Warwick atheists STILL don't believe it!

[Rogerrp]

Warwick atheists STILL don't believe it!
This was the front cover of the newspaper that I found last Friday during my short visit to Warwick Uni (business trip). I have a copy of the newspaper and mixed feelings about the whole controversy.
First of all, congratulations to Warwick Uni Atheist Soc (WUAS, :D) for winning the best new society award!
Now, the award has been canceled following complaints about a poster depicting religious symbols being thrown into the a trash can under the slogan "It is time to take out the trash" and with the overall message that it is wrong to shield your ridiculous and backwards beliefs under the "it's my faith" cover.
Here is my two mixed feelings:
1) :) AWESOME pair of balls! I wish more student groups (and non-students too) had the guts to run such a campaign. Even if it is too harsh, you get the attention of the media (two pages and an editorial in this case). I always dream of a "No tolerance of intolerance" campaign that exposes all the homophobic and misoginistic pigs that hide behind sacred books.

2) :confused: Isn't this the angry atheist shit that we always get thrown? Is this the right tactic or does it backfire, mobilizing the enemies of reason and allienating the middle ground crowd and the undecided?
Thanks to the input of some moderate atheists here at the HSUoE, we have spent a year playing the nice Humanist card with mixed results. It is my personal experience that every time a humanist/atheist discusses any topic with a religionist, and none of them raises the tone of voice, the humanist wins. So, with the Humanist hat, we have managed to get some inter-belief discussions going, which is good.

This is a forum to discuss tactics and events for student secular groups. So, if the HSUoE had run a "take our the trash campaign" we would not have been allowed into the Chaplaincy, among other infiltrations that we have achieved. However, the stirring among the students may have increased our membership and I would not be writing this while drinking my coffee alone in what is supposed to be our weekly meeting :(. How many passionate moderates do you see at your meetings? ;D

Anyway, Warwick Atheists, let me know how the whole story ends and if they give you the totally deserved £100.

All the best,

Roger

[norman]

We have had similar experiences here at Leeds.

I spent the first year on the committee putting the reins on Chris and some of the other more activist minded members to hold back on the kinfd of advertising and campaigning you have highlighted. However, I grew more and more tired of the fact that we were constantly hounded for even exisiting and how much we were struggling to get a message out there.

I still believe that moderate atheism is the only way to progress in the long term, howver, active campaigns and publicity that raises the profile of the group cannot be dismissed out of hand. Leeds A-Soc still has an uinwritten policy of playing it safe most of the time, witha few noticable exceptions...

1) We run at least one massively contaversial meeting or event a semester

2) We openly display our "There is NO god!" banner

3) We try to engage with other religious societies on our own terms.

[Chris Worfolk]

First of all, congratulations to Warwick Uni Atheist Soc (WUAS, :D) for winning the best new society award!

Congratulations indeed, that is a very hard award to win given other new societies are also driven by passionate proactive leaders and so also do a lot in their first few years.

1) :) AWESOME pair of balls! I wish more student groups (and non-students too) had the guts to run such a campaign. Even if it is too harsh, you get the attention of the media (two pages and an editorial in this case). I always dream of a "No tolerance of intolerance" campaign that exposes all the homophobic and misoginistic pigs that hide behind sacred books.

Yeah, getting media attention is very important. 9/11 showed us there is no such thing as bad publicity.

2) :confused: Isn't this the angry atheist shit that we always get thrown? Is this the right tactic or does it backfire, mobilizing the enemies of reason and allienating the middle ground crowd and the undecided?

Atheists have always been seen as negative but I'm not convinced that we have a long history of in your face you're wrong and we're going to shout about it - this seems to have only really come about in the past 5-10 years with the New Atheist movement. And it seems to be encouraging people to come out - over the past few years atheist societies have sprung up all over the country.

Thanks to the input of some moderate atheists here at the HSUoE, we have spent a year playing the nice Humanist card with mixed results. It is my personal experience that every time a humanist/atheist discusses any topic with a religionist, and none of them raises the tone of voice, the humanist wins. So, with the Humanist hat, we have managed to get some inter-belief discussions going, which is good.

As Norm said, we're gradually moving away from this. We started playing the nice guy cards but it hasn't really worked for us. In our experience inter-belief debate with Muslims only occurs when we are shitting all over their beliefs, otherwise they just refuse to talk to us.

My experience is a little different in terms of debate in that we never actually win any discussion. Our points make for sense and to any objective observer we usually win but they go away with their beliefs just as reinforced as when they entered the argument. Is this really a victory?

