Tuesday saw A-Soc roll around again and with no exec members there on the night, it was up to Sophie to lead us for the night. But of course she didn’t so I had to do it 😛 . The night involved a short introduction to Humanism given by myself followed by a formal debate on whether Humanism was a religion.
Michael argued it was and made some good points but was ultimately beaten by Tom who bravely swapped sides at the last minute after none of the speakers who were going to be arguing Humanism isn’t a religion showed up.
Monday saw a meetup organised on RichardDawkins.net in Leeds. Of course, the last thing Leeds actually needs is yet another splinter group for the whole free thinking movement but sometimes you just have to go with the flow.
The turnout was quite good, 15-20 people for just a pub meetup and the first time it had been done too. Myself and Rich basically just spent the entire night name dropping having recently attended the AHS press launch.
It also turns out that the Scarborough Hotel is quite a nice pub. You learn something new every day.
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? 😀 .
February 26th, 2009 |
Life
Having already gotten up at 5am yesterday only to discover I didn’t have to be up quite that early I headed off to get some breakfast as I figured a 20-30 minute powe nap would leave me feeling worse than I already did.
We headed down to Heckmondwike which is somewhere near Birstall, Batley, Cleckheaton, etc to drop my car off for repair and ended up getting back to Leeds with loads of time to spare. At which point Damien suggested we get some breakfast from McDonald’s.
I mean, what was I supposed to say to that? 😀 . Bit of a breakfast overload in the end then, I didn’t need to eat again until late afternoon, maybe it really is the way to start the day.
We rescheduled our original talk on Tuesday and replaced it with a selection of cartoon episodes with religious themes. It’s always an ejoyable night when we do this, especially when we have episodes of the quality of Christian Rock Hard – has anyone else been inspired to start a Christian rock band? 😀 .
I ended up leaving the pub fairly early afterwards as I had to be up early Wednesday morning but never the less it was a good night.
I met up with Chris Mitton on Monday night as it’s been ages since we’ve seen each other. We met up at the Chemic Tavern so it was somewhat a novelty of being back in our old haunts, even if I never actually spent a huge amount of time there.
It is weird to think how fast everyone is moving on and changing and I suspect it has affected most other people more than it has affected myself.
It seems like a lifetime ago since I started university. But given the speed life moves these days, it probably was. Still if it wasn’t this way we wouldn’t have old friends to meetup with over a few drinks.
Our plans having been thwarted last week we finally made it to Bella Italia this week. And interestingly enough had the restaurant to ourselves with the only other people in there leaving just as we were arriving. Made for very speedy service which was very nice.
I started with the Calamari which was interesting and then moved on to the Pollo Arrosto which is chicken cooked in some kind of herbs or sause that involves garlic and something else. I can’t actually remember what it was but it made for good eatign none the less.
As usual we finished the night with a good bit of KFC for dessert. It’s a winning combination.
In the spirit of promoting secular holidays, there is now an official website for Galileo Day. I use the term official loosely because how do you really have an official site for a holiday? Obviously, the answer is you don’t but it’s as close to some kind of official website as you can really get.
There isn’t much on it at the moment other than a bit of information on the holiday and how to enjoy a traditional Galileo Day Feast but this should expand over time.
Yesterday saw the February meeting of Leeds Skeptics in the Pub. The talk was by Dr. Richard Parker re-working his The Unwoven Rainbow talk into more of a group discussion, introducing several topics and basically seeing where it went from there. It worked suprisingly well.
More importantly this month, Carpe were still serving food by the time I had got things sorted so I could also enjoy a Hunters Chicken (though I couldn’t decide if it should actually be called Hunter’s Chicken). Beer, chicken and good company, what more can a man ask for?
