Archive for the ‘Humanism’ Category

Here at HAGs we’re making a real push at the moment to premote HAGs and get people volunteering.

It’s absolutely freezing here in Leeds at the moment and it’s often we at the moment as well so if there was any time of year that you don’t want to be stuck out on the streets, it’s probably about now.

As such we really need volunteers to make sure we’re going out as much as possible so if you can spare some time, do get in touch. We’re also working on how we can roll similar schemes out to other cities around the UK, and indeed the world, so if you’re interested let us know.

Last Tuesday saw the last proper meeting of term one at Atheist Society.

Having screened Morgan Spurlock’s Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden which was a very interesting watch but non-surprisingly very pandering towards the left we headed down to D-Fusion for a night of karaoke.

We recently held the One Life wrap meal to see out the end of the One Life course. I’m not so sure how successful it is, it’s nice to go for meal but nothing is really wrapped up. Even if not I would like to think it brings course participants together but then most people are in A-Soc already. Maybe we just need to change our advertising strategy.

We ended up down at Wagamama which I wasn’t overly impressed with. Their bench seating and place holders that were simply McDonald’s tray liners but without the trays isn’t exactly the hallmark of a good quality restaurant. Food was good, I think, but not really being a fan of it and their refusal to do my chicken in a bun to simulate the idea of a chicken burger didn’t held matters.

Still afterwards we got a long night’s drinking at ‘Spoons so all ended well. Even if it was a bit of a couples fest with Jonni+Kat and John+Lil.

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.

On Tuesday we had our second Movie Goer’s Guide to Life & Death at A-Soc. It was basically a load of clips from American Beauty and while I found some of the analysis dubious I certainly enjoyed seeing the clips again very much enjoyable. Smile – you’re at Mr Smiley’s!

Last weekend the AHS ran it’s first region social. It was somewhat less than a success with only Leeds actually turning up to it but it still remains the most success regional social the AHS has ever run. Good times.

Yesterday Gijsbert returned to Leeds Atheist Society to deliver a One Life session on human needs.

I went down to the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire on Thursday to listen to Norm’s talk on student atheism. It was a good talk although oddly punctuated by an altogether not all their Christian who had randomly turned up and occasionally started talking about Jesus. Crazy times.

On Tuesday we had our first formal debate of the academic year at Atheist Society on the motion “this house believes there is no god.”

Myself and Norm were arguing for the opposition which went quite well I thought – obviously the motion carried but by a reasonably slim margin which at an Atheist Society is no minor achievement. I managed to get away with quite a bit too, nobody called me when I described how evangelical Christian Francis Collins was very much outspoken on atheism (which he technically is – just not on the right side 😀 ).

With John having finally got a World of Warcraft group together for Atheist Society, we set out last night on our first exciting adventure as everyone started fresh characters under the banner of our new society guild, the Atheist Alliance.

Not having played for two years I spent Monday patching, or at the start clearing space to patch, as the installer informed me I would need to free up 15GB! However after a long, long period I finally got things finished 14 hours later and was ready to play. In grand news I also found my long lost original character which disappeared some time ago!

So we set out adventuring last night at about 8pm and next thing we knew it was 2am! We did however manage to get to level 10 in that time, which is quite impressive given the amount of time it takes to loot 40 wendigo manes not to mention factoring in the long period of time we spent knocking back beers at The Blue Recluse. We also have a guild tabard which looks very similar to our logo which is awesome.