Archive for the ‘Religion & Politics’ Category

Headed down to Alpha at South Parade Baptist Church last night.

I was expecting a fairly young audience given South Parade is reasonably heavy with students but that certainly wasn’t the case. It was very much a whole of church thing and it was nice to have a bit more of a classy atmosphere for the evening 😉 .

You could tell students weren’t involved from the standard of the food to be honest, which was excellent.

The event itself though was reasonably disappointing, it was a live speaker and the turn out was reasonably good which are both plus points but the standard of table leaders provided was somewhat lacking. Answers like, “yes, that is a tough question” aren’t really what we were looking for.

Still a fairly enjoyable evening and we got an Alpha book out of it so far from wasted time.

Last Friday saw the citywide Alpha launch event in Leeds which saw churches from across the city come together for a big launch event for the 36 Alpha courses which are apparently launching across Leeds this week.

The event began with a speech from Nicky Gumbel, the man behind Alpha who was a good speaker as ever though also, it turns out, a massively repressed homosexual. I wouldn’t know myself but Rich who was sitting next to me assures me he is gay, not only in spite of how much he mentioned his wife, but because of it.

Rich enjoyed much of Nicky’s speech too – or at least he did the first time he saw the material when performed by Jasper Carrott. Apparently the jokes aren’t as good the second time around.

After this we got onto the “celebrity guests” which were Cameron Stout the winner of Big Brother 4 and an apparently famous fitness video instructor. She did have some good advice though – the way to loose weight is to actually do some exercise. So at least she has some common sense when it comes to wellbeing, if not in the field of religion.

The show finished off with a few personal testimonies talking about Alpha, all carefully selected to hit each demographic. Flawless all the way.

In today’s ultra P.C. nanny culture the posters informing you what to do if there is a fire might as well not be there. As such I’ve decided to provide some practical tips on fire safety.

• If the fire alarm goes off, ignore it, it’s probably a test.
• If there is a fire, don’t walk – run! There’s a fire for god’s sake!
• Go back for personal possessions – you don’t want them to get burnt.
• If you are in a high rise building, use the lift, it will be quicker to escape the fire that way
• Bare in mind vulnerable groups such as children and the elderly. They may not be able to move as fast so you may need to push them out of the way.
• If the fire is small, just run for it, there is no glory in putting it out. Only attempt to tackle large blazes in which you stand a chance of getting on the front cover of The Express.
• Remember, safety first – wait until you are a safe distance away from the fire before attempting to take a picture with your phone and send it to TwitPic.

I’ve seen a lot of posts, comments, tweets etc, about the results from Sunday night.

I’m sure you’re aware of what has happened but in case some of you aren’t, the results for the European parliament were announced with Labour getting trashed and losing Wales for the first time since 1918 and more importantly the British National Party won two seats.

UKIP managed to come second, beating Labour and nobody really seems to be concerned about this. I can’t imagine why, UKIP are a ridicious one policy party and that is putting it nicely. Why we would want these people in power I cannot imagine. UKIP leader Nigel Farage also worries me, I didn’t think it was possible for anyone to be more smug than Mr. O’Shea but apparently it is possible 😉 .

The real backlash though has been against the BNP getting elected – in no less than two regions.

Personally I am sick and tired of people saying “oh this is awful, we shouldn’t have a system which allows people like that to get elected.” Of course you expect these stupid comments from Islamic extremists but they are coming from people I considered smart, educated people.

Of course the BNP should be allowed to run, we live in a free expression democracy and if we’re going to tolerate the Muslims we are going to tolerate the fascists, that’s just being fair. It isn’t a problem because if you’re saying really wacky far out there things nobody is going to vote for you.

What people are actually worried about therefore is that people are actually voting for the BNP and in large numbers – almost a million people voted for them in the recent elections. A million people!

No wonder given that nobody is even really discussing the issue. Everyone says “oh, how terrible, it’s the BNP” but most people don’t even know what the BNP policies are. Most people think they know BNP policy on immigration (you probably don’t though, it’s a bit different to what you think) but do you know their policy on the environment for example?

