Secular Portal Blogs

Arslan’s Situation

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010 | Leeds Atheist Society | No Comments

As most of you know Dr. Shaukat Aman Ulla, known as Arslan to us has been a member of Leeds Atheist Society and friend of many of us for over two years.

He is an out Atheist and ex-Muslim; currently living in the UK in safety. In Pakistan, his home country this is punishable by death!

Unfortunately his visa has run out and he has applied for asylum to stay in the UK.

We strongly feel that by being sent back to Pakistan for Arslan, is like being sent to his death. I urge you to support him.

His appeal is taking place on the 8th April and hopefuly this petition will show that he has support.

Please sign this to support freedom of belief and Arslan's asylum.

http://www.petition.fm/petitions/savearslan/0/4/

Thanks

Perspective looks at Islam

Sunday, March 14th, 2010 | Chris Worfolk | No Comments

With out speaker from the Muslim Debate Initiative having canceled us on the night before, a speaker from the Leeds Makkah Mosque kindly stepped in at the last minute to present the session on Islam. I found it a really good session, there were some excellent questions asked and interesting answers given.

Inside the Mind of an Animal

Sunday, March 14th, 2010 | Chris Worfolk | No Comments

On Tuesday I gave a talk to Leeds Atheist Society on animal consciousness. I wasn’t sure how well it went at first but the feedback came back very positive, despite one of the dolphins the audience telling me he didn’t believe animals were in fact conscious.

Robin Ince in Leeds

Sunday, March 14th, 2010 | Chris Worfolk | No Comments

Last weekend Robin Ince was kind enough to stop by to give us a talk before doing a gig at The Library later that night. While I sometimes find his material a little hit and miss, live he is an excellent performer and I really enjoyed both the talk and the show.

In the eyes of the innocent

Sunday, March 7th, 2010 | Chris Worfolk | No Comments

I love Richard Dawkins. But sometimes I think he is a bit too nieve. Take for example the recent goings on on the RD.net Forum. A few weeks ago they announced that the forum was going to be replaced by a new system. A system which was “similar to a forum” but had some differences, most notably threads would be tagged instead of categorised and that all threads would be moderated.

They announced they would be leaving the forum operational for 30 days and then replacing it with the new system. However two days later the forum was locked down with a message from Richard saying the following…

Imagine that you, as a greatly liked and respected person, found yourself overnight subjected to personal vilification on an unprecedented scale, from anonymous commenters on a website. Suppose you found yourself described as an “utter twat” a “suppurating rectum. A suppurating rat’s rectum. A suppurating rat’s rectum inside a dead skunk that’s been shoved up a week-old dead rhino’s twat.” Or suppose that somebody on the same website expressed a “sudden urge to ram a fistful of nails” down your throat. Also to “trip you up and kick you in the guts.” And imagine seeing your face described, again by an anonymous poster, as “a slack jawed turd in the mouth mug if ever I saw one.”

What do you have to do to earn vitriol like that? Eat a baby? Gas a trainload of harmless and defenceless people? Rape an altar boy? Tip an old lady out of her wheel chair and kick her in the teeth before running off with her handbag?

None of the above. What you have to do is write a letter like this…

You can find the entire thread here. Needless the say the letter that was written wasn’t in any way offensive – it was very pleasant and upbeat. But never the less it attracted widespread abuse from forum users. Here is why I think the reaction was nieve though…

Firstly, Richard’s first assumption is wrong. “What do you have to do to earn vitriol like that?” The answer actually is write a letter. Post a YouTube video. Visit /b. Basically anything on the internet attracts that kind of abuse, it saddens me that, that is the case but unfortunately that is how the internet is. Every time I post a YouTube video someone makes a stupid, inane and abusive comment, that’s life unfortunately.

Secondly I think it’s also a mistake to assume these comments are coming from people sympathetic to your cause. I suspect they didn’t. One possibility is they came from religious people just looking for any way to get to him but I suspect such comments actually came from general internet trolls who don’t really care about science, reason, debate or maybe even Dawkins, generally get off on the idea of annoying religious and non-religious people and just wanted to cause trouble. Basically imagine an even younger, more irriguous version of my friend Will.

I also suspect that it may be a nieve thought to think you can control and moderate the internet. I suspect a lot of the user base will be lost because people don’t like moderation because of the pressure it puts you under. However I could be wrong about this, only time will tell. At very least though you can see why this would annoy people.

Oxford

Monday, March 1st, 2010 | Chris Worfolk | No Comments

Despite still being in the recovery stage of flu I headed down to Oxford this weekend for the AHS national convention. We set off on the Friday afternoon as to be in time for Camp Quest UK director Sam Stein’s talk and stayed as late as the Sunday night to hear Dr Evan Harris’s talk on trying to introduce some common sense into Parliament – something which is not popular in there.

All this resulted in us not getting back into Leeds until 2am this morning, something which my body did not appreciate when I had to get up for work this morning. Never the less it was a great weekend. On top of the talks and conventions we also managed to fit in the Ashmolean Museum, the History of Science Museum and of course plenty of watering holes on the way.

Oxford is a beautiful city, if occasionally puncuated by some hideous buildings that really stick out and the colleges are all like mini-cities in themselves. Would be a really nice place to be invited to do postgraduate study (hint hint) .