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Open Letter to the Student’s Union

Adrian Hayter — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 12:38:30 +0000

The following is an email I sent to the Student’s Union at Royal Holloway after they made the grave error (in my opinion) of banning the Christian Union from holding their faith week after an incident at one of their lunchtime talks. Comments, opinions, and disagreements are all welcome.

To Whom It May Concern,

I was absolutely astounded at the decision of the Student’s Union to cancel the lunchtime bookings made by the Christian Union at Royal Holloway. Before I continue, let it be known that I am not a Christian, nor do I support the views held by the Christian Union in the slightest. I am the president of the Royal Holloway Secular Students group on campus, and despite our differences we have had a positive relationship with the Christian Union during the last 3 years. This relationship has enabled us to have several engaging debates on issues such as religion and the existence of God. It was at one of these debates (“Can we know God?”) last night that I was informed by a member of the Christian Union about the SU’s aforementioned decision.

I am writing to you to express my outrage and utter disbelief over this decision, which I believe was made without proper consideration or rationalisation. Firstly, the email that was sent to cancel these events and offer the refund of the fees paid was undeniably vague, alluding to something “wholly inappropriate” that had apparently caused “controversy” at the lunch event on Tuesday 9th February. I later learned (from an unverified source, so please correct me if this is wrong) that this controversial, inappropriate idea was that God had caused the Asian tsunami as some sort of punishment^[1].

If this is indeed the cause of the controversy, I can completely understand why. Such an idea is not only irrational, but blatantly disrespectful of the people, and families of people lost in that terrible tragedy. You may wonder then, why I am so against your decision. It is because, as a rationalist and sceptic, I cannot abide censorship of any form. All ideas, especially the controversial ones, are valid for discussion. Our entire modern culture, science, and political system is built on radical inappropriate ideas being discussed openly without fear. The strength of the ideology of free speech is that anyone can have an opinion, no-matter how absurd or offensive, because at the end of the day, those on the opposition have the same freedom to refute the absurdities.

It is unbelievable that at a university, a place where the very discussion of ideas forms part of the purpose of the institution, censorship of an idea can take place under the guise of “not being suitable” as you stated in your email. By disallowing the presentation of an idea, the Student’s Union has issued a statement; that it has the control over what students can think, what we can discuss in public, what ideas are “correct” and which are not. If anything is inappropriate here, it is the use of political correctness at an institution where the search for truth, whatever that truth might be, should be held as the highest form of being. I ask you, what is the purpose of our education if we cannot question what we are taught, challenge ideas where we see fit, and discuss the alternative possibilities openly?

I plead you to see reason, and let the Christian Union continue to host talks, preach, and cause controversy. Controversy feeds the mind; it allows us to think about new ideas, to explore them, and to refute them. Causing controversy is a right protected by the freedom of speech; getting offended by such controversy and using that offence to censor ideas, is not. By all means, be offended, shout, scream with a fiery passion, but for the sake of the freedoms which we hold dear, do not stoop to the level of censoring ideas! As I have previously stated, there isn’t much agreement to be had between my society and the Christian Union, yet I respect their right to have the opinions they do, as long as they respect my right to disagree with them. We debate them annually to share our views with those who might not have heard them before, to challenge notions that may be held dear, and to make known our disagreement in an intellectual forum.

I have sent a copy of this email to my friends, to members of the Royal Holloway Secular Students, and to members of the Christian Union. I will give them instructions to forward it to you if they support the freedom of speech and the discussion of ideas as much as I do. I hope this will make you see the irrationality behind your decision. If not, and if the Christian Union are still prohibited from speaking at the end of the week, I am quite prepared to send this letter to the Founder^[2], the NUS^[3], and as many media organisations connected to students as possible. I honestly hope it does not come to that, but if it must, it must.

-Adrian

Our debate last night went extremely well, with both speakers for the atheist / agnostic side presenting clear arguments and defending criticism from the audience. It helps when one of them is a PhD student in evolutionary psychology though.

This was confirmed by a member of the Christian Union I spoke with today. ↩
Our non-union student supported newspaper. ↩
National Union of Students ↩

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I Am Alive

Adrian Hayter — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:35:41 +0000

This is just a quick blog post to highlight the reasons for my continued absence from the blog, as my last post was more than a month ago, and I haven’t posted on a “regular” basis for several months. There are a few reasons for this, the main one being an increased workload at university, given that I am now in my final year of study for my degree. It’s more than that though; I like writing blog posts, but I generally think that blog posts that aren’t at least a few paragraphs long are ultimately pointless unless they are really meant as quick placeholders to let people know what I’m up to.

