Non-prophet week: Update 1

A short while back I wrote about how, contrary to what a some religious people think, non-believers give aid too, and now with the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Socieities’ Non-prophet Week, we really get to show that is the case!

Non-prophet week has been organised as a series of events running from today to next Sunday, with nearly 20 student societies across the UK all banding together. Raising money for charity has always been high on the agenda for the Aston Humanists so we jumped at the chance to be involved!

Here’s a run-down of the events that we’ve organised and the charities that we are supporting and how they are going so far:

From 9pm last Thursday (that’s 97 hours and counting!) Aston Humanist, Emma Moseley, has not spoken a single word as part of a sponsored silence to raise money for Volunteers for Educational Support and Learning. Through VESL, Emma will be going to India in August to spend 4 months as a volunteer in Andhra Pradesh (Southern India), running English activity lessons within 3 local schools during the school day and running after-school clubs as well as generally helping to care for the orphans as many will be disabled or HIV positive. At the time of writing she’s more than half way to her £500 fund-raising target. You can sponsor her on her JustGiving page.

I myself have once again managed to marry my twin passions of running and charity by setting myself the challange of running 5km every morning for the duration of Non-prophet week. All the money raised will go to Amnesty International. You can sponsor me here, either as a lump some, or per km that I run.

I started the first of my 5km runs this morning in not exactly the best shape, having spent the weekend in Manchester at the rationalist-oriented QED conference, but still managed a time of 24:01, which I’m pretty pleased with.

One of our members, who has moved on to pastures new, has promised to treble their donation if I beat my personal best of 20:42, so the pressure’s on! I’m planning on running 7 different routes, both for a little variety and to prove that I’m not cheating (it's all recorded on my GPS watch). Here’s the route from this morning.

We’ve also planned a series of bake sales throughout the week. Today, Nick Martin baked a batch of his special, secret recipe white chocolate brownies, which went down an absolute storm! The whole lot sold out in 45 minutes and we had countless people telling us how delicious they were! With £2s worth of ingredients we managed to raise £30 for Book Aid International, a charity that promotes literacy by providing books to countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Having a collection bucket really helped as, more often than not, the people that didn’t want a brownie still chucked in a few pence. It all adds up! No cakes tomorrow but I’ll be out and about on campus with the bucket during my lunch break.

For Wednesday we’ve got more cakes planned. Jack Hooker’s baking some of his mind-bogglingly multi-coloured cupcakes, honorary humanist member Emma Birkett’s baked some toffee and apple muffins (the apples are from her garden!), and my very lovely wife will be baking something too (although the first she might know about that is when she reads this). The money from Wednesday’s bake sale and the next day’s bucket shake will go to One World Action, a charity that helps marginalised populations, with a particular focus on women’s rights.

On Friday 11th we thought we’d mix it up a little and organise a Donation Station so that people who don’t much spare cash can still contribute by donating unwanted items. We’ll be accepting anything and everything in good conditions, with everything we collect donated to a Barnardo’s charity shop. Non-prophet week won’t end on the Friday though, I still have the last of my runs on Saturday and Sunday morning!

It’s definitely been tougher than previously to raise money, which is understandable given the financially constrained times we are in, but the support we’ve had so far has been great, and we’re all the more appreciative for it. We've decided to spread the money we raise across a number of difference charities to reflect the diverse causes that humanists and our society in particular support.

At the time of writing we’ve raised around £350!

Letter from Hardcash productions

Received this a couple of days back (unfortunately only just had time to catch up on the emails):

---
Dear Aston Humanist Society

My name is Andrew Smith and I am a producer with a TV company - www.hardcashproductions.com - which makes documentaries for Dispatches on Channel 4. Naomi Philips gave me your contact details from the BHA. I'm developing a documentary looking at Islamic faith schools - primary and secondary schools, especially independent ones - in the light of concerns which have been expressed over the nature of some of the teaching which may be taking place, and wanted to know if you had come across concerns in your local community area of this nature? I'm also interested in teaching and child protection at unregulated madrassas.

I would very much welcome a confidential chat over any issues of this nature you may have come across in your area. Could you give me a ring on *** or email me a number to contact you on?

