January 27th, 2019

Hi everyone!

Below are Ann's notes. They are fantastic. We had a lot of people today, and if I didn't get to talk to you personally, I wish I had. There will be an e-mail coming out soon with some updates about 1) directory 2) book club 3) next drinking skeptically and 4) street cleanup! Love you all!

Secular Sunday

January 27, 2019

Attendees:

·         Ann Brady	·         Bill Sparks	·         Sean Bienert
·         Richard	·         Pearl	·         Brian
·         Kia	·         Pam	·         Nora
·         Greg	·         Lyn	·         Diane
·         Adrienne	·         Geoff	·         Chelsea
·         Derek	·         Tara	·         Molly
·         Joe	·         Chris	·         Dawn
·         Josh	·         Antonio	·         Ronnie
·         Annette	·         John	·         Bob

Announcements:

·         Directory – if you want to be in it, let Sean know

·         Need pictures for the meetup site

·         Ann will get with the Parks and Rec department about getting a street for cleanup

·         Lyn says that we have had a blurb in the religion section about FAACT. We need a new blurb with our new name.

·         Book club – Randal Hayes, Greensboro Science Café has a book club but it is science centered. If we would like to have an atheist book club we can do our own or maybe meet with them if the book is scientific. We need to talk about this. Ideas for books? Seems to be a lot of interest from the email. Saturday looks like it might be a good day. Sean will send out a poll.

·         If you are not on the email list, let Sean know and he will add you.

·         Josh wants to know if there would be any interest in a non-religious interpretation of the Bible study group. He teaches this at his school and would be willing to lead. We could do other religious texts too. Maybe we can pick a time, every other Sunday, for example.

·         We have a website – JovialityBeforeMortality.org

·         John wants to know if all the “important” communications for the group are at the website. Sean said not emails, but everything else.

Discussion Notes:

Lyn wanted to discuss conventional medicine versus alternative medicine. Sacred clay from church yard in Boho Highlands in N. Ireland (Sacred Heart Church) contains a strain of bacteria that has been proven to halt the growth of dangerous bacteria. So science doesn’t know what it doesn’t know.

Sean – science as a religion. We (most of us) will say we “believe” in science, until science bumps into something we feel intuitively. Then we discount science. But this is what science does – it self-corrects. If we have a uniting principle as a group is it science or something else. This is a topic that has been suggested and segues nicely into what Lyn said.

Josh – it’s an odd binary, science vs. religion. They aren’t comparable. “Believing in science” is a convenient language tool because we are used to talking about belief. If you talk about science in the language of cults, we are doing the same thing as Scientology. We need to understand what the science says.

Lyn says that science is not what connects her to the group.

Adrienne – why do we need to define a unifying principle?

Derek – that’s not why he joined the group. He just wanted a sense of community. That’s what binds him to the group.

Lyn – we have Christians in the group too

Diane – science is something we all seem to agree on so it’s an easy way to relate (not sure I got this right.)

Sean – a lot of what we discuss comes down to semantics and we can’t dismiss that. We have to be careful how we discuss things. The language we use can unite or divide. We need to be fairly precise in our language if we are going to understand things. (Paraphrased). I believe this is happening.

Josh – I accept vs I believe. “I believe in the Church” is something that even abused people say and this is dangerous.

Lyn – why do they believe? (Understands that this may be not the best language) Like abused women who stay with their abuser – they want and need security.

Derek – we need some belief in something. If you try to prove everything that you believe it requires too much energy. We have to accept some things without spending too much time on it.

Josh – we need to accept things, but it isn’t necessary to believe them. We could be living in a simulation, but he doesn’t need to spend a lot of energy on it because it doesn’t make any difference.

Antonio – it’s like the free will debate. You can’t unpull the wool from over your eyes. Do we have the tools to understand every single thing in our world? Being a scientist is a full time, hard job.

Chris – blind faith is different than believing in science.

Derek – experience can inform your beliefs and helps you understand science without having to completely understand everything about it.

Sean – we are inundated with data. You have to ignore some of it. Scientific studies show correlations, they don’t prove anything.

Josh – some studies show causality. Not all of them though.

Sean at some point you have to look at the bulk of the evidence and decide where the evidence is pointing.

Josh – we depend on assumptions all the time. We assume that doors won’t fall on us and bridges won’t collapse. We have to function on assumptions.

Ronnie – if we’ve been told that we can’t spend all our time checking everything, doesn’t this validate faith? We trust our parents. Shouldn’t we believe them. If we can’t check every bridge why should we check every book?

Derek – experience teaches us that doors don’t fall.

Josh – there are assumptions that we’ve been taught don’t have to be checked. Example – satan is in people’s heart – how do we check that? Some things can’t be disproved. Some things can be. We identify with our opinions. Opinion questions don’t yield to change. Para-something-matic assumptions.

Lyn – how do we deal with entrenched faith? You can only plant a seed.

Molly – we don’t have to challenge everything about faith. We need to challenge hateful views.

Lyn – she misspoke – no need to confront beliefs so much as behaviors, prejudice (Adrienne too)

Derek – we have to be open to other people’s ideas too.

Ann – open minded vs hole in the head

Bill we have our own entrenched ideas

Derek – we have to recognize our own entrenched ideas

Pam – people who say “I wasn’t raised that way” – have you never rebelled?

John – why do we spend time talking about this? If we just wanted community we could join a hiking group. We are looking for something else. Like minded people we want to associate with. As Josh said, it’s how we think, not what we think. We are learning how to think in this group. We have a hunger for deep stuff. John wants to know 1) is there deep stuff and 2) how do we think about it in a productive way 3) what place does emotion have. In college, liberal protestants were the progressives. If you don’t believe in god how do we fit in with that. Talking to about god to some people is an emotional swamp. He got frustrated in the discussion about free will  vs determinism. What difference does it make in real life?

