’s Field Organizer Debbie Goddard (who some of you may know as the ‘welcome to Point of Inquiry’ voice on D.J Grothe’s wonderful Point of Inquiry podcast) picked me up and drove my to one of CFI’s lovely guest houses where I would be staying for the next two nights. Debbie ended up answering all my questions on the history of the American freethought movement until about 3am, giving me the goss on all the major players and organisations over the past 20 years. Just like in Australia, there are many, many different organisations with slightly different goals and methods of freethought strategy. There is American Atheists as well as Atheist Alliance International. CFI’s On Campus as well as Secular Student Alliance. CFI’s Council for Secular Humanism as well as The American Humanist Association. CFI’s Committee for Skeptical Inquiry as well as The Skeptics Society. The Secular Coalition of America as well as The Freedom From Religion Foundation. Is such a diverse, yet at the same time overlapping group of organisations counter-​​productive, or is it healthy? I honestly don’t know!

Today I was given a tour of CFI’s Headquarters in Amherst, New York. I met and talked at length with Dr Joe Nickell, the world’s leading paranormal investigator. He is a regular contributor to Skeptical Inquirer Magazine and has written over 20 books. He is a veteran of TV and Radio appearances, has worked with National Geographic and The Discovery Channel. Hillary Swank’s character in the Hollywood film The Reaping is actually (loosely) based on his life! What I like about Joe is that he approaches claims of the paranormal from an investigative point of view, rather than that of a ‘debunker’. The difference is that a debunker can be somewhat dogmatic, starting out with an assumption (the paranormal doesn’t exist), and then searching for evidence to prove this. In fact, Joe argues, this is no different to a true believer, who (most of the time) starts out with an assumption (the paranormal exists) and then works backwards from the evidence, picking and choosing to support their claims. Needless to say, this is not at all what science is about. A scientific approach must always begin with the evidence, which then must be tested and examined before conclusions can be drawn from it. This is something that Skeptics themselves can sometimes forget. Joe Nickell was actually in Australia about 9 years ago, where he investigated ghosts at the Old Melbourne Goal, went searching for Yowies in the Blue Mountains, and investigated dowsing for thee legendary Mahogany Shipwreck. Unfortunately no ghosts, Yowies or ships were found, but he did thoroughly enjoy eating a Kangaroo steak.


I was introduced to Tom Flynn, the editor of Free Inquiry Magazine and Executive Director of The Council for Secular Humanism. He is the author of The Trouble With Christmas and editor of The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief. His pun’s are cutting edge.

I also met Tim Binga, Director if CFI Libraries. He gave me a tour of the world’s largest collection of skeptic, humanist and atheist related books and journals, located in the basement of the CFI headquarters. It has a beautiful rare book collection which includes the first edition of Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason, signed versions of Robert Ingersoll’s works and other early paranormal works. As I’m sure you can all imagine, I was absolutely in my element. I could have spent eternity down there.

I was so delighted to have some students from the local University at Buffalo Freethinkers group take me out to lunch at a place called DUFFS, ‘world famous’ for their spicy chicken wings (hehe). They then took me to check out Niagara Falls (amazing) and we grabbed a coffee and talked all things family guy, religion, activism, and university campus life, constantly comparing experiences between Australia and the USA. One of the students, Ed Beck, recently served in Iraq, and I was fascinated to hear about his story, especially as he attributes that experience as triggering a greater involvement for him in the freethought campus movement.

If you want to know more about the conference, you can check out the program here, and the amazing list of speakers here. I miss my baby, and also the team at the Young Australian Skeptics.

To check out the complete set of photos, go to my Flickr page.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 at 4:30 pm and is filed under Jason Ball, Paranormal, Science, Skeptic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.