Arslan’s Situation

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010 | | 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 | | 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 | | 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 | | 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 | | 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.

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Oxford

Monday, March 1st, 2010 | | 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) ;) .

Sikhism in review

Monday, February 22nd, 2010 | | No Comments

Last Friday we were joined by a representative of the Sikh faith at Perspective.

While Sikhism is often seen as preferable to the major monotheist religions, I think it falls into the same trap as Paganism in that it mixes some good stuff in with a load of rubbish and then tries to use the plausible aspects as all true. At least Christianity offers you wholesale bullshit, you either accept the whole idea of Jesus or you don’t, there is no trying to force a square peg into a round hole.

First off, I want to say that in general, the concept that most people used to describe it this time (which is actually something I coined last year ;) ), that Sikhism is just “Humanism plus god”, I agree with. I was perhaps a bit harsh in my initial review in The Old bar on Friday night about my thoughts on it. However I stand by my stance that it is very much disagreeable.

Firstly, it has a concept of god, or “the Devine” but it doesn’t actually define what this is. According to the speaker, their holy book contains about 4,000 pages explain what god isn’t, but never explains what god is. This seems very confusing an ill-defined when it comes to building a belief structure around it.

It has the concept of a traditional family unit – you are commanded to get married and have kids. This is common among many other religions, especially Catholicism and Judaism and inevitably leads to an intolerance of homosexuals and even on a more general level creates judgement in the community of those that don’t choose to live as a traditional nuclear family.

They don’t cut their hair or shave. There is just no reason for this. You might be able to come up with some justification as to why this is done in terms of being one with nature but any such justification would almost certainly indicate you should do this with all your body – yet they are quite happy to cut their nails or shower for example.

Finally, they fall back on the favourite religious past time of trying to supress and control natural human behaviour in order to exhort control over the follower’s life.

The best example of this is that Sikhs are forbidden from indulging in anything that could be harmful to their bodies – such as drugs, alcohol or meat. Not only to most people naturally crave these things but actually there is nothing wrong with having meat or alcohol as part of a balanced diet and many studies have shown that they have a positive impact on your health. Particularly because I have Sikh friends who regularly eat at McDonald’s (having the vegetarian option of course but it’s still fast food1) so the rules then seem to become rather less meaningful.

Footnotes
1 I should point out that McDonald’s does not identify as a fast food restaurant. I use that term to describe the kind of food McDonald’s serves but they never call themselves it so don’t get arsey next time you’re waiting a whole three minutes for your food and making sarcastic comments like “you call this fast food?” because we don’t call it that, we never promised you it would be fast, we’re just so damn good at it that nine times out of ten we do have it all ready in under a minute.

LAS Leading the country in Interfaith

Thursday, February 18th, 2010 | | No Comments

Getting up at 6am, after a night out painted as a blue Avatar is never easy. The excitement of meeting other students from around the country, with the same obsession I have made it a lot easier. After a somewhat eventful journey down south and then through the enlarged rabbit warren Londoners call the tube, I arrived at St Ethelburga’s where the first NUS Interfaith Forum was due to take place.

The forum started off with a welcome from Ben Whittaker, NUS Vice President for Welfare. This was followed by an introduction by Kat Luckock, NUS Student Inter-Faith Coordinator. She went though why the forum has been set up and forum guidelines.

We then got into small groups and discussed what Interfaith is, what we have been involved with personally and issues and challenges that we have faced. My group had four faiths represented, with varying experience in interfaith work from a strong interest to someone that set up a coexist society at Warwick and someone that organises interfaith football at Bath. Each group presented their discussions to the rest of the room. One thing that became startlingly apparent was the Leeds Atheist Society has arranged and been involved in more and a wider variety of Interfaith events than any other group present, including interfaith/coexist societies!

After a lovely lunch Campusalaam trained us in the FlashPOD method. This is a way to record a deep discussion of a specific event or issue and then share it online.