I’ve been told multiple times by people that I’ve exceptionally good at explaining things (usually), and when I have an idea for a blog post, I want to research it as much as I can before I write about it. I usually read several sources, and the whole process takes a good hour at least, if not more. Hence my problem is finding a few hours free where I can work on the post without interruptions. Of course, the other problem is that Twitter has practically removed the need to write small updates on the blog. Not only do I stay in contact with a lot of my friends and readers via Twitter, I can post tiny bursts of information from literally anywhere with a 3G internet connection.

Another problem is that other projects have suddenly become popular, largely because of my advertising them on Twitter. AtheistForums.org for instance, has exploded with new members and posts in the past few months. Various events in the world have managed to piss me off so much that I’ve become increasingly more interested in politics, namely that of Libertarianism in the UK (a criminally underrepresented minority in my opinion). I could rant about so many things on this blog, but I’m worried it’ll just divert off to something of a personal blog again, rather than one focused on atheism.

Anyway, I’m going to plow ahead and see what happens. I want this blog to stay on track, and I certainly have no plans to take it down. I’ve been doing some “atheistic” work recently, so I’ll be blogging about that when I find the time. Tomorrow for instance, I’m going to the House of Lords (part of British parliament) with the President of the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist, and Secular Student Societies (AHS) and the British Humanist Association (BHA). Last week, I met Ariane Sherine at a book swap event in Windsor, and I have the photo to prove it:

@ah8r + @arianesherine = @awesomeness

So watch this space. It’ll be updated eventually, but possibly not as often as I have managed before. I’d just like to thank everyone who has supported the blog thus far, and that includes all my readers, all my twitter followers, and anyone else who’s stopped by and thought “cool blog”.

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Stuck to My Seat

Adrian Hayter — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 23:00:20 +0000

Last night, Derren Brown promised to show a subliminal film that would glue a lot of us to our seats; we would literally not be able to get up. A lot of people watched, and over 500,000 of us were “stuck”, myself included. My friends Florian and Laura were watching with me, but after the film ended they were able to stand up without any problems. I found myself suddenly incapable of doing so.

There were a lot of cries of “you’re joking!” and “stop messing us around”, which slowly but surely turned into gasps of shock and horror as they realised that I really couldn’t stand up. The best I could do was get a few cm of the chair by pushing up with my hands, but my legs simply refused to support me. It was a weird feeling, but as I watched the subliminal clip, I felt my legs getting heavier and heavier. By the end, I could hardly feel them at all, and as I tried to get up, they turned to jelly and all the energy went out of me.

My friend filmed the event laughing at my futile efforts to lift myself. If it’s not too embarrassing I’ll upload it to YouTube sometime this week for you to watch. Next week, Derren has promised to turn us into “psychic spies”, which will be very interesting. When Florian and I viewed the subliminal film again today, nothing happened to either of us, and I reckon the subliminal messages are shown through the entire episode instead of the small film that was meant to do the job. Derren is all about misdirection after all!

Update: Here is a picture of my friend (and fellow atheist) Robert Heywood (@rjheywood) stuck to his seat:

Witchcraft, suggestion, or laziness? You decide.

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Off to Egypt!

Adrian Hayter — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 21:48:26 +0000

Tomorrow I am jetting off to see the Pharoahs for a 10 day holiday. My mother, sister, and I will be going up the Nile to as many locations as humanly possible in the short space of time we have in the country. I’ll be taking my camera (and 24GB of memory cards) with me, so I’ll have a load of photos to share when I get back.

Naturally, I probably won’t have any internet out there, and whilst I still may be able to send the occasional message on Twitter, I won’t be posting on the blog. However, I sent a tweet out last week asking if anyone was interested in guest blogging, and I got two quick replies from Samantha Miller and S. A. Alenthony. They will be posting stuff in my absence, so make sure to be nice to them and give them lots of great comments!

I’ll be back on the 10th, but I probably won’t be posting for a few days. After that, I plan to resume development of the “atheist blog rankings” for which I will need plenty of suggestions from you guys. I’ll update you on that nearer the time though!

So long!

