Posts Tagged ‘Leeds Atheist Soc’

Yesterday was Darwin Day, the celebration of the anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, the father of modern evolutionary theory (or if you will, inventor of evolution :D). Sarann and Michelle having spent all weekend baking cakes (and a big thanks to them for doing so!) we spent the day outside the union talking to people about Darwin, handing out leaflets and selling our homemade wares.

The talks at lunch time and in the evening were reasonably well attended (by that I mean, some people actually came) and we have Norm’s speech on video which is now awaiting processing for the website. We got quite a few new people interested in the society too which was good.

I got watching The Four Horsemen to which Rich posted the link on the Atheist Society Facebook group which consists of a roundtable between Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett (how amazing is that!) which is well worth a watch to get an insight into the minds of these people.

One of the questions they asked I thought was particularly interesting, the issue of whether as atheists we actually can make a difference.

There is often a general feeling within the community that we can’t, that we are never going to manage to convince anyone to give up superstitious beliefs. I disagree with this attitude though, it has always felt to me like if that is what we honestly believe then we are really just wasting our time. Luckily, I don’t feel like this.

As Dawkins says, he runs into people all the time who have seen the light after having seen one of Dawkins’ lectures or reading one of his books. People who until this point fully believed their faith have it shaken and give it up to rationality and science.

Of course, at least for the moment, I don’t have the reach of someone like Dawkins and Hitchens but I’m sure this demonstrates the principles and indeed I see it working at the local level too. While I’ve yet to have one of the Christian Union come up to me and say “wow, you’re right, this whole faith thing is just silly” (to be clear we haven’t lost a member either ;)), I have a small list of people forming of reformed fence sitters now proclaiming the lack of a god thanks to my evangelism.

Dawkins puts it right when he says there is a huge pool of people who haven’t really made up your mind yet who can be shown the light. And I’m not just talking about people who describe themselves as agnostics, indeed I probably don’t include these people – I leave them for Gijsbert’s preaching. But people who describe themselves as beliving in god without really doing much about it – the 75% of whatever of people who put Christian down on their census form really are still up for grabs.

And just remember – it’s a million points if you convert Carl ;).

Thursday saw us head down to the Slug & Lettuce on Park Row for the Atheist Society Winter Solstice meal. Despite Jack’s pessimism when I told him I had booked for ten people and the fact that term had ended so a lot of people had gone home, we managed a turn out of eight which isn’t bad at all for an A-Soc social event.

While I was at first skeptical when we stepped into the Slug & Lettuce it turned out to be really good. They seated us quite fast once we had insisted that we actually had made a booking and it started to thin out so service wasn’t affected either. The one criticism that could be made was the music was pretty load but it is half a bar so I guess we can let that one slide.

The food was excellent, I was quite impressed and everyone else I discussed the issue with was also very impressed with their meal. Being two for one on desserts when you order main meals we made our way through quite a bit of food including some amazing chocolate-puddle puddings.

All in all it was a really good night and it was good to have an A-Soc social outside of the pub. Don’t get me wrong, I love the pub visits but it was great to do something a little different and I like to think everyone else enjoyed it too.

Earlier today A-Soc held a support rally for the British teacher Gillian Gibbons. We had quite a decent turn out in that people actually turned up which is always a victory :D. While we were only around for an hour we got quite a bit of interest and got someone new interested in the society so all in all it was a rather successful event. Go A-Soc!

Last weekend was the 2007 Atheist Society Weekend Away. We went down to London, staying just round the corner from King’s Cross station at a hostel named Ashlee House. It was a nice enough place, predictably we were on the 3rd (and top floor, I always am for some reason) floor but I’m not complaining, it presented a nicer view from the windows.

We headed down on National Express on Friday afternoon and rolled into Victoria station about 5. We hit a club on the Friday night and people got a little too drunk to be honest lol. Saturday saw myself, Norm and Jack disappear off to the Ethical Society and ended up at the British Museum. Sunday saw us hit speaker’s corner and doing some shopping on Oxford Street before heading home.