Thanks very much and I look forward to hearing from you
--

No idea what to really make of it, or why they would ask me! I've got some opinions on faith schools, sure, but I'm less sure that I'm brave enough to get involved in TV stuff.

No harm in ringing him and asking for more details I guess.

Fresher's Fair 2010

Aston's 2010 Fresher’s Fair is over and thanks to some of James’ delicious cookies, my constant, over-enthusiastic ranting about humanism, and of course our general all-round geeky charm, we had just shy of 50 people sign up! It might seem a modest figure compared to some student societies, but I can’t stress enough that a humanist society is really up against it at a university with such a large and religiously diverse student body.

I make a virtue of the fact that we were the only society and voice for non-believers on campus, but I dearly wish that wasn’t the case. And I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t intimidated by the sheer number, size, financial backing and enthusiasm of all the religious societies. A quick pan around the stands in the main Fresher’s Fair hall showed three explicitly Islamic societies (although none of them could actually explain why and how they were different to each other, other than vague statements to the effect of ‘we interpret the Qu’ran in slightly different ways’); Hinduism had the Hindu Society and Krishna Consciousness; Christians had the Christian Union and the University Chaplaincy and Sikhs had the Sikh Society. Coupled with these were societies that are not explicitly religious, but are bound into religious-cultural traditions, for example nationality-based societies like the Pakistani and Bangladeshi Societies, or the Bhangra society, which is a form of music and dance intimately woven with Sikh and Punjabi traditions.

Religious societies have ready-made memberships; a Muslim/Hindu/Christian student will go into that room and home in on their relevant society, and may not engage much, if at all, with the alternative societies. The problem, at least with a humanist society, is almost one of definition:  few people know what humanism is or what a humanist might think, do or believe (or more accurately not believe). My favourite response to the question “have you heard of humanism?” was “what, you’re not like Satanists are you? ‘Cause I’m really not into that, yeah”. We’ve still got some way to go before humanisms gains the recognition and even superficial understanding of established religions, but despite reactions like this, which made me chuckle and despair in equal measure, I was heartened to hear more positive responses than last year’s event, so we’re definitely heading in the right direction.

Gauging a student’s reaction was all a matter of reading their top lip. As soon as you say it’s a society for free-thinking atheists and agnostics, you either (1) get a smile, in which case you know you might talking to someone vaguely interested, or (2) watch their top lip curl into a grimace, which reveals that they’re almost definitely religious, and almost definitely not keen on hearing about how non-believers have morals too. Reactions to our stand ranged from “Atheists? Brilliant! Good on you” to “I don’t deal with petty humanists”, with ambivalence and disappointed ”you’re a lost-cause” headshakes in between.

Of course all this diversity has the advantage of throwing up some very interesting characters. I vowed to my colleagues that I wouldn’t get involved in a fruitless ‘religion is just mental, oh not it’s not’ debate, but I just couldn’t help myself. Especially not when a committee member of the Islamic Society starts talking about irrefutable scientific evidence in the Qu’ran, like how ‘salt and freshwater do not mix’, or that old chestnut of how ‘evolution is just a theory’; man must have been made by Allah from water and clay because there is no other way to explain how people, who are 70% water, could have arisen in the desert, where it never rains. These are the conversations that give me even more drive to promote and participate in not just humanist, but also scientific causes. This conversation boiled down to not just misguided theological principles, but a fundamental misunderstanding of just some basic science.

The brilliant, but divisive Richard Dawkins has written an endorsement for all member groups of The National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies, which very neatly captures exactly the ideals I was promoting to all of Aston’s new, and returning, students.

Students away from home for the first time are faced with a barrage of invitations from religious groups of various kinds, all eager to take advantage of the newcomers' unfamiliarity with their surroundings and their natural apprehensiveness about what lies in store for them, to lure them into the religious fold. I therefore congratulate the Aston Humanist Society for offering a real alternative, creating an environment in which young people can actively explore and celebrate the natural world and formulate an approach to ethics which is not dependent on superstition or myth.  Societies like this one offer a tremendous service, both to students who wish to learn about reality, and to the cause of atheism, humanism and secularism as a whole.

