AHS November 2008 Conference
Monday, November 17th, 2008 | Chris Worfolk | No Comments
Where to begin, where to begin?
There is so much to talk about. We’ve just come out of a whirlwind conference for the AHS. I guess the logical place to begin would be at the start. But I’m not going to start there. I’m going to start in the middle and work my way round in some kind of circular motion.
First of all, we now have an AHS. While I am a firm believer the AHS began at our June conference, because that is when it actually began, was named and became “something” but as of Saturday we now have a ratified constitution and so are even more “official.”
Secondly we now have elected representatives. Congratulations to Norman, Jenna and Tom who have been elected president, secretary and treasurer respectively. Myself, Alex, Chloe and Andrew have also been appointed as trustees. Hmm, thinking about it, we should probably let Andrew know about that 
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All in all it’s been a busy, busy weekend. We started on Friday with One Life (which I will blog about later) then had some drinks in The Terrace and then headed down to the German Christmas market. Saturday consisted of looking at the constitution and society presentations followed by dinner at L’oranise, drinks in The Old Bar and then Wendy House and then we finished up on Sunday with breakfast at Wetherspoon’s and some roundtable discussions. Still once it was all done I could go home and relax while I tried to catch up on all the freelance work I still had to get completed for Monday 
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It was great to see everyone again and meet a new few faces too. If I thought I packed a lot into the weekend it was nothing compared to the amount of jokes and puns that Stuart and Greg from Edinburgh managed to fit in. Even if they did start to grate on certain other conference delegates by the end of the weekend 
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We also recorded a “live from the AHS conference” edition of the podcast which will be available from Friday, providing I get it edited together in time lol. All in all, a very productive weekend and I look forward to seeing everyone again next year.
Conference prep
Friday, November 14th, 2008 | Chris Worfolk | No Comments
Having cleared up some unfair slander of my character in recent times and eaten a rather enjoyable sausage casserole courtesy of Michelle, the final preparations began for this weekend’s AHS conference.
The delegate packs are looking reasonably flash if I do say so myself and everything is now in place for tonight’s One Life which should produce some interesting discussions. I think this weekend is going to be very exciting given we are watching history in the making with the ratification of the constitution.
I am also very much looking forward to getting some events planning done and the live from the AHS conference podcast should be fantastic also.
Atheist arguments aren’t much good
Thursday, November 13th, 2008 | Chris Worfolk | No Comments
Having got out of work earlier than planned I headed over to The Terrace to meet Raby have have a bit of a catch up as we’d not seen each other in a month or so. All seems well in the School of Computing, the closure of 24 hours labs is more a change in official policy than something that has actually happened.
Afterwards we headed over to The Park Horse for the talk organised by the Philosophy Society entitled “atheist arguments aren’t much good.” The room was packed out which made for some fantastic photos to add to the A-Soc gallery (what, it was an A-Soc event to attend the talk :p ).
The talk was very interesting and I was impressed by how fast moving it kept with the basic premise being that atheist arguments don’t really work because disproving a specific god doesn’t disprove the idea of a god, it simply disproves that god but you can simply change the definition of god to get round that (for example, he doesn’t need to be all powerful, as this is never said in the Bible, he could just be rather powerful).
Of course this argument doesn’t hold up because if you accept there may be some kind of god but choose not to believe in any of the specific gods then you’re an atheist. It isn’t Atheism with a capital T (or positive atheism or whatever you wish to call it) but it certainly is atheism but regardless it was an interesting talk and well worth attending.
I’m not sure John took too kindly to my thoughts on philosophy as a subject though lol.
Congratulations Tom
Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 | Leeds Atheist Society | No Comments
I'd just like to say congratulations to Tom for his election as the society's AHS representative at last night's election!Tom will now be going on to take his place alongside Norman making up the two representatives from Leeds which will sit on the committee of the national organisation.
As Norm has already mentioned, the conference is taking place this weekend and full details can be found on Secular Portal.