McDonald’s
I managed to fit no less than six trips to McDonald’s over the weekend. The reason for this was that I slacked off on Saturday, otherwise it would have been higher. I was a little annoyed by the inconstency though, each store seemed to make up it’s own rules and policies.

It is also more expensive in London which shattered my illusions of The D not subscribing to price descrimination. A Big Mac sandwich was £2.49 rather than the £1.99 it normally is.

Roadhouse
We were discussing where to go for dinner on Saturday night. I mentioned I had seen a few nice places on Euston Road but Michelle suggested somwhere named Roadhouse which was a 50’s retro place as “the other places didn’t look that nice” and “this place would be good” and only about £8. Turns out it was £14. We had to send two drinks and Charlie’s food back. Although apparently things like flies and bits of foil in people’s drinks are to be expected.

Incidently on the way back to the hostel on Sunday we stopped at The Euston Flyer, one of the places on Euston Road. The food there looked amazing. Only about £8 too. Really nice place.

Sin City
It just goes to show, you can go to the biggest city in the country, on a Friday night and you still can’t fill a club if you run an alternative night. We hit Sin City at the Electric Ballroom on Friday night. It started with a quite extensive search of everyone on their way in. Which really made me feel lucky I had decided to take my pen knife out of my pocket for the weekend. The music was quite good – it was a fairly Wendy style playlist though they played Linkin Park and a few other bands I love but you hardly ever hear even at alternative nights.

Ethical Society
Conway Hall, home of the Ethical Society was a nice enough place but Jenny, the chief librarian didn’t show up to give us a tour so that was a bit of a bust. While we were there though we did find a book that was basically Humanist Paul in a book. Interesting stuff indeed.

British Museum
Having given up on trying to get to the Natural History Museum because it was too much of a mission we began wandering around to see what we could find and found ourselves outside the British Museum. After having a nice but not quite ultimate lunch at The Ultimate Burger we headed in to have a look around.

It was amazing, you walk in and just the building itself is fantastic. We spent a solid 4-5 hours in there before basically, it closed. We managed to get round a fair bit of it though not in great detail and it would still take us another few days to get round all of it. I’d have liked to go round with my digital camera too as my phone camera, as good as it is, is no replacement for a real one.

Speakers’ Corner
We headed down to Speakers’ Corner on Sunday morning to catch some quality religion debates. When we got there there was an imam who was basically plugging a random political agenda though soon enough a crazy woman who had apparently just made up her own religion and drew our attention away.

Next some Christian preacher named Patrick turned up and so looking for some quality Biblical debate we headed over and he was soon explaining to me how I was a “qualified unbeliever.” Then someome named Nicoli turned up, began heckling him and sent him running. Nicoli began talking with his friend Danny about the double standards of how we find violence acceptable but sex unacceptable.

Finally we heard Danny talking on his own with regards to his “don’t believe anybody including me” speach. By this point we were cold and hungry though so while I would have loved to spend more time there we headed off to The D for some food. Apparently Jay Smith turned up after we had left, gutted.

This weekend the union held it’s first annual student activites conference which replaces the old committee training. Apparently you have to turn up in order to get your funding and they did take registers but who is betting they don’t actually withhold anyones funding for not turning up?

I turned up at 11 yesterday, as did everyone given it’s an 11-5 Saturday and Sunday event. It actually started at 11:30 with a short introductory session. There were then hourly (for the most part) sessions being run in the ARC and Riley Smith for you to pick which ones you went to.

Sunday was a whole different story. Not having finished work till gone 3am, I didn’t get up until 11 so I didn’t make it there until 11:30. At which point I found a notice on the door saying “conference begins at 12:30.” Awesome, I got out of bed without enough sleep for that. It gave me a chance to get to down to Maplin though and I arrived back for another short introductory session in which Leslie Dixon and the pro vice chancellor (or a pro voice chancellor) of the university gave quick speeches.