Probably not because it never comes up for discussion. The BNP are banned from campus at Leeds and if anyone else was watching the unbiased BBC coverage on Sunday night you will note that despite speaking to most of the party heads they never spoke to Nick Griffin or anyone from the BNP. How are we supposed to make informed choices if we can’t even discuss these issues?

The discussions that are going on are about how people could vote for the BNP. A protest vote? They just really hate Labour? What nobody seems to have suggested is that people actually like the BNP policies.

Maybe some people want safer streets. A stronger NHS. Less bureaucracy in the civil service. A cleaner environment. Maybe people like the fact the BNP are campaigning on local issues that actually mean something to people. Maybe people want a party that isn’t using our money to pay for duck islands or moat cleaning.

So rather than going off on one about how awful it is that the BNP got in and criticising everyone else for being such a weak opposition, I would like to congratulate the BNP on a hard earned success. If you don’t like it, go out and campaign for someone else.

I voted Labour, by the way.

On Tuesday we had a debate with the Islamic apologist Adam Deen. The man is a fantastic public speaker and even though I think most of us from A-Soc have heard all the arguments before, they were very eloquently put. Norm did a good job of speaking for outside, as did Sophie chairing a debate for the first time – not an easy one to start on!

On Saturday myself, Tom and Norm were down at Conway Hall for an AHS meeting. Unfortunately given that it was sandwiched in between two shifts at work I wasn’t able to spend any extra time in London, which is very disappointing especially given it was a bank holiday and so otherwise I didn’t have to be back in Leeds until Tuesday. Still, probably for the best given I don’t have any money at the moment.

The meeting itself was resonably productive, at least given the baseline of not productive in any way which was what I expected. It has certainly given some food for thought although I think as well as moving things forward we’ve still come away with conflicting visions of what we think the AHS is as this issue never really got raised in the meeting.

At the end of the day though that is probably always going to be the case in a free thinking organisation. And all the better for it.

Yesterday saw a total of 87 arrests by police in London related to the protests surrounding the G20 summit currently going on.

Of course, none of us are suprised. It would have been far more of a shock if the events had have passed peacefully. Indeed it was perhaps a suprise that so few people were arrested given the protestors broke in to a brand of the Royal Bank of Scotland and continued to ransack the building. Because that is what the banking system could really do with right now.

It seems somewhat ironic that a group generally consisting of socials and tree huggers who would traditionally have been considered pro-peace (or at least that is what they would claim) have become the blight on society that they have replacing football hooligans as the unwanted trouble making element of our society.

Last Friday saw our GIAG event of the semester, an interfaith panel. There was a good turn out of religious speakers though notably lacking a Humanist one and so just before we got started I was asked to speak for the side of Humanism and so stepped in.

We got some really good questions in the end and ones which generally everyone could answer on. The Humanist view seemed fairly in line with the Pagan view (Pagans, much like Sikhs, are basically just Humanists) though the Islamic view isn’t quite as in line.

I tried to answer a lot of the questions with the best bits of Humanism – for example the large amounts of pre-martial sex and I caught the Islamic speaker (who ironically was sat right next to me) turn away in digust a few times. Still I’m sure I would have done the same if he was as frank about the Islamic teachings as he could have been.

Friday saw our Perspective session on Paganism with a practicing witch coming into to talk to us. You have to respect the guy’s honestly, he opening said “it’s all made up” and was created about 30-40 years ago. However it is apparently a belief system that works for him and he has seen it working with his coven using the power of their mind to change reality. Fair enough I guess.

Zoltan provided the food this week and did a rather nice vegeterian dish. We also had meeting room 8 rather than meeting room 5 so we actually had enough space for once. All in all, a very nice session if I do say so myself.

So it turns out that Sikhism is just Humanism.

It has a bit extra, some stuff about “the Divine” but basically they believe that everything is god pantheism style so basically there isn’t a god and we should just all be nice to each other.

The other fact we learnt about Sikhism is that it’s followers are not big fans of sandwiches. We made a lot of sandwiches most of which went uneaten. Luckily however the CU were right next door and so gave us a hand with the whole sandwich consumption thing.

It’s interestingly really because it goes back to the whole Atheists and Christians are united by their love of sandwiches. We really need to do some kind of joint sandwich event in the future.