Archive for the ‘Humanism’ Category

I haven’t blogged in a while, mainly because I’ve been so busy with Rationalist Week. If you are around LUU any time this week drop in for a drink, we have events going at 12 noon, 2pm, 4pm and 7pm every day as well as all night debate on Friday and live entertainment at certain points too.

It’s been a busy few days.

Friday: 15
Thursday: 14
Wednesday: 13

I couldn’t say before this date as my call log doesn’t go back that far (I only knew Wednesday’s because I already knew the figure, half the calls have already moved off the list).

Yeah, organising things is fun.

So A-Soc still has no money. We’ve spent a lot of it but we don’t have any. Any chance of getting sponsorship is all but gone we’re in a deep financial mess.

Meanwhile I found out yesterday that Michelle has stolen Norm on the Tuesday night. So he will miss Mike Lake, not that Mike Lake has a confirmed topic to speak on yet.

Oh and the marquee hire company got back to us this morning to say they couldn’t get a crew to put the tent up on Sunday so they are doing it Monday morning. Despite the fact we are all meeting on Sunday to decorate the tent. Indeed I booked the weekend off work (at considerable cost to myself) to do just that.

I could go on. I could talk about how we don’t even have a generator booked yet because the hire company haven’t got back to me and a list of hundreds of people who have failed to return my emails. But I’ll save that for a later blog post.

I passed through Chrismukkah without much of a stir, not really engaging in the spirit of the holiday if there were such a thing as it were. Much to Michelle’s disappointment no doubt.

However, I have recently concluded that it isn’t due to the fact that I am cold and empty inside. Notably because, while Chrismukkah isn’t my celebration of choice, equally such Christmas lovers as Michelle do not feel the same affinity to such events as Rationalist Week.

The reason I bring it up is because it’s two months till Rationalist Week which while in the planning terms isn’t too far away, from an outside perspective it is quite a while away, and yet I am beginning to get madly excited about it. It was when I found myself jumping up and down in the shower shouting “it’s nearly Rationalist Week” that I realised how much my actions echoed those of Michelle’s when she began talking about Christmas in October.

While this is an interesting point to meditate on, I also want to talk about something else – namely, that Rationalist Week is coming! We’re already in the planning stages putting together provisional events timetables, getting quotes for the various stuff we need to hire, fund raising, etc.

It’s all so exciting!

A few people recently raised the question “why is A-Soc celebrating Darwin Day? It is just an excuse to have a go at religion?”

Of course, it isn’t. But it could seem to many people that were are advocating the link between Darwinism and atheism which Dawkins seems to suggest.

This I believe is probably a misconception. Dawkins does talk a lot about evolution and atheism for two reasons. Firstly, learning about evolution was the thing that pushed Dawkins into atheism. It was the turning point that he renounced his Anglican upbringing and joined the ranks of the infidels. Secondly he believes that Darwinism allows you construct a coherent world view without a god (which was difficult to do before evolution). This does not mean however that he advocated an inherant link between the two.

But I’m getting off the point. The reason we celebrate Darwin Day is not because of any inherent link between Darwinism and atheism (for which I believe there is none, as I demonstraited in my speech evolution – it’s a fact showing how evolution could be reconciled with modern theology so it seems silly for us to argue over it).

The real reason is that Darwin represents somewhat of an ideal, at least in legend if not in reality, of an open minded free thinker. Despite the fact his work and research was leading him away from his beliefs he remained true to the principles of science and reason and kept his mind open to new possibilities. That, is what being a free thinker is all about.

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.

So are you.

We’re all Humanists really.

These days it seems the atheist community has more labels than members. Atheists, rationalists, secularists, Humanists, secular humanists, naturalists, Darwinists, nontheists, agnostics, week atheists, strong atheists, secular believers, free-thinkers, skeptics. I agree a lot of these are very different terms but they are all terms in which someone showing up to an A-Soc meeting may well describe themselves as.

Watching the Life of Brian to check everything is in order before the upcoming screening this term it got me thinking.

“People, don’t fight! We are all here together! We must join up against the common enemy!”
“The Judean’s People Front?!”
“The Romans!”

I’ve been wondering recently if we spent too much time worrying about the semantics, squabbling over names and labels when we should actually be doing some productive. Is it really that bad if someone mistakenly calls us a Humanist? I could think of a lot worse labels.

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.

On Tuesday we went down to the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire’s meeting as they were holding a talk entitled “first offender to old lag – inevitable?” It was delivered by Angie Petit who is head of performance at the HM prison in Leeds.

It turned out to be a really interesting talk. A lot of it centred around what is being done to reform people in prison, what the prison has to deal with and what they actually do in prison though it covered a very broad spectrum. What was really interesting though was the statistics and results.

For example, 60% of people that come into prison have a hard drug problem. 80% have mental health problems. What passes for a mental health problem these days I don’t know (and I suspect that a lot of things do) but it’s still quite a shocking statistic. It was also suprising that short spells in prison, a throw back to the Conservates “short sharp shocks” don’t work and that movement of prisoners from prison to court is now done by a private company who can send a prisoner back to whichever prison they happen to be driving past. Crazy.