HUMANIST SOCIETY OF WEST YORKSHIRE
Affiliated to the British Humanist Association

NEWSLETTER (121), DECEMBER 2009

Next Meeting, Thursday 3rd  December 2009, 7.30 to 9.00pm at Swarthmore
“Just Suppose” Mike Lawrence  (NB, this is the first Thursday)

The first half of the presentation, produced and narrated by Mike himself, sets the scene for the need to question the world view given to us by the Christian Church.  It asks the audience to “just suppose” they are wrong.    It then travels through a critical investigation of the dates allocated to the events narrated in New Testament scripture.  This investigation demonstrates that the baseline story of the four gospels cannot possibly be credible due to the dates allocated to the story, by the story itself: dates which conflict with events in other, non-canonical, literature.

The presentation claims, and demonstrates, that literature exists that reveals that Jesus, as in ‘Jesus Christ’, existed as an allegorical character long before the dates attributed to the version of the Jesus character found in the four gospels and “Acts”; thereby proving these five books to be reworked stories of an ancient allegorical myth, rather than factual biographies.

Having presented the case for a mythical, as opposed to a historic, Jesus and thereby establishing the need for a more in-depth investigation of all faith systems, the second half travels back to our first civilised societies and introduces the concept of theological belief evolving from astrology.  It demonstrates how the very core of theology is steeped in simple naked-eye astronomy and the primitive ideas thereby formed; concepts that were then evolved and used to create a recurring theme of  ‘God Child’ in different guises, in nearly all ancient cultures.  The presentation makes many parallels with naked-eye astronomy and mythology.  It also demonstrates how these links have found their way from ancient mythology to form the base-line stories in present-day theology.  It then tackles the issue of how these newly created theologies became entrenched in the psyche of humankind. 
This then leaves about half an hour for your comments and questions to Mike.           

November meeting “Student Atheist , Humanist and Secular Societies” (AHS for short). Norman Ralph

The Leeds U.U. Atheist Society was launched in January 2007; only ten students came to its first meeting and half joined!  In April 2007 they held three ‘Awareness Weeks’ attracting over a thousand students to the meetings.  It is now the largest student AHS in the U.K.   Six societies met in Edinburgh in January 2008 to form the national federation (AHS); it had its national launch in February 2009 at Conway Hall.  It represents twenty student societies with a total of around a thousand members.

Religious societies are very powerful in student unions with only 10% of students they have half of the money available for Union societies!  Thus 90% of students were not represented before this.  Moslems can refuse to take exams on their holy days.  They can also wear the burqa in exams, there has already been a case of it being used for a substitute candidate!  The religious societies have been very much against the Atheist Society.  The Islamic Society were invited to the screening of the TV programme “What Moslems Want”  This ended in very heated arguments from the Moslems.  The scheduled speaker on “I’ll Mock Mohamed if I want To”, on the Danish cartoons, received death threats and hate mail, resulting in the meeting not taking place.  A motion at a meeting to outlaw the unethical slaughter of meat animals greatly aroused the Islamic and Jewish societies.  Atheist Society members were personally insulted and one was physically assaulted!  In April this year, the Atheist Soiety. held an  ‘Atheist Week’; their generator was vandalised and Islamic graffiti daubed on their hired marquee.  So the Society had to pay for cleaning.  The Christian societies are less unfriendly as they hope to make conversions,  However, the Atheist Soc. has made two religious students change their ideas - even a Jehova’s Witness!

The society is now in its fourth year, so it has been handed over to new students, not the founding members.  The main focus of the national body is to give support to get young people involved and keep the AHS societies going. Young people can make a difference in the campaign against faith schools, for instance.

Quotes of the month.
 “Scientologists  should be forced to justify their delusional lunacies - the only sadness is that other religions are apparently exempt from having to do the same.”  (Marina Hyde, The Guardian.)

“Who will rise to challenge this cancer of segregation seeping into the conscience of Muslim youth?  The same clerics who sit on inter-faith and multiculturalism conferences and breakfasts with politicians are the very people who endorse the anti-Jew and anti-Christian message coming from their Saudi masters.”
(Tarek Fatah, National Post)

“The Vatican is doubtless right to say that Christianity has shaped Europe’s destiny.  But so too have social and intellectual forces opposed to organised religion, starting with the 18th-century Enlightenment and the French Revolution and going all the way to Marxism-Leninism and the liberalism of the European Court of Human Rights” (Tony Barber, F. T.)

Dates for Your Diary;
Meetings, unless indicated otherwise, are at Swarthmore 2-7 Woodhouse Sq. LS3 1AD at 7.30pm.
(Park in the adjacent ‘Joseph’s Well Car Park)
14th January; “The New Atheists” Tim Stephenson, North Yorkshire Humanist Group

11th February; “What Darwin Didn’t know”  Written and presented by the Professor of Evolutionary Biology, Imperial College.  This programme was on BBC4 at a late hour, so you may well not have seen it.

11th March;  “ The Catholic Church - Big Church or Big Business” Mike Granville, Sheffield Humanist Soc.