Posts Tagged ‘interfaith’

Next month, we’re launching Perspective Citywide, here in Leeds.

Perspective has been running on campus at the University of Leeds for several years now, starting it’s third run at the end of this month. It’s proved exceedingly popular and led us to us publishing the Perspective Leader’s Guide last year.

However, with it being based on campus it was somewhat limited in the audience we could get and so we really wanted to take it off campus so that everyone could access it.

As a result, we’re launching Perspective Citywide which will be taking place each Wednesday, starting 2 February. Running for 8 weeks, each session will see a different religious speaker joining us to talk about their faith and then open the floor up to a “no question off limits” Q and A with the audience. So if you have a burning question you want to ask, don’t miss out!

You can find out more information on Citywide on the Perspective Course website.

On Tuesday, Leeds Atheist Society held an interfaith panel featuring speakers from Baha’i, Quakers, Humanism, Christianity, Paganism, Scientology and Judaism.

We’re pleased to announce the launch of the new Perspective Course website! During interfaith week we will be launching the new version of the Perspective Course Leader’s Guide which will be made freely available to groups which are interested in running their own version of the course. You can request a pack for your group from the website.

In November we hosted an interfaith panel inviting speakers from all major faiths to come down and field questions from an open audience. We had speakers from Buddhism, Baha’i, Humanism, Sikhism, Christianity and Judaism.

Thursday saw an interfaith social supposedly organsed by the interfaith assembly. They didn’t really do anything other than delegate all the work to Nicola though. The event featured a quiz and a buffet which was nice though Nicola did all the food so it soon ran out. Of course the real socialising took place in The Old Bar afterwards but that is to be expected 😀 .

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.

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? 😀 .

Yesterday was our long-awaited interfaith panel in which we invited representatives from each faith down to an open discussion in which the audience could ask questions and each representative could answer with respect to their faith.

In the end we had quite a good panel with Buddhism, Christianity, Mormonism, Sikh, Bahai and Atheism represented. ISoc and JSoc have continued their long-established tradition of refusing to talk to us despite Nicola’s best efforts but I didn’t feel we were missing anything as it worked really well with the good selection of beliefs we already had. John also did a good of chairing the meeting and making sure things didn’t get too out of hand.

As already mentioned we also successfully broadcast the event live for everyone who couldn’t make it in person. It is also available as a saved video clip somewhere, hopefully it will get posted on the A-Soc website in the near future.

All in all, it was a very successfully Give It A Go event for us. We managed to get a total of 45 people down which is probably the best turn out we have had this year.