This weekend I attended the 2011 World Humanist Congress. I attended as a member of the Norwegian Humanist Association. The congress is held every third year by the IHEU, this year in Oslo Norway. The topic of this congress was «Humanism and Peace».
The congress was opened last Friday by the president of the IHEU, Sonja Eggerickx and the president of the Norwegian Humanist Association, Åse Kleveland. There were also a greeting by the Norwegian Crown Prince later on that afternoon.
There were also three opening talks, the first by Erik Assadourian from The Worldwatch Institute on the topic «The state of the world today». The next speaker was Johan Galtung, a controversial man with a controversial talk. He spoke on the subject of peace and conflict resolution and made some interesting points about seeing the legitimacy in claims of all parties in a conflict. He also made some strong claims about the US and Nato which were controversial and I could not agree with. The last, and in my opinion, best talk of the opening night was Richard Norman‘s, a British philosopher and humanist and author of the book «On Humanism» (a must-read for humanists). His topic was «Killing the innocent: Humanism and the Just War tradition» which was a very good talk. I’ll link the video as soon as proper ones are available (at the moment there are bad copies of the live stream available here).
Day 2, Saturday, had parallel running sessions. I myself attended a talk by Greg M. Epstein, the Harvard Humanist Chaplain. A talk titled «Good Without God in Action: Building Congregations and Mobilazing Community Service Among US Humanists». Epstein’s take on humanism and building communities is a different one than most, but I found his points interesting. The second talk was by Jeremy Gunn on freedom of religion, and the last of the morning sessions was by Lars Gule, a Norwegian philosopher and former activist. His talk was on «Totalitarian Ideologies and Political Religion: How to identify and defuse extremists views» and possibly one of the best talks I attended the entire conference. Again, I hope good quality videos will be posted.
After lunch I attended PZ Myers session on «Evolution, conflict and religion» and Judith Hand’s talk on «The Human Potential for Peace». Both very good. Hand talked about the evolutionary origins of violence and conflicts, but the conclusions she drew were not the ones we usually hear. Conflicts are not such a fundamental part of humanity as we’ve been led to believe according to her. The Saturday ended with an excellent dinner at the Oslo Opera House with beers on the town afterwards.
Sunday I have to admit I slept too long to attend the two earliest sessions, and only attended the debate on military service, the adoption of the resolutions and the closing ceremonies.
All in all an excellent congress with a lot of interesting people. I’m looking forward to see the talks I did not get the chance to attend, and of course looking forward to the next congress in 2014 in the UK.
More photos from the congress can be found here.
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