Archives for January 2017

Annual General Meeting 2017

30 January 2017 by
The Humanist Society (Singapore) invites all our members to our Annual General Meeting (AGM).
If you want to find out more about HSS and our activities, our past events in 2016 and our future plans for 2016 and beyond, do join us on 4 March 2017.
We will also be electing several key appointment holders for 2017 (see below) and we would certainly appreciate your support.

Date
04/03/2017

Time
3:00 pm – 5:00 pm

Location
OnePeople.sg
381 Lorong 1 Toa Payoh S319758
Singapore

AGENDA
  1.  Introduction by President
  2. Events and Activities in 2016/17
  3. Press and media coverage in 2016/17
  4. Auditor and Treasurer’s report
  5. Constitutional ammendments
  6. Election of New committee members
    1. Vice-President
    2. Secretary
    3. Committee Member

To attend the AGM, you must be a member of HumanistSG. You can sign up https://humanist.org.sg/membership-faq/membership/ on the day of the AGM or renew your membership to attend the AGM.

For members who wish to vote for committee members, but are unable to attend the AGM, please e-mail secretary@humanist.org.sg to request to vote by proxy. We will forward details concerning the nominees and further information about proxy voting to you by further e-mail.

Announcements

The educator

26 January 2017 by

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Hafiiz joined the HumanistSG executive committee in 2014 as our assistant secretary. In 2015, he was elected as our secretary. Hafiiz is an educator at heart.  At many of our field trips, he would volunteer as our guide, relying on his own scientific knowledge and passion for nature. During our visit to Lee Kong Chian museum, he helped to provide explanations about natural history and wildlife. [Read more…]

Blog

Post-event discussion: Hate spin in Singapore’s context

20 January 2017 by

On January 17, the Humanist Society (Singapore) organised a post-event discussion about the dangers that hate spin could pose to Singapore. We also invited members from the Leftwrite Center, including Mohamed Imran Mohamed Taib, who had already blogged about the new book. About 15-20 people took part in the discussion, which lasted about 1.5 hours. [Read more…]

Blog

Strategic offense-takers and their threat to Singapore

20 January 2017 by

In multi-religious, multiracial Singapore, many Singaporeans will not hesitate to stand up on behalf of countrymen at the receiving end of racist jokes, insults and discrimination. From young, Singaporeans have been taught the importance of respecting different religions and cultural practices. Where public education is insufficient, the government has an array of legal tools to tackle instigators of religious and racial conflict. [Read more…]

Blog, Featured Articles/Letters

Forming a strong cause: Rooting yourself in the tangibles

10 January 2017 by

The Humanist Society (Singapore) is a non-profit NGO. All NGOs are rooted in causes, often gaps in governance.

Gaps in governance occur because no policy is perfect. Trade-offs happen. In a democracy, there is always a pressure on governments to serve the majority.

Sometimes the private sector can step in to fill voids in public service, but sometimes the void is due to existing regulations and societal norms.

No amount of money, for example, can easily change how Singaporeans view atheists and apostates.

Nonetheless, any successful cause has to be rooted in tangibles. The tangibles that attract the most concern are always about your physical safety, your livelihood, your loved ones and your identity.

The Humanist Society, even as a non-profit society, must link its efforts to the tangibles enjoyed by the non-religious demographic.

The Society must explain why the losing the rights to be non-religious, results in physical harm, loss of livelihood, separation from your loved ones and loss of your identity.

Examples abound in neighbouring countries where atheism have been declared illegal or unconstitutional.

The Society must be understood as a safeguard for the non-religious to lead the lives true to themselves.

Example:

An esoteric cause: A cause to promote humanism as a philosophy and clarify misunderstandings about it.

A tangible cause: To protect your freedom to work openly as an atheist, to walk around as an atheist without getting killed, to be safely accepted by religious loved ones as atheists.

Blog

Organizing Humanism: Catching star speakers

10 January 2017 by

According to our experience, two powerful forces pull people to Humanist events. The first is a powerful cause. The second is star personalities.

Based on existing evidence, good speakers draw the most attendants at Humanist events. The top 5 events above 100 participants all involve good speakers.

Singapore is a small and young country, we do not have many famous Humanist thinkers and celebrities.

However, Singapore is a very connected global city. The Singapore government and universities pay huge sums to fly famous humanists into the country.

By collaborating with them to host these famous humanists, our local programme will be enriched tremendously. Examples include visits by A.C Grayling and Jerry Coyne. 

What you can do

  • Tracking famous speakers flying across the world. Humanist activists whom we have met at overseas conferences can give us advance notice.
  • Scour the websites of A*Star, Singapore Writer’s Festival, local universities for any visiting dignitaries.
  • Send regular queries to humanist organisations living abroad (BHA, AHA), to inquire about upcoming visits or even invite them to Singapore.
Blog

Organizing humanism: The critical mass

9 January 2017 by

There is no such thing as too much money. There is also no such thing as too many people an event.

