Posts Tagged ‘Leeds Atheist Soc’

Having cleared up some unfair slander of my character in recent times and eaten a rather enjoyable sausage casserole courtesy of Michelle, the final preparations began for this weekend’s AHS conference.

The delegate packs are looking reasonably flash if I do say so myself and everything is now in place for tonight’s One Life which should produce some interesting discussions. I think this weekend is going to be very exciting given we are watching history in the making with the ratification of the constitution.

I am also very much looking forward to getting some events planning done and the live from the AHS conference podcast should be fantastic also.

Another Tuesday night having arrived we set about our usual committee business at which we got through everything on the agenda except the most important point of all – the impending AHS Conference which was taking place this weekend! Still, how much fun would we miss out on if everything was carefully prepared and planned?

The film was good as ever, I almost watched it again when I got home. Turn out was moderate, it’s hard to live up to the high standards that we have so far set this year but Milood came down for the first time and Brett pitched up to the meeting too so there were some victories.

The social continued in The Terrace afterwards and went on until midnight with myself, Brett, Nicola W, Zoltan and Kate dancing the night away.

Norm currently being struck down with illness, it fell to Sophie to lead this week’s session of One Life.

It went quite well, we got a good turn out as usual and the discussion kept rolling on around this week’s topic, science and critical thinking. The lesson I really took from it comparing it to the sessions I led was that you really need a critical mass in order to really get good discussion going which this year we thankfully have always managed.

Lil also did quite a good job as head chef for the evening so all in all things went very well.

The first formal debate of the year having arrived last night, myself and Tom took it upon ourselves to put forward the case for the Flying Spaghetti Monster being the one true god.

The debate was of quite a high standard with both sides making some excellent points. The motion was ultimately defeated but at a fairly even split of 14 votes to 12 but this is of course just part of his devine plan. Ultimately, it was a really fun debate and one we should definitely run again in the future.

Last Friday saw another session of One Life come and go, this one on rights and responsibilities. It got off to a rather shaky shart – at five past seven nobody had turned up! But by the end of the session we had 15 of us which is more than a respectable number, especially given it was Halloween.

As predicted the session degraded into a big argument about speciesism which interesting enough seemed to produce positive results. Paul having made a massive rant about it prompted Zoltan to later suggest that maybe the whole speciesism argument didn’t make that much sense after all. So maybe we’re one step closer to thinking rationally about it 😀 .

I delivered my first proper talk of the academic year last night, the ever popular debating the theists. It went down very well from the people I spoke to in the pub afterwards though I did end the question with “none of this constructive criticism BS, just positive adjectives please” so who can really say.

We got around 25-30 people to the meeting and most stayed for the social afterwards which continued on until about 11:30, just in time for us to get to The D afterwards which worked out well. London is now sold out too so that is going to be an amazing weekend. As ever, things are looking up.

Once again Friday saw a well attended One Life course where we were discussing ethics. It was an interesting session, we spent most of the night with me arguing in favour of objective morality to get the debate going which was fun 😀 .

Photos of the event can be found on Facebook.

Tuesday came and it was time for another exciting A-Soc meeting. We bashed our way through quite a number of issues at the committee meeting before heading down to set up for our screening of Jesus Camp, a film about the Evangelist summer camps for young children to prepare them to “lay down their lives for the Gospel” in the same way Muslims are.

It is a scary film. Some of the one liners in it are incredible.

Attendance was following our usual numbers of popularity, I’ve also got almost everyone’s name now which I’m quite pleased about. It was good being able to put names to faces. The real bonus though is the amount of people that have signed up for London – we’ve sold almost all the places now, there is like one or two left.

The social went on long into the night and I ended up getting home at like 1-1:30 or something with a very drunk Michelle and Liz in toe.

For those of you who weren’t able to attend the recent FSM church service put on by Leeds Atheist Society and Spaghetti Ministries, the video is now available for you to stream off YouTube.

Last Friday was the second session of One Life. Not having our guest speaker in to do the human needs session we re-arranged things a little and Norm delivered an excellent session on society and community. Sarann’s cooking and Sophie’s recipe were excellent as usual.

The real success of the evening though was the turn-out. We had no less than 17 people turn up in the end, we could hardly fit people in and this is after having moved from the Parkinson building to the union after campus security declared we couldn’t have the room the union had booked us after all because they wanted to close the building and go home.

As it happens this caused perhaps the best part of the evening though. I was chatting to Joel, male president of the Christian Union as he greeted people outside the union turning up to Ignite (previously known as Friday Night Live) and not really doing much greeting myself until over a dozen people turned up en masse 😀 .

There was also a great deal of discussion for hours in The Terrace afterwards too. All in all another fantastic success.