Posts Tagged ‘Leeds Atheist Soc’

Tuesday we were scheduled to watch Morgan Spurlock’s Where on Earth is Osama Bin Laden but Norm hadn’t ordered the DVD on time so we had to switch to plan B. Luckily I had a feeling it was all going to go wrong and so had copied over Morgan Spurlock’s 30 Days onto my laptop as a backup.

It ended up going down really well and we got some good discussion afterwards including plenty of discussion in meeting room 3 as we wanted to avoid the carnage of St. Patrick’s Day going on in the bars below.

In the end we ended up sitting outside on The Terrace which altough a little on the chilly side provided a good arena for group conversation in that for once we could actually here each other. And I managed to solve my current Rationalist Week scheduling issue so it worked out well all round.

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.

Tuesday evening started off with the usual A-Soc committee meeting which brought up some interesting discussions, followed by the usual A-Soc meeting which this week was Michael’s talk which by all accounts was excellent.

Unfortunately I missed the talk as I was down at the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire attending their event on Ashley Montagu as a critic of Darwin which was also very interesting. Too many choices on Tuesday!

This was followed by hitting The Terrace for a few drinks at which we bashed out some great ideas (or as a titled the sheet at the time, ideas that seemed great when we were in the pub 😉 ) for Rationalist Week so hopefully some of them will actually be useful!

Friday saw our Perspective session on Paganism with a practicing witch coming into to talk to us. You have to respect the guy’s honestly, he opening said “it’s all made up” and was created about 30-40 years ago. However it is apparently a belief system that works for him and he has seen it working with his coven using the power of their mind to change reality. Fair enough I guess.

Zoltan provided the food this week and did a rather nice vegeterian dish. We also had meeting room 8 rather than meeting room 5 so we actually had enough space for once. All in all, a very nice session if I do say so myself.

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.

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? 😀 .

We rescheduled our original talk on Tuesday and replaced it with a selection of cartoon episodes with religious themes. It’s always an ejoyable night when we do this, especially when we have episodes of the quality of Christian Rock Hard – has anyone else been inspired to start a Christian rock band? 😀 .

I ended up leaving the pub fairly early afterwards as I had to be up early Wednesday morning but never the less it was a good night.

Wednesday saw us head down to London for the launch of the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies, better known as the AHS. We managed to get ten of us down there from Leeds – a number unmatched by any other society with the closest competitors only achieving five (not that I’m bragging of course 😀 ).

The day itself went quite well, we eventually managed to get the technical sorted and all of the speeches were very good. We got some good pictures too which will do very nicely for publicity not to mention the endless angles we got video from.

I met Richard Dawkins, I said “what kind of microphone would you like?” and he said “a lecturn will be fine.” That is my Richard Dawkins story 😀 .

The hotel was alright, we had quite a big room for the amount we paid. I think I managed to spend as much money on taxis getting to and from the train station I did as my train tickets which I found quite amusing but the important thing is, I actually made my train (unlike certain other people who had to go via Manchester at 4am to get down there).

All in all if the AHS can continue like this, we’re going to do very well. Congratulations all on a victory well deserved.

A lot of stuff went wrong Tuesday. By 1pm there had been so many things go wrong I was ready to give up for the day but in the end a few things pulled themselves round and didn’t end too badly.

The evening saw us take up a debate on Scientology looking at whether it was a cult or not. Attendance was fairly good though we had been moved into the resource lounge (which was better than the original plan of just not having a room).

After this we headed down to The Old Bar to join the Christian Union’s barn dance. Not that we did that much dancing, we had drinking to do, but it was fun never the less.

Sunday being Galileo Day we decided to celebrate in the traditional way with a Galileo Day Feast. Sunday would have provided far too much time to prepare so we held it on Monday night on which I didn’t get home until 6:30 so eating at 8pm wasn’t bad at all.