Leeds Atheist Society

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 ).

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!

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 800×600 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 1024×768 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.

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.

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.

We finally have a date fixed for when our guest speaker, Dr. Gijsbert Stoet will be presenting his session of One Life on human needs.

That said is November 21st so mark it down as it will no doubt be an excellent session to attend.

Adam Cooper has written an interesting comment feature in the latest issue of LS2 discussing the Large Hadron Collider and the reaction it has had from the religious community.

In the article Adam points out that “the decline of believers can be closely correlated to the raised scientific awareness of the modern day.”

We also received a brief mention during his discussion of the rise of atheism in recent times.

For those of you that haven’t seen it in the news yet, here is the link to the BBC article on the atheist bus ad campaign which is now being administered British Humanist Association’s (The BHA).

BBC News.

There are only two places left for this year’s trip to London in November!

If you want to join us for what promises to be the social, educational and cultural trip of the year then get in contact with Norman as soon as possible with your

Bookings are now open for London 2008, so if you want to join us for an amazing weekend then head over to the weekend away page and begin reserving your place! It really is a fantastic weekend and we’re offering at half the price it would normally cost you so it’s a bargain.

What a week!

As always Intro Week has lived up to its billing of high octane action, the consumption of large quantities of alcohol and the sight of campus filled with fresh faced (or not deppending on what they up to the night before) students looking to sign up for the massive variety of societies on campus.

A-Soc was one of those societies and for only our second Intro Week we managed to attract our fair share of new members. In fact we have doubled our membership since this time last year!

Well done to all those that manned the stall all week and welcome to all our new members.

Finally, just a reminder that our Intro Meeting is taking place on Tuesday 30th September at 7pm in the ARC. We will be introducing the society and our events for the coming year and it is the ideal opportunity to get that first stamp on your membership cards! Don’t worry if you don’t have one yet, membership is still open. Catch up with a committee member and get signed up!