Best wishes,

Richard Dawkins

Occasional excitable chats like these aside, we were careful not to alienate those with religious views who might want to engage with humanists in ways other than arguments about the veracity of evolutionary theory. We were keen to emphasise that arguing with religious people was not our main aim (I should tattoo “you cannot reason someone out of something they did not reason themselves into” onto the back of my hands), but rather to promote the positive idea that people can be good, moral, loving and happy without necessarily having God, a holy book or even their mother to tell them to be so and that we champion lots of positive, religion-free causes, for example pro-science campaigns like Science Is Vital #scienceisvital, raising money for charities like Amnesty, Cancer Research UK and Medicine Sans Frontier, and organ and blood donation (the latter being a ‘religion-free cause’ only if you don’t include Jehovah’s Witnesses, of course).

We also had fantastic response to our environmental friendly, pro-literacy, university-wide bookswap proposal, which means that the university may just have to pay a bit more attention this time round, and not just fob us off excuses like ‘it’s a fire hazard’ or that a box of books in the corner is ‘not in keeping with the university aesthetic’. I feel our first petition coming on!

On a lighter note, we also had a competition to find the best science-related joke. The prize: a signed copy of Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science. The best of the bunch submitted on the day was: “What does it take to run the Marathon? 80p.” The competition will stay open all week. If you think you can top the one above, email it to astonhumanistsociety@gmail.com with your name and number. All the jokes will be read out at next week’s meeting and the one that raises the biggest laugh will win the book!

Now that madness of Fresher’s Fair is over, here’s the line-up for the rest of October:

Thursday the 7^th of October will be our first meeting of the academic year and will be a chance for all of our new members to get to know each other over some drinks and nibbles.

Wednesday the 13^th of October we’re meeting at 6.30pm before heading over the Victoria pub to see Simon Singh speak to the Birmingham Skeptics in the Pub about his run in with the British Chiropractic Association and the subsequent Libel Reform campaign.

Thursday 21^st of October will be our first discussion: “Having a baby: right or privilege?”, an ethical minefield which is taking on even more importance given potential revisions to government policy with regards to IVF treatment in reaction to the financial crisis and the need to cut NHS spending.

All the scheduled events will go up on the public Aston Humanist Society Google Calendar. To make things easy, there’s a handy button which will automatically add them to your own diaries!

Meetings on campus will be held weekly on Thursdays at 7pm in the Presentation Suite on the second floor of the Aston University Student’s Guild. Membership is £5 and runs for a calendar year from October 2010. £5 is the minimum required fee set by the Student’s Guild to cover the cost of admin., hiring rooms etc. throughout the year. We’d like to be completely free, but the price of a couple of pints is pretty good value for being part of one the coolest clubs on campus.

We'll be over the moon if all the 50 people that signed up today became regular active members, but we're realistic enough to know that probably won't be the case. The main thing is we’re continuing to grow and we’re continuing to provide a voice on campus for those who are proud of thinking for themselves.

If you’re not sure about joining the society or unable to come to meetings, feel free to email astonhumanistsociety@gmail.com for more information about us, or how you can get involved through the blog, Facebook pages and Twitter @astonhumanists!

Fresher's Fair and Future Plans

The new academic year is nearly upon us and after a summer of slumber the Aston Humanist Society is truly wide awake and ready to set minds alight once again! It all kicks off with Fresher’s Fair next on Sunday 3rd of September in the Aston Student’s Guild at 11 o clock. For anyone that can make it, it’s to speak to some of us in person, find out what we’re all about and join up!


It’s important to stress that we’re absolutely not an 'anti-theist' society that exists just out to ruffle religious feathers, those with religious beliefs are very welcome to join; the main objective of the group is to provide a forum for discussion so that people can express their ideas and opinions on things that interest them.

Membership is £5 and runs for a calendar year from October 2010. £5 is the minimum required fee set by the Student’s Guild to cover the cost of admin., hiring rooms etc. throughout the year. We’d like to be completely free, but the price of a couple of pints is pretty good value for being part of one the coolest clubs on campus. To sweeten the deal (if you’ll excuse the pun), everyone that signed up last year was treated to a special homemade humanist fairy cake, this year we’ve got some special cookies lined up!

Meetings will be held weekly on Thursdays at 7pm in the Presentation Suite on the second floor of the Aston University Student’s Guild. For those unlucky people that can’t make it to meetings and events in person, the blog is the best way to keep abreast of the latest action and contribute to articles and ideas.

