It’s been more than a week since the Imagine No Religion 2 conference in Kamloops. I’d never been to Kamloops, and in fact had only ventured into the Interior a couple of times. So hey, this was a little closer to home than TAM, a lot of the local skeptical crowd would be there, why not go too? It’d be like a 2-day long Skeptics in the Pub.
May 18
Road trip! We left Vancouver in the late morning, and decided to take Highway 1 to Kamloops. Longer, but more scenic. We stopped for lunch in Hope, snapped some pictures, and moved on.
After that, it gets a little confusing. I took lots of pictures but for the most part I only have a vague idea of where I actually was. One stretch of Hwy 1 looks pretty much like another, and I had very few landmarks to guide me. Still, it was a great experience. How often do I get to see a semi-arid landscape like this? Don’t think I’d want to live there (I do like the green), especially with nothing but tiny-ass town for miles around, but it’s nice to visit.
And then we got to Kamloops. A pretty little town!!
There wasn’t much going on Friday night except a debate (not covered by conference fees, because it was open to the public). You know the drill: two atheists and two theologians debate the age-old question: does God/Gods exist? Actually, they only debated the Judeo-Christian God, with the same lame arguments you’d expect: Prime Mover, the fine-tuning argument, the argument from absolute moral values, atheism requires omniscience, if you consider the evidence with your heart you’ll see it, etc… All of them have been debunked, all of them show these theologians have never debated in front of a mainly skeptical audience. Not surprising, really. The other debaters, Matt Dillahunty and Christopher DiCarlo took them on and demolished their medieval arguments, though of course no minds were changed. Oh well.