Educational Beliefs

Hi all,

Feeling the urge to take a break from emulating the ARM processor in the C programming language (I shit you not), I thought I'd share with you a few of my experiences of religious groups and Theology in general since the start of University. It's about time, right?

Needless to say, it's apparent that the majority of people at Bristol are either Agnostic or Atheist. Which felt kind of strange at first, after being around Catholics, Fundamental Christians and Muslims throughout my previous years. However, by no means have I escaped the aura of preachers and religious spokespeople. At the beginning of this term, the Christian Union held what I can only describe as a 'campaign' entitled "Dare to Believe", and organised a series of talks with somewhat questionable titles including "Do Atheists make good scientists?" - I mean, they were obviously going for the shock approach to get more people to attend the events. I wish I could have gone to one, but I do have an awesome set of flatmates, so I weighed up my options. I spoke to a guy on my course who attended the talk (also an Atheist from a religious school), and he said he was literally "shaking with rage" at what the speaker was saying.

On the one hand, I suppose I feel more comfortable in talking about my own beliefs openly, but I still can't help but feel so incredibly interested to hear what the religious people have to say. I guess it's because I can relate to them by comparing my experiences, coming from a religious school. When you're surrounded by people who (to you at least) are completely bonkers in how they view the origin of life, you're entitled to defend your opinion. I respect that.

One of the main things I've noticed about University is about how it seems to have filtered out the true believers and non-believers, as people tend to make up their own mind once free from the views administered by the family. I've noticed a few of my friends changing 'their views' from Catholic to Agnostic, but nobody the other way around. Of course, it makes me happy knowing they're finally making up their own minds about their religion and breaking themselves away from the confinement of it.

I guess I could say that I'm more passive about religion than I used to be. Then again, I haven't really come into contact with religious people in Bristol anywhere the scale of what I've experienced in East London. I still hold the same views though, on the whole.

Also, many thanks to Henry Murray and Sophie Valentine for the image up top :)

Until next time.

Social Clubbing

Hi all.

Okay so, I know it's been a long time since I last blogged, but I won't give you a full run-through of what's happened in the past few months because frankly, it'd be a bit tedious. Although, if you manage to make it to the end of this post, then cheers!

Why'd I decide to blog about something now? probably two reasons, the first being the fact that I made a 'pinky promise' with one of the flatmates to stay awake till 5, so I'm basically trying to kill time; the other reason would be the fact that I'm now back at my flat, after having left my flatmates in a club, mainly because my level of soberness was by far the highest out of everyone there. More importantly, I shall now explain why I hate clubs.

First off, I'd like to make it clear that I do understand why people go to clubs; it's a social thing to do, there's euphoric music with a decent soundsystem, there's a chance to pick up a one-night stand, and it's an excuse to get completely off your face on every substance known to man. They're fair points, depending on what sort of person you are. Personally, they're poor excuses.

As such, most if not all the times I've been at a club I've been sober enough to look at the complete mess of states that people are in. I can't help but observe people as they sway their wrecked masses about, casually bumping into each other, occasionally looking around for people to grind on. Possibly the thing that annoys me most about clubs are the people who casually move up behind someone they haven't met and proceed to rub themselves into the other person's crotch like a sexually frustrated chihuahua. Idiots. I go on a bit of a rage when the person involved is someone I know, and they clearly aren't comfortable.

After noticing that sort of thing happening, I begin to start judging everyone in the club, and come to the conclusion that simply put, society is really messed up. The worst thing is when I realise that I'm simply not of the right frame of mind to start a group conversation or contribute, because I'm too busy thinking about how much of a bad time I'm having. Either that reason, or the fact that I'm a lot shorter than everyone else so people don't notice me. Then again, this does happen to me even when we're having group conversations at other times. Perhaps it's my low self-esteem that I seem to have developed since the start of University. Don't get me wrong, I'm loving my time here, but I just feel like people view me in a completely different way to how my friends back in London did. Not that it's a bad thing, I just think I still have to have time to adjust. Mehhhhhh.

Until next time.