-Adrian

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YouTube Thursday Saturday – Michael Jackson L.I.M

Adrian Hayter — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 11:00:39 +0000

So I was planning on doing a YouTube Thursday, but our BBQ party turned into a night of card games (Phase 10 FTW!) culminating in a poker game that ended quite early Friday morning. Of course whilst we were playing, the news of Michael Jackson’s demise arrived through a text message. At first, we were certain it was a joke, so I fired up TweetDeck (news travels faster in the Twitterverse), expecting to see nothing but the random tweets of people I follow. This was not to be, as my screen was suddenly filled with the words “Michael Jackson”, “heart attack”, “dead”, and links to various news sources that were covering the story. My heart sunk, and I said to my stunned friends “Oh my goodness…it’s true”.

We got the news quite early on, so early that when we turned on the T.V to watch the BBC news flash, the reporters were still saying that nothing was confirmed, that the LA Times were the only ones saying he was dead, and that other reports claimed he was in a coma, but still alive. I hoped that the LA Times had received a bad source, but 30 minutes later and all the networks were showing the official reports from the hospital; that Michael Jackson had collapsed at his home, fallen into a coma, and had died on the way to hospital. For an hour, medical staff attempted to revive him, but they were unsuccessful.

So for this special YouTube Saturday, here are some of his greatest songs. Oh, and to get away from the dreary and religious “R.I.P”, I say L.I.M (Live In Memory) which is much more upbeat.

Black or White:

Earth Song:

Thriller:

Bad:

I Want You Back (Jackson 5)

ABC (Jackson 5)

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The AHS AGM

Adrian Hayter — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 22:00:23 +0000

So my last two rather sporadic posts talked very briefly about the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist, and Secular Student Societies (AHS) AGM, and how I got elected to the executive position of Secretary. What I thought I’d do is write a more detailed account of my weekend.

I caught the train up to Coventry at around 13:00 on Friday 19th, and the journey was pretty decent. There was only one change (at Reading) and I managed to not leave my suitcase on the train like I did the last time I was travelling across the country (luckily that time the train was in the station for 30 minutes so I was able to get back on board and retrieve it!). I was in a carriage that had laptop plug sockets, so I booted up and watched some comedy clips I had to pass the time. A couple of hours later, I was arriving into Coventry. I’d already phoned Stewart of Warwick Atheists so he could meet me at the station, but lines got crossed somewhere (my fault probably) and he had gone to Leamington station instead! Not panicking, I followed his directions to a bus stop and caught the bus to Warwick University Campus.

I finally met up with Stewart and Alex (of Oxford Atheists) at a university café, and they took me to a bar on campus. There I was greeted by several other Warwick atheists, and the British Humanist Association (BHA) representative, the lovely Andrew Copson. The afternoon went on, many drinks were had, and more and more atheist students from all over the country kept on entering the bar. We eventually moved away from the noise of the band to a spot next to the bar, where we could pull two tables together and order our meal. At some point during the evening, we tried to come up with a list of atheist songs, that is, songs that either mention atheism or could be interpreted as atheistic. We then proceeded to try and find these in the jukebox. I seem to remember putting in “Losing my religion” by R.E.M and “Thoughts of a dying atheist” by Muse; for some reason Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen was also selected.

Then we all decided to go to the shop, buy (more) alcohol and sit on the grass in a circle and chat. The AHS Press Officer, Chloë Clifford-Frith had also arrived, and I caught up with her on the various press issues I had blogged about. I dutifully surrendered a blanket I had brought along so that people could sit on the grass, a decision I would come to regret as it started raining, since I had to sleep under it that night.

The next morning (I slept over at Stewart’s house) was a rush to get ready in time to catch the bus. The morning was a lot of administration, listening to the reports from various people on the status of the organisation, and voting on very specific issues to do with the constitution. Being students though, we tried to keep it fun, and soon it was time for lunch. We went to a Asian restaurant on campus where I had a delicious plate of ribs (was very cheap too), before heading back to yet more voting.

Soon, it was time for the part everyone had been waiting for, the election of the new Executive. Jenna (the outgoing secretary) ran unopposed as the new President, but she still presented a very well thought out plan for the next year, and was quickly elected to the position. Both myself and a guy named Michael put ourselves forward for the Secretary position, and we were grilled by a series of questions from the committee. I aimed my “campaign” at working with national and international organisations (BHA, NSS, Secular Student Alliance, etc) and making administration more effective. Something I said must have been good, because I was voted in as the new Secretary. Stuart was then voted in as the new Treasurer, and after a few more discussions about our web presence, we all went out for a meal.

