Posts Tagged ‘god’

For the October meeting of the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire, Brian Quinn presented a talk “why does god hate women?” It was delivered in Brian’s usual eloquent style, with plenty of very dry humour and well-researched well-sourced information.

Last week at Atheist Society, Heini presented a talk entitled “Disproving God With Philosophy”.

I’ve just started watching Diarmaid MacCulloch’s documentary series, “How God Made The English.” The premise of the series is that the one common identifier over the past thousand years in Britain has been religion. I’ve heard good and bad things about it, so I decided to give it a watch.

One of the points he discusses in the first episode is the idea that once we had abolished the slave trade in our own country, we then set about forcing this on the rest of the world. In MacCulloch’s words, we became God’s policemen.

An interesting parellel could be drawn between this and today when the United States, an anomaly in being the only major developed world to contain such high levels of piety, now takes on a similar role perhaps best illustrated in Parker & Stone’s Team America: World Police.

Is there then, a connection between religious devotion and a feeling that you can tell the rest of the world what to do?

Almost certainly. As luck would have it, we didn’t have to work out whether it was wrong or right to go into Iraq and kill a lot of civilians based on some fictional weapons of mass destruction. Why? Because both George Bush and Tony Blair both spoke to God, and he confirmed that that was exactly what he wanted.

That isn’t to say that political positions didn’t play a part in this too. In both cases, we and America not only had the will to enforce our view on the rest of the world, but the power to as well. As the saying goes, power corrupts.

But it is this power, combined with divine right – the knowledge that you are unquestionability doing the right thing because you have God on your side and God can never be wrong, that seems to lead to such totalitarian attitudes towards the rest of the world.

Not that I’m all together against interventionism.

Recently, I attended a debate at Nottingham Trent University, as part of their Islamic Society’s Discover Islam Week.

The event itself was held in a lecture theatre in the Newton Building, which reminds me a lot of the building that holds the student union at University of Bradford – very new money, wide open spaces, etc.

There was a clear division between the sexes in the room – the front eight rows were reserved for males, and the back three reserved for females. They even had separate entrances too – to the point where we were about to go in the top entrance, but had to turn around at the door and go round the building lobby and down some stairs to go in the bottom entrance instead.

As ever with such events, people are going to be walking out of the room with the exact same views as they walked into the room, so decided a slightly different tact was necessary.

I was asked to speak first, which seemed very strange for a debate in which I was the opposition, but it fitted in quite well with what I had written, so I thought I would just roll with it. My speech focused less on rebutting the proposition, which was nothing more than the cosmological argument anyway, and more about offering an alternative explanation for religion.

Unfortunately, not being a philosopher, the rebuttals I did do against the argument were not overly eloquent – though I did get in the core points that it was a case of special pleading, identity of the first cause and attacking the idea that infinite doesn’t exist, though not being able to accurately put why Hilbert had been misquoted let my argument down.

Never the less, it was always going to be a tough task going into the lion’s den if you will, so I was only a little disappointed with my performance.

I also found it rather strange that they finished the event with a video from Siria. Not not a humanitarian appeal which I presumed it would be when they first announced they would be showing a video. Rather, it was footage from a mass rally in which a speaker was telling the gathered mass how Allah would crush their enemies as people chanted his name. I’m relucant to envoke Godwin’s Law and describe it to something that would not be out of place at a Goebbels rally, but then I would only be returning the favour ;).

In any case, I was an enjoyable event and I would like to thank Nottingham Trent University Islamic Society for their hospitality.

Last Tuesday we decided to hold a bit of an ice breaker at Atheist Society with a Make Your Own God event. The turn out ended up being great and everyone got stuck in sticking, cutting and building. All the photos are available here.

As you probably know, atheists are currently celebrating Stephen Hawking announcing there is officially no god.

I was on BBC Radio Leeds talking about it earlier. It went pretty badly, to be honest, I could have spoken a lot better and we ended up discussing what evidence I would require to believe in god rather than talking about Hawking’s new book. Never the less it’s always an experience and it’s great to get a mixture of view points on the show which BBC Leeds are always really good at.

You can listen again for seven days on the BBC website, it’s about 38 minutes in.

On Tuesday we had our first formal debate of the academic year at Atheist Society on the motion “this house believes there is no god.”

Myself and Norm were arguing for the opposition which went quite well I thought – obviously the motion carried but by a reasonably slim margin which at an Atheist Society is no minor achievement. I managed to get away with quite a bit too, nobody called me when I described how evangelical Christian Francis Collins was very much outspoken on atheism (which he technically is – just not on the right side 😀 ).