There were two sides: one from my school, and one from the school the conference was being held in. My school was the "Affirmative" side, and the other was the "Negative" side. By the end, our team lost. I felt cheated.
Next came the "Philosophy Challenge", whereby the 20 most best "philosophers" from each school were to compete against each other. There were four schools (three girls, one boys), so there were eight teams (10 students to a team). It was pretty crap, since it only involved a trivia quiz about the life of famous philosophers and answering three philosophical questions. Naturally, the audience was bored, and again started talking. But it appeared that they were more bored than during the hypothetical, since they talked louder. The results came in despite the noise. And surprise, surprise! The school that we were in won! My school came second. No wonder their school won! There were five judges there, two of whom (a teacher and a student) came from the exact same school!
Then came another debate; "that God is not essential to the good life". The same schools competed, but there were different teams. The girls school was "Affirmative" and my school was "Negative". I must admit; we performed a pretty good show. All the debaters from my school wore tweed jackets and pretended to smoke pipes. One even mentioned as his main argument that "God is the highest regard to a person. Even cheese can be God". I believe that this made us win the debate! But then I suddently relised how biased these debates were, for there were more claps given out to the girls team than there was for our team.
After a 45 MINUTE break, we were then tortured by listening to yet ANOTHER string quartet, but this one sounded better. I don't think it was because there were different musicians. I believe it was because I was too tired to notice all their mistakes.
Our guest speaker was now about to speak. His name was Peter Singer, a famous writer and philosopher. He kept talking about morality and ethics. Pretty boring stuff. I suppose that was why half way through the speach, members of the audience around me were dropping dead like flies, succumbing to slumbering. I nearly went with them if it wasn't for Mr. Singer talking about the V1 rockets that attacked Britain during World War Two, and how they tried to tell the Germans to change their course so that it would land on villiages rather than London. Then I nearly went again, but the audience's claps made me conscious. This signified the end of the speech.
The next half an hour consisted of students asking Mr. Singer some stupid questions. Remember the paranoia bastard that wrote out two pages of "wisdom". Well even HE asked a question. No surprise there! After the conference, I gave him a piece of my mind.
The conference finished at 3:45, 15 minutes early.......