This is a forum to discuss tactics and events for student secular groups. So, if the HSUoE had run a "take our the trash campaign" we would not have been allowed into the Chaplaincy, among other infiltrations that we have achieved. However, the stirring among the students may have increased our membership and I would not be writing this while drinking my coffee alone in what is supposed to be our weekly meeting :(. How many passionate moderates do you see at your meetings? ;D

I think it probably depends on your type of society. Atheist societies probably wouldn't be allowed in the Chaplaincy anyway (we have so far been unable to get in) whereas Humanists are more likely to, at least, I would have thought.

We have had plenty of meetings where nobody has turned up. However, to be honest, it's happening less and less since we started pushing the boat out a bit more.

[StuartPilbrow]

Hi, Stuart here, President of the Warwick Atheists. I guess we have some explaining to do about this poster. I assume Rogerrp didn’t see the poster that is in question because the Warwick Union banned it from being published on Campus.
It is important to note the order of events surrounding the award being taken away. Complaints were made to the Union’s Welfare officer about the poster and by Union rules if complaints are made the incident has to go under investigation and therefore the posters were removed (this was by the way after the event had happened). The society’s federation, who are in charge of giving out the awards, were informed of the situation and then decided to withdraw the award. Just so you know the timescale of the events, this was one week after the award was given to us. It is also important to note that the reason we got the award in the first place was for doing a lot to promote religious discussion on campus in all our events and by setting up WIFF (Warwick Inter faith Forum).
The poster went up towards the end of last term to advertise an event titled “The importance of Atheism,” this was a talk given by anyone who wanted to about the negative aspects of religion and how it effects our lives. The poster said “An evening hosted by Warwick Atheist Society, of talks given by Atheist students on campus, on topics such as; Persecution, Religious repression of sexuality, the maltreatment of women in religion, and many more...” One of the things we were told people complained about was that it accused religion of being “ridiculous viewpoints.” First of all there is nothing wrong with saying this, but that is not what we were trying to say on the poster. The “ridiculous viewpoints” referred to the topics we were discussing as were printed on the poster and listed in the quote above. The other part of the poster people found offensive was the line “Its time to take out the trash.” This merely referred to the image of a recycling logo throwing religious symbols into a trash can. This image has been compared by some people to the anti-fascist logo of a man throwing away the swastika, this however was purely coincidental. The image is merely throwing away the symbols of the organisations which people hide behind in order to do bad things. We tried to use a large variety of religious symbols in order to show that we were not “throwing away,” an individual belief but a wider theology. Our society feels that the people who were offended by the poster misinterpreted what we were trying to say and we feel that the Union over reacted in how dealt with the situation. The last thing we ever wanted to do was offend people and gave out an apology in the Warwick newspaper.
The current situation is that the Union and Soc’s Fed are giving us an appeal and will not re-issue the award to an one else in the meantime. This is likely to happen in a few weeks however, as the Union took ages to get back to us and now we all have exams and so don’t have the time. We are reasonable confident that we will get the award back because we have some very good arguments and the reasons that the Union gave for taking away the award are vague and out of context.
I think thats about all to say on this, if anyone else from WA wants to add something i missed out then feel free.

[StuartPilbrow]

Maybe I should also add that th ereason that we didn't bring this situation to this forum before was that we wanted to ressolve things with the Union first. Also the reason the headlin of the paper was "Warwick Atheists STILL don't believe it," was because the front page headline when we won was "I don't believe it," with a picture of Victor Meldrew.

[StuartPilbrow]

Me again
Just some links if people want them
http://www.warwickatheists.co.uk/
http://muselive.com/datas/users/2300-boar1.png
http://muselive.com/datas/users/2300-boar2.png
The poster in question can be found on the top link under "Links and resources" and the file is called "The Importance of Atheism"

[Rogerrp]

As I said before:
CONGRATULATIONS! on winning the award.

and thanks for the explanation. I brought up this issue because I think it is of interest to the purposes of Secular Portal. Other students societies will feel inspired and have a lot to learn from WA (Same from Leeds U and others (;D)).

Will we have the chance (and the honour) to meet you guys and discuss this during the Secular Student Conference, in Edinburgh this June?

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=22402050165&ref=mf

In any case, this thread is interesting to read and this is the sort of discussions that I would have liked to have when we started the Humanist Soc at UoE.

All the best,

Roger

[norman]

Firstly, I love the poster - I would like to use something similar for one of our events in the new academic year if that's ok?

The most surprising thing I have noticed since being involved in the politics of running societies on union campuses is that intolerance and bias towards religious groups doesn't come from outside. The worst offenders when i comes to religious bigotry are the religious. Espousing "tolerate me" and "tolerate my religion" every day of the week whilst systematically campaigning against everyone elses viewpoint.

I hope the appeal runs in your favour. If you require any support from us in Leeds or this umbrella group in terms of letters of support, relavent precadent (we have had many complaints from within the union) or just a show of support do not hesitate to ask!

[norman]

Did this ever get resolved?