Archive for the ‘Humanism’ Category

Friday saw the long awaited session of One Life on “Human needs” presented by Dr. Gijsbert Stoet.

While we were missing quite a few regulars we never the less had a large turn-out as expected. The food went down a storm as the photo gallery shows with many people going back for second and even third helpings!

Gijsbert’s talk was good and importantly included Maslow’s hierarchy of needs which everyone loves (because it’s awesome, obviously). All in all, a very successful week for One Life.

On Thursday we headed over to the University of Bradford for a talk entitled “Secularism – The Big Discussion” which was sort of a debate slash discussion about religion but it was all fairly wishey washey and never really got on topic. Not that, that made it a bad event. It was good.

One of the speakers was the chair of the Humanist Philosophers’ Group Peter Cave who we ended up going for a pint with afterwards! He’s actually a fantastic guy, not only does he know his stuff (which is to be expected) but he is also incredibly quick witted and entertaining.

Well worth the trip. Even if I didn’t get to bed until 1am while still having work the next day. Like every day really I guess.

Yesterday was our long-awaited interfaith panel in which we invited representatives from each faith down to an open discussion in which the audience could ask questions and each representative could answer with respect to their faith.

In the end we had quite a good panel with Buddhism, Christianity, Mormonism, Sikh, Bahai and Atheism represented. ISoc and JSoc have continued their long-established tradition of refusing to talk to us despite Nicola’s best efforts but I didn’t feel we were missing anything as it worked really well with the good selection of beliefs we already had. John also did a good of chairing the meeting and making sure things didn’t get too out of hand.

As already mentioned we also successfully broadcast the event live for everyone who couldn’t make it in person. It is also available as a saved video clip somewhere, hopefully it will get posted on the A-Soc website in the near future.

All in all, it was a very successfully Give It A Go event for us. We managed to get a total of 45 people down which is probably the best turn out we have had this year.

Yesterday Atheist Society completed our first successful webcast.

Not that we have previously had unsuccessful webcasts, this was the first time we tried it and it worked really well. I made use of the services on uStream which performed like a bottomless pit – flawlessly (I know, I know 😉 ). I’m really impressed with it to be honest, it has a lot of options and you can do things like overlays but the real jem is just how well it works out of the box as it were.

We had some technical issues in that the feed was password protected during our testing phase and then when I turned it off it kept prompting for a password anyway and wouldn’t except the previous password. Still once we got this issue sorted we were on our way achieving three viewers! On of which was myself monitoring the playback but that still leaves Norm and someone else geniunely watching it.

Friday was the long awaited session of One Life – no, not the Gijs’s, mine of course! The subject was “leading a better life” and was your typical group discussion though scaled up for the fact that we would have a lot more people there, having sub-groups which then fed back to everyone else.

It being AHS weekend we brought in loads of takeaway food which despite quite disappointing attendance we still managed to eat our way through it all. Which I think is testament to the hedonistic lifestyle led by most of our society members. And believe me, it’s good 😀 .

Where to begin, where to begin?

There is so much to talk about. We’ve just come out of a whirlwind conference for the AHS. I guess the logical place to begin would be at the start. But I’m not going to start there. I’m going to start in the middle and work my way round in some kind of circular motion.

First of all, we now have an AHS. While I am a firm believer the AHS began at our June conference, because that is when it actually began, was named and became “something” but as of Saturday we now have a ratified constitution and so are even more “official.”

Secondly we now have elected representatives. Congratulations to Norman, Jenna and Tom who have been elected president, secretary and treasurer respectively. Myself, Alex, Chloe and Andrew have also been appointed as trustees. Hmm, thinking about it, we should probably let Andrew know about that 🙂 .

All in all it’s been a busy, busy weekend. We started on Friday with One Life (which I will blog about later) then had some drinks in The Terrace and then headed down to the German Christmas market. Saturday consisted of looking at the constitution and society presentations followed by dinner at L’oranise, drinks in The Old Bar and then Wendy House and then we finished up on Sunday with breakfast at Wetherspoon’s and some roundtable discussions. Still once it was all done I could go home and relax while I tried to catch up on all the freelance work I still had to get completed for Monday 😀 .

It was great to see everyone again and meet a new few faces too. If I thought I packed a lot into the weekend it was nothing compared to the amount of jokes and puns that Stuart and Greg from Edinburgh managed to fit in. Even if they did start to grate on certain other conference delegates by the end of the weekend 😛 .

We also recorded a “live from the AHS conference” edition of the podcast which will be available from Friday, providing I get it edited together in time lol. All in all, a very productive weekend and I look forward to seeing everyone again next year.

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.

Having got out of work earlier than planned I headed over to The Terrace to meet Raby have have a bit of a catch up as we’d not seen each other in a month or so. All seems well in the School of Computing, the closure of 24 hours labs is more a change in official policy than something that has actually happened.

Afterwards we headed over to The Park Horse for the talk organised by the Philosophy Society entitled “atheist arguments aren’t much good.” The room was packed out which made for some fantastic photos to add to the A-Soc gallery (what, it was an A-Soc event to attend the talk :p ).

The talk was very interesting and I was impressed by how fast moving it kept with the basic premise being that atheist arguments don’t really work because disproving a specific god doesn’t disprove the idea of a god, it simply disproves that god but you can simply change the definition of god to get round that (for example, he doesn’t need to be all powerful, as this is never said in the Bible, he could just be rather powerful).

Of course this argument doesn’t hold up because if you accept there may be some kind of god but choose not to believe in any of the specific gods then you’re an atheist. It isn’t Atheism with a capital T (or positive atheism or whatever you wish to call it) but it certainly is atheism but regardless it was an interesting talk and well worth attending.

I’m not sure John took too kindly to my thoughts on philosophy as a subject though lol.

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.

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.