Posts Tagged ‘Leeds Atheist Soc’

Friday saw the Christian Union come to Perspective to talk to us about their faith. It was an interesting event shall we say.

While so far Perspective has been fairly restrained so far there were some rather heated discussions on Friday and behaviour on the A-Soc side was quiet frankly not up to scratch. We persevered though and at least the feedback I got from Joe from the CU when chatting to him afterwards was that people were at least asking geniune questions which is what Perspective is all about.

The food was a bit of a disaster too, the catering plans feel through and so I had to be dispatached to bring in pizza which resulted in there not being much food to go around. All in all, not the most successful session but at least the discussions kept going long into the night.

Last Friday saw the first planning meeting for Rationalist Week 2009. While the event is still over two months away things are finally starting to fall into place and we’re about half way through our fundraising drive for it so we need to keep the momentum going on.

The first meeting was really just to throw around ideas but the week is starting to take shape now, at least as outlining the events we want to do. Exciting stuff!

Last Thursday saw A-Soc’s Darwin Day 2009 celebration in the union. Thanks to the hard work of Nicola and Sophie as well as the baking of Norm and Michelle, it was an all day party which ended up raising us some cash for Rationalist Week too.

Well that’s it, I’m now a card carrying Humanist.

On the plus side, it would seem people are fairly receptive to moving the HSoWY meetings to a different night so we can finally end the clashing between HSoWY and A-Soc.

Last night’s talk was by Rich on Neodarwinism which was interesting. Meanwhile Norm lead a group discussion on Darwin at A-Soc, both events seemed to go down fairly well. Afterwards we converged in The Terrace so it was all good.

While I’m on the topic, congratulations to John and Zoltan who have been elected onto the committee at the EGM.

Last night saw the second session of Perspective at which we welcomed John Halsall to talk about Buddhism.

As with last week out speaker delivered an excellent talk and I came away thinking I had really learnt something. He also led a short mediation session in which we were encouraged to focus on different parts of the body in term and try to consider what was going on in each of them. Though to be honest it just got me thinking how many parts of my body hurt lol.

Yet again we packed out the room and so next week we might have to reconsider how we lay the room out or maybe even try and move to a bigger room. It’s not easy being so popular.

Last night saw us hold a fairly informal debate prep meeting ahead of the upcoming debate with the Islamic soiciety later this month. They are bringing in an external speaker so we thought it best if we gathered our heads together a bit.

Despite our actual speaker for the debate not turning up we got a few good ideas down though a lot of it just needs a bit more research really. Never the less it should be a debate that is going to be very interesting indeed.

Yesterday saw us repeat a debate we ran at Atheist Society last year, “do the benefits of religion outweigh the negatives.” Initially we had five people volunteer to speak but three of them having pulled out at the last minute, myself and Nicola ended up arguing for the oppisition.

We won, and while this is to be expected I thought it would have been a closer debate given we were just winging it. Perhaps it is just too much of an easy argument to win? Though I did have an idea of what I wanted to say, having argued for the opposition last year.

Afterwards we headed down to OK Karaoke were it was indeed free entry – but there wasn’t any karaoke. I mean seriously, what karaoke bar doesn’t offer karaoke? At least, you would think that is the kind of thing they would have mentioned to Sophie when she spoke to them on the phone. They did however mention drinks offers, to which there weren’t any.

So we prompted stormed out and headed to Courtyard for a drink or two. Unfortunately Courtyard being dead as normal, decided to close at ten so we were only there for less than an hour. So all in all a bit of bust, but we’re still smiling so it’s all good.

Adding a bit of culture (and retracting a bit of sleep 🙁 ) we were up bright and early on Saturday morning to head down to the Royal Armouries to take a look round as well as watching some of the interpretations being put on and generally have some fun.

Friday saw the launch of Perspective, a course I developed and by developed I mean came up with the name and handed the work on to Nicola to do. Good times. The basic idea is that each week a different religion comes down to tell us about what they actually believe and everyone can ask questions, over a free dinner of course. Nothing original but highly successful, we got 20 people down on a Friday night for the Baha’i session.

The exam period being over, things were back to normal at A-Soc this week even if the union managed to lose our room bookings and end up putting us in Meeting Room 4 without a projector. Good times.

The social was a big success though with a rather large crowd having formed by the end with plenty of people both coming down from the meeting and joining us there. Ironically the one week Liz wasn’t there was the one week all her men turned up!