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:
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Ann Brady
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Bill Sparks
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Sean Bienert
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Richard
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Pearl
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Brian
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Kia
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Pam
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Nora
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Greg
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Lyn
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Diane
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Adrienne
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Geoff
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Chelsea
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Derek
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Tara
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Molly
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Joe
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Chris
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Dawn
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Josh
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Antonio
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Ronnie
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Annette
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John
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Bob
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Announcements:
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Directory – if you want to be in it, let Sean
know
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Need pictures for the meetup site
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Ann will get with the Parks and Rec department
about getting a street for cleanup
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Lyn says that we have had a blurb in the religion
section about FAACT. We need a new blurb with our new name.
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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.
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If you are not on the email list, let Sean know
and he will add you.
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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.
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We have a website – JovialityBeforeMortality.org
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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.
