Posts Tagged ‘course’

Last Friday, another series of the One Life course kicked off with a session on the meaning of life which Will had asked me to chair.

I tried to expand the discussion a little further than previously, where it has often stuck to its philosophical roots, to go beyond that and get into questions like, what would be a wasted life and what tenants do you live your life by. All in all, it seemed to go very well.

The biggest problem, however, is that for the first time ever, they didn’t provide a hot meal. I’ll be filing an expense claim for my McDonald’s shortly…

Last Friday saw the the Answers course start once again at the University of Leeds, hosted by Leeds Atheist Society. Answers is a course for those who have decided they are atheists but are not really sure where to go from there – how do you express your beliefs and make sense of your thoughts? Luckily, Answers has answers!

We held the first planning meeting for a new course today which will hopefully be piloted by Leeds Atheist Society next year. It will focus around issues on sex and relationships but in a way relevant for atheists, in particular students.

How much this will be abstract discussion and how much will be real issues is yet to be worked out but the idea behind the course is to actually make it useful for attendees – for example nobody really needs advice on what contraception is available and how it works because this gets taught in school and we all know it anyway. But things like breaking up with people for example aren’t really looked at.

Development will continue for the next few months though if you have any ideas or feedback regarding the project do get in touch (or even just comment on this blog post).

When we launched the Perspective course in 2009, we had no idea it would be such a huge success. Of course you hope that it will be a popular event but the interest we received in the course was far better than we thought we could hope for.

It proved to be popular with both members of the society and with the religious speakers who came to give the talks. Not only that but it even proved popular with your rank and file religious followers who wanted to learn about what religions other than their own believed and it wasn’t long before our events were packed out to capacity.

Given the course had worked so well we set about, as we have with all our courses, developing a leader’s guide so that the course could be run by other societies around the country and even the world. This suffered some delays over the summer but finally we have it in a state ready to ship out – as such we are now officially launching the guide!

So if anyone is interested in running a Perspective course at their local community do not hesitate to get in touch with us for a copy.