It was twenty years ago when the European skeptics organized their first international congress. It was in Bad Tölz in Germany and that gathering was followed by regular symposiums and congresses since then. At the 1994 congress in Oostende (Belgium) participating organizations had formed ECSO, the European Council of Skeptical Organisations to strengthen international cooperation.

This cooperation is more important now than ever. Astrologers, energy machine builders, UFO believers are generally working individually or in small assemblies and they mostly cause damage on an intellectual level. That is a challenge itself for critical thinkers, but nowadays skeptics face quackery and pseudoscience on a much higher level. Unscientific ideas about health care, origin of life and even history appear in organized forms utilizing the advancements of modern science based technology as blogging, twitter, community portals, Youtube etc. They are infiltrating to policy making even on European level, they enter to elementary schools and to science and medical universities.

The organizers of the 13th European Skeptics Congress (Dublin, Ireland) had realized this and added a short workshop session at the end of the congress. There we had the possibility to briefly discuss topics, challenges that we all share, like alternative medicine lobbying in the European Parliament, science teaching etc. No doubt, there was a great interest in those small workshops. We had some very nice ideas, but overall we could not initiate a real campaign to reinforce cooperation among skeptics in Europe. Active skeptics are a scarce resource in each country and challenges became more and more international. This begs for real networking over our countries.

I raised this issue at one of the fringe events on TAM London last year. We all know that there are brilliant forums for skeptics, like podcasts, discussion forums, blogs etc., but they are mostly Americans, which is not in itself a problem, but they mostly cover skeptical issues from an American (mostly US) perspective – perhaps with some news coverage from Britain. These resources are extremely useful and I strongly recommending to everyone to check them, but we badly need some platform where we could discuss our specific problems taking into consideration of the language barriers also. For example EU legislation issues about pseudo-scientific issues are not so much covered in the existing skeptic media. Homeopathy is simply treated by skeptics in the US as a clear and obvious example of pseudoscience meanwhile simplified registration of homeopathic remedies is endorsed in EU recommendations and in many European countries and public financing is either ongoing or close to that in the various countries. Consumer protection and product registration rules in other areas are also driven by EU directives more and more and vendors of dubious products are navigating very successfully between the national and EU level procedures making the life of a skeptic in any given country very difficult.

That is why we should either bring our special topics and requirements into the existing skeptic forums, or – while still working close to them – we should build our own European skeptic media. ECSO president Amardeo Sarma made special efforts toward this goal by setting up a new ECSO web portal with forum, news and – recently – even blog capabilities. But these media will work only if we use them; if we advertise them and if we produce content to them.

During the 14th European Skeptics Congress we will cover these topics as well during workshops. Based on the current plans we will have the following workshops:

• Enforcing cooperation among skeptics in Europe – Should we set up our own platforms, or should we use existing forums? How should we cope with language barriers? How could we utilize, translate each others articles, videos etc. Should we start a podcast specialized on European topics? Should we prepare common statements on specific issues?
• Reacting to anti-evolutionist propaganda – Should we participate on direct debates or not? Should we reflect on claims coming from evolution deniers? How should we react on initiations about “teaching the controversy” in schools? How should we present evolution theory, the concept and the new findings to the public?
• Answering the CAM challenge on a European level – How could we influence policy making about complementer and alternative medicine on the European level? Could we create a general policy recommendation? What are the similarities and differences on CAM regulation and practice in the various countries?

Some lectures are connected to these topics, but we are planning to involve the audience to discuss these issues in a greater depth. During the  next months we are trying to prepare action paper proposals that we could discuss on the congress. If you are interested in any of these topics, please contact us and contribute to this work!

Event: 14th European Skeptics Congress
Place: Budapest, Hungary
Date: 17-19 September 2010
Web: http://congress2010.skeptic.hu/

International skeptic events in Europe since 1989

For more then 20 years skeptic events are organized throughout Europe. Hereby we list mainly those organized by the member organizations of ECSO. Click on the map to see the locations on map.