Secular Portal Blogs

“But are we really sure about the name?”

Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 | Will Wybrow | No Comments

The thing that has always bugged me a bit about the AHS is that the ‘S’ stands for ’secular’.

I would like to point out that the word ’secular’ means non-religious. What I think the ‘S’ should stand for is secularist. Why?

A secularist is someone who advocates secularism - that’s the idea of having a secular state. But having a secular society… well, lots of societies are secular. Warwick’s “Wine and Whiskey” society is secular. Warwick Snow is secular. Now do you see what I mean?

A secularist society would be, I think, one that could dabble in the things that other AHS-affiliated societies do; atheism and humanism and rationalism all thrown in together, because these are natural precursors to promoting a secular state. There’s a difference between ’secular’ and ’secularist’, and being secular doesn’t necessarily imply the latter. What’s more, being secular doesn’t justify irreligious events; it just means the society holds no religious viewpoint. In fact, boasting being a secular society should mean that the society has nothing to do with religion at all, even being critical of it…

A secular state is one that gives no benefit to the religious. In that sense, it’s what could be described as “religion-neutral”. Now, if it can give no benefit to the religious, it can’t really disadvantage the religious on the grounds of religion either. It can’t speak out against religion or criticise it, because we’re secular, not atheist.

Secularists, on the other hand, are justified in speaking out against religion as long as religion still enjoys unwarranted benefits. Secularists can be anti-religious as a matter of persuading and campaigning for a secular state.

The Shit’s Hit the Fan Now, Boys

Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 | Will Wybrow | No Comments

Oh my god, things are fucking kicking off with the AHS. From it not really moving much over the six months between its official conception and its official creation, things have sped up a hundredfold and we’re flying now down the channels of activity. Everyone’s up and moving and it’s great.

Watch the fuck out, everyone. If you’re godless and part of an atheist/humanist/secular(ist)/rationalist society, we’re coming to find you. If you’re godless and you don’t have an atheist society? We’ll help you set up the bastard.

If you believe in god? Well, the shit’s hit the fan now for you guys, because we’ve just become the country’s best catherds, and we’re rounding up the godless power lying dormant amongst you.

Fuck yeah.

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 .

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 .

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 .

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.

AHS Conference - November 2008

Monday, November 17th, 2008 | Leeds Atheist Society | No Comments

Well, Leeds pulled it off!

Leeds Atheist Society has just hosted the second conference of the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies (AHS for short :P ).

The event was a great success. The constitution was ratified and its directions put into place. Two of our members were elected on to the Executive of the AHS. Tom Leadbeater, our recently elected AHS Rep for A-Soc was chosen as the organisation's Treasurer, a prestigious job. I was elected President of the AHS, which means that hopefully A-Soc's aims and objectives should get a good hearing at a national level.

Congratulations to Chris, our Events Sec who was appointed as a trustee for the AHS, a position that I am sure will be walk in the park for him.

Thanks to those A-Soc members that came down to support your representatives and ensure that we were shown off in the best possible light.

Watch this space for more information and upcoming events!

Website makeover

Sunday, November 16th, 2008 | Leeds Atheist Society | No Comments

The observant of you may have noticed that the website is looking a little different today. Not massively but sufficently, it's like a fresh lick of paint really though there are a few more changes when you scratch the surface. As such, I'm going to discuss the thinking about the makeover and go through what has been changed.

The website has gone through some quite major changes since it was first launched in 2006. It began life in the summer of that year when the society was just starting and months before it was finally ratified by the union. To date however these have all been to the content of the site, we've added a lot, created the members area and made it far more interactive. The design has remained constant though while in the outside world, technology moved on.

The first change then is that the site is now quite a bit wider when it used to be. The original site was designed to fit in an 800x600 screen because that was fairly common back then and people may be starting to look at it on portable devices. These days people have much bigger monitors and we don't need to worry about people using phones or handhelds because the site has an alternative version for them (just open it in your phone and you'll see the site looks different) so the site is now designed to fit in a 1024x768 screen.

It is a bit more graphics heavy now as well. Almost everyone is on broadband these days so we can make the site look a little prettier without affecting load times too much. After all, when it comes down to it, we're all about style in A-Soc ;).

Next, the site navigation has been played around with. The tab system at the top is the same but we the links themselves have changed. Each page in the site is now sectioned into one of these days and when you go into that section a submenu appears down the right. This is because as the site content expanded we needed a better way to navigate round without having just a list of pages down the right hand side as we used to have.

The final big change is that our upcoming events are now listed down the right hand side. We wanted to make it easier to find the information you were looking for when you arrived on the site and finding out what events we have on has to be high on that list so you can now see all the events we are running for the next seven days in the menu box.

There are a few other changes too. For example, with the events archive you can now browse by academic year rather than just a big long list of all previous events. The photo galleries are also paged too both in the list of albums and when there are lots of photos in one album.

All this should hopefully make the site easier to use and navigate and make it easier and faster to find the information you want. I'll love to hear your feedback on the site so if you have any thoughts then please drop me an email and let me know what you think.

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.