Friday night was work’s Christmas party. If nothing else it produced some good photos 😀 .
Last Tuesday saw the last proper meeting of term one at Atheist Society.
Having screened Morgan Spurlock’s Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden which was a very interesting watch but non-surprisingly very pandering towards the left we headed down to D-Fusion for a night of karaoke.
We recently held the One Life wrap meal to see out the end of the One Life course. I’m not so sure how successful it is, it’s nice to go for meal but nothing is really wrapped up. Even if not I would like to think it brings course participants together but then most people are in A-Soc already. Maybe we just need to change our advertising strategy.
We ended up down at Wagamama which I wasn’t overly impressed with. Their bench seating and place holders that were simply McDonald’s tray liners but without the trays isn’t exactly the hallmark of a good quality restaurant. Food was good, I think, but not really being a fan of it and their refusal to do my chicken in a bun to simulate the idea of a chicken burger didn’t held matters.
Still afterwards we got a long night’s drinking at ‘Spoons so all ended well. Even if it was a bit of a couples fest with Jonni+Kat and John+Lil.
While the new billboard campaign from the BHA at first glance seems to be a final attempt to squeeze a bit more publicity out of the Atheist Bus Campaign, on review it’s quite a remarkable idea – they’ve only actually paid for four billboards and from it have generated a wealth of publicity, that’s rational thinking in action.
The Freethinker published a good news story on the event quoting several religious figures reacting to the news. While it would be easy for me to have a go and those that use it as an opportunity to attack humanists the comment that really draw my attention was this one.
One positive thing that could come from this is if it opens a debate on faith. I am not offended by it, but perhaps the money used for it could have been channeled better into a humanitarian cause.
At first it seems like a harmless, even supportive comment. But of course it isn’t. It’s a grasping desperate attempt to reclaim the higher ground from the bottom of the cesspool religion has found itself in.
Think about what has just been said here – you should stop wasting your money on religious issues and give it to charitable causes. The church, the Catholic Church no less says we should stop channeling money into religious issues and start giving it away to better causes!
From the church who has it’s own sovereign state containing streets lined with gold comes the message that we should stop wasting our money and use it to feed the hungry, build shelter for the poor and help the downtrodden. What a beautiful, humanist message.
This is a much wider issue of course – have you seen how much churches rake in these days? Tithing, the donation of 10% of your salary is still common practice and with the average salary in the UK now being £26,000, that means the average church patron is giving £2,600 a year to church! That’s more than I bet you spend on food.
Luckily though there is a salvation. The figure won’t actually be that high on average because atheists are statistically more likely to be on above average salaries which will drag the average up a bit though not much. But more importantly atheists are earning large amounts, they are more likely to he charitable with it. Just look at the stats on Kiva.
I’ve added a new category named essays to my blog.
It will house all of my long whiney posts that you probably won’t reach the bottom of but should because that’s where the message is. It will hopefully be sufficently different from the thoughts category in a number of ways.
First off, they should be longer and more involved. I’ve gone back and categorised a lot of old posts into the category but rejected a lot of them simply because they were too short even though they perhaps otherwise fitted the bill.
Secondly they should be relevant to the wider audience. A lot of the posts in the thoughts category are just literally stuff I have thought about or which is relevant to my life but anything categorised into essays should have meaning for at very least a group people who don’t know me personally.
Finally they should be on some kind of important topic or aspect of life. As such many also share the categories of politics and religion, but not all of them do.
If you think there is something I should write about, why not suggest it in a comment.
For those of you that aren’t aware, due to some unfortunate events that have befallen my recently I now have a new laptop. This one is going to be named Tolima and is a rather shiny MacBook Pro.
I went for the higher spec 2.5Ghz Core 2 Duo with the extended hard drive and so far performance seems reasonably swish. I haven’t really put it to the test beyond some big installing but it potters along quite nicely and does some lightening fast shutting down.
The battery life is also very nice, I squeezed around 7 hours out of it last night, a small amount of that time it was on sleep but I certainly wasn’t taking it easy installing going on 20gb of programs and I began to put my life back together. It’s also not much heavier than my old laptop while squeezing another inch into the screen which makes quite a difference to the point I wish I could run it at a higher resolution than 1280.
Only time will tell if I love it or hate it but I’m planning to duel boot it anyway as 7 really is a sexy piece of work.
Having won tickets to the rugby league Four Nations final, I headed down on Saturday to watch the game. Luckily England had pulled a surprise victory over New Zealand beforehand so had made it through to face Australia in what would hopefully not be a repeat of their first encounter in the competition.
We started off quite well scoring the first try to take an early league and were only trailing by 4 points at halftime. However shortly after the second half had kicked off Australia realised that rather than trying to break our line, if they just kicked the ball past us and ran after it we wouldn’t really know what to do eventually leading them to win 46-16.
Still, no matter how many times you witness it, it’s still funny to watch someone shout advice about the rules to 26 national-level professional players whose job it is to play the sport and several officials whose job it is to marshall the sport even though they are at the other side of a 40,000 seater stadium.
All in all I have to say I really enjoyed it, I thought I would get bored at some point during the match but I never did. Although I did lose the £1 I had wagered on the match even with Australia having a 12 point handicap. Gutted.
As part of my aim to try new things, I gave some kind of new foodstuff a go today. It’s some kind of weird green thing that the nice lady in Co-op informs me is known as a “vegetable.” How very quaint.
Combined with the tomato ketchup I had I believe that counts as two of my five a day.
How exciting.
As if it wasn’t bad enough that while I was running around on Halloween trying to sort my costume out I found Poundsaver already laid out with wall to wall Christmas crap, Radio 1 played their first Christmas song last week.
Still on the brighter side of news as we enjoyed lunch on Sunday we were able to watch them busily work on setting up the German Christmas Market on Millennium Square. You just can’t beat a big German sausage and a litre of beer.
Saturday saw Atheist Society’s legendary (as if any of our events aren’t 😀 ) Halloween party, hosted by our el presidente Sophie. It was a great night which ended in us performing a Satanic ritual which seems a bit on the edge but is really quite mild compared to the fact that Zoltan was dressed as the prophet Muhammad 😀 .
