Sunday saw another exciting night with Rich not being on the close and Craig not being at band we were able to meet up in The Mill beforehand and have a few drinks before heading off to the local Toby Carvery for a meal. There is just something so satisfying about saying “I’ll have every meat please” 😀 .
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.
Last week was No Vices Week which was a week (well, 5 days lol) in which we avoided takeaway and alcohol and donated the money we saved to Rationalist Week. There wasn’t a huge uptake but some of us actually managed most of it.
It almost killed me to be honest. Day after day I was like “aww, I can just get McDonald’s on the way home” and then remembering I couldn’t. I drove Norm to work on Tuesday morning thinking I could just go for breakfast to fill the gap before I started work and then realised I couldn’t so I headed for “non-takeaway” breakfast – which was closed! Needless to say, I was not amused.
The other worry of course was that with me and Lil not eating McDonald’s we would put on a lot of weight (we are of course living proof that McDonald’s keeps you thin). Luckily Lil came up with the answer in us just sugaring our bread and eating a loaf a day. Seems to have worked.
Having nothing officially scheduled to do on Wednesday night (I had no appointments, just the usual stuff to catch up on) I was looking forward to an easy night and set off driving home from work. I almost made it as well. I had literally just pulled up outside my house when I got a phone call from Lil telling me to come to the pub.
So I headed down to The Terrace where Lil was off her face alright along with Oli, Fat Harriet and Norm. Nicola and Matt later joined us too so it turned into an alright night until Lil ruined it by spilling beer everywhere (tut, tut, tut 😀 ).
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? 😀 .
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.