On Tuesday we held our annual debate at Atheist Society as to whether Professor Dawkins had been a positive or negative influence on the whole atheism discussion.

To my surprise almost everyone came out in a huge sea of support for Dawkins and rightfully so too!

Tuesday saw Michael deliver his talk on Limits of Atheism. Suprisingly it was actually a fairly interesting talk, I’m not sure I learnt anything about what the limits of atheism are (presumably we can assume from that, that there are in fact none) and the philosophers in the room were looking very dubious, but it kept us reasonably entertained for an hour or so, so well done Money Bags!

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 descrimination 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.

Where to begin, where to begin?

There is so much to talk about. We’ve just come out of a whirlwind conference for the AHS. I guess the logical place to begin would be at the start. But I’m not going to start there. I’m going to start in the middle and work my way round in some kind of circular motion.

First of all, we now have an AHS. While I am a firm believer the AHS began at our June conference, because that is when it actually began, was named and became “something” but as of Saturday we now have a ratified constitution and so are even more “official.”

Secondly we now have elected representatives. Congratulations to Norman, Jenna and Tom who have been elected president, secretary and treasurer respectively. Myself, Alex, Chloe and Andrew have also been appointed as trustees. Hmm, thinking about it, we should probably let Andrew know about that .

All in all it’s been a busy, busy weekend. We started on Friday with One Life (which I will blog about later) then had some drinks in The Terrace and then headed down to the German Christmas market. Saturday consisted of looking at the constitution and society presentations followed by dinner at L’oranise, drinks in The Old Bar and then Wendy House and then we finished up on Sunday with breakfast at Wetherspoon’s and some roundtable discussions. Still once it was all done I could go home and relax while I tried to catch up on all the freelance work I still had to get completed for Monday .

It was great to see everyone again and meet a new few faces too. If I thought I packed a lot into the weekend it was nothing compared to the amount of jokes and puns that Stuart and Greg from Edinburgh managed to fit in. Even if they did start to grate on certain other conference delegates by the end of the weekend .

We also recorded a “live from the AHS conference” edition of the podcast which will be available from Friday, providing I get it edited together in time lol. All in all, a very productive weekend and I look forward to seeing everyone again next year.

Having got out of work earlier than planned I headed over to The Terrace to meet Raby have have a bit of a catch up as we’d not seen each other in a month or so. All seems well in the School of Computing, the closure of 24 hours labs is more a change in official policy than something that has actually happened.

Afterwards we headed over to The Park Horse for the talk organised by the Philosophy Society entitled “atheist arguments aren’t much good.” The room was packed out which made for some fantastic photos to add to the A-Soc gallery (what, it was an A-Soc event to attend the talk :p ).

The talk was very interesting and I was impressed by how fast moving it kept with the basic premise being that atheist arguments don’t really work because disproving a specific god doesn’t disprove the idea of a god, it simply disproves that god but you can simply change the definition of god to get round that (for example, he doesn’t need to be all powerful, as this is never said in the Bible, he could just be rather powerful).

Of course this argument doesn’t hold up because if you accept there may be some kind of god but choose not to believe in any of the specific gods then you’re an atheist. It isn’t Atheism with a capital T (or positive atheism or whatever you wish to call it) but it certainly is atheism but regardless it was an interesting talk and well worth attending.

I’m not sure John took too kindly to my thoughts on philosophy as a subject though lol.

I delivered my first proper talk of the academic year last night, the ever popular debating the theists. It went down very well from the people I spoke to in the pub afterwards though I did end the question with “none of this constructive criticism BS, just positive adjectives please” so who can really say.

We got around 25-30 people to the meeting and most stayed for the social afterwards which continued on until about 11:30, just in time for us to get to The D afterwards which worked out well. London is now sold out too so that is going to be an amazing weekend. As ever, things are looking up.

Genius. Absolute genius.