At some of the meetings last year, we attempted answer, or at least think about, some of the questions that god wasn’t going to answer for us: “How do we deal with the involvement of religion in major health issues, namely the Pope and his reigniting of the condoms/Aids situation”, “Should we treat paedophiles and criminals or mentally ill?”, “Trust in doctors or trust in god: how should society deal with clashes between people's beliefs and medical ethics?” and “Do criminals should have the right to vote?”.

Members can nominate a topic on anything that they wish by emailing astonhumanistsociety@gmail.com or coming along to meetings. A doozy of a topic we’ve got lined up for one of the next discussions is “Having a baby: right or privilege?” an ethical minefield which is taking on even more importance given potential revisions to government policy with regards to IVF treatment in reaction to the financial crisis and the need to cut NHS spending.

It isn’t all intense, high-brow and heated debates though! Last year we also had regular movie/documentary nights (including Richard Dawkin’s The Enemy of Reason, Religulous and the BBC doc. My Name Is Muhammad, we hosted talks by Ariane Sherine (Atheist Bus Campaign) and Rebecca Watson (Skepchick), and took part in fundraising events like AmnesTEA parties, and the Cancer Research UK Relay for Life.

This year the plan is for a monthly rota of events roughly broken down in to:

1. Weekly discussion meeting on a topic decided by members
2. Documentary/movie night
3. Birmingham Skeptics in the Pub talk
4. Social in the pub, which will be a chance to do a bit of drinking along with the thinking

with other events and guest speakers slotted in as and when then happen.

All the scheduled events will go up on the public Aston Humanist Society Google Calendar. To make things easy, there’s a handy button which will automatically add them to your own diaries!

The first meeting will be on Thursday the 7^th of October and will be a chance for all of our new members to get to know each other over some free drinks and nibbles. The first proper event is a cracker: a trip to the Victoria on Wednesday the 13^th of October to see Simon Singh speak to the Birmingham Skeptics in the Pub about his run in with the British Chiropractic Association and the subsequent Libel Reform campaign (which you should definitely sign up to and support!).

We’d also like announce that we are now an official member of the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies (also confusingly shortened to the AHS), with myself and James Ellor as the two members on the committee.

With the society really finding its feet and promising to go from strength to strength, it looks to be an great year ahead, chock full of fantastic events and opportunities to shares ideas, vent your spleen, or just listen to what others have to say on some interesting and often controversial issues. With the support of the AHS and other societies like ours, we’ll be able to put on bigger and better events and contribute to an ever-growing network of student groups promoting free-thinking!

How and Why I Started the Aston Humanist Society

I founded the Aston Humanist Society in February 2009, quite simply because there wasn’t a society anything like it that I could join myself. Perhaps the idiom that ‘getting atheists together is like trying to herd cats’ had put off anyone who had tried to start a non-theist society before me. I’m not even sure what took me so long to get round to it, perhaps my PhD finally wasn’t keeping me as busy as my supervisor would have liked.

Of the 48 societies at Aston University, there are nine religious ones, including all the biggies: Islamic Soc, Hindu Soc, Christian Union, Sikh Soc and Jewish Soc. Although there are many more denominations who are not officially listed with the Student Union). It’s a good reflection of the multicultural environment that the university is well known for. What the list of societies doesn’t reflect, however, is that there also are many students that lead a secular life that would enjoy meeting like minded people too.

Having decided to take action, I faced two big problems: deciding what the society was actually about and almost as importantly what to call it. Like the Skeptics in the Pub groups, but unlike religious societies or the increasing number of nationality/culture-based societies at Aston, there was no pre-formed idea of what you had to be/know in order to join. Because there was no precedent, I set the society up to be some nebulous idea of what I thought was missing: an open forum promoting values such as freedom of expression, and scientific and personal inquiry, centred around free discussion of philosophy, politics, science, religion and history.

I could have could just have easily called it the Aston Secular/Rationalist/Skeptics Society (or the slightly more fun Thinkers-Not-Drinkers), but settled on Humanist simply because I am one, and I feel that humanism neatly captures the secular/rational vibe I was aiming for. Lots of people are essentially humanists, but just don’t know the term or decide not to call themselves by such a name. I guess the trouble with people who insist on thinking for themselves is that they don’t usually like being labelled! I deliberately steered clear of ‘atheist’ as it has (sadly) come to have connotations of exclusivity and I didn’t want anyone to think that the group had an anti-theist agenda and be put off from joining.

