Archive for the ‘Religion & Politics’ Category

Last Friday saw our GIAG event of the semester, an interfaith panel. There was a good turn out of religious speakers though notably lacking a Humanist one and so just before we got started I was asked to speak for the side of Humanism and so stepped in.

We got some really good questions in the end and ones which generally everyone could answer on. The Humanist view seemed fairly in line with the Pagan view (Pagans, much like Sikhs, are basically just Humanists) though the Islamic view isn’t quite as in line.

I tried to answer a lot of the questions with the best bits of Humanism – for example the large amounts of pre-martial sex and I caught the Islamic speaker (who ironically was sat right next to me) turn away in digust a few times. Still I’m sure I would have done the same if he was as frank about the Islamic teachings as he could have been.

Friday saw our Perspective session on Paganism with a practicing witch coming into to talk to us. You have to respect the guy’s honestly, he opening said “it’s all made up” and was created about 30-40 years ago. However it is apparently a belief system that works for him and he has seen it working with his coven using the power of their mind to change reality. Fair enough I guess.

Zoltan provided the food this week and did a rather nice vegeterian dish. We also had meeting room 8 rather than meeting room 5 so we actually had enough space for once. All in all, a very nice session if I do say so myself.

So it turns out that Sikhism is just Humanism.

It has a bit extra, some stuff about “the Divine” but basically they believe that everything is god pantheism style so basically there isn’t a god and we should just all be nice to each other.

The other fact we learnt about Sikhism is that it’s followers are not big fans of sandwiches. We made a lot of sandwiches most of which went uneaten. Luckily however the CU were right next door and so gave us a hand with the whole sandwich consumption thing.

It’s interestingly really because it goes back to the whole Atheists and Christians are united by their love of sandwiches. We really need to do some kind of joint sandwich event in the future.

Wednesday we had a long awaited debate with the Islamic Society scheduled. It was a big step forward as traditionally they have been very hostile towards us and generally refused to engage in any kind of interfaith communcation.

It turns out though that the guy organising it had “left ISoc” which apparently (though I’m going on what I’ve been told, but this is by people directly involved) that he was kicked out of the society for trying to encourage interfaith dialog between ISoc and Atheist Society.

We had no idea of this though and ISoc didn’t seem to actually be organising the debate (which would fit with the above being true) so we volunteered to take responsibility for running the event and get it all organised.

This was a bit of a headache but needs must and all that so we took about getting it all sorted.

It turns out however that the day before the debate, ISoc had gone down and cancelled the venue booking (which was in their name because they guy originally organised) to prevent the event from actually going ahead.

We only found this out at about noon yesterday (the day of the debate) and tried out best to get the message out to everyone but unfortunately didn’t get to everyone – some people were doing three hour round trips to attend and were not amused to find out it had been cancelled.

So there you have it, I don’t know why we expected better from ISoc but at least we won the debate by default – does that count as proof there is no god? 😀 .

Friday saw the Christian Union come to Perspective to talk to us about their faith. It was an interesting event shall we say.

While so far Perspective has been fairly restrained so far there were some rather heated discussions on Friday and behaviour on the A-Soc side was quiet frankly not up to scratch. We persevered though and at least the feedback I got from Joe from the CU when chatting to him afterwards was that people were at least asking geniune questions which is what Perspective is all about.

The food was a bit of a disaster too, the catering plans feel through and so I had to be dispatached to bring in pizza which resulted in there not being much food to go around. All in all, not the most successful session but at least the discussions kept going long into the night.

Last night saw the second session of Perspective at which we welcomed John Halsall to talk about Buddhism.

As with last week out speaker delivered an excellent talk and I came away thinking I had really learnt something. He also led a short mediation session in which we were encouraged to focus on different parts of the body in term and try to consider what was going on in each of them. Though to be honest it just got me thinking how many parts of my body hurt lol.

Yet again we packed out the room and so next week we might have to reconsider how we lay the room out or maybe even try and move to a bigger room. It’s not easy being so popular.

Is it really that time of year again?

This week is the Christian Union’s Mission Week and so as part of it we had an A-Soc trip down to see David Hamilton, former terrorist from Nothern Ireland, deliver a talk.

I found it a good chance to catch up with CU male president Joel, having already seen the talk before, though those that had not seen it before were on the whole fairly angered by it lol. The feeling was that the talk basically said it’s ok to be a terrorist because Jesus will forgive you.

Never the less I had fun and it was good to see quite a few people I haven’t seen in a while, even if I don’t know a lot of the upper echelons of the CU anymore.

Friday saw the launch of Perspective, a course I developed and by developed I mean came up with the name and handed the work on to Nicola to do. Good times. The basic idea is that each week a different religion comes down to tell us about what they actually believe and everyone can ask questions, over a free dinner of course. Nothing original but highly successful, we got 20 people down on a Friday night for the Baha’i session.

Christian Voice having been defeated in their challenge of the atheist bus ads, they are probably wondering what to do next. Being the nice person I am, and also bored at work, I knocked together a few counter ads for them.

The ASA have ruled on the atheist bus ad issue and decided there is nothing wrong with the adverts. In their statement they said…

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has concluded that the “There’s probably no God” bus ad campaign by the British Humanist Association is not in breach of the advertising code. The ASA will therefore not launch an investigation and the case is now closed.

The ASA carefully assessed the 326 complaints it received. Some complained that the ad was offensive and denigratory to people of faith. Others challenged whether the ad was misleading because the advertiser would not be able to substantiate its claim that God “probably” does not exist.

The ASA Council concluded that the ad was an expression of the advertiser’s opinion and that the claims in it were not capable of objective substantiation. Although the ASA acknowledges that the content of the ad would be at odds with the beliefs of many, it concluded that it was unlikely to mislead or to cause serious or widespread offence.

This was to be expected given the consequences of making a different ruling but never the less a welcome decision.