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.
As part of my aim to try new things, I gave some kind of new foodstuff a go today. It’s some kind of weird green thing that the nice lady in Co-op informs me is known as a “vegetable.” How very quaint.
Combined with the tomato ketchup I had I believe that counts as two of my five a day.
A few days ago we tweeted that we had a big announcement coming in the next few days. Well, here it is – so prepare to be slightly excited or every disappointed having had your hopes up since Wednesday!
In early 2010 the Chris Worfolk Foundation will be launching our humanist community pilot project. To supplement the current range of humanist and atheist events we are launching a new community group running on Sunday mornings. We’re going head to head launching a secular alternative to church.
The project is still in the early stages of development but we’re hoping to have the first event in February next year. Currently we’re in the process of recruiting people who are interested in getting involved and preparing the format. So if you are interested in being involved, get in touch.
Yesterday the new foundation website went live! I say that like it is a whole new website, it isn’t, it’s just a slightly updated version but now located at ChrisWorfolkFoundation.org. There is some new content too though lots more new content is on it’s way soon.
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 😀 ).
How exciting.
As if it wasn’t bad enough that while I was running around on Halloween trying to sort my costume out I found Poundsaver already laid out with wall to wall Christmas crap, Radio 1 played their first Christmas song last week.
Still on the brighter side of news as we enjoyed lunch on Sunday we were able to watch them busily work on setting up the German Christmas Market on Millennium Square. You just can’t beat a big German sausage and a litre of beer.
I normally pay off all off the full balance of my credit cards via direct debit each month. However when it came to renewing my car insurance last summer I calculated, given the amount they charge you to pay monthly, it was actually cheaper to pay the whole lot upfront on my credit card and pay that off each month than it was to just pay my car insurance monthly.
As such I’ve had a rapidly diminishing but never the less outstanding balance on my Lloyds TSB credit card for the past couple of months.
Bare in mind that this is a credit card which I have held for over three years now and never have they written to me regarding it. Then today I was opening my mail and found a letter announcing that they had increased my credit limit. Actually, according to the letter, they have increased my “credit limit.”
And I know, I know, a corporation is by definition a soulless entity without feelings designed to grab as much money from people as possible by whatever means and I am normally the first to preach about how you can’t really judge such an entity for immortal practices because it is by it’s very nature amoral.
But seriously, we’ve just gone through a global financial meltdown. Indeed one which Lloyds TSB was actually bailed out by the government. And when I say by the government I mean by me, because the government is funded by the huge tax bill I pay every month.
Now I don’t particularly care that they have done this because I’m not going to go out and spend the extra money and struggle to pay it back, I have far higher limits on my other cards anyway. But there must be thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people out there who would go out and dig themselves into even more debt which they would struggle to pay back all because the banks saw another opportunity to take advantage.
Wankers.
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.
Tuesday saw Michael deliver his talk on Limits of Atheism. Suprisingly it was actually a fairly interesting talk, I’m not sure I learnt anything about what the limits of atheism are (presumably we can assume from that, that there are in fact none) and the philosophers in the room were looking very dubious, but it kept us reasonably entertained for an hour or so, so well done Money Bags!
Saturday saw Atheist Society’s legendary (as if any of our events aren’t 😀 ) Halloween party, hosted by our el presidente Sophie. It was a great night which ended in us performing a Satanic ritual which seems a bit on the edge but is really quite mild compared to the fact that Zoltan was dressed as the prophet Muhammad 😀 .