Josh – in that discussion, scientists overstate their case by extending assumptions they can’t prove (ex. Sam Harris).

Diane – it’s interesting to discuss these ideas even though they don’t affect our day to day life.

John – question is why are we coming? This will help us define what the group does and keep everyone interested in coming.

Sean – we are trying to do that especially since our reorganization. We have talked a lot about chunking – especially in relationship to concepts. Ex. socialism. Clear out the emotional baggage. You can get to the point where you understand the basics – now what? Are we trying to understand it to the most minute detail or do we want to understand it and use the information in some way? When we are talking about interfacing with other people this is one of the things we need to figure out.

Tara – we are planting a stake in the ground and saying that religion doesn’t have to define us as a country or a people.

Lyn – religion is oppressive and suffocating because it’s everywhere. We need the moment to be with like minded people and away from religion.

Derek – has not had the persecution for his atheism that some of us have had. He wants genuine discussions and would appreciate having more religious people in our group to discuss thing.

Sean – lots of reasons for why people come to the group. Maybe next time we should discuss again.

Josh – this is a little like a Quaker meeting except everyone talks. It’s kind of meditative. Our discussions move in similar ways. We start with topics that Sean or other people suggest and the topic migrates. No one tells us what the topic is or what to do. We come up with ideas that occur to us in the moment.

Bill – tries to start conversations about atheism with people.

Antonio – sometimes it’s not a discussion with people outside our group. They want to grill us.

Sean – recent converts (to religion or outside it) are the firebrands

Bill – lots of people with no direction.

Sean – to Lyn’s point – there are some people with whom there is no point in having discussions. But some times you have to intervene – if someone believes that strychnine in large quantities can cure anything, you may want to disabuse them of that idea (or not).

Lyn – some ideas have to be challenged.

Josh – we live in More Better Land (??) If you believe that you need to believe in God to go to heaven, you will try to convince people of it. But we share public space.

Bill – dialogue without challenging. That pushes people back into their corner.

Lyn – does anybody have an idea of what really happened with the MAGA hat kids?

Kia – the Daily Show segment – depending on who was filming different groups look like the victims. It was a mess. Ignorance more than malice with the kids.

Joe – the kids were not as innocent as you may think.

Kia – in this particular case may not be as bad as people would have you think.

Pam – his body positioning was threatening

Josh – cameras change the dynamics of situations. Black Israelites were using this in their confrontations.

Molly – some people are attracted to that kind of self-righteous victimization.

Kia – they are horribly confrontational.

Meeting Notes - January 20th, 2019

Seventeen people showed up.

As per usual, we had a discussion that meandered wherever it damn well pleased. It began with Michael making reference to the movie night movie, "Dogma," and a scene where Ben Affleck's fallen angel character rejects god because of his behavior, in full knowledge of his existence. At least one of the iterations of Satanism promotes this idea: rejection of god isn't contingent upon his existence, practitioners of that philosophy reject the idea of being ruled by this, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, "god character." (This is, in part, my after the fact editorializing.)
This led to Derek bringing up Marcus Aurelius' (potentially apocryphal):

"Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but...will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones."

There's an absolute world of bun-fighting associated with this quote... if you have time, the Google rabbit hole is very, very deep.

James M. then segued us into a discussion of whether or not there would be good without bad, or if a gray area would if there could be joy without suffering. Ronnie pointed out that it wouldn't be terribly difficult to conceive of a world that was created better than the one we live in. (No matter what Leibniz said.) Steven pointed out that there are different kinds of suffering. E.g. - striving and working toward goals and having your food stolen and your children killed by a dictator.

From here we sort of got into the nature of god and his *ahem* "works."

Joey pointed out that good gods and bad gods are easier to understand and therefore believe in. Antonio made the point that, well, for a god so powerful, his actions are pretty mundane. A being that can create the universe is pretty silly when he shows up in toast (or, and I chuckle butt cannot help myself). James commented that that is a reflection of human hubris, and Ronnie brought us back to the God of the Gaps. Joey filled this in by pointing out that we use god for explanations of what we don't understand. People project themselves onto whatever god they believe in. I added that the Jews of the old testament were actually polytheistic, but believed that YHWH was just better. There's a scene where the King of Moab burns his own kid as a sacrifice, and it works so that he can beat the Israelites. Additionally, I brought up the "scapegoat" ritual of putting the sins of the early Israelite community out into the wilderness "for Azazel." I'm now reading that Azazel might be the word for scapegoat? Dunno - let me know if you know!
Then, we got into Lord of the Rings as a potential religion and how The Silmarillion fits the specs for religious texts - unreadable and fake.
We talked about God on Trial.
There was some back and forth for a while about faith, science, and money. For instance, on larger, more abstract things, we cannot directly observe our effect on, say, climate change. And, while scientists can be bought, it is scientific research that exposes any mistakes or transgressions on the part of individual scientists. However, there were some differing opinions on human health. This went from the anti-vax movement to GMOs to regulation of sterilization in hospitals.
Then, eventually we rounded back to politics, the electoral college, gerrymandering, and reasonable sizes for congressional districts. There were a lot more comments made, arguments had, and jokes. Forgive me, or let me know if I've omitted something.
Right at the end of the meeting, Michael was talking about a book concerned with honor culture and violence. I think this was it, but let me know if I'm wrong.