The God Who Wasn’t There
Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 | Chris Worfolk | No Comments
Another Tuesday night having arrived we set about our usual committee business at which we got through everything on the agenda except the most important point of all - the impending AHS Conference which was taking place this weekend! Still, how much fun would we miss out on if everything was carefully prepared and planned?
The film was good as ever, I almost watched it again when I got home. Turn out was moderate, it’s hard to live up to the high standards that we have so far set this year but Milood came down for the first time and Brett pitched up to the meeting too so there were some victories.
The social continued in The Terrace afterwards and went on until midnight with myself, Brett, Nicola W, Zoltan and Kate dancing the night away.
AHS this weekend
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 | Leeds Atheist Society | No Comments
Leeds Atheist Society will be playing host to the second national conference of The National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies (The AHS) this weekend, 14th -16th November.It is going to be a great experience for those that take part and an opportuntiy for Leeds A-Soc to really show off. I hope many of you will make it down for some of the events and witness an historic moment - the formalisation of a antional organisation as we ratify its first constitution.
The details of the weekend can be found on our front page.
One Life
Sunday, November 9th, 2008 | Chris Worfolk | No Comments
Norm currently being struck down with illness, it fell to Sophie to lead this week’s session of One Life.
It went quite well, we got a good turn out as usual and the discussion kept rolling on around this week’s topic, science and critical thinking. The lesson I really took from it comparing it to the sessions I led was that you really need a critical mass in order to really get good discussion going which this year we thankfully have always managed.
Lil also did quite a good job as head chef for the evening so all in all things went very well.
Democracy in action
Friday, November 7th, 2008 | Chris Worfolk | No Comments
Last night was the union council meeting to look at what motions should make it to the referendum or not. Myself, Norm, Nicola, Moz and Gijsbert turned up to support motion 4 and while it’s probably a good job we did, it didn’t do us much good.
I have written a more in depth article for Leeds Student (and anyone else who wants to run it) which we’ll be sending in along with all our other articles in the hope some of it will make it to the next issue, but I will briefly summarise things here.
First of all, amendment 4 passed which removed “this union resolves” part 1, which was to stop stocking Halal and Kosher meat. From a motion to remove Halal and Kosher meat from the union. There is no way that is constitutional! The union council rules state they cannot pass amendments that “significantly alter the nature of the motion.” How could you ever, ever come up with a less appropriate amendment? How could you change it’s nature any more than that?
The amount of open descrimination against the atheist community was also quite clear. It didn’t seem to matter how many times union council members had gone on and on about how this is about whether motions should go forward to referendum, not about the politics of each issue, union council members repeatedly voiced their own opinions and yet hardly any of them mentioned the core issue here - animal welfare.
Finally it would seem important in what is aiming to be a democractic process that union council members are free to vote how they wish. It is interesting then that when Barry abstained from voting on the motion (not even voted for it but simply abstained) he was ridiculed by the chair and asked to give reasons for his decisions.
All of this amounts to showing the clear descrimination that goes on, on campus against the atheist community.
For his noodliness
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 | Chris Worfolk | No Comments
The first formal debate of the year having arrived last night, myself and Tom took it upon ourselves to put forward the case for the Flying Spaghetti Monster being the one true god.
The debate was of quite a high standard with both sides making some excellent points. The motion was ultimately defeated but at a fairly even split of 14 votes to 12 but this is of course just part of his devine plan. Ultimately, it was a really fun debate and one we should definitely run again in the future.
A spooky One Life
Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 | Chris Worfolk | No Comments
Last Friday saw another session of One Life come and go, this one on rights and responsibilities. It got off to a rather shaky shart - at five past seven nobody had turned up! But by the end of the session we had 15 of us which is more than a respectable number, especially given it was Halloween.
As predicted the session degraded into a big argument about speciesism which interesting enough seemed to produce positive results. Paul having made a massive rant about it prompted Zoltan to later suggest that maybe the whole speciesism argument didn’t make that much sense after all. So maybe we’re one step closer to thinking rationally about it .