An over-attended event may suffer, but an under-attended event is worse.

The no.1 rule of organising any Humanist event is getting a critical mass of attendants. Never take pride in an event so esoteric that nobody comes.

A critical mass of event attendants leads to:

  • A critical mass of volunteer sign-ups
  • A critical mass of exco members
  • A critical mass of spin-offs, such as side projects
  • A critical mass of funds

Poorly-attended events lead to:

  • Falling volunteer sign-ups
  • Falling exco members
  • Vanishing spin-offs and side-projects
  • Slow death of the movement.

As a general rule of thumb, Humanist events should strive for at least 30-5o per gathering.

The critical mass rule can be broken if the meeting is aimed at decision-making, or sealing a deal. Too many cooks spoil the broth, so keep the decision-making team lean. (<10, <5).

If you don’t believe in having proper events and wish to form small cliques just for self-expression, the Humanist Society is not for you.

Blog

Nomination for Executive Committee 2017/2018

7 January 2017 by

Dear members,

We are calling for our Annual General Meeting for 2017. We would like to invite our members to be a part of the Executive Committee.
The positions in the Executive Committee for the year 2017 are as follows.

1) Vice-President: Open to members of the society for a minimum of 1 year and must be a Singaporean citizen / permanent resident

2) Secretary: Open to members of the society for a minimum of 1 year and must be a Singaporean citizen / permanent resident

3) Committee Member: Open to members of the society for a minimum of 6 months

The length of term for all offices is 2 years.

For a description of the roles and responsibilities of the above roles are outlined in The Society’s Constitution, which can be accessed at https://humanist.org.sg/about/our-constitution/

Members are free to nominate themselves or another member of the society.
Nominations must be seconded by another member of the society.
Please submit the following details for the nominee, the member recommending the nominee, if not the same individual , and the member seconding the nomination

Title: Nomination for HumanistSG Exco 2017/18

1) Full Name
2) IC number (for Singaporean citizens / permanent resident)
3) E-mail
4) Contact number

Please submit the details to secretary@humanist.org.sg by the 30th of January 2017. Any submissions after 2359hrs on said date will not be applicable.

Please feel free to contact us at secretary@humanist.org if you have any further queries concerning the nomination process.

Announcements

Leaving religion and defending secularism

1 January 2017 by
I was a Christian, but believed strongly in enlightenment values like reason and pluralism. So I used to do the whole internally irrational narrative thing that all religious moderates do, which is to say “ok, my religion is separate from my outside actions/thoughts etc”. Or even worse, I would twist my religious values into some self contradictory version of “see my religion does kinda support enlightenment values if I kinda sorta twist the interpretation this certain way”.

Eventually I realised I was being stubborn and stupid in equal measure. I saw my religion as a rotten tooth. Just cos it’s not killing me or giving me cancer doesn’t mean it’s good. It may have chewed some good food for me in the past, but that’s irrelevant now; it’s rotten and I should remove it.

So I did! And I got a shiny replacement implant which is much better. And it fulfills all the good functions of the old tooth, while losing the baggage of the rotten decay.

Actually, it was indescribably liberating to leave my religion. I felt a sense of freedom and exhilaration that has not left me since. My mother was extremely disappointed in me and we have had many fights, but overall our relationship is going strong. Which shows the power of love is universal and requires no silly stories of burning bushes or flying horses; just human acceptance and understanding.

I have replaced religion with the values of humanism, reason, human rights, democracy, secularism and pluralism. These values are really important to me and always have been. And when I see how religion threatens all these things, I feel a great and urgent responsibility to make the case for secularism and do my part in strengthening the opposition to theocracy and enforced ignorance.

Bryan Gan

This story was first published on ‘Ask An Atheist – SG’ Facebook page in 2016.
Blog

Important for belief system to be congruent with reality

1 January 2017 by
I was never really religious but as a teenager I had been to quite a few cell group meetings and bible study sessions. I went to these sessions because it seemed to me that my Christian friends were so serene and unruffled by the amount of suffering and injustice in the world. I thought they knew something which I didn’t.

Unfortunately, the more I found out about Christianity, the more I realized that it simply didn’t make any sense. There were numerous conflicts with various scientific disciplines such as archaeology, biology, astrophysics and geology. There was no way I could become a Christian in spite of its lure because it was important to me for a belief system to be congruent with reality.

Regardless, I couldn’t believe that so many people could be so wrong about something so important; hence, I remained agnostic. However, as I learned about cognitive biases and heuristics, and other limitations of the human brain, as well as how vulnerable we are to social conditioning and indoctrination, I gradually accepted the reality that a vast majority of my fellow human beings were deluded by the fables of our ancestors. That’s how I became an atheist.

Chan Yue Kong

This story was first published on ‘Ask An Atheist – SG’ Facebook page in 2016.
Blog
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