Secretary Adrian Hayter, President Jenna Catley, Treasurer Stuart Pilbrow

By Sunday, we were all tired, although not as tired as me since Elles decided that she was lonely without me to talk to on Skype, and decided to call my mobile at 7 am, waking up everyone in the living room (my ringtone is Dawkins saying “Science is interesting, and if you don’t agree you can fuck off”). Nevertheless, we got on with a morning of activities, including a discussion of possible merchandise, and a workshop on how to organize Fresher’s Fairs. The day ended with half the group (myself included) deciding to miss out on the BBQ as it was raining, and to head home instead.

All in all, it was a wonderful experience, and I hope to help organise more events like this one in the future as the new Secretary!

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Victory is Mine!

Adrian Hayter — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 00:56:44 +0000

V for...erm...victory.

I got elected to the position of Secretary of the AHS (National Federation of Atheist, Humanist, and Secular Student Societies) which is great! I am now slightly drunk (in celebration) so I don’t trust myself to type more. Just thought I’d update everyone!

Others elected were Jenna Catley as President, Stuart Pilbrow as Treasurer, and Ellis Pugh as Director of Membership. We hope to work closely with both national and international atheist, humanist, and secular organisations in the future.

Thanks for the support! (if you gave it)

Adrian Hayter,

Secretary of the AHS.

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Atheist Students AGM

Adrian Hayter — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 07:50:48 +0000

AHS Logo

This weekend is the Annual General Meeting of the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist, and Secular Student Groups (AHS), which gives us all a nice chance to meet up and get drunk (as we did last night). Today we actually get down to business, voting on some motions and electing a new executive (President, Secretary, and Treasurer). I’m standing for the position of Secretary, so wish me luck!

Anyway, let me have this chance to thank Warwick Atheists for their kind hospitality, knowledge of the best drinking areas, and to Stuart Pilbrow for allowing me to sleep on his floor (and save on expensive hotel fees). This should be a fun weekend for all!

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Damn You FOX!

Adrian Hayter — Sun, 31 May 2009 09:00:46 +0000

It’s been 7 years, and I still cannot believe they canceled Firefly. Every now and then I stumble upon a great clip from the show (of which there are an incredible number given the short run it had) and it makes me angry that this show isn’t picked up again. God is Pretend recently included a great clip of River Tam (my favourite character by far) “fixing” the Bible:

Book: What are we up to, sweetheart?

River: Fixing your Bible.

Book: I, um… What?

[Pan over to River, who works on a book with pens, brushes, and loose pages.]

River: Bible’s broken. Contradictions, false logistics… doesn’t make sense.

Book: No, no. You -- you can’t…

River: So we’ll integrate non-progressional evolution theory with God’s creation of Eden. Eleven inherent metaphoric parallels already there. Eleven. Important number. Prime number. One goes into the house of eleven eleven times, but always comes out one. Noah’s ark is a problem.

Book: Really?

River: We’ll have to call it “early quantum state phenomenon”. Only way to fit 5,000 species of mammals on the same boat.

. . .

Book: River, you don’t… fix the Bible.

River: It’s broken. It doesn’t make sense.

Book: It’s not about… making sense. It’s about believing in something. And letting that belief be real enough to change your life. It’s about faith. You don’t fix faith, River. It fixes you.

Oh River, you taught us so much; like how “the human body can be drained of blood in 8.6 seconds given adequate vacuuming systems“. If you haven’t watched Firefly, then go watch it on Hulu, or buy the DVD. If you simply don’t have the time, then the Wikiquotes article should give you a few laughs.

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My 21st Birthday!

Adrian Hayter — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 20:26:42 +0000

So today was my 21st birthday, huzzah! I’ve had a great day, was taken out to lunch by my mother and her new boyfriend, had a card made for me by my friends, and got given “The Passion of the Christ – Director’s Edition” by my atheist housemate. Unfortunately I’ve also had to revise a load for exams coming up, so it has been a day of trying to comprehend horrible software engineering slides.

As with this time of year, I’m cutting back on the blog to make time for my studies. I’ll still post every now and then, but it will probably be small posts rather than lengthy philosophical musings. I’ve been contacted by a person who wants to write some articles for the blog, so hopefully that will go ahead and we’ll have some form of content going. If anyone else wants to write the odd article, or share something you think others might like, then feel free to contact me.

Oh, and 21 in binary is 10101 which is palindromic and awesome. Another example is in base 4, where the number is 111. If I ever want to feel like a teenager again, I can use hexadecimal and get 15!