The Atheist Blogger

About two weeks ago I attended the launch of the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies (AHS) in London, my full blog post about which can be found here. Last Friday I was contacted by a journalist from the London student newspaper “London Student” concerning the launch. He’d been passed my information by the group organisers because (a) I go to a university of London, and (b) I’m a blogger and like the attention. At the time he phoned, I was busy coding some of my group project with a few other people, but I managed to sneak away to some corner of the Computer Science department (which stereotypically is in the basement) to do a quick interview.

He asked me some questions about the AHS, why it was a good idea to have such a society in the UK, my experiences in running an atheist society at university, and what I thought of the Christian buses in London. I answered the questions as best I could, and I made damned sure that I emphasized the whole “freedom of speech” issue concerning the atheist & Christian buses, something I’ve blogged quite passionately on.

The whole article is in the latest edition of the paper and also contains commentary by some AHS representatives and a Christian Union president. The overall article is pretty good, and paints us in a good light. One small misquote I was rather worried about was this:

“The Student Union was against us forming,” head of Royal Holloway Secular Students Adrian Hayter said: “they seem to think we’re anti-religious and that we don’t have anything to say because we don’t believe anything.”

Firstly, I never mentioned our Student Union; what I actually said was that “several students were against us forming” (this was evident as some of my flyers were ripped down), and that generally people thought we were an anti-religious group (if only) that didn’t matter because we don’t have any beliefs. Whilst it is true that several societies in England have had trouble getting ratified with their Student Unions (Chloë Clifford-Frith of the AHS mentioned that in the article), it isn’t true for our society for one very specific reason:

We have never attempted to get ratified.

It’s not like we feel intimidated or anything, but we simply haven’t got around to doing it. We’ve instead concentrated on building up enough members so we can get ratified when the time comes (you need 20 signatures). Granted, I didn’t tell the interviewer that we weren’t ratified, so I can understand where the confusion arose, but I now wonder if a quote like that might have implications when we try to get ratified later this week (hopefully). I’m not sure whether to leave it and simply handle any objections when the time comes, or ask the London Student to correct it.

Hopefully they SU will allow us, given that we are a “secular” group and technically open to all faiths, but we’ll see what their decision is down the line.