On March 7th Leeds Atheist Society began their fifth annual Reason Week. If you are not familiar with Leeds previous reason weeks, we have usually held it in a marquee on a central area of campus and the marquee was occupied for the whole week and we’ve had events all day! Unfortunately the layout of the university campus has changed and there is no longer a suitable area to set up a marquee; so the committee decided we would shift the focus towards a speaker orientated week.
We still wanted a presence on campus all week so we had a stall set up outside the university union and were running events from their and advertising our evening events. At times it was a battle against uncharacteristic Leeds weather; we had to move our stall under cover to avoid rain and weigh down our leaflets to stop them blowing away! Despite this we were still able to run our events, these included awareness discussions on Human Rights, Science and Medicine, Sex and Sexuality, Scepticism and Morality. We also had ever popular Make Your Own God: a blue peter style arts and craft session, Ask an Atheist, an afternoon promoting the Census Campaign and Debaptisms!
The main evening events started on Monday with a discussion on Religion as a Human Creation; the panel was made up of a Humanist, Sea of Faith and a Quaker. It was good discussion although we didn’t get much further than agreeing religion was a human creation! A side note, I still don’t really know what Sea of Faith are but enjoyed meeting and talking to them.
Tuesday we had Dr. Antony Lempert chair of the Secular Medical Forum who delivered a talk entitled ‘Cutting Religion out of Medicine’, it was entertaining but the serious message of the talk was put across very strongly, I highly recommend him if you want to know how religion still interferes with medicine in Britain today. His details will be available on the AHS speakers directory soon. Afterwards we headed down to our favourite karaoke bar!
Wednesday saw chief executive of the British Humanist Association Andrew Copson come up from London to talk about humanist ethics, he was enjoyed by all and we then went down to a local restaurant with Andrew and had some fantastic food!
Thursday we headed down to Humanist Society of West Yorkshire who were hosting a debate on Humanist chaplins, the debater for was head of the humanist chaplaincy network Gjisbert Stoet and chair of HSoWY chair Paul Dean argued against. Both sides made very compelling arguments and certainly give us all a lot to think about on the issue.
Friday we had Mark Edon talking about Creationism in the UK and the work that the British Centre for Science Education do to combat it. Generally thought of as an American problem, but is becoming one in the UK too; one example Mark brought along a genuine looking GCSE biology textbook that taught creationist pseudoscience and this book was sent out to secondary schools across the UK! The BCSE details will be available on the AHS speakers directory very soon.
The final event of the week was LAS’s famous All night debate we were outside the union from 10pm to 3am chatting to, mostly drunk, students over hot drinks and sweets. We had some entertaining discussions, and some idiotic ones such as one student who shouted at us for being atheists then walked off saying ‘I don’t believe in God but I’m not an atheist!’
I thoroughly enjoyed coordinating Reason Week 2011! The highlight of the week for me was all night debate, after Reason week had finished we had a couple of hours sleep and then headed to London for the AHS convention!
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