Archive for the ‘Humanism’ Category

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.

Tuesday saw the long awaited Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster at A-Soc. We got another fairly decent attendance, about 30 people or so turned up in the end I think. We got quite a few new members down again so hopefully they weren’t too freaked out that having been their first meeting 😀 .

The event itself went fairly well, it all seemed to happen so fast at the time though according to the time stamp on the camera it actually went on for about 40 minutes. The video will be up on YouTube as soon as a I get some free time to sort it.

We haven’t really had a post mortem discussion about it yet but it is definitely something that we want to repeat in the future.

Friday night saw the long awaited return of One Life.

We managed 13 people to the session which was a fairly respectable number and it was rather amusing to be just down the hallway from the Christian Union’s Friday Night Live (now re-named to Ignite I believe). The food that Norm cooked based on Sophie’s excellently prepared menu was excellent and we got some good discussions going. Another event to chalk down as a success I recon.

It’s not easy being popular. A-Soc had moved of meeting room 4 because we weren’t sure we could fit everyone in as it only holds around ten people. We were right. Especially when 45 people turned up to A-Soc last night :D.

We had a lot on, a committee meeting, Norm’s talk “Intolerance in religion”, Pro Life Through Pro Choice, preparation for the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire’s debate against Bradford University’s Islamic Society and a social and it really pulled in the crowds.

When we arrived in The Terrace for our social not only did we fill an entire row of benches outside on the terrace itself but we had to move a few benches onto the end of the row to fit everyone on!

It really has been a fantastic start to the year for the society and I would like to congratuate everyone involved on really getting stuck in and making it work. People are already focused on maintaining this strength as well, it has really got me excited about what the society at the moment.

Another acamedic year has arrived and once again the A-Soc machine is rolling. We delivered out intro meeting to a packed out room last night at which Norm gave an excellent talk resulting in another load of sign-ups for the society.

Afterwards we headed down to OK Karaoke, taking around 30 people with us and despite the fact that nobody else turned up we still managed to make the place look crowded all by ourselves. They were so impressed that we’re now in talks for regular visits 😀 . Not to mention that they kept the bar open all night for us having been planning to close at 11.

Everyone seemed to have an amazing night and by the looks of things we will have lots of new people coming back. I had to leave at 1am due to having to be up for work that morning and most people were still in there! May the good times roll.