Archive for the ‘Religion & Politics’ Category

Wednesday we had a long awaited debate with the Islamic Society scheduled. It was a big step forward as traditionally they have been very hostile towards us and generally refused to engage in any kind of interfaith communcation.

It turns out though that the guy organising it had “left ISoc” which apparently (though I’m going on what I’ve been told, but this is by people directly involved) that he was kicked out of the society for trying to encourage interfaith dialog between ISoc and Atheist Society.

We had no idea of this though and ISoc didn’t seem to actually be organising the debate (which would fit with the above being true) so we volunteered to take responsibility for running the event and get it all organised.

This was a bit of a headache but needs must and all that so we took about getting it all sorted.

It turns out however that the day before the debate, ISoc had gone down and cancelled the venue booking (which was in their name because they guy originally organised) to prevent the event from actually going ahead.

We only found this out at about noon yesterday (the day of the debate) and tried out best to get the message out to everyone but unfortunately didn’t get to everyone – some people were doing three hour round trips to attend and were not amused to find out it had been cancelled.

So there you have it, I don’t know why we expected better from ISoc but at least we won the debate by default – does that count as proof there is no god? 😀 .

Friday saw the Christian Union come to Perspective to talk to us about their faith. It was an interesting event shall we say.

While so far Perspective has been fairly restrained so far there were some rather heated discussions on Friday and behaviour on the A-Soc side was quiet frankly not up to scratch. We persevered though and at least the feedback I got from Joe from the CU when chatting to him afterwards was that people were at least asking geniune questions which is what Perspective is all about.

The food was a bit of a disaster too, the catering plans feel through and so I had to be dispatached to bring in pizza which resulted in there not being much food to go around. All in all, not the most successful session but at least the discussions kept going long into the night.

Last night saw the second session of Perspective at which we welcomed John Halsall to talk about Buddhism.

As with last week out speaker delivered an excellent talk and I came away thinking I had really learnt something. He also led a short mediation session in which we were encouraged to focus on different parts of the body in term and try to consider what was going on in each of them. Though to be honest it just got me thinking how many parts of my body hurt lol.

Yet again we packed out the room and so next week we might have to reconsider how we lay the room out or maybe even try and move to a bigger room. It’s not easy being so popular.

Is it really that time of year again?

This week is the Christian Union’s Mission Week and so as part of it we had an A-Soc trip down to see David Hamilton, former terrorist from Nothern Ireland, deliver a talk.

I found it a good chance to catch up with CU male president Joel, having already seen the talk before, though those that had not seen it before were on the whole fairly angered by it lol. The feeling was that the talk basically said it’s ok to be a terrorist because Jesus will forgive you.

Never the less I had fun and it was good to see quite a few people I haven’t seen in a while, even if I don’t know a lot of the upper echelons of the CU anymore.

Friday saw the launch of Perspective, a course I developed and by developed I mean came up with the name and handed the work on to Nicola to do. Good times. The basic idea is that each week a different religion comes down to tell us about what they actually believe and everyone can ask questions, over a free dinner of course. Nothing original but highly successful, we got 20 people down on a Friday night for the Baha’i session.

Christian Voice having been defeated in their challenge of the atheist bus ads, they are probably wondering what to do next. Being the nice person I am, and also bored at work, I knocked together a few counter ads for them.

The ASA have ruled on the atheist bus ad issue and decided there is nothing wrong with the adverts. In their statement they said…

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has concluded that the “There’s probably no God” bus ad campaign by the British Humanist Association is not in breach of the advertising code. The ASA will therefore not launch an investigation and the case is now closed.

The ASA carefully assessed the 326 complaints it received. Some complained that the ad was offensive and denigratory to people of faith. Others challenged whether the ad was misleading because the advertiser would not be able to substantiate its claim that God “probably” does not exist.

The ASA Council concluded that the ad was an expression of the advertiser’s opinion and that the claims in it were not capable of objective substantiation. Although the ASA acknowledges that the content of the ad would be at odds with the beliefs of many, it concluded that it was unlikely to mislead or to cause serious or widespread offence.

This was to be expected given the consequences of making a different ruling but never the less a welcome decision.

The nature of writing for the media these days means you need to be sensational and controversial. This is true whether you’re writing for the Daily Star or the Telegraph. And so I suspect when Gerald Warner wrote “Atheists will need martyrs if they are to compete with Christians” he doesn’t actually believe most of what we writes, or at least not with the conviction to which he writes it.

Never the less I feel it is important to address the issues raised in his blog entry.

Most of what he writes is (or at least should be) laughable. Comments such as “it is good to see a Christian making difficulties for aggressive secularists” hold no real standing. I have yet to hear of a case of an atheist bus driving refusing to drive a bus with an Alpha advert on it nor has Ariane Sherine filed an official complaint with the ASA against them.

In reality of course the secular community is constantly under attack from the religious community. If they aren’t trying to indoctrinate our children with religious ideas at faith schools they’re trying to prevent our freedom of expression.

Quite frankly some of his writing his embarassing and would be far better placed within the pages of The Sun and The Daily Mail. Unrelevant comments with obvious connotations such as “Mr Heather, who served in the Royal Navy for 25 years”, “congratulations to this British sea dog for fighting back” are of the cheap tacky ilk you would expect to find on American news reporting.

From here the comments move to simple ignorance. “Is this not, in fact, an agnostic, rather an atheist, advertisement?” It is interesting that he later lists Dawkins in his post and yet seems to show no knowledge of Dawkins writings surrounding the subject. If Mr Warner had read The God Delusion he would in fact understand that these terms are essentially interchangable and it’s perfectly possible to be an atheist and accept there is a chance there is a god (indeed I don’t know a single atheist who completely rules out the idea).

This is followed by a good deal of very Christian thinking such as “since when was the message that there is no one in charge, nobody to protect us or lend succour, thought reassuring?” Not withstanding the fact that such a statement shows why many religious people would allow themselves to believe such an obvious falsehood, I find it hard to believe why some people can’t understand why some of us would actually be more comforted by the fact that we have free will as opposed to our destiny being controlled by a being with a rather genocidal past record.

Further more I almost laughed out loud when I read the claim that “many of the people who most zestfully enjoy life are Christians.” Mr Warner is clearly working on a very different sample set than I am.

To answer the underlying point though, atheist martyrs are already here. Not withstanding the treats we have received at A-Soc (and according to Alex at the BHA, they receive their fair share too), Salman Rushdie is only alive today because they couldn’t find him and Theo van Gogh has already died for his convictions.

So, turns out Christianity isn’t at the heart of Christmas after all 😉 .

If you’ve been keeping an eye on the news today you may have seen the story that a bus driver refused to do his shift because he was given a bus with the new atheist advert on it.

I mean seriously, what the hell?

This is a clear case of discrimination against atheists. If an atheist tried this stunt with one of the many, many Alpha adverts that can be found on buses he would be ridiculed, told to stop being stupid and ordered back to work. But when the tables are turned it’s suddenly acceptable to walk off shift?

But it gets even more offensive…

“I was just about to board and there it was staring me in the face, my first reaction was shock horror.” “I think it was the starkness of this advert which implied there was no God.”

Horror? What horror is caused by this? An advert which has gone out of it’s way to accommodate religious people (it could have read there is definitely no god, now shut your cake hole). An advert with has already been approved by the Advertising Standards Agency.

What this really shows is the massive intolerance bread by religion. Who ever heard of someone refusing to drive a bus with a political party advert on which always push the boat out and get personal and yet as soon as something goes on that isn’t even offensive, the atheist community is suddenly under attack. Disgraceful.