The day lived up to my high expectations. After almost two years of arranging Interfaith events mostly through Leeds Atheist Society, meeting other people with the same goal was invaluable. We shared stories of problems we had encountered and how we had over come them.

It was great to see that it is not just Atheists who believe in the importance of Interfaith. The forum was made up of mostly Jews and Muslims and I met one Sikh and one Baha’I too.

The forum is going to meet with the Minister for Universities, David Lammy on 4th March. How this is going to be ran was discussed by the forum.

Amongst the project aims the six Interfaith Forums will help the members to develop a strong inter-faith collaboration and enhance campus cohesion by creating space for interfaith dialogue and activities.

I believe it is already doing this. By using the FlashPOD method my group discussed why certain faith societies are less than enthusiastic about supporting interfaith events run by Leeds Atheist Society. I found this extremely insightful. Apparently people of faith feel they have nothing in common with Atheists and the idea that we want to spend time with them is greeted with suspicion as they think that we think they are stupid. I at least managed to dispel the popular myths about atheism.

Many of us that attended the forum have added each other to facebook so we can keep in contact until the next forum meeting. It was defiantly worth travelling 400 miles on Valentines day to attend.

I hope that the future forums will include more networking and small group discussions. These will facilitate the sharing of ideas for how to arrange successful interfaith events and discussion of problems that arose when staging these events. There is also need for training and a sharing of know-how on how to word things, as these are contentious issues and insensitivity benefits no-one. It would be terrible to unintentionally offend two faith societies on campus within minutes, wait that might have already happened!

I have suggested Leeds SU as a venue for the next forum and have sent in an article similar to this to the NUS, which will hopefully be appearing on their website shortly.

Oh and I think Leeds Atheist Society are officially entitled to the title “King of UK Interfaith.” :D

Everybody loves Dawkins

Sunday, February 14th, 2010 | | No Comments

On Tuesday we held our annual debate at Atheist Society as to whether Professor Dawkins had been a positive or negative influence on the whole atheism discussion.

To my surprise almost everyone came out in a huge sea of support for Dawkins and rightfully so too!

Paganism and curry

Sunday, February 7th, 2010 | | No Comments

On Friday we invited the Pentagram society to Perspective to talk about Paganism. It was a very interesting talk although I have to say I’m not a fan of Paganism, or certainly that brand of Paganism because it’s too wishy washy new age. While religions such as Christianity are clear they are making crazy claims in a take it or leave it fashion, the views expressed were very much trying to force a square peg into a round hole and say it fits.

For example one of the things suggested was that what we called magic thirty years ago is now called neuro-linguistic programming and so a lot of Paganism is things science simply doesn’t understand yet. That would almost be an argument if it wasn’t for the fact that NLP is for the most part unproven bullshit. More importantly it really smacks of when alternative medicine practitioners try to attribute something that clearly doesn’t work but they are still trying to sell as being something to do with quantum theory, taking advantage of the lack of public understanding of the topic.

It was also interesting to witness the fact they couldn’t actually work out what they believed in. Most religions have differences in their beliefs – just look at the amount of different denominations of Christianity (or even Islam which now has more and more developing despite stricter controls over it and even, unbelievably, Scientology) but they do at least have some common beliefs. 100% of Christians believe in Jesus for example whereas the Pagans didn’t seem to be able to give us anything they could say 100% of Pagans believed in which, as Chris Tedd did, raises the question “how do you even know your a Pagan?”

Finally I also felt there was a lack of internal consistency in the beliefs, probably resulting in the fact that they can’t really work out what it is they believe in. For example they started by talking about reincarnation and then later talked about talking to dead ancestors so Heini raised the question “how can you talk to dead ancestors if they have been reincarnated?”

A much better approach to take to the belief system I felt was the one presented to us at last year’s session on Paganism where out speaker basically said “I’m not going to lie to you, we made it all up in the 60s, but it works for me.” Never the less, it was a very interesting evening and well worth attending.

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