Posts Tagged ‘Humanism’

Tuesday saw A-Soc roll around again and with no exec members there on the night, it was up to Sophie to lead us for the night. But of course she didn’t so I had to do it 😛 . The night involved a short introduction to Humanism given by myself followed by a formal debate on whether Humanism was a religion.

Michael argued it was and made some good points but was ultimately beaten by Tom who bravely swapped sides at the last minute after none of the speakers who were going to be arguing Humanism isn’t a religion showed up.

Last night I headed down to the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire for Moz’s talk on religion in Pre Christian Britain. While it was mostly an excuse for Moz to show off the quality of pictures his very expensive camera can take, the talk was never the less etertaining and brought up some up some very interesting facts about the suprisingly rich heritage of Britain before the Romans arrived.

As I had suggested, Paul invited everyone to Joseph’s Well for a drink and the uptaking was very impressive, by Humanist Society standards anyway, we must have had a good fifteen of us stay for a drink compared to the usual quick evaporation of meeting attendees that traditionally takes place.

Having had a drink there I headed up to the union to meet the usual A-Soc crowd which had somewhat increased since the meeting first began, clearly people were in need of a good pint to calm their pre-exam nerves.

So did anyone else see the Queen’s speech yesterday?

Now before I get into this, I want to point out that I am a massive royalist. The monarchy is brilliant, they bring in far more money into our country than they cost us, the Queen is a massive symbol of power throughout the world and still head of the Commonwealth and any alternative system would be equally, indeed far more, flawed.

But I was not amused by her speech yesterday. At least by the end of it. When she first started to talk about Jesus as if he was born on December 25th (he wasn’t, Christians have no idea when he was actually born) I laughed but then she just got offensive.

She basically said that the ideas of altruism and being nice to your fellow man were values derived from Christianity and the teachings of Jesus. That is, of course, complete bullshit, I was being nice to people way before I read to Bible as I’m sure you were too not to mention the historical fact that people had civilised societies well before the Abrahamic religions arrived. Indeed all The Bible in reality detracts from altruism by saying you should be good to win favour with God rather than just because it’s the right thing to do.

I think the philosophy you’re actually looking for Elizabeth is Humanism. Because, dare I say it, “just be good for goodness’ sake.”^[1]