We are excited to announce a series of talks for 2024 for all Faith to Faithless service users and anyone else in the UK who has left a controlling religious group. The first talk, on 7 February, will feature Professor A C Grayling, a well-known university professor of philosophy, and he will speak with us about various non-religious philosophies. Many of us were taught that if we left religion and faith then we would become immoral people. We know from our own experiences that this is not true. But Professor Grayling will be able to talk in a more in-depth way on how it is entirely possible to be good without a god or without a religion.

Please join us for this exciting event. Please remember, this event is just for people in the UK who have left a controlling religious group or cult.

About A C Grayling

A C Grayling CBE MA DPhil (Oxon) FRSA FRSL is the Founder and Principal of New College of the Humanities at Northeastern University, and its Professor of Philosophy. He is also a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. He is the author of over 30 books of philosophy, biography, history of ideas, and essays. He was for a number of years a columnist on the Guardian, The Times, and Prospect magazine. He has contributed to many leading newspapers in the UK, US, and Australia, and to BBC Radio 3, Radio 4, and the World Service, for which he did the annual Exchanges at the Frontier series; and he has often appeared on television. He has twice been a judge on the Booker Prize, in 2014 serving as the Chair of the judging panel. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Vice President of Humanists UK, and a patron of Defence Humanists.

These talks by expert speakers will aim to correct religious miseducations that many of us will have experienced when we were still in our religious groups. For example, most of us were taught creationism instead of evolution or we were taught that it was right to exclude LGBT people. We will have an academic speak on the theory of evolution by natural selection, and we will have an LGBT activist who has fought hard for the rights of LGBT people, including protesting religious groups.

We aim to have one of these talks a month. They will be online on Zoom and you will be free to ask questions of the speaker. These will be informal events, and we expect we will have about 15–30 people attend. This means it will feel like our regular peer support events but with an expert speaker instead. So please feel comfortable to ask any questions at all and to speak about your own experiences relevant to the topic.