Review: The Amaz!ng Meeting - what happens when Cory Doctorow, Stephen Fry, Alan Moore, and the Amazing Randi play host to 1000 of their closest friends

The Amaz!ng Meeting, bringing together sceptics for an entertaining exchange of ideas, recently staged at the Hilton Metropole Hotel last weekend. Organised by conjuror, paranormalist investigator and bane of Uri Geller, the Amazing Randi, TAM brought together a dazzling array of speakers to discuss loose variations on a topic- What is scepticism and how can we use it to save the society we believe in?

A brief and incomplete recount of the conventions highlights would include the superb and hilarious MC’ing of Richard Wiseman, the fascinating tour of the weirder corners of the universe by Marcus Chown, Cory Doctorow discussing the madness of a proposal for a copyright firewall in the UK, an interview with Lost Girls graphic novel artist Melinda Gebbie, and Richard Dawkins. There was a light ripple of confusion in the applause following Dawkins’s statement that Christianity was the armour needed in our battle against the most evil religion of today, Islam. What he meant, I think, is that the actions of extremist Muslims – stonings, suicide bombings, attacks on free speech and “honour killing” of young women perceived by men as somehow besmirching their good name – are wrong and should be stopped, regardless of cultural relativity. Atheism had a frequent mention at the talks. While being a sceptic and humanist doesn’t necessarily preclude being religious, it is awfully hard to view the universe clearly if you think, at the heart of it all, there is a benevolent but bloodthirsty deity who created the world 6000 years ago in order to punish the vast majority of his children for not being narrowminded enough. A moral atheism was continually espoused, that we should be good to each other because it is right to do so, not because a lightning bolt took divine dictation on a couple slabs of rock three millennia ago.