The content was on the whole uninformative. That is from my perspective as someone who is currently in their 4th term of office on a society committee so it would be interesting to see what the new comers thought. However I didn’t come away from the first day feeling like I had learned anything at all or really done much useful. Today was slightly better, I quite enjoyed the “how to be a great leader” session.

I don’t think the turn out helped. We have something like 200 societes each with 3 executive committee members. That’s 600 people. We had about 50 on the first day and about half that today. I felt sorry for the ARC staff, Andrew and everyone else involved in it as they had clearly put quite a bit of work into it and nobody was really using it.

Still, lessons learned for next year I guess.

Today’s A-Soc meeting got a decent turn out. Gerry Hannant’s “Scientific standards: does religion measure up?” didn’t attract a massive crowd but it brought in a larger one than usual and one that if we could attract to every meeting would probably make running the society worthwhile.

Let’s hope so anyway as I feel like I’m going A-Soc crazy at the moment. Next week I have like 6 A-Soc events! We’re putting together a faith and belief survey, we’re getting the stage production planning underway, we have two debates, a social and a lunch time talk.

People are finally signing up for London too. We took several hundred pounds in today from people reserving their places so if you are looking for a bargain trip to London I would hurry up as places are going fast.

The A-Soc intro meeting having been a mixed result, I couldn’t really help thinking about the poor turnout. Sure we had an amazing conversation rate and now have enough members to constitute a society as well as a bit cash too but it was a struggle to even get what we did. I put my faith in a better turnout for the lunch time talk on Thursday, after all, people will have gone home by 8pm whereas they can spare an hour of their day.

Turns out, they can’t.

We got 5 people, including myself and Norm. Maybe there was a lack of promotion. Though it did go out to the mailing list, was mentioned at the intro events, put it on LUU Online and handed two dozen flyers out (that really isn’t that much to be fair). Maybe people had lectures – Sarann and Jack both spoke to me later saying they couldn’t come because of lectures and several people gave the same reason on Facebook.

The fact could well be though, that nobody cares. Atheism is a magnet for apathy. Maybe it’s time to finally accept Jesus Christ as our lord and saviour.

Hmm, I need to blog more about this (and life in general) in length. 1:30am when I need to be up at a reasonable time for uni is not the time to it. But I wish share my preliminary thoughts with you.

Tonight was the A-Soc launch meeting for this academic year. Basically, nobody turned up.

That’s not really true. But turnout was poor. At the Film Making Soc intro meeting last year we got like 100 people. You can put the A-Soc turn out down to the fact the meeting wasn’t until 8pm, the fact that we were only in the Riley Smith Hall for one day plugging the society or the fact that nobody wants to be part of A-Soc, any way you look at it, I was ready to cry at 8:15 when only a handful of people had turned up.

We ended up with a little over a dozen people at the meeting, a far cry from what I was expecting and indeed what most other societies get. Never the less the talk was delivered in full. And people signed up. We got an amazing conversation rate. Something like 86% of the non-members at the meeting signed up to become paid members. Given the turnout that isn’t that many members but it is amazing conversation rate – given normally you would expect sometime like 10-20% at best.

We ended up in the pub with the usual suspects and a few new members as well. Hopefully we will pick some more up on Thursday and a few more in the coming weeks too. Hopefully we will pick up enough to actually make it worth the effort that goes in.

I really should make more of an effort to post regularly given content from other circle and beyond bloggers is quite sparse at the moment (*cough* Kieran *cough* ;)). That said, last time I checked Michelle was still blogging on a regular basis. I can’t reach blog.com at the moment though.

Today saw the second A-Soc summer social. With Norm stranded in Kirkham and Rich still mysteriously missing plus Sarann being a big geek and Claire not being hardcore enough we were a little down on numbers which was a shame really as we had some quite interesting conversations about campaigns for next year and also a discussion emailed to me by Simeon about offering a non-agenda based support group style meeting as an alternative to the kind of support offered by the religious groups which I think has a lot of promise.