It was more than just a riposte to all the religious groups, although I must admit that walking past ‘boarding the Jesus Train, WOOP WOOP!’ and ‘Obligatory Islamic Knowledge’ posters on my way to the office every morning had a little something to do with it. Starting the Aston Humanist Society was my pro-active response to something else that had been bothering me throughout my studies. Without (I hope) sounding too high-minded, I was increasingly bothered by what I saw, and still see, as a pervasive culture of having ‘just enough education to perform’ at university. I know that for some, being at university is about getting a degree and then getting a job; no more, no less, and it is not really my place to judge that ambition. I think AC Grayling eloquently captures exactly how I feel (as he almost invariably does) in this quote from a short essay on Education:

“Liberal education is a vanishing ideal in the contemporary West, most notably in its Anglophone regions. Education is mainly restricted to the young and is no longer liberal education as much as something less ambitious and too exclusively geared to specific aims – otherwise, of course, very important – of employability. This is a loss; for the aim of liberal education is to produce people who go on learning after their formal education has ceased; who think and question, and know how to find answers when they need them. This is especially significant in the case of political and moral dilemmas in society, which will always occur and will always have to be negotiated afresh; so members of a community cannot afford to be unreflective and ill-informed if civil society is to be sustainable  ... People who are better informed and more reflective are more likely to be considerate than those who are – and who are allowed to remain – ignorant, narrow-minded, selfish, and uncivil in the profound sense that characterises so much of human experience now”.

To help get the group started I was lucky enough to have had the help of a number of organisations. Happenstance meant that I decided to start the group at the very same time that The National Federation of Atheist, Humanist & Secular Student Societies was being launched. I was lucky enough to attend the inaugural event, speak to lots of other societies, get a ‘starting a student society’ help pack, and even get some helpful advice from Richard Dawkins and AC Grayling. I also joined the Secular Portal which was a great way of getting in touch with other secular students, and sharing practical ideas, and managed to rope in the Birmingham Humanists to help out with our Fresher’s Fair recruitment stall  at the start of the 2009/10 academic year. The brilliant cartoonist Thad Guy was also kind enough to let us use his images for posters and flyers.

We’ve held weekly meetings which have attempted to try and answer, or at least think about, some of the questions that god wasn’t going to answer for us: “How do we deal with the involvement of religion in major health issues, namely the Pope and his reigniting of the condoms/Aids situation”, “Should we treat paedophiles and criminals or mentally ill?”, “Trust in doctors or trust in god: how should society deal with clashes between people's beliefs and medical ethics?” and “Do criminals should have the right to vote?”. None of these questions are going to help anyone pass their degrees directly, but I’d like to think that everyone benefited from the critical thinking and discussion that took place. I certainly left each meeting feeling a little more enlightened and with a lot more to think about.

We’ve also worked in collaboration with the Birmingham SITP on a couple of occasions and hosted both Ariane Sherine and Rebecca Watson for special ‘Skeptics in the Classroom’ meetings, held fund raising AmnesTEA parties, the Aston Happy Humanist team raised over £500 for the Cancer Research UK Relay for Life and we’re working with Aston’s Environment and Sustainability office to sponsor a university-wide bookswap scheme to promote the pleasures of environmentalism and reading.

It started out as just a few of my friends meeting in the university bar, but over the last year and a half the AHS I would like to think that the AHS has been a success and achieved at least some of its lofty ambition. The start of the 2010/11 academic year brings fresh hope, ideas and scope for growth. I’m not sure where I’ll end up once my PhD is over, but if there isn’t a society to join, I’ll use this experience to start another one. The ubiquity of social networking makes starting and maintaining societies much easier.

I hope that I have at least laid the foundations of some form of secular society at Aston. I hope the meetings, events, and this blog will allow people get together in some form or other discuss the world around them, for no other reason than because they want to think for themselves and learn what others have to say.

[A version of this post has been published on the Birmingham Skeptics in the Pub page]